Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Mission Possible - Mission Beach 23 - 27 June





A crazy idea yes indeed, out of our comfort zone and the rest of the ball park, could we pull it off I wasn’t sure, but hey let’s give it a red hot go.  This trip is about taking risks, finding new things, getting back in touch with ourselves while exploring the country in an 18ft tin box, so what we did next made sense, sort of.   Our next destination was Mission Beach and just off Mission Beach is Dunk Island.  Did you know you can camp on a large number of the Queensland national park tropical islands – no? well I didn’t either.  But you can and we did.

So we got off to a bright and early start from lovely Rollingstone (pretty unusual for us) and in order that we didn’t end up in Mission Beach hanging around waiting for our caravan spot to be ready we decided to stop in at the Tyto wetlands in Ingham.  We had a pleasant if warm walk (the temp was 28 degrees by about lunchtime) and spotted a few birds and even some large tadpoles – it is probably a much better place to go early or late in the day.  Still we had a lovely time and did try to get through to the kids that sightings of birds is pretty dependent on the noise level from our group (not always effectively).  Strangely for a somewhat manufactured wetland our friend the crocodile warning sign was hanging around, not that we saw any.


I love these birds – they are crazy.


We arrived in Mission Beach and stayed at a really cute caravan park (the Tropical Hibiscus Caravan Park).  It wasn’t on the water, didn’t have stunning views of the islands or any of that kind of thing.  It was run by a lovely couple who told me their philosophy was to incorporate the things they liked to have and to do and boy did that work.  They had drinks every evening (and people turned up), but best of all they had a pizza oven and on Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays you bring it they cook it.  So for two nights while we were there we dined on our own handmade pizza while conversing with people not just from Australia but the world (there were quite a few backpackers staying here).  We loved it. Might have to look at installing a pizza oven back at home.


Our main mission here was Dunk Island and we built our time around that.  But we still managed to do a number of walks including Bicton Hill, Lacuala Fan Palm Walk and even went to the ‘Monster’ Mission Beach markets (maybe not quite as big as Eumundi).


 Such small spiders up here!



 Unfortunately not the real thing and we didn't strike it lucky and spot a cassowary in the wild.

 But our real mission here was Dunk Island - but you have to read the next post for that story.



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