NORTH QLD ADVENTURE - DAY 13 – A DAY EXPLORING THE BEACHES AT MISSION BEACH.

Today was a rather relaxing day.  We caught up on some phone calls, and emails, booked accommodation ahead, caught up with family and then we took off to explore at leisure some of the beaches along the Mission each coastline.

 We left home around 10.30am and headed into Mission Beach to do a bit of the Ulysses Walk along the foreshore, taking the beach access paths to check out different areas of the beach.  We crossed over several fresh water creeks or springs that meandered out along the beach to the ocean.  We walked right up past the caravan parks, and information centre and then did a rainforest walk before finally walking out onto the beach and we then walked all the way back to our car along the beach.

Beautiful Mission Beach

The beaches are beautiful here in that the rainforest goes right down to the sand and the shore line is populated with hundreds of coconut trees all bearing massive amounts of coconuts.  You wouldn’t want to venture from the path under them.   Due to lots of coconuts recently fallen to the grown, it made us a little cautious not to walk under the trees.  However, we saw one man in the shade of a coconut tree directly below a whole bunch of coconuts.  A hit on the head from one of them would certainly knock him out, or at least knock some sense into him…

Massive cuttlefish on the beach at Mission Beach.

Dunk Island

Once we got back to the car, I did a little walk behind some of the café’s to get some shots of the beautiful cassowary artwork painted in the laneways.

As we thought the tide might be coming in, we decided to head directly to Garner’s Beach to get some photos before the tide came in too far, because we noticed that the tide left no beach when we were here the other night.

The drive along the coast around to Bingil Bay - Mission Beach

Beautiful Garner's Beach - Mission Beach.

Ready to explore the rocks at Garner's Beach

However, on arriving and after a short while we noticed that the tide was actually receding, so we had plenty of time to take some shots, morning tea, exploring the rocks and adjacent bay.  Steve even managed to cast a lure, but without any success.

We really loved this beach, there was plenty of shade as the rainforest literally goes right down to the waterline and “meets the reef”.

We spent a good couple of hours just relaxing on the beach here and taking in all of the natural beauty. 

We left around 2pm to go and do some more exploring.  We went driving down all the dirt roads we came across but there was nothing as nice as Garner’s Beach.  Most of the roads led to nowhere, well actually someone else’s private property.  

On our way back towards Mission Beach we stopped at the lovely little eclectic Bingal Bay Café for an ice creek.     What a colourful little café this was.  It was well done and Steve was very impressed with the cooling fan on the side verandah.  He even had to take a video of it…

I of course took lots of photos…  I was not the only one… one of the other customers was taking shots also. We sat outside in the breeze to eat our ice-creams. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On our way back I just had to try and photograph some of the beautiful coastline you drive along where the rainforest truly does meet the reef.  I can see why people love Mission Beach.  It really is a little piece of paradise and we are so fortunate in Queensland to have so many stunning beaches...

Our next stop was the jetty, we had visited it late in the afternoon a couple of days earlier and commented that we need to take a walk out along it before leaving Mission Beach so that was our intention now as we pulled in to check it out...

 

From here we headed back to Wongaling Beach and then down to South Mission Beach.  We had planned to do a walk down there but when arriving there were no car parks to be found. 

 In the end, we decided to head home as Steve’s back has been playing up today and has been pretty sore…

Our caravan park

We stopped in at Woolworths on the way home to stop up on some more fruit before taking off tomorrow and then fuelled the car ready for departure and then it was home…

 We spent time sitting out under the awning enjoying the breeze and a nice hot cup of tea.  Steve nodded off a few times, I edited some photos and checked my messages.

 We had a lovely Steak and salad dinner and then it was time to start the packing to get ready for a fairly early departure in the morning…

 We are off to Paronella Park tomorrow… We visited here 7 years ago and I loved it,  one of the few things we are returning to this visit… most other things we have done this trip are things we didn’t have time to do last time…

 We have loved our stay at Mission Beach, it is definitely a place we could come back and re visit, but I think next time it would be good to stay for a week just to fish and relax…

 That could be said for most of the beach spots we have visited these holidays though…