We’re in Gimuy tonight, which is what we now call Cairns (or Cairns City). The Gimuy-Walubarra people of the Yidinji nation are the traditional custodians of the area, and we pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
We made it to Cairns – and more importantly, the car made it to Cairns with no more dramas! We’re pretty thankful for that.
This morning we started with a bush breakfast at Undara. It was a wonderful experience – about a 5 minute walk from the resort, out to a clearing in the bush. And it was essentially a full breakfast – a chef was cooking some eggs, bacon and sausages on a hotplate, but then we had coffee and tea cooked over a campfire, and if we wanted toast we had to cook that over another campfire ourselves. We got there right on 7am to give us plenty of time to enjoy breakfast before our 8am tour. We definitely all had a really good fill, and it was all delicious.
We headed off on the Archway Explorer tour at 8am, and this was definitely one we were really looking forward to. This was a chance to explore some of the incredible lava tubes that exist in Undara National Park. On the bus trip out, we heard a lot from our guide, Kevin, about how the land was formed through all the volcanoes over the millions of years – but more relevant to the area, the Undara Volcano some 190,000 years ago. The lava from that volcano flowed quickly, and a long way – some 160km from the crater! And that created all these incredible lava tubes across the National Park.
The first cave we visited was the Collins Road cave – so long and deep. We headed right down into the depths of the cave and even saw a few microbats where they were roosting. We had a chance to understand a lot about the stalagmites that slowly develop in the lava tubes as well. This was also just where we spent a lot of time hearing about how the lava tubes in general were formed (whereas in the next couple of caves it was more about just exploring).
The next cave was the most incredible – the Ewamian cave. Before we headed into the cave though, we walked through the Archway – essentially part of the lava tube that has just collapsed 50m either side, creating this incredible archway. What waited on the other side of the Archway was the Ewamian cave, which still has flood waters in it. This is apparently a one in 10 year event! And we then had the chance to wade through the waters in the cave right down to the end! This was such an amazing experience. The water was fairly cold, but it was only ankle deep. We all absolutely loved it – smiles on our faces all the way!
After we got back from the tour we quickly got things packed up and checked out of our rooms. We picked up our packed lunches from reception and got on the road to Cairns. We wanted to leave reasonably early to just give ourselves a chance to take it easy on the drive over, knowing that we still had the space-saver spare tyre and a damaged tyre on the car.
We stopped in at Ravenshoe (pronounced ravens-hoe, so you don’t make the same mistake as me!), about an hour and a half up the road for some lunch. It’s Queensland’s highest town, and it was a really lovely little town – probably would’ve been fun to explore a bit more if things were different! We stopped briefly briefly at the Windy Hill Wind Farm just up from Ravenshoe – we initially put this on our list to see when we were planning, thinking it would be great to see a wind farm up close. Little did we realise we’d come across plenty of wind farms down south in Victoria and SA! The Windy Hill farm is really different to a lot of the wind farms we saw back in SA and Vic – this one was built in 1999/2000, making it 23 years old! And you can really tell, with the turbines look quite weathered and much different in design to the far more modern wind turbines we saw down south.
We arrived in Cairns about 4:30 this afternoon, and like I said at the top, we were thankful we made it hear safely. We’re in a small apartment just to the north of the city, but certainly close enough to all the things we’ll want to see and do here over the next few days. And there is definitely some of the more exciting things of this whole trip to come over the next few days!
