Swimming in Nature Part 2: Millaa Millaa Falls

Since I don’t have a job yet, and Bae is still getting used to working predominantly in an office, we’re both trying to make the most of every weekend by doing something nature-y one or both days, so neither of us ends-up going cray-cray.

Nature Deficit Disorder, they like to call it.

I’m happy to just go to the same place over and over. I reckon I could go to The Boulders every weekend for a month, and still happily go back for more, but Bae is more adventurous, and wants to try something new every time.

So this weekend it was Millaa-Milla Falls in the Atherton Tablelands.

The blurriness isn’t from the camera, it’s the splash from the waterfall, and mist from the mountains!

This place is pretty famous (by Australian standards), which means it’s featured in a Peter Andre music video (yeah who? The only reason I know the guy is because at the height of my morbid obsession with all things tacky and celebrity in ’06, I was obsessed with Jordan/Katie Price – that former UK Page 3/Glamour model with the giant fake titties, whom he was briefly married to).

According to Wikipedia, it’s also apparently in some random Indian Lotto and Swedish shampoo ads, as well as this recent Herbal Essences one, which I guess is at least kinda funny and tongue-in-cheek? I can’t even tell when the waterfall is supposed to feature though. I mean, I think the blue butterfly at the end is meant to be a Ulysses Butterfly, which is endemic to the region??? I don’t fucking know.

Delusions of grandeur, classic Australiana.

That aside, another great place to swim. Absolutely freezing (if you ever come-up here to visit us mum, we WON’T take you there, unless it’s the absolute dead of summer).

A local showed Bae and I the best way to get into the pool (it’s very rocky and slippery and steep), and to reward the poor guy, we were screaming and hollering at the cold, as we submerged ourselves inch-by-inch.

Made me very thankful my genitals are located inside my body.

Luckily my Germanic and Scandinavian genetics kicked-in pretty quickly, and I soon felt just a little chilly under the water, while Bae was still actively shivering the poor thing. Reminds me of that ‘Cold Water Therapy’ that’s supposed to help you lose weight, with like, 15 minutes of shivering being the equivalent of burning an hour’s worth of cardio calories.

Can’t wait to go during Winter to get that Summer bod, it’ll be fab!

Once again the recent rain meant the waterfall was extra fierce, meaning we weren’t game to go under the actual flow (in case it drowned us or something), but it was still definitely worth swimming around it.

Afterwards we continued driving all around the mountain (Bellenden Ker strikes again!), exploring the waterfall and creek circuits of Wooroonooran National Park. The other two famous waterfalls were not particularly swimmable (one plunges into a rocky water-pool that would 100% lead to your death), and the other one was too shallow, but still worth the look.

Death Falls
Shallow Falls

We couldn’t resist the opportunity for a photo-shoot though!

If I do something cool, but don’t put photographic evidence of it on the Internet, did it really happen at all?

Until next time!

Swimming in Nature Part 1: The Boulders & Mission Beach

The Boulders

On the weekend, Bae and I decided to go to one of the most popular and advertised tourist places in this region, the Babinda Boulders! Located 60kms south of Cairns, this place is beyond words. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Magnificent. Incredible. Any cool, too-good-to-be-true photo of it on Google is no lie.

We took the Scenic Drive out of town, and it was extra *Italian Chef Kiss*

Lush rolling hills, fields of cane swaying in the breeze, trees and vines growing like crazy on periphery foothills, cutie cows mooing everywhere… So, so relaxing. Kinda glad I can’t drive yet, ’cause I just kept zoning-out and almost drifting-off.

Bonus: With all of the extra rain at the moment (which is thankfully not affecting us here in Coconuts), we even saw the flash-flooding make a temporary waterfall down a cliff-face of Bartle Frere (the tallest mountain in Queensland), which is part of the ‘Bellenden Kerr’ mountain range (very LOTR-esque naming).

Bae assures me the waterfall was definitely not there on his drive up to Cairns last week, so very special! No photo unfortunately, as the range was way too far away for our camera-phones, so you’ll have to take my word on it.

Once we got there, The Boulders themselves were gorgeous.

Bae said the last time he was there five or so years ago (on a dudes-only road-trip), it was a lot more shallow and dry, and you could mostly walk upstream to The Boulders, with the two rivers confined mostly to the banks either side, and meeting up downstream.

Once again though, with all the rain and the cloud-coverage overhead dappling the water, the whole thing was flooded with teal, sapphire, emerald, aqua, everything! Crystal clear in some spots, but really deep and dark and unfathomable in others.

Even Bae (who is 6″4 tall) couldn’t reach the river-bed with his feet in some places and freaked a lil’. Me on the other hand? I’m so short I can never reach anything ever, so just normal levels of terror for me.

Unfortunately, my photography skills ain’t great, and I couldn’t do it justice, but here’s a photo anyways. We’re both thinking a proper camera might eventually be in order once some of our other pressing purchases are out of the way.

