Balgal Beach is 59 Kms (37 mi) north of Townsville and 64 Kms (40 mi) south of Ingham. We stay for 2 nights at a fabulous free camp right on the beach. A reasonably successful afternoon’s fishing resulted in 3 tailor. Unfortunately, nobody told me they had to be bled as soon as they are caught – if not, they taste awful as we found out.

More golf – 3 rounds at Ingham Golf Club. We camp at the golf club itself with about 6 or so other caravans. Our golf wasn’t super successful but we did manage a couple of bottles of wine a 3 golf balls for small daily prizes.

Ingham has a couple of interesting tourist attractions. The Mercer Lane Mosaics, where the history of the sugar cane industry is celebrated with art. The community came together to create a 42 metre tiled mural as a tribute to the local cane cutter industry.

The second attraction is the Tyto Wetlands where there are many walks around lakes to view varied birds and marine life.

Wallaman Falls is notable for its main drop of 268 metres (879 ft), which makes it Australia’s tallest single-drop waterfall.  The pool at the bottom of the waterfall is 20 metres (66 ft) deep.

We stop for 2 nights behind the local pub in the small town of Halifax – no charge as long as you buy a beer or two – fine by us. We head to nearby Lucinda where we did manage to catch a couple of nice bream for lunch. (Lucinda is famous for the longest jetty in the Southern Hemisphere at 5.76 Kilometres long).

Next major golf comp is at Cardwell for 2 days – nothing of interest to note re golf successes. Cyclone Yasi decimated the area in February 2011. When we visited in 2012 a metal tree sculpture was broken in half – it has now been repaired – see the 2 photos below.

Another quick stop at Tully, a town infamous for being the wettest town in Australia, garnering an average rainfall of 4000mm. The town also boasts one of the largest number of UFO sightings in Queensland. The Golden Gumboot shows the actual height of the record rainfall of 7.9 Metres which fell on Tully in 1950.

Our next Golf comp is at Cardwell. Having hit a jackpot with our recent platypus encounter, we now try for another first – a real life cassowary. So we are off to Etty Bay, a beach where 8 days out of 10 cassowary’s are spotted. Unfortunately we hit one of the 2 out of 10 days when they didn’t appear. We did spot some sky divers though. I have popped in a picture of a cassowary so you can see what we missed.

Next stop is Atherton for their two day golf festival. We free camp just north of the town for the duration of the visit. There is another one day golf competition at Millaa Millaa which we travel to from Atherton. Siobhan did very well at Millaa Millaa winning the overall ladies comp and also getting a nearest the pin prize. She also achieved fourth place overall at the much larger Atherton comp. We had a hitch hiker on the van – a beautiful small green frog – released back into the wild to live to fight another day.

 

Just outside Yungaburra is the Curtain Fig. This is a strangler fig. Normally these figs germinate on top of another tree and try to grow roots into the ground. Once this important step is accomplished, the fig will grow vigorously, finally kill the hosting tree and then grow on independently. In this case, the hosting tree tilted towards the next one; the fig also grows around that one. Its curtain of aerial roots drops 15 metres (49 ft) (49 feet (15 m)) to the ground.

We have experienced many wonderful things on our journeys across Australia – places, views, animals, people – but there are still a few that we would like to cross off our list.

The duck billed platypus was near the top of that list and we hit the jackpot today at Peterson Creek in Yungaburra. A delight to just sit there and watch this small and private creature just going about its daily business of foraging for food.