After leaving Karumba we headed to a little place called Mount Surprise. its a little town of only 61 people with a really nice caravan park. from here we did a tour of the Undara lava tubes and did some gem fossicking. The lava tubes were pretty amazing with some really nice colors and a lot bigger than we expected. basically when the volcano erupted the lava followed the river beds and the outside formed a crust with the lava still flowing inside, because the land had such a grade on it the lava emptied out leaving a tube. The gem fossicking is named wrong, it should be called gem mining :-). We had a 43k drive out to the fossicking fields where Nan and Pop did there first creek crossing, once we were there basically we got handed a pick, shovel, a siv and a siv stand. I did the grunt work on the pick and shovel putting it into a bucket and then taking it up to Fiona who then sived out the crap and looked for topaz. every now and then the girls would take up half a bucket for me, we found half a dozen or so gems with 3 or 4 being good enough to cut. Nan and Pop got a few good ones as well so Fiona is getting a pendant made and Nan is getting earings. Topaz looks like glass and when polished up it looks like diamonds. after 3 days at mount surprise we have headed to Atherton in the tablelands of Cairns. On the way we stopped at Mill stream falls where Nan and Pop caught up with some friends, the falls are supposed to be the wide'st in australia. the change in scenery on the way to Atherton was amazing as we left scrubby desert bush and came to lush dense tropical and really green area, the tempreature has dropped a few degrees here but its still nice and warm.