I woke up on April 20th purposefully early to see if I could hop on a trip around the Atherton Tablelands for the day. I initially wanted to do one that took me to Paronella Park (abandoned Spanish castles in the rainforest), but the tour desk at Gilligans didn’t open until 8:30am, and the only tour picked up THAT late (yes, 8:30 is a late morning in the tourist world) was Uncle Brian’s Fun, Falls, and Forest. Since I wasn’t going to bother with another day in Cairns because it’s a dead city, I took what I could get. I was initially sceptical of Uncle Brian’s because the brochure was pretty hippy-tree-hugger looking and gave a VERY vague idea of what we were exactly going to see. It turned out to be one of the best tours I went on the whole trip!
When the bus pulled up, our guide Nathan hopped out and introduced himself, and made it a point within the first 5 minutes of the tour to have everyone’s names memorized (17 of us!), and it just so happened that Kerri, the first girl I met in Cairns, was on this same tour with her mom! Nathan told us the reason Uncle Brian wasn’t doing his tours was because he fell on Aunt Anne and now she was preggers, so he was at home taking care of her. Also, the bus we were on was called Gus, so when he drove us around, we were officially a “gusload”. Nathan had fun switching the gears out of place and honking like crazy to make Gus have a mind of his own.
We started out on the M1 highway, more affectionately known in Oz as the “Bruce Highway” (I guess they like naming their roads here?), and Nathan challenged us with a riddle: “If the M1 runs all along the skirt around Australia, is clockwise or anticlockwise the faster way?” First I was surprised they say anticlockwise here instead of counter clockwise, but the answer ended up being clockwise because they drive on the left hand side of the road here and you’d be on the inside lane the whole time. Clever eh?
One of the fields we passed on the way to our first stop was a sugarcane field owned by a man named Bill. Because of Bill’s location, it was pretty common during the wet season for the rain to flood at the bottom of the Misty Mountains (right next to us), and his entire sugarcane field would be underwater. But Bill didn’t let this get to him, because he went out and bought a jet ski. SO now whenever it floods over his crop, Bill always sees the bright side and goes for a jet ski ride over his sugar cane fields.
Our first stop was the town of Babinda and the Babinda Boulders. The Babinda Boudlers have some Aboriginal mystery shrouded over it, and the story was something like a girl was betrothed to an older man but fell in love with a boy from another tribe and when they were caught together, she broke out of their hold and ran into the stream, and boulders fell from the sky pushing her into the earth, and the place has been bad juju for males ever since. Of all the deaths that have occurred at the boulders (which you can see in my shots), 16 out of the 17 have been male, and the bodies get pushed underground because of the water flow through the boulders and they have to call the Navy in to excavate the bodies. We went for a rainforest walk to see the Boulders and the creek from different views, then we went and had some morning tea (thank god because I hadn’t eaten breakfast), and then we all got in our “cossies” (strine for swimming costumes) and jumped off a cliff into a watering hole right above the boulders! It was probably one of the bigger jumps I’ve done, I’d say about 10ft. There’s a quarry back by TCNJ with a 14ft dive I’m willing to try when I get back home. I met one girl while swimming who went to Macquarie but was travelling with her mom, and she admired me for travelling alone. She did equestrian riding back home though, so I picked her brain about it because I would love to get back to riding horses like I did when I was little. Get some cantering in after only 10 years!
After Babinda, we rode Bruce down the Josephine Falls, notorious for its natural rock slide. It was quite an art form to climb up the rock crevice and get out to the slide without falling on your bum, but it was so much fun sliding down every which way; I even went down superman style! Then I help Nathan’s arm (yummy) while we all piled onto one another’s backs and I led the way down the rock slide in a 10 person chain! After the Falls, Nathan had us doing stuff like “Hide n Waves”, where we’d all hide at the bottom of the bus below the window line, and then he’d tell us when to pop up and wave and scream while he honked like crazy and freak out some innocent bystanders. We drove through Bartle Frere, where Gus has a secret crush on an ambulance, and Nathan told us the spicy story of their tryst, complete with love letters, out of gear shifting, and a photo of the two vehicles front bumper to front bumper. Scandalous!
