A small note to self – do not go for 10km walks in mosquito infested rainforests again. What starts out as a wide track, ends up as a tiny, muddy track with thorny vines ready to grab you as you pass. Do not expect husband to be waiting for you where and when you specified. Enjoy the wine after these activities more than usual.

Random item for today: it rains so much around Tully (highest rainfall in Australia) that they mow their lawns every 10 days. Imagine being a mower repair man up here. You’d be taking holidays in Monte Carlo.

It certainly is lush and green around these parts and it was bumper to bumper crops of bananas and sugar cane today. We decided to have an educational (no historical displays !!) morning at the Tully Sugar Mill. From the beginnings of the harvested cane…

Sugarcane!

all the way through the process of extracting the sugar and filling up the big B Doubles with the finished product. This place is like being on a movie set – from the 50s.

Tully Sugar Mill

See the steam rising out of the grates over the drains? I kept expecting Marilyn Monroe to pop around the corner. I think it was built in the 20s, and not much seems to have changed.

Inside the refinery

I keep hearing that Midnight Oil song going round in my head – the sugar refining company won’t help you – but I’m sure it’s all happy days here. The mill works for 24 weeks a year from June to December, then shuts down and does maintenance. The smell is an unmistakable sugar kind of smell. Sort of. Or maybe just a weird smell. I could still smell it the next day in different clothes and after a shower. Once the sugarcane is harvested, they have to extract the sugar within 8-12 hours before the content starts to decrease. I never knew that. The mill works 24 hours a day ploughing through the stream of cages full of freshly harvested cane.

Sugarcane on its way to our table

They are very environmentally friendly. The huge plumes that puff out of the chimney stacks aren’t icky polluting gases. It’s actually steam. They burn some of the waste product and produce enough power to supply the entire mill, plus put some back in the grid that powers about 5000 homes.

Furnace at Tully Sugar Mill burning at 500 degrees

Pretty impressive. They reckon that sugarcane puts more carbon back in to our world than trees. Maybe one day we will have sugar cane forests everywhere!

It’s fair to say you wouldn’t expect to find a Spanish Castle in the rainforest of the north Queensland hinterland of Innisfail. I’m not really sure where Queensland becomes north Queensland, and then when it becomes Far North Queensland. Just thought I should put that out there for future reference.

So, there’s this place called Paronella Park. A Spanish dude called Jose Paronella made his fortune in the cane fields in the 1920s. This gave him the funds to build his dream – a Spanish castle. It’s the most unexpected find on our trip so far. He built a castle with a ball room that hosted parties and dinners for many guests as well as theatre productions. There’s a landing near the waterfall (Mena Waterfall) with space for his guests to watch the spectacular falls. There’s another building that was used for a dining room, two tennis courts, and change rooms. He built walk ways through the forest and drilled out a tunnel that takes you to another small waterfall.

The Refreshment Room at Paronella Park

This place has its own hydro electric generator using the waterfall and was the first in Queensland.

At Mena Waterfall in Paronella Park

 There’s a long, long story about who owned the place over the decades since Jose died in 1948. Suffice to say, it suffered from a fire, a few cyclones and one huge rainforest eating it up. It was rediscovered in about 2004 by a couple who have lovingly restored it and opened it to the public again. With the help of Jose’s daughter, Theresa, who was living in Brisbane, the new owners even found this truly amazing avenue of Kauri trees that Jose planted.

Avenue of Kauri trees

Jose even planted another row a couple of metres into the rainforest because these will one day be so fat that you won’t be able to walk between them. You could knock down the central row, use the timber (make a fortune) and still have an avenue of kauris. Only thing is – that will take about a thousand years. But hey, Jose liked to plan ahead.

These are the most majestic trees. They tower up, perfectly straight, way into the sky. Here’s my favourite photo of them:

Kauri – Supertree

I don’t think the boys realised it at the time, but we did squeeze in an extra historical item without them noticing. They had put  a moratorium on anything of heritage value after the last couple of days steeped in all things old. (I wonder if that includes me). Anyway, we stopped to see the Curtain Fig tree which is thought to be over 500 years old.

The Curtain Fig Tree

It was bigger than you could ever show in a photo, and very, very impressive. It’s called the Curtain Fig because it killed its host tree which then toppled over on an angle and the fig continued to drop its roots down, forming a curtain. We humans get very creative with names, don’t we? On the path back to the car from seeing the giant Fig Tree I saw this pair of (appropriately located) Fig Parrots – a male and female – having a munch on the seeds of a tree.

Fig Parrots

They weren’t the least bit scared of me (and 10 other people) taking their photo.

Atherton Tablelands

Pretty stunning hey? This is the view from a lookout right in the middle of Atherton. They grow heaps of different crops round here. Apart from the obligatory sugarcane and bananas, there’s acres of fruit trees, avocados, corn, tea, coffee and stuff we didn’t even recognise. The cattle have big smiles on their faces with the lush green countryside. Only bad thing for us was the temperature. With this elevation comes the need for a blanket at night. It was quite a shock.

Then you get into the waterfall side of things. There must be a couple of dozen waterfalls to stop and visit as you wind your way south to the coast near Innisfail. After all things historical yesterday, we tried to keep the overload of waterfalls to a minimum, so we just did three. Here’s a pic of Millaa Millaa falls.

MIllaa Millaa Falls

Then we went directly to the best one – Josephine Falls, just at the base of the imposing Mount Bartle Frere (1622m) which is Queensland’s highest peak. Thank goodness John has already climbed this peak a couple of times otherwise I’m sure the boys would have found themselves at the top. I was exhausted just looking at it. Anyway, back to Josephine Falls…..

Josephine Falls

You can swim in the clear blue water here and slide down the slippery (derr) rocks to the pool below. Which of course the boys did – many times.

Rock sliding at Josephine Falls

It wasn’t all waterfalls today though. I finally saw a sugarcane train! I made John stop just for the photo opportunity.

Sugarcane train near Innisfail.