Such a good swimming spot though – cannot stress this enough, just fresh, clear, *crisp* water, and so invigorating. Again, *Italian Chef Kiss*

The water-current was surprisingly strong, and even after watching a local try and fail to swim upstream to the Boulders, we gave it a go ourselves. Needless to say, neither of us got very far, but it was a good shoulder work-out, and really relaxing just floating down with the current afterwards.

You wanna know the extra cool/spooky/scary/particularly-alluring part of the trip though? People have DIED at The Boulders. Like, 17-people-in-50-years-died, not just one or two, so you know it’s not just a fluke.

The deathly/maim-y part wasn’t the section we swam in thankfully (I flat-out refused to even entertain the idea), but further down on a separate confluence of rivers called ‘Devils Pool’.

You were right about the legend by the way, mum.

According to local Aboriginal lore, a young woman was scorned by her lover, and jumped to her death in the pools rather than live without him. Ever since then, she’s drowned several young men, so she could be with her lover forever.

Coincidentally 16 out of the 17 deaths have been young men…

Me being my morbid self, I was of course eager to have a look at the pool, so we walked along the river (sans phones, and therefore sans photos), and with the recent rain, it was absolutely torrential, roiling like crazy, a complete vortex of kinetic energy.

The photos I’ve linked here and here are deceptively placid, and don’t reflect what it’s like when there’s been a fuck-ton of rain, but it was creepy powerful. You can see where the water has been battering the rock-sides of the river for thousands of years, carving-out these perfect, alluring, circular pools.

Flimsy human bodies just don’t stand a chance against that kind of geological/hydrological power.

Mission Beach

In a glib 180, the next day we tried another popular tourist spot, Mission Beach.

Honestly, as overwhelming cool as The Boulders was, Mission Beach was as underwhelmingly disappointing. Maybe that’s a little unfair of me, since it was literally the end of the tourist season, but there were no lifeguards (despite the website saying there would be), a sunken stinger-net that wouldn’t keep out the biggest jellyfish, and no visitor-centre in-sight. Downside of a small, regional Council I guess?

On the upside, we’d recently bought and brought along a cutie plush Cassowary toy, and decided on an impromptu photo-shoot.

JUST TOO. FUCKING. CUTE.

It broke my goddamn mind, and it’s just a plushie.

Did the locals think I was insane?

Clearly.

Oh well.

Animal Adventures

When bae was like, ‘Plz move to Far North Tropical Queensland with me’, one of the many shameless bribery tactics he employed was the promise of cutie animals =P

And not just letting me rescue Baby Boo-Boo either (Short for Boudica, because she’s fierce and bite-y, like the bad-ass Warrior Queen).

No, I was promised wild animals! Crocodillies, cassowaries, berbs, and more! And Far North Queensland has so far delivered!

We’ve been to Etty Bay twice now, and as well as stinger-nets, a life-guard, beautiful forest up to the shore-line, a local cafe with decent coffee, and being only a 15 minute drive away (try finding that in Brisbane), there have been MANY Cassowaries, INCLUDING A BABY!

According to this cool website about Cassowaries, you can differentiate and identify Cassowaries based-on the droopiness of their butts (boys are droopy, and girls are… perky???), the size and colour of their ‘neck wattles’ (NOT based-on sexual dimorphism – boys and girls can both have big neck scrotes!), and the size and shape of their ‘casques’ (the head horn things).

We also saw another Cassowary on the way to Etty Bay (which I don’t have the photo of at the moment), meaning we may have seen up to FIVE. DIFFERENT. CASSOWARIES. Seeing as though Southern Cassowaries are an endangered species, with only 1200 wild specimens left in Far North Queensland, we have potentially seen up to 0.475% of all of the Cassowaries left in Australia.

BIG DEAL.

Closer to home though – quite literally, only 50 metres form the new house – there is a beautiful river-ocean estuary-type thing, with a lil’ slice of beach and sand. Completely un-fucking-swimmable though. No stinger nets, no life-guard, absolute croc-country, complete with a yellow ‘ACHTUNG’ crocodile warning-sign.

Now, Etty Bay had something similar too, but it was a much smaller ‘sighting’ rather than ‘confirmed’ warning-sign, so I was like, pfft, people are actually here and swimming, there’s no crocodile! So off we went for a walk and a swim, with nary another thought! And of course, nothing. No croc sighting, no danger.

Back at home with Etty Bay in mind, I figured that the local Council is really just covering its arse when it comes to warning-signs. So bae and I went for a walk along the local beach, and lo and behold! Crocodilly!

This was kindly edited by a friend, who pointed-out that I wasn’t actually pointing at the crocodile…

I later found out from the locals that this is only the small crocodilly! He’s either the 1 metre croc, or the 1.6 metre croc, but definitely NOT the 2 metre croc. So yes, I have three local crocs, the largest of which is apparently getting more and more bold when the locals gut their fishing catches!