We then hopped onto the Palmerstone Highway and made our way to Milla Milla. To tide us over on the long drive out, Nathan gave us mind-bender games to play with, as well as oodles of Cadbury chcolate. When we got to Milla Milla, the lunch was heavenly because it was on a farm and the sun was shining and the breeze was blowing and you were surrounded by green hills covered in cows with a home-made meal right in front of you. The chicken and couscous salad were exceptional, but what really topped it off was the homebaked bread and just-out-of-the-oven Peach Cobbler (still doughy on the inside!) with piping hot custard poured over it. Mmmmm sooo good!
After lunch, we packed up and checked out Milla Milla Falls, which was one of the prettiest falls we saw all day. It’s called a curtain falls, so you swim right behind it and watch the water fall. Nathan told us about how he propped to his fiancé here: he brought her behind the falls for the first time, and she said “It looks like a thousand diamonds are falling!” He then said “I don’t have a thousand to offer you, but I do have one.” How adorable is that!!! Even on the drive in, he had the theme from the monolith scene in Standley Kubrick’s Space Oddyssey, as he drove us in and said at the climax “Welcome…to…..THE CARPARK!!”
We drove out to Malanda next, where the Malanda Dairy Center is. It’s pretty much THE dairy supplier for all of Queensland… other than that, Malanda is a dead town. Even the lawn right next to the high school had cows in it.
Our second to last stop was Lake Eacham, which is a Crater Lake. There’s no water source pouring in and out of it, it was just a pocket underneath the ground the crumbled in and filled with water. I jumped in for a bit and swam with some fish and turtles; and it was the warmest swim of the day, which was nice after all that cold water. We practiced some flips off the dock, and then had some afternoon tea, compliments of Nathan: homemade carrot cake with hot chocolate made with cream. Such good food today!
Finally, we all piled into Gus and stopped at a small creek and went wild platypus spotting. Nathan said of every tour he’s taken, only 4 have seen the platypus. We ended up seeing it, and he popped up right in front of us! He was quite possibly the cutest thing I’ve seen in Oz so far, and he was much smaller than I expected! His little monotreme body just rode the stream for about a minute and plunked back down underwater.
The ride back to Cairns was on some road that seriously had about 70 turns back and forth, but Nathan kept us occupied by singing with the radio and different songs from our respective countries. He even shared an Oz song with us and he had the sweetest voice ever… I think it was “We Are One”, about Australians sharing the same life as Indigenous.
Pulling into Gilligans, he hopped out and gave us all hugs. I had to kill time until my bus to Airlie Beach pulled out at midnight, and I made the mistake of not booking a spot on it and gave myself a little scare. I called home (much to my mom’s sanity), and walked it out to the bus stop with all my luggage (not fun). I still had an hour to kill and it was a shady area of town, so I walked back to Gilligans with all my luggage and sat outside the hostel reading my book. Luckily, one of the security men had overheard my convo and that I was going to the bus station, so he had a special shuttle for me and drove me there. I got on my bus at midnight and I have to say, that was as far into my 2 week trip I had planned. There was something unnerving but very maturing, when you get on a 15 hour bus over night to a place you know nothing about, with no idea where you’re staying when you get there, nor what you’re going to do, and you’re all alone.
And just reflecting, 4/20 is a notoriously popular "holiday" in the lives of college students (for certain reasons), I was just reminiscing that exactly a year ago today, I had dropped out of rushing Phi Sigma Sigma and was in the mosh pit of a Less Than Jake/ Early November/ Starting Line concert, having a blast getting Kenny the lead singer of Starting Line to look at me, and meeting up with my Dad after the concert who happened to be in the area. Good times at TCNJ :o)
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