cairns to mt suprise

This morning saw wal off to get his tyre and me trying to upload photos onto the blog with limited success. Enter kelly, the girl on reception, who in my mind is in a stand-up knock-down fight with emma from bmw for the title of most helpful person in cairns. She very kindly let me monopolise her computer for about three quarters of an hour, uploading a truck load of images. Thanks kelly.

Other than that we had a bit of a look around the cairns waterfront which is very nice indeed.

Sightseeing and blog maintainence taken care of, it was time to once more pack the bikes and head off. The target was mount suprise via gordonvale, atherton and ravenshoe.

The ride from gordonvale to atherton was incredible, the road winds up through some spectacularly beautiful and amazingly lush countryside, allowing for some glorious riding. The mountains there have the most amazing forms, and the views along this section of road are stunning. Atherton was our lunch stop and the burgers were very good indeed.

on the road to atherton

atherton

From there it was on to ravenshoe where we came across a wind farm atop the aptly name windy hill. It was a interesting scene, giaint turbines standing majesticly in fields of outrageously green grass with herds of cows standing around them.

russ, cows and alternative energy 

After ravenshoe we started to head down onto the western plains and the landscape changed again. Gone were the rolling hills, green grass and lush vegetation, replaced by flat, brown grassland with low scrubby trees and the temperature started to climb steadily.

We stopped for fuel at mt garnett and from there, we were once again in full-on roadtrain territory with roads that wrere only one lane. This meant that if we encountered a roadtrain, or pretty much any other vehicle, we needed to get off the road and out of the way, which has it's own perils as the quality of the edges varies greatly. Fortunately we only encountered one roadtrain so it was reasonably stress free.

While in mt garnett we asked the locals where was good to stay in mt suprise and the unanimously said the bedrock village, so that's where we went. Given that mt suprise is a very small place, essentially in the middle of nowhere, bedrock village was packed and we were in the tents for the first time on the tour. The park was great and the recommendations were well founded, the staff were extremely helpful (not in the same league as emma or kelly but bloody close) and we where situated next to an old guy from darwin who used to race push bikes, a topic close to our hearts, so we had a great chat to him about australian cycling and the tour de france.

Dinner was at the pub across the road and once again the meal was brilliant and once again the steak was massive and once again friendly locals who were interested in where you were from and where you were going.

With acouple of take aways in hand it was back to the tents for reasonably early night as we planned to be up and away by a resonable time.

our exact location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=-18.1425,144.3222&ll=-18.1425,144.3222&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1