I know that this special blog is a little behind when we visited but I wanted to give it the attention it deserved and as we are relaxing in Townsville I am taking the time to share the 'Paronella Experience' Paronella Park is Jose Paronella's dream. Jose came out to Australia from Spain in the 1920s and worked as a cane cutter. He was an entreprenuer and bought up cane farms and sold them to acquire his fortune. He was here for about 10 years and then decided...

We are definitely in sugar cane country and as you'll see from the photos we have been getting our fill of information about how this industry is the 2nd largest money maker in Queensland (us tourists being the first!). After we left Atherton Bert and Fran stayed at Bill and Val's place at Peeramon and we went down to Tony's friend Graham (Grumpy) in Edmonton, just out of Cairns. None-the-less the four of us did similar things during the time we were apart. We...

Well we have arrived in one of the most beautiful parts of North Queensland, the Atherton Tablelands. The area is full of tropical rainforests, waterfalls, sugar cane, beautiful volcanic lakes, coffee and tea plantations and lots of rolling hills and mountains. We spent 4 full days touring from Milla Milla in the south to Mareeba in the north, west to Herberton and East to Yungaburra and the Tinaroo Lakes and dam. We were very fortunate to be able to stay at fr...

The Savanah Way stretches across the northern part of Queensland and meets up at the Atherton Tableland. The scenery varies from savanah grasses to mountainous areas particularly around Georgetown. We travelled from Normanton across to Croyden (this is where Tony and I travelled to on the Gulflander and stayed overnight at the Club Hotel before boarding the train the next morning and travelling back to Normanton (see our previous blog entry). We decided to go ou...

We had one last stop in the Northern Territory - Wanerah Bore. We also called into Barkley Homestead for lunch. On Thursday 12 June we crossed the border into Queensland. We were a little disappointed with the entrance statement which was covered with graffitti. Definitely not as impressive as the sign we had a photo with at the South Australian/Northern Territory border (see previous blogs). We spent our first night in Queensland at the billabong a couple o...