So I guess the cats are definitely indoor-cats now…

Living It Up in the Motel California

We got a houuuuuuuse. Yesssssssssss.

It’s in a lovely place called Coconuts. I assume it’s called that because there are coconuts absolutely EVERYWHERE. I plan on learning how to crack and scull ’em as soon as we’re settled in, and I might even get into making ‘fresh young coconut’ – you know, the drink with the delicious, crazy amounts of sugar-syrup that you get in every Thai and Vietnamese restaurant. I’m sure the local cane-growers will appreciate my new found love of sugar (gib job plz, cane-farmers).

I’m really just super relieved though, because living out of a motel, even if only for a week, is… not great. Cannot stress that enough. Don’t get me wrong, the motel is completely serviceable, and would usually be more than enough, except I’m actually living in it ’round the clock, instead of just using it as a stop-gap between tourist outings.

That and the cats are driving me fucking nuts. Their truce was short-lived it seemed, and when the still-as-of-yet unnamed kitty isn’t constantly attempting to ‘play’ with Grace [i.e. jumping on her back and biting her on the neck], she’s either crying for her third serving of food, or pooping unfathomable amounts.

The closest they’ve gotten to each other post-carrier, without hissing and clawing.
Kitty looking smug/suspicious after getting reprimanded for smagging Grace.

Thank god for free WiFi, a Netflix account, and a now mangled cat-toy.

I have however, perfected the art of cooking in a motel-room, without a stove-top, microwave, or even a kitchen-sink. All we’ve had access to is a kettle and fridge! Suspecting something like this might happen (and that it would take the government-contractor forever to move our stuff), we did pack a couple of kitchen things in the car. Cue a visit to the local Woolies – which has a surprisingly good Asian-food section – and I devised the following ~delicious~ recipe.

Cook the vermicelli rice-noodles with water boiled from the kettle. I insulated the pot with tea-towels in a somewhat futile attempt to keep it warmer for longer.
Warm-up the can of satay-sauce in a bowl full of hot water (again from the kettle).
Warm the pre-cut veggies and cashews in… you guessed it! Warm water from the kettle!
Drain the noo-noos and veggies in the bottom of your motel shower (don’t forget to stomp any left-over pieces of food down the drain!).
Finally, mix the noo-noos, veggies, satay-sauce, and cashew nuts altogether in a bowl. Add some ABC hot-sauce (it’s better than sriracha), some salt, and it’s pretty alright.

Adapt. Overcome. Survive.
Surprisingly edible…

Bone-app-the-teeth.

Get a Move On

Moving house can be fun.

I actually usually like doing it. I get a fresh start, it’s an excuse to de-clutter my crap, I get to um-and-ah over all the brand new ways I can store and display all my stuff in a brand new house. It’s pretty all right.

It’s also an opportunity to show-off how great I am at packing and unpacking a house. No joke, after 20-ish house-moves in more than 20-ish years, I can confidently say that my one true, undeniable skill in life is the ability to pack and unpack an entire house in a ridiculously short amount of time, without a trace. The record I believe was unpacking EVERYTHING in three days, only a couple of days before Christmas, when we hosted eleven people, and no one could even tell we had just moved. It’s true, THEY TOLD ME SO.

That said however, moving cities blows.

Moving with cats kinda blows.

Moving 17 hours away in a State that says you have to view a property before signing a lease, therefore leaving you technically homeless, definitely blows.

What blows most of all though, is moving with the proviso that a government-contractor has the sole responsibility of moving your belongings, and that said government-contractor is currently super duper busy. Too busy to move your shit.

Can I organise it myself and get reimbursed later then? No.

What if I find something cheaper than the contractor? No.

Could you have told me this four weeks before the move instead of one? No.

Can you tell me when you’ll be able to get my shit up there then? No.

What if I give you a very specific date by which I need it to be done, can you at least then tell me if you can’t do it, so that in the meantime I can maybe organise for my shit to get temporarily stored elsewhere, because my lease has ended and I don’t want everything I own to end-up on the curb? No.

No? NO? ‘Kay. Cool. Whatever, I guess it’ll all just figure itself out then.

On the bright-side though, my cats were incredibly cute, albeit annoying on the drive-up, and I lived in constant fear of them over-heating, even with the air-con blasting the whole way.

Exhibit A. While these two started their new-found acquaintance hissing, clawing, and otherwise growling at each other, they eventually bonded over their shared hatred and/or trauma of spending 17 hours in a cat-carrier in a moving car.

Exhibit B. On one of our frequent breaks, Grace decided she’d had enough of our shit, and was jumping ship. Jokes on her though, this is why we got the leash. The as-of-yet unnamed kitty didn’t seem to mind the car as much, but still wanted to see what all the fuss in the bushes was about.

Going…
Going…
Gone.

Until next time.

Au revoir.