Into the Tropics

We stopped in Townsville for a couple of nights. It is a nice city, mainly flat with some big rocky hills here and there. We spent a day looking around the city and did some shopping and part of the next day was spent returning the things that didn’t work or didn’t fit properly!

In Queensland the opportunity to free camp has been greater than in NSW, so we are using the free camps as much as possible. They generally provide a place to park up, a toilet block and sometimes have showers and drinkable water. We find these camps much more social, and they are usually occupied by people who are travelling like us, rather than parked up for a prolonged holiday. There is usually a restriction of up to 3 night's stay, sometimes only one night. Another advantage of these camps is that you can often light a campfire, which is nice to eat ones dinner beside, sup wine and bake the odd scone.

We spent 2 nights at a free camp at Toomulla beach, about 50 km up the road from Townsville. The camp was a few metres from the beach and at low tide low tide we picked up many different and interesting shells. There were different kinds of coral washed up on the beach too. We drove Paluma, a small village surrounded by tropical rain forest, 800 metres above sea level. While we were there we saw Ulysses butterflies with a brilliant blue on the upper wings. Unfortunately they never stopped long enough for me to take a photograph.

We had an interesting day at Paranella Park, not far from Innisfail. The park is set on 13 acres beside a stream and in the 1930’s it’s creator Jose Paranella set about building his castle and gardens. Today most of the buildings are in ruins. The scale of what he created is impressive and the tropical forest has enhanced the beauty of the ruins. Our entry fee included both day and night time tours through the park and a free stay at the adjacent camping ground.

We had one more stop on the coast at Brampton Beach before heading inland to Lake Tinaroo in the Atherton Highlands. The lake is renowned for barramundi and red claw crayfish so we headed there armed with a trap for red claw. We camped at a Qld National Parks camp, which is on the shore of the lake and is amongst regenerating rain forest. We found a spot 60 metres back from the lake and slightly elevated so we have great view. Our campsite is screened from other sites by trees and we have a fireplace beside us for our campfire. We set our trap and the first day caught 8 red claw. They are quite small crayfish and the tails of the 8 gave us about 2 cups of meat, which tastes very similar to the NZ crayfish – yum. The next day we caught a further 3 red claw and the following day only 1. We did have an empty trap and no bait that morning so maybe they escaped after eating the bait or maybe someone else cleared out trap. It is Queens Birthday weekend in Australia so there are a lot of people at the camp. There are no designated sites and lot’s of space so every one is well spread out.

As our travels continue kookaburra have become commonplace. At almost every camp if we don’t see them we hear them. At Lake Tinaroo we had barely got set up when a kookaburra came and perched on the end of our awning. It didn’t mind us walking by within a metre of it. Fortunately their laughter in the early morning doesn’t disturb us too much.