The Atherton Tablelands

Palm Cove, Queensland, Australia
Tuesday, January 21, 2014

It's been a change of scene today, as we decided to take a look at the Atherton Tablelands. It involved a drive up and over the Divide, which is twisty and forest heavy until the other side of Kuranda, when suddenly the landscape changes and opens out. The rainforest melts away, the mountains retreat and you find yourself in a completely different country, but still within North Queensland. In effect you have climbed on to a plateau and are almost on a savannah type grassland, interspersed with eucalyptus and termite mounds. Everything shimmered in the heat as we headed for Mareeba, from where you can branch off and drive to Broome on the WA coast some 2500 kms away. It will take you approximately two days.
Once at Mareeba we called in at Coffee World for a tasting session and some lunch. I guess it makes a change from wine! There are around 50 coffee farms on the Tablelands, where the acidic volcanic soils are well suited to growing coffee. We sampled excellent local coffee roasts, teas, liqueurs and the locally made chocolate. An enormous collection of coffee historica is displayed, all collected by one man, for whom coffee has been something of an obsession.
Did you know coffee originated as a drink in Aden, Yemen and was brought initially to Constantinople where it was immensely fashionable in the 1500s? At this point coffee was known as the Wine of Arabia. It was then imported to Venice and thence to Paris and London. Coffee Houses were the place to be seen in the mid 1600s, during the Jacobean period. Around the same time it was taken to America and coffee's popularity has grown and grown ever since.
After lunch, we drove down to Atherton which is essentially a market town serving the largely agricultural community. There are cattle stations and tropical fruit farms. Interestingly, the cattle are crossed with Indian Brahmin cattle, who are better able to withstand the heat. Turning East once more we headed for Yungaburra, a village still steeped in the Australian pioneering spirit. There are many original Queenslander wooden houses, (built on stilts) around a village green. We seemed to have stepped back in time. The Hotel Eacham was built in the 1860s and has retained many of its original features including the staircase of local timber. The police station and court house building is hardly altered and so it goes on, until we came upon an extraordinary scene in Cedar Rd. Here is the Yungaburra Bowls Club, immaculate in every way and there is a match in progress. All the players were in pristine white and concentration was typically Aussie, extreme. Not a word was uttered the whole time we stood watching. It seemed a moment out of time.
The landscape has changed yet again and we are amongst rolling green volcanic hills and lakes. This is referred to locally as the Lake District. Just on the outskirts of the town is a duck billed platypus viewing platform at Peterson Creek, so naturally we strolled down to have a look. It is a muddy overgrown stretch of water with a dirty brown dappled surface, which makes spotting a tiny, dirty, brown platypus easy of course. (they are only about 12inches long) The little dears are really nocturnal and tend to be active at dawn and dusk.. This was three o'clock in the afternoon, so the chances of a glimpse were slim, but hang on, what is that over the far side under the overhang of that tree. It is dark brown and scuffling about at the edge of the creek. Just a minute there are two of them! Excitement starts to build, but they are a little too far away for the us visibly challenged old dears to be certain what we are seeing. After a couple of tantalising minutes out of the shadows come .......... a pair of dirty brown ducks!! Oh well, you can't be lucky all the time.
On that note we headed back to Palm Cove. It was a day with a difference and it gave us the opportunity to see a different side of Queensland, beyond the tropical rainforest coastal strip.
A change is as good as a rest, but tomorrow we concentrate on the rest!Read more