After our day on the reef we headed in-land to the rainforest areas, bananas, and sugar cane. By the way they have a whole little train system all over the place that is used to transport sugarcane to the processing plant.
We went to a National Park called Wooroonooran (really) a water fall called Josephine and a trail through a tropical type forest called Danger.
Next we went to a private park developed in the 1930's called Paronella Park. Some guy from Spain came to the area bought some land that had a waterfall, river, and lots of topography.
The guy built stairs and buildings in concrete by hand. It was an interesting place.
In the 1930's it was quite an entertainment center with swimming, diving, tennis, ballroom dancing, trails, walks, restaurant etc.
The park has fallen on hard times the decendants of the original ower sold the property off a few years ago and a mysterious fire destroyed most of the central building. The current owners are trying to restore or at least maintain the place an interesting historical site.
We headed north along some twisty narrow mountain roads and stopped to hike down to waterfalls at several places. One interesting stop resulted in a cow drive.
We did see a crater from an old volcano that was sort of interesting
We went through some of the fringes of the Outback there were trees but little underbrush (called a savanna). We saw some pretty impressive termite mounds.
We stopped by the side of the road at a spot with a marsh in foreground, a lake in the middle ground, a mountain in the background and a sky full of sunset.
We got to Port Douglas about 7:30 PM and to the place where we will be staying until Friday we will be doing day trips from here. The hotel/condominium complex where we stayed had suits with a full kitchen, living and dining rooms two bedrooms laundry facilities and two covered decks one overlooking the pool, pretty nice quarters.
Michaelmas Cay which is in the Coral Sea. The whole site is part of Australia's national park system. The trip out was a bit overcast and rainy and the time was spent getting instruction about what to do and not do once we were on site. We anchored off of the island and were transported over to the beech where we could wade out into relatively shallow water and snorkel. the bright blue colored water has sand below and the darker colored water is where the coral is.
