Qld - Cairns to Normanton

The drive up to the Atherton tablelands west of Cairns was very picturesque with farms along the way growing everything imaginable. Many had road side stalls selling some of their produce.
When we arrived at Ravenshoe, Queensland’s highest town, we were greeted by about 12 wind generators producing electricity with no negative effect on the environment. You have to ask why there aren’t more out there in the Australian countryside.
As we continued heading west the land became much dryer and flatter and the farms quickly became stations, some thousands of acres. We spent a wonderful morning at Undara Volcanic National Park where there is over sixty extinct volcanoes. We walked around the rim of one of these, Kalkani crater, which is about 1.5 klms around the rim. From here we could see many of the volcanic cones in the area.
The Undara lava tubes were created about 190,000 years ago. These tubes were formed when the outside of the crust of a lava flow cools very quickly due to a rapid drop in outside temperature as the core of the flow keeps moving. The inside of some of these tubes were used by the aborigines for hundreds of years as eating places.
We spent a couple of memorable nights on the way to Normanton at camp areas where we sat around the camp fire with a guitarist, having sing a-longs with people we had never met. There is something magical about the outback.
Normanton is about 75 klms from the Gulf of Carpentaria. The main street of town has a replica of Krys, the 8.63metre long crocodile who was shot by a woman Krystina Powlowski in 1957. He is so massive that it is hard to believe that he was real.
While in Normanton we took a three hour trip on the Gulflander, the local famous old train which took us on a twenty mile trip where they stopped for us to disembark and have morning tea by a pond with water lilies and bird life. We have become quite the bird watches and have our book out all the time identifying the bird life. We have found lots of Brolgas, cranes and kites here are being challenged trying to take photos of them.
We now head further west to the Lawn Hill National Park where we will put our van in storage and camp for four days.