Day 203 We felt we had stayed a plenty in Townsville and it was time to move on. On the way we seen the local market so we stopped for a quick look. Walking by a table we got handed two scratch and wins and Jenn happened to win the big prize. We were really excited for the next few minutes until the details surfaced....SCAM! "Come by our office, have a chat with one of our reps and then you can claim your prize" the girl said. Not falling for that one. We'll never get back the hour and half of our lives we wasted at the last one of these in the Falls.
We headed out for a free camping spot we picked out of the bible. When we got there we were disappointed that it mislead us a bit. It said there were showers there, which was true, but it failed to mention this shower was cold water only AND it was outside. We stayed anyway and as we were having drinks out of nowhere in an instant the sky was filled with bats. Hundreds of them! And as quickly as they appeared a few minutes later they were gone. A few more drinks and we called it a night.
The next morning we stopped in Ingham and had a shower at Andy's Roadhouse before getting on with the day, our goal was Mission Beach. At the Ingham tourist info we picked up a couple of local to-do's and took the 50 km detour out of town to see OZ longest sheer drop waterfall. After another steep climb and some dirt road we were at Wallaman Falls, a world heritage site, in Girringun National Park. The track down to the 20 meter deep rock pool at the bottom of the 268 meter high falls was unsafe as it was damaged by weather, so we only got to see the falls from above. It was still worth the detour. Nowhere near the volume of Niagara but the height and the surrounding landscape made it spectacular. We had lunch up there before venturing back down the mountain, (avoided some cattle hanging on the road) through Ingham and over to Lucinda home of the worlds longest jetty. At just under 6 kilometers in length and supported by more than 660 concrete and steel pylons, the jetty is nothing short of an engineering masterpiece with its length actually following the curved contour of the earth. It is used to load sugar onto vessels heading mostly to Canada and Malaysia. It takes the sugar 22 minutes to reach the vessel from shore. After this we stopped not far up the road just before Tully in a rest area for the night.