Day: 025
Date: Sunday, 26 July 2020
Start: Cardwell
Finish: Babinda
Daily Kilometres: 126
Total Kilometres: 2727
Weather: Mild and misty early, then warm and sunny
Accommodation: Guest House
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Curried egg sandwich/Chicken, cheese & avocado sandwich
Lunch: Roast beef, cheese & pickle sandwich/Corned beef, cheese & pickle sandwich
Dinner: Aussie pizza, cheesecake.
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: For the first hour of the day, there was little traffic as we rode through misty fields and rainforest as the sun rose. Eerily beautiful.
Lowlight: None really.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left our motel shortly after 6:30am and detoured via the Cardwell waterfront on our way out of town to take a look at the magnificent dawn vista. Then it was northwards on a quiet and misty highway (see above), making the riding very enjoyable and interesting. Everything was exceptionally green, as might be expected in the region that experiences Australia's highest annual rainfall. Cattle were silhouetted by the rising sun in their misty paddocks, while the many creeks we crossed were crystal clear and bordered by dark dense green rainforest.
As we neared Tully, our planned breakfast stop, the mist cleared and sugar cane plantations, some of them being harvested, surrounded us. Columns of steam, pumped high into the atmosphere by refinery chimneys, seem to be the trademark of sugar towns, and we could see Tully's many kilometres before we reached there. We stopped at a busy little town roadhouse and ate our sandwiches at an inside table (all of the roadhouses we have visited have been strict about signing in with our contact details if we eat at any of their tables) as people came and went on their Sunday activities. It was, by now, a beautiful sunny morning.
From Tully, it was 53km to our planned lunch stop, Innisfail, and we took a short break about halfway at another roadhouse where we bought some cold drinks on what had become a warm morning. At Innisfail, we detoured via the attractive Johnstone River waterfront before getting some sandwiches at another roadhouse on our way out of town and riding a short distance to the town railway station where we found a nice shady spot to eat. Not too many trains pass through Innisfail, and my reading of the timetable indicated that the only one for the day had passed through two hours ago. We had the place to ourselves.
On the way out of the town, it was nice to see several local cricket games in progress in a large park. Further out, banana palm plantations, their fruit clusters covered by colourful plastic bags, joined sugar cane plantations and mango tree orchards alongside the road in the verdant tropical environment. At one point we passed a cane train whose two engines had been derailed in some kind of bizarre concertinaed accident. The driver was sitting by the engines apparently waiting for help, while the long train itself was stretched across two side roads preventing access and exit.
The remainder of the ride was undulating with much more traffic, dominated to the west by the looming bluish mass of Bartle Frere, Queensland's highest mountain at 1,611 metres. We reached the small town of Babinda around 2pm, riding up the short main street and past its closed supermarket to our guest house which had originally been the nurses quarters for the adjacent hospital. It was an atmospheric and well-kept solid period building, with the downside that we had to drag our heavily-laden bikes up a number of steps to get anywhere near our room.
After dropping our bags in our room, we rode 6km along a side road to the beautiful and popular Babinda Boulders swimming hole on a crystal clear stream amongst jungle-like rainforest. We didn't swim, but others were, while others enjoyed the lush picnic grounds. Very pleasant. Then it was back to the guest house to relax. With the supermarket closed Julie later walked into town and bought some pizza for dinner.
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