After leaving Townsville we drove 300km north through a lot of nothing again. If this is what rural Queensland is like, what the heck is the Outback going to be like eh?!?!?

On the way up we drove through a town called Tully where for the first time in 5 weeks it started to rain!! That must be a record for people like us coming from the UK to not see rain in 5 weeks But, turns out for Tully rain is the norm as this is the wettest place is Oz, and it shows as it suddenly got very lush and green. Just after Tully we turned off the main road and headed to the small beach town of Mission Beach which the tourism book make out to be a tropical paradise worth the stop over, plus its also the area in Oz where you most likely to see a wild Cassowary. A Cassowary is a funky colored bird similar to an Emu but like all Ozzie animals, its more than capable of killing a human, but it actually plays an important role in looking after the rainforest because its the only animal which eats certain kind of fruit, which by crapping it out hatches the seeds so the plants can grow. Random!!! Anyway, Cassowary's have a habit of running across the road and getting killed so on the way to Mission Beach there were massive signs everywhere saying SLOW DOWN, DON'T KILL THE CASSOWARY, so we went slow and the Ozzies all came tanking past us! Anyway, Mission Beach to put it blunt was crap. Nothing there except a ton of pissed backpackers so we turned around and went to our campsite for the night at Kuramine Beach.

Now what did we just say about tourism books? Well yep you guessed it, Kuranmine Beach also got rave reviews as "the place locals holiday".......well I guess the locals like holidaying in a town in the middle of nowhere with nothing around except boarded up hotels/cafes etc. Great!! We quickly rummaged through our camping books and found another town and site further north so hightailed it outta there quick and ended up in a town called Innisfail just further north.

We must be in a sleepy town belt or something because Innisfail was another one. Apart from it raining all night, the morning was hot and humid as hell, but Innisfail itself was like stepping back 100 years. My god you got lethargic just looking at the place

We would normally have left but we needed to stay in the area to visit Paronella Park on Wednesday, but as our campsite from last night was rubbish we moved to the other site in town which was just down the road and checked in at 11am as there was nothing more to do. We were given the tinniest spot ever (number 13 eek) and basically stayed in the camper all day putting a video together of our time in New Zealand. We did end up talking to a nice New Zealand couple over a BBQ so it wasn't a total loss.

But the reason we are up this way is for the next day, which was Paronella Park.

Paronella Park is hard to describe. It is basically an area of land which in the 1930's a spanish fella bought up and set about building a small castle and lots of small buildings in the style of the old spanish days. The chap, Jose Paronella, was a bit eccentric so he did the whole place really well and it ended up being one of the biggest attractions in Queensland at the time, but sadly he died in the 60s and the place fell into disrepair. It ended up getting totally overgrown and everything covered in moss/forest etc so when the new owners found it, it looked like something out of Tomb Raider which is how it is now. Its actually an awesome place and for the bargain price of $60 we both got in, had a full day guided tour, plus a night time tour by torch light, plus a nights camping in the camp ground next door. Bargain! Paronella Park is voted Queensland's Number 1 Tourist Attraction. It was certainly good, but not number 1, but the Ozzies do like to big things up

Anyway, Paronella Park was still great. Had a very good tour when we arrived where we got told the history of the place, then had an even better tour by torchlight at night where we got to see a python slither past, saw a massive hunstman spider, bats, a bandicoot plus lots of cool scenery and buildings which looked totally different at night. Overall a great experience!

After this we packed up Bolt on Thursday morning and headed north on a 1.5hr drive to Cairns.