Paradise Lost?

A nostalgic trip to

Far North Queensland - 2001

Tony was recuperating from major surgery to replace a faulty valve in his heart and felt the need to be some place warmer than Adelaide in a cold and wet winter. It had been nearly twenty years since David had returned to Far North Queensland where he was born and where he had spent his early life. These two old farts left their partners in the cold and flew off to the tropical paradise for a few weeks of sun and relaxation.

The picturesque Cairns Harbour on Trinity Bay

Cairns, the tourist capital of Far North Queensland, was a quiet country town of 28,000 people when David worked there. Now its population exceeds 120,000 and tourism dominates the economy. Over 1 in 4 residents are directly involved in the tourist industry and even though they may not like it, the economic well being of most of the rest of them depends on the success and profitability of tourism. There is a love/hate relationship between many of the locals and the tourists. Some of the locals blame the tourists for the destruction of the quiet life style of the old days and for the high real estate prices commanded by inner city properties. They complain about parking problems and crowded restaurants. They forget that the tourist provides their pay packet.

But has Cairns really changed much over the thirty years since David worked there? Yes and no. Yes, it's larger, busier and more crowded. The city centre is now packed with tatty souvenir shops, internet cafes, travel agents, restaurants, cafes and high priced boutiques selling exotic goods from around the world. The government office where David worked is now an up market cafe. The old courthouse next door is a pub popular with young travellers. The seedy collection of old hotels near the water front known as the "Barbary Coast" where certain women used to ply their trade and drunken sailors and waterside workers brawled has disappeared and been replaced by luxury apartment buildings. The city is for the tourist; the locals tend to live and shop in the suburbs. In spite of all this tourist related development, Cairns is still one of the most beautiful cities in Australia and it still has a relaxed, laid-back tropical atmosphere. The beautiful warm winter climate is still there and the views from the coconut palm fringed esplanade over the waters of Trinity Bay to the rugged, rain forest clad mountains are still as spectacular as ever. More people live at and visit the fantastic beaches to the north of the city but these are still quiet, peaceful pieces of tropical paradise. Looking for a palm fringed beach where the only foot prints are your own? You may have to look a little harder but they are still easy to find.  It is difficult not to be envious of the lifestyle of the residents of Cairns and its surrounding area. 

It was a deliciously warm sunny day as we rode north on the bike path which follows the Captain Cook Highway to Palm Cove. The highway was busy and even though there are wide shoulders all the way it was quieter and more pleasant to ride on the bike path. Unfortunately, sections of the path are in very poor condition. Heavy vehicles have broken the concrete path in places and damage caused by torrential summer rains has not been repaired. Some parts of the path are very narrow and some of the corners are dangerous. If action is not taken to increase maintenance on the path, it is only a matter of a few years before there won't be a rideable path at all. Jungle clad mountains lined the western side of the road while on the right, short roads headed off to a succession of small beach resorts, Holloways Beach, now virtually a residential suburb, Yorkey's Knob, Trinity Beach and Palm Cove. We rode into Palm Cove passed the luxury hotel and apartment complexes and stopped opposite the pleasantly shady campground. Campsites which cost only a few dollars a night are only a short stone's throw from apartments costing several hundred dollars. A stroll across the quiet road and the same beach is free for everyone. We bought a couple of drinks at the tiny supermarket and ate our lunch under the shade of the coconut trees and relaxed with a million dollar view of beaches and mountains.

Not far from Palm Cove is the Wild World Tropical Zoo. This is probably the best small zoo in Australia and it's a great place to have a look at some of the more elusive or dangerous Australian fauna. They celebrated their 21st birthday one Sunday while we were there. Locco, our host in Cairns and the popular Radio 4CA breakfast announcer, was involved in an outside radio broadcast as part of the celebrations. We are not sure how it happened, but we ended up cooking what seemed like thousands of sausages and onions for the free sausage sizzle. 

