Wallaman Falls with no beer
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
28
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Ingham,
Australia
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Today we travel past a continuous series of sugar cane fields. Sugar cane takes about 7 months to mature and the fields appear to be in continuous cultivation on a rotating basis; so that the crop in each field appears to be of a different age than the next. We are headed to Cairns (pronounced 'cans') which is where we have to turn in our Wicked Campervan on Jan. 4th at 11 AM. We still have time for another side trip to see Wallaman Falls just west of Ingham. This is billed as the tallest single stream waterfall in the southern hemisphere. The winding drive up the mountain side to the viewing area opposite the falls [GPS 18 35.370S 145 48.314] was almost too much for our Wicked Campervan and it over heated about 2/3 the way up. With steam rolling from under the hood we pulled over on the shoulder, which was about a foot wide. Fortunately we had a large container of drinking water from which to refill the radiator
01-02a
. Half an hour later we continued the trip up with the automatic transmission in low gear and no further problems. The view of the falls was spectacular and we took the winding 2 Km rocky path down to the pool at the base of the falls. The view from there was pretty good too. We had hoped to swim in the pool under the falls, like in the movies, but after we got an up close look at the jagged rocks surrounding the pool we gave up on that. The 2 Km rocky nearly vertical climb back up with unused extremely large beach towels was a challenge, the completion of which gave us confidence we could handle just about anything the trip had in store for us. On the way out of town we see the other "Pub With No Beer." Their take on the story is that the during WWII the Yankee troops came to town and drank all the beer (but not the wine). The next day a local came to the bar and was so upset he wrote a poem about it which was published in the paper. They claim it was that poem that was the inspiration for Slim Dusty's song. After a beer in the second pub with no beer we continued on towards Cairns into the night until we found another roadside rest stop, this time with showers. Jan. 3, 2007
We pulled into Cairns early afternoon and found a camp site at the Cairns Holiday Park
01-02b
. [16 54.633S 145 45.460] Tonight will be our last night in the Monty Python Wicked Camper before we turn it in. So Irina spends sometime cleaning the interior and repacking our belongings which by now have increased in quantity and taken over all the spare space in the camper. We also have a broken zipper on our largest High Sierra backpack. It is really too big to be called a backpack, except maybe for Hulk Hogan, and even then the zipper burst from being over packed. It's clear that we will have to unload a lot of stuff before we make the trip across the Australian desert to Darwin. Irina culls some of the stuff, including food items which Arvid passes out to other campers who look like the could us it. We pack the bag up and mail 17.5 kilos of stuff back to Julie, Irina's daughter. The post office told us it would go by slow boat and take 2-3 months. Julie e-mailed us a week later to say she had already gotten it. 
