Babinda to Cairns

Friday morning I swear I heard a rooster crowing in the very wee small, in fact miniscule hours. And here he is, strutting around the Babinda Boulders as if he belonged there, looking magnificently incongruous beside the brush turkeys.

The Babinda Boulders has been redeveloped in a very superior way since our last visit a few years back. In the morning we had a swim, solo, early before the first tourist bus or carload of children arrived, and it was gorgeous. The swimming area is enormous, but still some people insist on swimming in the gorge itself, and almost every year it drowns someone, usually a young male.  There is an aboriginal legend that two young lovers were separated here by their tribes.  She leapt into the waters, and huge round boulders were thrown up where she drowned. The legend says her spirit claims young lovers, as she searches for her own lost love.

David felt very nervous in case his attractive personage was at risk of being claimed by the spirit of Babinda Boulders. The place is as lovely as ever, but we didn't see any platypuses this time.

I may have mentioned that I can't resist a good fungus...This one was cup-shaped and had about 100ml of water in it. 

This area, the Queensland Wet Tropics, is World Heritage Listed. Thank goodness. So no bulldozers will ever replace this thick, complex vine rainforest with sugar cane or palm oil.  The plant below, with stems about the thickness of a broom handle was one of so many extraordinary growths to be seen on the Babinda Rainforest Walk. It's really worth doing, built as it is into the side of a hillside beside the creek in an area that gets about 8m of rain annually. The path is easy enough to do in a wheelchair.

What a beautiful thing a rainforest is.

Babinda is about 50Km south of our destination, Cairns. We arrived there on Friday afternoon, the first day of October, to stay with David's mum Marjory for a while. It has been raining and raining and raining ever since we arrived, so we've just been resting and not doing much.  I'm off to Melbourne for the ANZ Family Therapy Conference, on Tuesday 5 October and David will stay in Cairns. He has undertaken to continue the blog until I get back in a week, so stay posted.