Innisfail…..hopefully our last day..Day 132

4 July 2014

Its raining and we are waiting for the car to be repaired. I hurt my back emptying the toilet cassette and can’t get a physiotherapist appointment inside of 10 days up here.

On Friday 1 August we decided to do a long day trip. We left Innisfail and finally saw a small narrow gauge sugar train, taking a load of cane sugar for cruising.

 

Then we headed westwards towards Millaa Millaa, passing Crawford's Lookout. Wow what a spectacular view.

We stopped at the Mungalli Creek Bio-Dynamic Dairy for a milkshake each, mango flavoured and I choose a Sicilian Cheesecake with some of the dairy’s cream. It was delicious. After debating if we “needed” to buy some cream or not, we decided we still had a lot of things to see.

Then it was onto the tea plantation of Nerada Tea. we saw a lot of trees looking like they were dying but they had just been pruned and I was told they would be all green within a couple of months. Apparently the trees are pruned every 3 years. We stopped and had cups of tea and both bought a new cup each.

Driving to Atherton we saw some beautiful scenery. Atherton was a large place and we only drove through the town as we had a lot of kms to travel.

Our next stop was The Peanut Place just past Tolga. They had finished harvesting peanuts a couple of months ago. There was all sorts of peanuts such as normal salted, chilli, curry etc. We choose some salted and a packet of peanuts still in their husks.

60 peanut growers on the Atherton Tablelands produce about 10,000 tonnes of peanuts per year. They are planted in December and take about 22 weeks to mature.

We then drove on to Mareeba, the place we were going to stay at initially, before the car’s hose split. At Mareeba we turned back towards the coast where we called in at the Jaques Coffee Plantation to have a quick look……and yes that is your coffee beans on the tree,

This is the giant coffee bean.

Just a little further on our car took us into the car park of the Emerald Creek Ice Creamery. Seeing as we were already in the car park we went in to buy ice cream cones. Yummy.

Onwards to Kuranda, the top of the Sky Line Ride from Cairns, down a very winding road to Cairns and home back at our caravan where we had fresh fish and chips, bought from a caravan on the wharf in town.