The roads around Ingham, as in so much of Queensland, are dead flat, mostly dead straight. The last 10 or 15 kms of the trip, the road suddenly leaps upward, with a hairier road than Paluma- this is the other end of the same range. Hairpin bends, narrow road, looking at the tops of trees, and as you rise the dry tropics are replaced by the wet tropics, with dense rainforest growth, lots of palms of many varieties, many broad-leafed plants we couldn't identify but one looked very much like monstero delicioso- imagine it as a tree! Signs warned of cassowaries on the road, but we haven't yet seen one in the wild.
Finally we reached the falls carpark. We'd checked with a local before this trip and knew that the carpark was right next to the falls. So we walked up a slight incline to the fence and WOOOOOOOW!
The most impressive falls I've ever seen, and the photo doesn't do it justice.. Just the sound alone is impressive, with constant booming and spray rising a long way into the air. The surrounding sheer rock walls are breathtaking, even without the falls. Yet none of us had heard of them before, why not?
We walked down another path to view the massive gorge carved out by this Stony creek., which is a tributary of the Herbert River. This huge volume of water is simply a creek! The gorge lookout gives views of the creek winding through the dense greenery far below.
On the return trip we stopped to watch some sugar cane being harvested. In the photo you can see the feathery seed heads of the cane. The yellow thing on the extreme left cuts off the heads and spews them out of the black funnel so that it goes over the top of the bin and out onto the ground beyond. At the same time, an augur at the front of the yellow harvester cuts the cane and clears the leaves- it goes through some sort of chopper and is spat out into the bin already cut into small sections about six inches long.The bin is pulled by a tractor which travels at the same speed as the harvester (quite fast) along the length of the field. At the end of the run, this tractor tows the full bin off to load it into a rail wagon, and is immediately replaced by an identical outfit which has been waiting in place for a minute or so. The whole process is very efficient and we were astounded to think that in the old days, many men would have taken days to harvest the same amount of cane. This process, using three drivers and three machines, does the work in a fraction of the time.
On the way out to the falls this morning, we discovered that in our previous exploration of Ingham, we'd somehow missed the main street! It's a lot bigger than we thought. Chris found someone to cut his hair, I finally found an optometrist to replace the screw in my specs, and we all found a hole in the wall. Most towns have ATMs, but lack the other services. There are actually three supermarkets, not two, and Target Country.
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