Cairns & Port Douglas Day Seven - Wonderful waterfalls and Night Sky Secrets

Emma

Dec 27, 20202 min read

Today was the one day of our holiday that Noel was in charge of planning, and he did a great job!

He planned a big driving day to check out some waterfalls and other attractions outside of Cairns. The waterfalls we visited included Josephine Falls, Zillie Falls, Millaa Millaa Falls, Lake Eacham crater lakes national park, Lake Barrine as well as the newly opened Mamu Tropical Skywalk. I have shared the map link below so you can go on the same drive as us if you have the time.

All of the waterfalls were beautiful, but if you are limited on time and can't spend a whole day then I think Josephine Falls would have to be the pick of the bunch. This is a really big waterfall with several different viewing platforms. If you are game you can swim here, and there is even a naturally occurring waterslide you can slide down. The falls are only a few hundred metres walk from the car park and there are toilet facilities here.

We also really loved Mamu tropical skywalk, which is about 15 minutes out of Innisfail and the viewing tour at the end of the path is really quite spectacular and worth the climb up the never-ending stairs. We were lucky there were only a few people visiting when we were there and we had the viewing tower to ourself.

We had a booking for an astrology tour and we had to get to the meeting point, so we set off for this making sure we had given ourselves plenty of time. The whole of the Atherton Tablelands are really pretty to drive through and we easily could have spent a couple of days exploring them. Next time we come to Cairns we will definitely be spending some time there.

We met at the designated spot for our astrology tour and I even managed to spot an Echidna while we were waiting. We were led to a very dark spot beside a lake and given a nice dinner of Indian food before spending a couple of hours with the tour guide who pointed out a bunch of constellations etc before letting us loose on his high powered telescope to look at the planets. It was so dark we could clearly see the Miky Way and way more stars than I have ever seen in my life. It was pretty cool.

The tour ran a bit late and we didn’t get back to the hotel until almost midnight. We had another fairly early start tomorrow, so after a well earned hot shower we fell into bed.