It doesn't matter which road you take, to get from Cairns to the Atherton Tableland involves a lot of steep climbing. We cheated. The railway trip from Cairns to Kuranda is one of great tourist attractions and is highly recommended. The train with its restored timber carriages lined with cabinet timbers from the North Queensland rain forests, climbs slowly up the Barron River gorge. There are spectacular views over the coast and mountains. Being a tourist train, it slows down or stops to allow photographs of some of the waterfalls and views. At Barron Falls, there is a ten minute stop to view the gorge and the remnants of these once great falls. A dam for a hydro-electricity power station now takes most of the water and it is only after heavy rain that the falls roar and thunder into life. Years ago, they used to turn on the water flow just before the train arrived to provide a spectacle for the tourist. Since the Skyrail cable car development, nearly everyone has to buy a postcard to see how great the falls once were. About an hour and a half after leaving Cairns, we arrived at the lush, fern clad railway station at Kuranda. We retrieved our bikes from the small guards/baggage van and used the tiny lift to gain access to the town. When we had loaded our bikes onto the train in Cairns, the railway employee who helped us was most anxious that we didn't leave any valuables on the bikes. We took our wallets with our credit cards and cash and our cameras. Ironically, the value of our bikes and the equipment we left on them, far exceeded the value of the things we took with us but the employee wasn't worried about those.  

The Cairns to Kuranda Railway

Kuranda used to be a very attractive little village surrounded by rain forest. It is still surrounded by rain forest but it is no longer attractive. Everything is tourist driven and everything is expensive. The village motto could be "Rip the tourist off as quickly as possible!" We tried to buy some bread rolls to have with our lunch but not even the local bakery would sell an un-filled bread roll. If you wanted an exorbitantly priced sandwich or an expensive bowl of soup, there were lots of places eager to help. The rates at the local internet cafe were three times dearer than we had seen in Cairns.

We headed out of town as the rain started to fall. We stopped and put on our rain jackets but only managed to get a hundred metres down the road before it stopped. For the next 15 kilometres, showers swept in quickly and  then disappeared again. It was warm and the rain was warm so after a while we forgot about the rain gear. We dried out very quickly in the warm sun between the showers. Slowly the vegetation changed as we headed inland towards Mareeba. The rain forest gave way to dry open savannah land where beef cattle grazed. Large ant hills (termite nests) dotted the countryside. As we approached Mareeba, mango plantations appeared. Tobacco used to be the main crop on these irrigated farms but times have changed. Tobacco has now disappeared; replaced by mangoes, sugar and coffee.

The next day we took a quiet back road as we climbed slowly towards Atherton. It was cool and cloudy and the strong south-easterly winds which dominated the weather for most of our trip gave us a nasty head wind to fight all the way. Our only respite from the wind came when sugar cane grew close to the narrow road. Not long after we joined the main highway again, we stopped for lunch at Rocky Creek at the site of a Second World War army hospital. During the war, the Atherton Tableland was dotted with army camps where soldiers trained before and rested after their vicious campaigns in New Guinea. Today very little evidence of these camps remain, but signs show where the various units were based. Thousands of wounded soldiers and medical staff had lived in the tent hospital where we sat and ate our bread rolls. At Tolga we turned onto small roads as we headed to Lake Tinaroo, the huge lake created to provide irrigation water for the farmers. There were a couple of showers of rain overnight as we camped in the tiny village of Tinaroo.

From Tinaroo we rode along the Danbulla Forest Drive, a quiet dirt road which goes through rain forest for much of the way. The forest was thick and lush and seemingly impenetrable. Thick vines hung from the trees. For much of the time we rode through parts of the World Heritage listed Wet Tropics forest. There were tantalising glimpses of the lake through the forests. At several places around the lake, sites had been provided which allowed camping in picturesque areas by the water. Near one of these sites we heard what we thought were power boats on the lake but it turned out to be chain saws cutting timber in a small forest of exotic pine trees. The road steepened and we had several steep climbs  before we stopped at the huge Cathedral Fig Tree for lunch. Shortly afterwards we left the forest and had a hilly ride through dairy farms towards the beautiful volcanic crater of Lake Barrine. David's father had spent many years living on the Atherton Tableland and had worked in the sawmills which processed the huge trees cut down as the rain forests were cleared to make way for the dairy farms. In his later years he gained a lot of pleasure from seeing people replanting rain forest trees and watching the forests slowly reclaim abandoned farms.

It started to rain as we arrived in the tiny, attractive town of Yungaburra. The town has a large number of heritage buildings and these with the close proximity of the crater lakes and rain forests have provided a focus for a quiet, laid-back tourist industry which has kept the town alive.  As there was no campground here, we booked into the backpackers' lodge. This comfortable and cosy lodge is one of the most pleasant hostels we have stayed in and the friendly staff made a stay here very enjoyable. The nightly barbeque dinners are very good value. No wonder the place is so popular with travellers.

