Mission Beach
Trip Start
May 07, 2008
1
44
90
Trip End
Jan 06, 2009
Mission Beach,
Queensland,
Australia
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Well, our next destination from Cairns was Mission Beach. Another recommendation from everyone we met. To get there, we drove through several towns. Nothing worth mentioning though. Most of them had high streets the size of dual-carriageways and industrial sized warehouses as local shops! Bizarre! Making the town very soul-less and "passing-through" kind of environment.
One place that deserves a brief mention was Tully. This had, in 1950, one hell of a lot of rain. If you can believe this: nearly 8 metres in one year. There was a day where over a metre of rain fell in one night!!! To commemorate and try to get the place on the map - the town council decided to build an 8 metre wellington boot, with a frog on it. You can go inside and climb to the top
The boot and frog
. The local youth probably like touching each other up in here, as can be seen from the messages on the wall.Mission Beach was a wonderful place. Very simply..sunbathing on any of the 14km golden sandy beach, rainforest walking, cycling through the lush green hills. We arrived in late afternoon - without a....give you a clue...zzzzzzzzzz THAT'S RIGHT!! BED!!! So we went straight to a Lonely Planet recommendation up in the hills. The name was illustrative enough of what to expect: Sanctuary Retreat. Specialising in yoga and meditation retreats in the rainforest, sleeping in log cabins, overlooking God's Wonderful Country. Bit hippie chickie and new age for us but sounded like bliss nevertheless. When we got to the woody, isolated car park, an arrow pointed to a wooden telegraph pole with a phone attached and a note saying "Call Reception Here". So we did. They had rooms and gave us directions on how to reach them. We had to walk through the rainforest, quite literally, as signposted and we should reach them in approx 10mins. Do we have sturdy shoes on? Good. See you soon!
The walk to the main building was certainly entertaining. It consisted of a rainforest, unguided walk apart from infrequent signs, "Reception, this way" in a Man Friday kind of scrawl on driftwood nailed to trees! And rocky, uneven, fern-lined steps snaking their way higher and higher to sunlight. It was quite beautiful actually but took longer than 10mins!! When we got up to reception, it was literally a massive log cabin housing a bar and a restaurant. We were given a key to one of the nicer rooms. If we liked the room, they crank up the 4x4 to go get our bags back down in the car park. These guest rooms were in rows down the hill consisting of a small bedroom and tiny bathroom with windows overlooking the rainforest so you could watch the wildlife as you scrubbed your pits
Local poetry!
. As we walked down the woody tree-lined track, I happened to glance right and there just 2 feet away from me stood a towering Cassowary at the front door to one of the guest rooms. I froze. It froze. My heart froze. If you remember from a previous blog, we were told that when confronted with one of these emu-like creatures, you should not run away or it will excite them. You should simply back away and try to get a tree or a car in-between you and it. Remember: they will rip out your insides! (or so we were told by an Australian tourist and that's good enough for me!!) So I looked away and did exactly what you should not do: I walked fast past it down the hill. David said "Oooo look at him!" and I said over my shoulder "keep walking! Keep walking darling!" but no. David did not keep walking and instead went to get a closer look at it! Face to Face!!! For pitys sakes! Which is when the guy at reception who gave us our key, roared down the hill in his Land Rover, slammed to a halt creating a dust devil and leaned out of the window. "Oh look... that's... erm" and he reversed a bit back up the hill. "Ah, that's the young one, he's a bit skittish". (David: I thought that going 'coochie-coo' was probably not a good idea... the reception guy didn't look the type! Anyway, I promptly made sure the car was between me and the big bird) Then our Reception man reversed fast back up the rest of the hill and was gone. I kept on walking, my legs shaking with David following me and as I looked over my shoulder the flaming Cassowary was now behind us on the path walking slowly behind us. These creatures CAN RUN FAST. We saw one move in lightening speed! This was not good. WHERE WAS OUR F***ING ROOM??!!!
