Josephine Falls

Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Bye Graeme, bye Gladys

Walsh's Pyramid

What sign?

Big rock

Josephine Falls

Good looking couple

Below the falls

Stairway to nowhere

Swimming hole

Josephine Falls

Thinking - how to get back to the bank

Southern end of Bartle Frere

Bartle Frere and canefields

At The Boulders - spot the diver?

The Boulders - rock formations

The Boulders

Happy tourist

The Boulders swimming hole

After having a farewell happy hour with Gladys and Graeme on Sunday evening, we were up early to make sure they managed to depart on Monday morning.  However, only having a 25 minute drive to Palm Cove, they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry!  The remainder of Monday just seemed to vanish, with laundry duties, a walk and some shopping before we spent a pleasant hour or so with Margaret and Chris.

Tuesday was much of the same, except after having a walk, I decided to check out Cairns Central (not having been there for a couple of weeks), especially after someone sidled up and explained that he had used up all his perfume!  It did take longer to select his new cologne than it did to find a pair of long white shorts for myself.  Tuesday evening was spent on the bowls green as usual.

With the weather continuing hot and sunny, this morning we set out for Josephine Falls, having heard good reports of this attraction and never been there before.  It only took us just over an hour to travel to the falls, on the slopes of Bartle Frere just south of Babinda.  We had an uphill (always uphill!) walk along a good footpath to the base of the falls – very nice falls and further downstream were some large swimming holes and slidey rocks.  Cat wasn’t the least bit impressed with the signage!  There were also lots of young tourists enjoying themselves taking selfies.  We returned to Babinda for lunch at the much talked about bakery and we each had one of the much talked about pies – mine was excellent value, have been enjoying it all afternoon and will probably continue to do so well into the evening!  Being so close, we continued on to The Boulders and enjoyed the up and down walk along the side of the river to the furthest lookout, stopping to watch a German backpacker climb up the cliff on the opposite side of the river (after organising a friend with his camera) and performing a very graceful dive into the water.  When we returned to the main swimming hole, we discovered about 15 young men standing in a circle in the water, whilst ensuring their fluid intake remained at a sufficiently high level for the humid conditions.  We were informed by a late arrival that it was a buck’s party, continuing on from a morning at a paintball venue.