Mareeba and Chillagoe

A highlight of our stay in Mareeba was a day trip 2 hours inland to Chillagoe. The striking black rock formations were fascinating to walk around, and we also went on a tour of an enormous cave system, with microbats flitting about our heads.

Balancing rock

Tree root deep in cave 

Back in Mareeba, we enjoyed a delicious lunch at Jaques Coffee Plantation, and went on a guided tour with Jason Jaques, who was happy to pose for a photo with his coffee beans.

Coffee is a major theme in Mareeba, and we also visited Coffeeworks, which is a museum of all things coffee and tea related, with a fabulous tasting room, with tea, coffee, chocolates and coffee/chocolate liquer available for as much tasting as you can manage! Ben certainly enjoyed the chocolates, while Garry actually confessed to having had so much coffee he had the coffee jitters (unheard of!).  I had a bit of everything, and really liked the historical teapots. 

The Mareeba Wetlands were also lovely, and quite astonishing to learn they are man made, with nothing planted. They are covered in waterlillies and attract a great deal of birdlife - we saw green pygmy geese, which were great to see. 

Mt Surprise

I am madly in love with Mt Surprise. It's a bit difficult to put a finger on why, as there isn't much there. Perhaps it is Bedrock village caravan park, which is a lovely oasis, with large private sites and the most enormous showers I've ever seen.  It also has dinners every night and a great cafe, and a pool, although it was a bit chilly for that.  The cold snap was surprising to all, and the poor residents were all rugged up.

We did a tour of the nearby Undara lava tubes, which are caves left by a long lava flow through the area.  The tour started with a walk up the Kalkani crater and around its rim.

We then headed off to the lava tubes.

The second tube was deeper, and there were some bats!

The tour also included a look at the Undara International Airport.

The other main attraction here is topaz fossicking.  No tag along tours here - we hired gear and I finally got my own fossicking licence!  Yay!  We drove 40km to the public site along the creek and set to work. It was a glorious place to spend a day, and we had a picnic lunch.

And yes, we did find some topaz!

I think I could really get into gem fossicking :-)

Charters Towers

Charters Towers was founded after gold had been discovered there, and has many gorgeous buildings built with the great wealth discovered there.  In its heyday in 1899 it was the second largest town in Queensland and was nicknamed 'The World'.

Now it has just on 9000 people and its four main sources of income are education, agriculture, mining and tourism. Why education, I hear you ask?  It has three large boarding schools, which service the outlying towns which don't have high schools. Charters Towers also played a major role during World War II.

My favourite experience here was the Texas longhorn cattle station.

Our tour with Lynda got us up close to their gorgeous cattle and their Guiness book of records steer JR, with his record 3m horn span!

They also have some Watusi crossed with longhorn,

Bison

Buffalo

and shade camoflaged Scottish Highlander cattle.

A great morning!

Richmond

Richmond is a lovely outback town that is doing a lot to make itself attractive to tourists and locals. It has a man-made lake that they use for rowing and fishing, a water play park, and the absolutely world class Kronosaurus Korner museum.

We arrived early, and as we were checking in to our van park we were told about a 'dig at dusk' on that afternoon, where you could go to the fossil site with a paleontologist. Naturally we signed up.

It turned out to be the three of us, and three experts - the outgoing museum curator, the acting museum curator and Dennis, a really experienced volunteer. They explained the mysteries of the fish-mash layer and helped up find a small collection of interesting bits and pieces.

Life sized model of Kronosaurus found in Richmond

The next day we explorerd Kronosaurus Korner and were blown away by the amazing fossils on display, many of which had been found in the fossil site we had been at the previous afternoon.

Kronosaurus jaw with croc jaw for comparison

Fossilised, mummified, Minmi 

Most complete pleisiosaur skeleton, in position it was found in,  on a nearby farm

Anyone can dig there, but they do ask that if you find anything interesting you alert the museum, and don't take it.  You are not allowed to sell fossils you find there either.

The following day we ventured back to the fossil site, and found a few more little bits and pieces. My favourite bit is a small piece of icthyosaur rib bone.

Fossil site 1

The dig site even has amenities!

It was amazing to think we were unearthing remnants from 110 million years ago.

Hughenden

Next stop on the dinosaur trail was Hughenden. Technically Richmond was closer and not a logical way to go as we'll have to backtrack, but the direct road had a large portion that was dirt road.

We spent some time in the Flinders Discovery centre there, looking at more dinosaur fossils, including a large Muttaburrasaurus replica.

This area is more eroded than the Winton region, meaning the close to the surface fossils are usually from the earlier ocean covered era, when the Eromanga sea existed in inland Australia.

We also went up Mt Walker to admire the view.  A land of sweeping plains indeed.

The other main attraction near Hughenden is the amazing Porcupine Gorge. I think it is just as impressive as Karrajini in WA.

You can camp in a National Park campground there, and walk down into the gorge (at a more gentle entry point) and swim in the waterhole. Sadly, I was expressly advised NOT to go down the steep track by the lovely doctor I saw in town, in the interests of my knee getting better, so we were limited to admiring it from above. Another time perhaps.

Winton

It was with some trepidation that we headed off to Winton, as I had memories of a not very nice caravan park on our trip last year, and the other parks didn't get much better comments on the trusty Wikicamps.

In the end we stayed at the Tattersalls pub park. As is so often the case, we had a much better stay than expected. Our site fees included a free drink with each main meal bought at the pub, and there was a great saxophonist playing every night - AND I won a $10 meal voucher the first night in a Scouts raffle. I was glad we were on a site as far away from the pub as possible, as it may have been noisy at night.  The water in Winton really does stink of sulphur though, which is not fun when cleaning your teeth.

Winton was the start of our dinosaur trail experience, and we learned that in this area, the level nearest the surface is the 95 million year old layer, with Australia's large plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs, medium sized carnivores such as Banjo, small plant eating ornithopods and chicken-sized coelurosaurs.

We opted for a bus tour to Lark Quarry, as it was over a hundred kilometres of dirt road each way.  Vicki from Red Dirt Tours was an awesome guide. We stopped for morning tea at Merton gorge - what glorious scenery!

Then on to Lark Quarry, with salads for lunch before a tour of the dinosaur stampede footprints.

 Hundreds of small dinosaurs, and one big one! How mind-bending to think you are looking at footprints made 95 million years ago. They really looked as if they had been made yesterday.

The following day we went out to the fabulous Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum.

A tour in 3 parts, we saw the fossil preparation area,

the display of specimens,

and the brand new dinosaur canyon, which was a very picturesque display of bronze statues on the edge of the jump-up (mesa). They are also developing a cycad valley with living cycads and other ancient remnant plant species.

It was a wonderful visit, even though the 3 hour tour didn't allow time for lunch, and the cafe was depleted by the time we finished.

We found time to check out the local boulder opal - lovely - and were pleased to catch up with a couple that had been on our sapphire tag-along tour back in Anakie.  So I left Winton feeling very much more positive about it and keen to return for the next stage of the Age of Dinosaurs museum.