During his childhood, David had spent many school holidays around Atherton and Yungaburra. His mother had lived on a dairy farm nearby and many of his distant relatives still live here. The area is full of memories of a long ago "innocent" age. The next day it rained heavily so we only rode the twelve kilometres into Atherton to do some shopping. Things had changed since David holidayed here as a young boy. It took a while for it to register but the large supermarket complex where we shopped had been built on the orange orchard in front of his aunt's house. 

The weather improved and we set off on a hilly ride to Millaa Millaa through Peeramon and Malanda. The tablelands are rich dairy farming country and all the milk produced is now processed in the large factory at Malanda from where it is distributed over much of northern Australia. The smaller factories in places like Millaa Millaa have now closed and much of the life in these small towns has disappeared. When the World Heritage forest areas were declared and many of the sawmills closed, many towns turned to tourism and have prospered, but Millaa seems to have missed out.

On the road to Malanda

The Palmerston Highway out of Millaa Millaa was quite narrow considering the size of some of the trucks using the road to travel down to the coast. The only hassles we had with traffic on the whole trip were from two trucks on these few kilometres of narrow road. The road widened once we reached the top of the climb and we enjoyed a fast sweeping downhill through rain forest to the Beatrice River. A long steep climb followed before we began the downhill run which lasted almost all the way to the sugar farming town of Innisfail. On the way we stopped at a couple of roadside fruit stalls and bought freshly picked pawpaws, bananas and other fruit for a tropical lunch on the side of the road. Innisfail claims to have the greenest grass in Australia. There is good basis for this claim in that they have the highest average rainfall in Australia. Tully, David's hometown, holds the record for the highest rainfall (over 300 inches or 7,500 millimetres) in a year but Innisfail is wetter on average. We camped on the banks of the South Johnstone River near where the campground manager told us she regularly saw small crocodiles swimming.

The South-East Trade winds continued to blow strongly as we rode south through the small sugar cane farming towns of South Johnstone, Japoonvale and Silkwood. Thick rain forest covered the hill sides as we made our way through continuous fields of tall green sugar cane. A lot of the cane was in flower with long grey/white tassels waving in the breeze. Harvesting was under way in some areas, but we had yet to see any of the huge mechanical harvesters at work. The days when gangs of men, blackened by the sun and the black soot from the spectacular fires used to burn the leafy trash, cut the cane with long handled machetes are long gone. We stopped briefly at Paronella Park, a folly which had been built by a home sick Spanish immigrant. We just wanted to have a cup of coffee in the cafe adjoining the entrance gates but the owners who have dreams of making the park into a popular tourist attraction wanted to charge us $15.00 each entrance fee. We moved on to the local hotel for our coffee and ate the luscious ripe pawpaw we bought from a nearby farm.

At Silkwood, our quiet back road ended and we joined the Bruce Highway for the 10 kilometres to El Arish. There was a wide shoulder on the road for the whole distance which made the ride bearable but the traffic was very heavy. It was a pleasure to turn onto the quiet road to Mission Beach which wound its way gently up and down through the Tam O'Shanter Range to the beach. We camped at the small, slightly run down, council camping ground which was separated from the beach by a thin line of tall waving coconut palms. The rather more luxurious caravan park on the opposite side of the road cost more than twice the price we paid for our beach frontage.

Kilometres of palm fringed, gently sloping, golden beaches lapped by gentle waves stretched into the distance. The resort islands of Dunk and Bedarra lay offshore. Only a few people, no more than a dozen could be seen, were sitting on the sand or swimming in the warm winter water. Paradise, and the scene of numerous happy summer picnics from David's childhood. But summer in paradise can be dangerous. Nobody seemed to worry very much, but nearly every summer at least one person died after being stung by something while swimming at the beaches of North Queensland. Nobody seemed to know what it was that was causing the deaths and people didn't worry. It certainly didn't stop them swimming. Dr Flecker, a Cairns based family doctor, started searching for the elusive stinger. The small jelly fish with exceptionally long tentacles that he discovered and which was named after him, Chironex Fleckerii, caused panic among swimmers. They now knew what was killing the unfortunate few and they were scared. During summer months when the jelly fish are prevalent, the beaches were deserted. Now, large stinger proof enclosures are erected at all the popular beaches during the summer.

