Babinda & the Atherton Tablelands

After Innisfail, we were originally going to go to Cairns, then the Daintree and then the Tablelands, but the park we wanted to stay in at Cairns was fully booked so we switched directions and did the Atherton Tablelands first.

Babinda

We did a small day trip to Babinda. This is a really cool little river where the water tumbles over large boulders. There is a nice swimming area at the top (unfortunately we didn’t have our swimsuits) and then a walk along the river to see the boulders and waterfalls. It’s a significant spot for the local aboriginal people and is apparently haunted by the ghost of a jilted woman who drowned here.

Atherton Tablelands

The tablelands is a beautiful area up the Great Dividing Range mountains from the coast. It’s where people from Cairns come in the summer to cool down and swim since it’s several degrees colder up here. It is considered the food bowl of Australia. They have stalls everywhere along the road where you can buy all kinds of fruits and vegetables. There are also a couple of dairy farms and we had a lovely lunch sampling a cheese platter and some chocolate truffles at the Cheese and Chocolate factory.

On one of the days, I took the kids for a late afternoon swim at the two ancient volcano crater lakes. Lake Eacham is the one that’s more set up for swimming as opposed to Lake Barrine that instead had a lovely tea house and boat tours.

The Atherton Tablelands have quite a few other natural wonders. There are giant fig trees everywhere, but the most famous is the Curtain Fig (see image below). There are also tons of waterfalls, R and I have visited them all before and the kids were getting tired of waterfalls (we’ve seen too many on this trip so far) so we only went to the most famous one: Millaa Millaa falls.

Herberton Historic Village

One of the days we went to the Herberton Historic Village. They brought a bunch of old buildings to this area and filled them with old stuff. (Some of them not THAT old – I remembered some of the toys they had in the toy house and the kitchen appliances house reminded me of my grandmothers kitchen cupboard!). The kids loved it there – we ended up spending hours walking around looking at various things (old things like telephones and records!). There was also a woodcarver there that we watched for quite a while who was telling us how to carve wood and various kinds of Australian wood. He gave our daughter a wooden bowl for free at the end of the day!

Crystal Caves

Ever since we went to Lightning Ridge, we have developed a newfound love of rocks and minerals. So, when we saw that the town of Atherton had a museum called “The Crystal Caves” we had to go! It was amazing – I would highly recommend it for anyone into rocks. The Dutchman who started it has been all around the world collecting various minerals and he created this museum that he designed like your walking into caves. He had glow in the dark minerals, and an enormous amethyst as well.

We really love the Atherton Tablelands and unfortunately left feeling that we didn’t get to do even half the stuff we wanted to do here. Oh well, next trip!