Road Trip Through Queensland

Shortly before Christmas my girlfriend Simone arrived here in Townsville after having spent half a year in Indonesia. In the meanwhile I had bought a car as it is almost a necessity here in Townsville. We celebrated Christmas with some good friends by having a barbecue and pool party. It felt a bit awkward so far away from family and home and was not exactly what a European would expect for Christmas but none the less a really nice substitute.



Past the Christmas days we set out on a little Road Trip through Queensland over the Christmas holidays. Already a few miles north of Townsville the lush green of Queensland’s countryside starts to turn into tropical rainforest. The rainforest here in Northern Queensland is one of the oldest on the planet and exhibits an array of exotic wildlife. There are lots of beautiful little creeks, rivers and waterfalls nourished by the heavy rain falls driven by winds from the Coral Sea that ascending against the mountains of the Great Dividing Range. The Wallaman falls close to Ingham pour down over 250 meters in a refreshing pool at the bottom of a scenic jungle walk.


Wildlife is just stunning and we saw amethyst pythons sneaking directly over the street in front of us, tame tree frogs that did not really care if you were a tree or not, spiders the size of a an outstretched palm and others that pretended to be some kind of spiny beetle, fungi the color of cherries and creatures out of science fiction I am still not sure what they really were……








After camping and hiking in many of the national parks and a few days the in the beautiful rainforest village of Mission Beach we arrived in Cairns the capital of Northern Queensland.
The slogan of Cairns matches its character perfectly – ‘Rainforest meets Coral Reef’.
The Great Barrier Reef lies as close as 30km of the coast here which makes it the perfect spot for diving and snorkeling trips. Inland the rainforest touches the coast in some places where it has not been cleared by sugar cane fields yet. The only thing Cairns is missing are nice beaches, but the city made up for it by creating a free access swimming pool directly on the shore esplanade including its own little beach.
We went out on a diving trip with one of the liveaboard ships for 3 days to explore the reefs. The outer-reef is stunning and consists of a myriad of spurs and groves that waited to be explored.


After that we went all the way west inland to the so called Atherton Table Lands. These highlands are a perfect hideaway from the very hot and humid weather along the Queensland coast. The highlands have a much cooler climate with extended grass lands making it a perfect place for horseback riding and bird watching. From here we travelled on further west into the outback. Unfortunately the road got flooded and we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and had to camp out in the open for a night till the water level of the surrounding creeks sank again.


At our final destination in Chillagoe we had the chance to explore 3 magnificent limestone caves. Chillagoe itself is an old outpost of the gold rush and a real Ozzy town in the middle of nowhere where ‘Kangaroo and Cockatoo say each other good night’! It is the last dwelling before the long dirt road along the Gulf of Carpentaria.
However the big adventure of our ‘great northern safari’ had to be postponed to one day in the future……..