 After a couple of days relaxing in the shade of the coconut palms and enjoying the warm 28 degree days by the almost deserted beaches of South Mission, Wangaling and North Mission beaches, it was time to do a little more cycling. We rode through the low forest clad hills near the beaches and through the flat sugar cane farming country to Tully where David was born and spent his childhood. Tully is a small unattractive town in a very beautiful setting on the slopes of Mount Tyson. It's famous for its rainfall, sugar cane, bananas and white water rafting. The sugar harvest had started and the smoke from the processing mill billowed high into the skies above the town. As we approached the town, there was an all pervading, sickly smell of boiling sugar which enveloped the town and which brought back so many memories of childhood.

Mission Beach

The town hadn't changed much in the 25 years since David was last there. The names on the front of some of the shops were different; the picture theatre was now a fundamentalist Christian church. We rode to the school David had attended and where he had been a prefect and dux of the tiny high school attached to the primary school. There, at the end of the building was the room where, in year eight, he had sat next to the delicious and beautiful Carmen who had nearly all the boys rampant with pubescent desire. Where is she now? Was she still beautiful? The gardens which had once been the pride of the school had been allowed to deteriorate and now looked rather run down. The large stands of high quality rain forest trees which had once surrounded the playing fields had largely  disappeared. What wonderful games of cowboys and Indians and soldiers we had played in the dense shade of those trees. They also offered little nooks and hiding places for older boys and girls to have a quick kiss and cuddle without being seen. One year, one of the girls fell pregnant to an older boy. The unfortunate girl was expelled but the boy wasn't. There were no sex education or "lifestyle" lessons, but from then on, girls were not allowed to play football with the boys. What football had to do with pregnancy, none of the students could work out.

We made our way to Cook Street where David's home had been. The old, corrugated iron clad house he had lived in and which seemed to lean over whenever there were strong winds from a nearby cyclone, has been rebuilt.  After crossing the Banyan Creek which had been the scene of happy, summer swimming afternoons, we started on the 27 kilometre ride back to the beaches. It had been over 40 years since David lived here. His family had moved away to Cairns and the Atherton Tableland. Our time in the town was short and we didn't have the opportunity of trying to find people he went to school with. The town was full of memories but they were rather ethereal, ghost-like memories as if from a dream. As we rode out of town, Tony remarked that Tully was indeed a good place to leave.

We were starting to run short of time. There was a lot more we wanted to see but we didn't have time to cover the distance on our bikes. We decided to take the bus back to Cairns. Really, we didn't want to ride along the Bruce highway. There is a wide shoulder nearly all the way but the traffic is very heavy and constant. Cycling long distances along this road would not be very pleasant. Only one bus company services this area but operates under two different names. They have a negative attitude to carrying bikes and the fares reflect this. Sixteen dollars each for us, twenty seven dollars each for the bikes. The luggage bays on the bus were less than half full and there was plenty of room but the company has decided on a flat fee for bicycles regardless of the distance involved. The same fee would have taken the bicycles from Brisbane to Cairns, a distance of nearly 2,000 kilometres. It had the advantage of being relatively fast; two and a half hours by bus instead of two days by bike.

Back in Cairns we arranged to hire a small car and drove up the mountains passed Kuranda and on to Mareeba. Here we made a short detour to visit Maloberti's coffee plantation. David's brother had recommended their coffee which is grown without pesticides and other chemicals. After having one or two cups of their delicious coffee, we bought a couple of kilos of beans to take home with us. Then it was on through cattle country to Mount Molloy before heading down the Rex highway to Mossman and the small town of Daintree. On the banks of the Daintree river and on the edge of the famous Daintree rainforests, Daintree Village re-created itself from a timber milling town into a laid-back, quiet tourist village. We camped that night at Wonga Beach north of Mossman. This was the only place where we were bothered by mosquitos during the whole of our time in the tropics and the only place where we didn't have any repellent with us.

Beach at Port Douglas

When Australia's best known and most notorious fugitive from justice, Christopher Skase, built his multi-million dollar tourist resort at Port Douglas, it was a quiet, peaceful collection of holiday houses with a beautiful beach and easy access to the Great Barrier Reef. Now it's a thriving, bustling town with some of the best and most sophisticated restaurants in North Queensland. He may have been the man despised by most Australians, but there must be many who thank him for the fortunes they have made out of the development of Port Douglas as a holiday destination.

From Port Douglas we headed south to Cairns along the spectacular Captain Cook highway with rain forest clad mountains on one side and beautiful empty beaches on the other. In two days we had covered the distance it would have taken us a week or more to travel on bicycles. Maybe there is a place for travelling by car after all.

Many thanks to Locco, the voice of the Radio 4CA, 102.7FM  breakfast show, for his hospitality and friendship and to all the people who helped make this trip enjoyable.