Frosty Mango & Giant Gumboot

Today we took our time leaving Townsville knowing we didn't have a really long drive ahead of us. It had rained overnight and the noise of the tin roof was a bit disturbing so neither of us slept very well. There was a lot of traffic on the Bruce Highway going in both directions - to and from Cairns. We came across a place that the Cane Farm Tour people had recommended called, Frosty Mango. It is a Cafe/Ice-creamery that sells all kinds of delicious smoothies, ice-creams etc as well as other food and coffees. I had a cone with strawberry and mango 'ice-cream' although it didn't have any dairy in it and Fin had a mango smoothie. We both thoroughly enjoyed our morning tea and headed back on the road with a bag of dried mango pieces to munch on also. Fin made the comment that we had let a lot of the traffic go now and the road wasn’t as busy but we caught up to it all later when to our amazement we came across the same long, wide load we had seen twice before many kilometres away. Well, we didn’t know that is what we came across but just found ourselves stuck behind a long row of cars when we got to the top of a steep incline. Going down was very, very slow and in fact Fin used the manual gears in the car instead of just riding the brake the whole time. Eventually there was a chance for the police to pull the big load over to the side and direct the traffic around it and that is when we realized that it was the same one! I got shot of it this time.

Later we decided to stop for lunch at a town called Tully. We pulled off the main road and found ourselves heading toward a town with a sugar mill on one side of the road and a park on the other with a great big gumboot with a large green tree frog ‘climbing’ up the side. It is called the Golden Gumboot and it is 7.9 metres tall which represents the rainfall in Tully in July 1950, an Australian record so the sign underneath told us. It also said, Tully – “A pretty wet place.” And it must have been when it was bucketed with rain during Cyclone Larry eighteen months ago too.
We drove into the park and got out our lunch things. The first thing we noticed was the large spreading trees with little orb shaped nests made with dried grass and holes in the side hanging from the ends of some of the branches. These nests were obviously not still in use but there were so m any in such a small area that we could only imagine what it must have been like when they were busily visited by parent birds feeding their nestlings. I don’t know what sort of bird they belong to although I think some finches construct nests in this way; maybe someone else has an idea. Following this we noticed all the ferny plants - epiphytes, that were growing all over the three large trees in the park. They were prolific! Obviously they had found an ideal host in those trees. The trees, by the way, were devoid of their own leaves being of some deciduous variety but again I have no idea what. All the plant life up here is so different to what we have in Victoria and I can only guess at what some of them are. There was a little cane track nearby and a cute little engine went up it with some cane trucks in tow. They look so like toy trains, we still love seeing them!

We headed off after taking relevant photos and enjoyed the rest of the drive through more cane fields but also many banana plantations also. The mountains came rising up in front of us as we got closer to Cairns and one in particular looks very much like a pyramid. I took a photo and then we saw a sign along the road saying, Walsh’s Pyramid so I guess others thought the same. We got to Cairns by 3.30pm, settled our stuff in then went out to find the Subaru dealer since the car is going to have a service while we are here. That was a challenge because we have found that Tom doesn’t cope well with street address numbers, especially on long stretches of road like highways so he sent us in the wrong direction but we eventually found it the old fashioned way – by looking! Next we went to the Skyrail Terminal to find out about it for our trip tomorrow while the car is being serviced. Once that was organized we felt a lot happier and could look for a place to have dinner. “Always thinking about your stomach?” Well, we have to don’t we?
I am looking forward to going over the rainforest on the Skyrail. We didn’t do it last time we were up here but promised ourselves we would this time. Should be fun!