rover all over: Jourama Falls Campground

Paluma Village also known as Cloudy Clearing, sits high on Mt Spec, and the road up there is extremely scenic. We unhitched Clover and abandoned her at the start, and drove up into the clouds and the blessed cool. Paluma is proud of its history as a recovery place for injured service people in WW11. You can imagine how healing and soothing this rainforest environment must have been. The access road was built as a project by the unemployed of the depression era. This is a 60ft span arch bridge built by hand in 1932.

McClelland Lookout has views over the Paluma Range National Park all the way to the Hinchinbrook channel and the island. We won't have time to do justice to any more Queensland coast islands on this trip. But the Whitsundays and Dunk island are on my bucket list.

We did the rainforest walk at Paluma.

The village is quaint, but was mostly closed. Their busy season must be some other time.

We collected Clover and went a bit further north to Jourama Falls campground. You could spend weeks on this area, "The Great Green Way" from Townsville to Cairns. It is a delight.

This campground is even lovelier than the last, and even fewer people. We set up on soft grass in the deep shade of a massive fig tree, with a rather picturesque bent tree arch framing the back of the van. We started to ask eachother what we had done to deserve this splendour.

There was a spectacularly lovely swimming hole, which we had to ourselves (again).

Between the day use section and the camping section there is a creek, alive with birds. One was a massive brown thing later identified as a pheasant coucal. It crashed around in the branches and made a sound like water glugging down a plughole. We spotted a buff-breasted kingfisher and a metallic flycatcher. There were brush turkeys, emerald doves, little yellow honeyeaters, golden orioles and of course, fig birds. Pizzey got a workout. The dawn chorus was deafening, so many calls I had never heard.