river – Far North Queensland and Beyond

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.