I saw the room. Great. I was not staying here. To get to the main building from whence we had come, for drinks or dinner, we would have to walk back up the hill. In the dark. With a torch if you're lucky. Without one in the pitch black if you're not. Cassowaries may be roaming, probably. What if we returned to our room one night and there was one in front of our door like just now? How would we get into our room? Forget it. Upon leaving our room, I just completely lost it. I went into panic mode. We had to go back up the hill to return the key. What if the Cassowary was there again? What if it went for us? When I think back on this now, I am perplexed. I don't know what came over me. I just went completely irrational and hysterical!! I was shaking and telling David there was no way I was staying here with these creatures wandering about ready to eat our lungs. He was trying to calm me down, assuring me they would not hurt us and I just stood and shouted at him to get me out of this place. (David: Well, I think they can quite possibly hurt you. But it's far less likely if we were to act like normal human beings that it sees everyday from its forest hidey holes. Jumping around and getting all excited was probably not normal human behaviour in its young experience. Scary thing though... it has a pre-historic mono-horn on its head, I mean come on... what sort of creatures need bloody great big horns on their heads?)
We returned to reception, back up the hill, me quivering in my shoes looking about for man-eating Cassowaries and then we had to return to the car. If we were to take the room then we would have had a lift down to the car park to our car to collect our luggage in the Land Rover - a 15minute walk down sloping, gravelled, dusty track, surrounded by the rainforest. As we did not take the room we had to make our own way back down, either by this dusty, gravelled track or back through the rainforest from where we originally walked up to reception. I chose the dusty track. If we got into trouble, there's a chance the Land Rover may be roaring down giving someone else a lift and they would come to our rescue. Walking back down that track was slightly emotionally charged, to say the least! David was trying to rationalise with me, to calm me down and I was just an emotional woman convinced that any second this gravelled track would turn into a blood bath of Cassowary and human slaughtering. There was some substance in my fears though. They have been known to maim. (David: Full size living veloceraptors if you ask me. A real life dinosaur. Seriously!)
David's argument for taking the room was that it was already 6pm and the chances of us finding a room at this time of night were slim. My argument was that I would rather sleep in the car but I was optimistic as usual (although I do have my black moods!!) and assured David we would have no problems finding a room. We always get somewhere. At all times of a night. All over the world. Even Beijing at 10pm. We would find somewhere.
We found a room within half an hour. In a fantastic B & B with a huge beautiful garden, wooden chalet type house with a big veranda outside where we were invited to have a complimentary drink with the owners before we went out for dinner. It was a great little place. David, unfortunately, had to listen me saying "I told you we'd find somewhere!" (David: I wanted to study the veloceraptor some more... still, it was an incredible experience seeing him) The owners were lovely. From New Zealand originally and we sat outside chatting to them while little gheckos crept up the walls around us and wildlife called out to each other. It was really wonderful listening to the night sounds of the rainforest while sipping G & T. This B & B had a rainforest at the bottom of their garden. They had a beautiful place.
We nipped into town to get a Thai curry. It was good, not great but good. The owners were an Australian Farmer who had never ever left Australia in his whole 50 years, apart from once: to Thailand where he met his Thai wife and brought her over. We shared stories about Bangkok. He had never been to a restaurant in his life and he had no experience of running a restaurant in his life. So he bought a restaurant with his new Thai wife to make some money. Hmmm...interesting! The food was good, but nowhere near as good as in Thailand. He spent a good 20 minutes slagging off Australian red tape, rules and regulations: Apparently, if you want to be a taxi driver in the area (there are very few about) then you need a licence. The licence costs 350,000 dollars (about £125,000).
The next day, we left early to make our way to our next destination: Airlie Beach. Mission Beach was quite literally a stop-over. We came, we ate, we got heebie jeebie'd by a living dinosaur and then we left.
Love, us xx
