Our destination is in sight! En-route to Cairns we stopped at Cardwell to see the Big Crab outside what used to be a seafood restaurant, but is now Nan’s Tea House, so you can see the connection even if not so relevant now .

All around as we head up the road, there are innumerable fields of sugar cane and the fields (and roads) are cris-crossed with the winding tracks of narrow guage railways that take the cane to the processing factories. Occasionally you catch a wiff in the air of the processing, strangley familiar as there was a sugar refinery on the outskirts of Newark where we used to live.

Then we called at Tully to see the Big Golden Gumboot. We were quite entertained to discover the this is the wettest area of Australia and there is a lot of deep-seated rivalry between the local towns as to which is the wettest, drawing on different sets of statistics. This has resulted in there now being a gumboot trophy awarded each year to the town with the highest annual rainfall. Tully prides itself on being 'A Pretty Wet Place' and having the heaviest annual rainfall ever recorded. The Big Gumboot celebrates this in style by being the height of that very highest rainfall! We took an opportunity to climb up inside the gumboot to get an idea of the scale of it and to view the panorama of the metropolis that is Tully (see picture of sugar refinery) . You can see Tony peeping over the top of the boot in one of the pictures. For those of you who know that Rosa affectionately calls Tony ‘Toad’, you may agree that the Toad meets frog pose is quite lovely!

We headed on our way and got to Cairns in good time to try out the campsite laundry and finally make connection to the internet! Oh the practicalities of life on the road…. Our campsite here (Cairns Crystal Cascades if you want to look it up mum!) is surrounded by mountains and rainforest and we have taken a day off to catch up, book up some diving and book camp spots on our trip to Cape Tribulation. So far we’ve just found sites as we’ve gone along, but we’re now finding that things are fully booked and so we’re having to plan a bit! It has been fairly full-on so far, with us making reasonable distances each day and it has been good to take time out and just chill out by the side of our camper, sipping a little cool drink.

Some people in a cabin opposite us have just come over and given us their left-over unopened biscuits, pop and jam as they’re flying back to Sydney tomorrow . Marilyn was saying that she didn’t like to pass on the opened spread etc and she’d just throw it away, so I very cheekily offered our services to look after the opened stuff too! Then she offered her husband’s beers, convinced that he wouldn’t be able to drink it all tonight, but we suggested they should wait to see what was left in the morning as he was clearly setting out to make big inroads into his stash!

They were most interested in discussing the English property television programmes that they enjoy, marvelling at the age and abundance of period details in so many houses but also that English people are willing to put up with such tiny gardens. These comments reminded us that we had noted last year that our little house in Newark was older than the oldest building in Brisbane! looks like most of us might need to choose between space or heritage. She also commented that property in some of the better areas of Sydney can be as much as half a million australian dollars (£250,000), which seemed quite cheap to us!