Tablelands Tour and Last Day

Baby Bat
Curtain Fig Tree

Our last full day in N. Queensland Keila took us on a roundtrip tour of the tablelands, the area the lady in the tourist information station in Mareeba wanted us to visit. We went to Tolga and stopped to see some totem poles depicting the history of the region. The town was preparing for their annual ANZAC day parade, and groups of school children were congregating near the edge of the main street. After enjoying a coffee and an Anzac biscuit (the type issued to the military in their rations) in one of the local cafes, we headed to the Bat Hospital in Carrington just beyond Atherton. Keila’s friend, Jenny Maclean, a retired PT now runs a hospital for bats. People in the area phone her to rescue bats from barbed wire, the netting put around fruit trees and even their own homes where the bats fly in an get caught or injured by ceiling fans and sliding doors among other things. We were able to see tiny bats the size of the end of my finger and larger ones hanging in groups in cages. When possible she releases the bats back into the wild, but she also provides a home for those too injured to ever live in the wild again. Her program is world famous and people come to do internships with her. She was very welcoming, showed us an introductory film and answered all our questions. It was a first for me to pet a little bat.
We then went to see the Curtain Fig Tree in the forest and headed out to Yungaburra to take the Peterson Creek walk to see tree kangaroos. We were rewarded by seeing one high up in the trees a long distance away. It was pouring with rain so we headed to a platypus blind, my last chance to see one of these amazing creatures. Alas no platypus. I’m afraid I must leave Australia without ever having seen one. We did see a lovely turtle swimming in the rain however.
We headed to Lake Barrine for a tasty lunch, walked a path to see a double fig tree and headed to Gordonvale to visit Kia and Anthony’s bio-dynamic farm. We were making an unscheduled stop, but Kia received us graciously and drove us around the farm to see the chickens and crops. It was a real tropics farm with sugar cane blowing in the warm breezes.
We returned to Kuranda for our last dinner under the stars and listened to the strains of an open air concert in the nearby amphitheatre. Lee Kernaghan was singing. He is coming to Canada on tour soon so we should look out for him.
Our last morning we headed to Cedar Lodge for brunch, our only chance to treat our hosts. Jean, the Wwoofer, told us about her acquaintance in his 70s who has a Healthy Living Centre in the vicinity. It seems that he lives on a raw food diet and supervises people who are fasting, many of them cancer patients looking for alternative cures. She related a story about a woman from Perth with an eating disorder who took neither food nor water for 2 weeks. She spent a lot of time keeping cool in the swimming pool and spraying her mouth. Not surprisingly she became severely dehydrated and had to be hospitalized. She was worried the doctors would think she was crazy!
The Swiss-German owners of the lodge do rescue work with marsupials so there were wallabies and pademelons hopping around the grounds of lodge. One of the wallabies had a baby in her pouch but he was too little to come out yet. Awww I would l have loved to see that. Keila and I went down to the creek and sat on a swing and pulled on ropes to sit in the middle over the river. Then we sat outside under a canopy for our northern European breakfast of cereal, yogurt, buns and breads, homemade jams, lunch meats and cheeses. The setting for the lodge is lovely, it’s about 5 km. in from the main road. The lodge itself was built by a German and imparts a rather dark and Gothic atmosphere. There are rooms that open onto the garden that looked comfortable but very dark.
Jean wanted us to drive her 6-10 km. further into the bush so that she could visit a fellow who teachers about bush tucker (aka survival food). As we have a rental car, not a 4WD vehicle, we desisted. Also we had to get home to finishing packing, so we dropped her at an intersection of two unsealed roads and wished her luck in finding the his place. I asked Keila how she’d get home, and she said that she’d either hitchhike or someone local would pick her up if she were walking. This area has a delightfully 1960s feel to it; I’ll have to email Keila to find out if she ever returned.
We departed from our friends and their gracious hospitality. We hadn’t seen Keila in 10 years and Henri in 20. They haven’t changed one bit, and we were happy to find that out. They are content living at the edge of the tropical rainforest in N. Queensland, playing host to a wide variety of young and old travelers, both friends and strangers, who happen along much the same as they did when they were living in Montreal. We however are glad to be leaving the hot humid tropics; we’re probably well suited to life in Canada where it’s only hot and humid for about 1 month of the year, and most of that time we hide out from the heat in air conditioned comfort! I’m afraid we must admit that we are spoiled North Americans, not cut out for life in Australia, but we would like to return for a visit. As I write these last words we are winging our way back to Sydney for our last night. We’ve had amazing adventures, far better than we could have imagined. We’ll look forward to seeing most of you followers of the blog soon.
G’day Mates!
Sydney, by the way, looked magnificent. The temperature was about 21C when we arrived, and locals were complaining of the cold – can you imagine that? We took in an Australian film, Under Hill 60, about Australian miners, who were assigned the task of tunnelling under the Germans in WWI to explode Hill 60. It came out on ANZAC day and was filmed in Townsville south of Cairns, and I really wanted to see it before leaving. After the film which was really good, we enjoyed salads and decadent hot chocolate (to ward off the “cold”) at the Guylain cafe at Circular Quay. Not only is the hot chocolate rich, you pour it over a square of chocolate in the bottom of the cup, I’ll have to remember this recipe. We treated ourselves on our last night and enjoyed staying at the Sir Stanford Hotel at Circular Quay right near the opera house, one of those solid older hotels in the English style with lovely antique furniture on display. We slept well and appreciated the comfort of our room, the doors closed with a clunk because they were so solid.

Tree Kangaroo (we did see from afar)

Platypus (we didn't see)