venture to innisfail, silkwood, paronella park, undara.

We set off to Inisfail a small north Queensland town with friendly people and spent the night in a caravan park.This is an entry to a caravan park in the main street of Inisfail but not the one we stayed at. The trees light up at night.
Just south of Inisfail we found a winery called "Murdering Point Winery" named after a massacre which occurred at that location many years ago. However the wine was made from the local fruits and native herbs grown in the area including lychees, mangoes, passionfruit and many others. They were all very nice especially the liqueur to rival baileys.

We travelled through the village of Silkwood which has the smallest bank in Australia.

Then onto Paronella Park a castle built by the  catalonian man Jose Paronella  who arrived in Innisfail in 1913 and worked hard for 11 years buying and selling cane farms to enable him to buy land where he commenced building his castle which included a ballroom and movie theatre. He planted 7000 trees and built Queensland's first hydroelectric power plant. There was also tennis courts and change rooms for the swimmers. However in 1946 logs being cleared upstream descended on the park destroying the refreshment rooms and then fire in 1979 swept through the castle and a cyclone in 1986. The new owners are gradually restoring it. The kauri forest above is often the backdrop for wedding photos.
Undara was our next experience, this is a series of lava tubes created by volcanic phenomena 190,000 years ago. Undara is home to one of the earth's longest lava flows from a single volcano with lava flows travelling more than 90 km to the north and 160 km to the north west. This resulted in the formation of underground caves with water flowing through thier bases. Many of these remain undiscovered. Some of these are homes to microbats which as they fly out they are eaten by the snakes which live in the trees at the cave entry.

Undara was originally part of a cattle station and its owners provided tours and accommodation and when the parks and wildlife wanted to turn some of this property into national park it was on the condition that it remained a tourist spot with various forms of accommodation along with tours. Guests eat at the restaurant and partake of a bush breakfast with kookaburras who drop in to sample the food from tourist's plates. We satyed in  ofthe old Queensland Railway carriages which had been converted to hotel rooms. Kangaroos roamed the outside gardens unperturbed by anybody.