THE ATHERTON TABLELANDS - IN A NUTSHELL
The Atherton Tablelands is located about 100km inland from the Queensland coast, running roughly parallel with Cairns at the northern end, down to Innisfail in the south. Having spent several days in the Atherton Tablelands, it's fairly easy to summarise what it's like.
Firstly you're up in the mountains, so it's considerably colder than down in Innisfail or Mission Beach. Most mornings were around 15-18 degrees C, although daytimes were pleasant. Given there are all these mountains, and you're in a tropical area that gets about 2.5m of rain per year, there are lots of rivers and waterfalls criss-crossing through the region, so there are plenty of very pretty locations, although the water is very cold!
The roads in and out of the Tablelands go through areas of rolling hills, which are well used for farming animals and fruit, so these parts are beautiful in their own respect - similar, we felt, to parts of country England.
The Atherton Tablelands is also the main, if not the only, place in Australia where coffee is grown.
We imagined the Tablelands would be a fairly rough, untamed area - but surprisingly we found most of the roads have fully-fenced private farms running either side of main the road - in this respect it's a bit like driving through parts of the Adelaide Hills, e.g. from Mt Barker to Strathalbyn. This means there's not all that much 'scrub' or 'state forest' where you can just pull off and find a spot to explore or sleep. The few which looked promising often turned out to be private driveways! So the road is pretty well just a corridor to get from one town to the next and enjoy the view along the way, rather than presenting many opportunities to duck down bush tracks and explore a bit more deeply. We also found there were a lot less free camps than we had imagined.
For all these reasons, the Atherton Tablelands gave the sense of being a bit more 'built up', 'tourism-oriented' and 'controlled' than the fairly rough, untamed place we'd imagined. That said, it was still a place with some truly stunning scenery and the odd place to still squirrel oneself away!
Saturday 4 July - Innisfail to Zillie Falls
Normally when arriving in a new town that we want
to explore we go to the information centre to find out the what things
there are to do and any other interesting brochures that could be useful
for the surrounding area or our next stop. We got given heaps of
brochures from this information centre and realised the Sugar museum was
very close by that may be able to tell us more about how all this sugar
cane is processed and then turned into the sugar we use today.
