Tuesday, December 1, 2020

NORTH QLD ADVENTURE - DAY 20 – OUT AND ABOUT IN CAIRNS

 A much quieter day has been planned for today.  The last few days have been pretty full on days with lots to cover and see and we have been getting home rather late so this morning we took our time getting ready and headed out around 10.30am.

Our first stop today was at Rusty’s markets which are the big arkets in Cairns.


Rusty’s Markets are a popular eclectic Cairns icon and are frequented every Friday, Saturday and Sunday by locals and tourists alike in search of the freshest locally grown and harvested seasonal produce.  The fresh fruit and vegetables are grown regionally and sold by the farmers themselves.  The mix of nationalities here is wonderful with many Chinese, Indian, Australian, Italian, Papua New Guinean and many more.

Over the last years 30 years, Rusty’s Market has earned a rightful place as the unofficial cultural heart of Cairns—a meeting place where people come together and it all exists because of the vision of Emrys ‘Rusty’ Rees.  The stall holders are colourful and quick with a smile, and the music hardly ever stops with regular performances by local musicians.

Tourists from all over Australia and around the world visit the market as part of their Cairns ‘must do’ agenda and we were no different.

There didn’t seem to be as many stalls this visit, still plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, in fact the supply of these was extremely good with kind of fruit and vegetable you could think of being stocked.  We bought a few tomoates and potatoes as we were nearly out of these.

They had quite a few food stalls also with meals, curries, pork belly right down to Danish Pastries all being sold.  There were lots of health conscious alternative foods also and we purchases a Raspberry and Pear loaf from one of the stalls.  The stalls that were missing mostly this visit, were the number of stalls selling clothing, and other things besides food.

We spent a good hour wandering around the markets checking them out.  One thing you would have to say about Rusty’s is that they are always colourful, and this has always been one of the appeals to me.

From Rusty’s we walked down Grafton Street to another one of Cairn’s icons.  The legal Graffiti Lane which is just covered in spray can art. 


It is quite amazing and we made sure we took lots of photos of the art here… I am sure there is more art than when we visited last time, and I also think that quite a bit of it has been updated.

We ended up walking right down to the Esplanade but didn’t cross across the road to it as the road was closed as they were doing a lot of excavation and the road was uncrossable.

 A lot of money has been spent on public art in Cairns since we were here last.  There are lots of mosaic seating in this area, along with different sculptures particularly depicting a lot of the Aboriginal culture of this area.  We walked for about an hour until our parking time had almost run out and then we headed back to the car. 

We had bought some left over pizza from dinner the other evening with us for our lunch, so decided that it would be nice to go down and have on one of the picnic tables in the lagoon area on the Esplanade.

 

We had bought some left over pizza from dinner the other evening with us for our lunch, so decided that it would be nice to go down and have on one of the picnic tables in the lagoon area on the Esplanade.

This is a really beautiful area of Cairns and a very relaxing place to be.  One of the other things we noticed this time in Cairns, were the lack of people around the city, particularly the young  international backpackers, but generally the streets were very quiet and a lot of the shops had closed down.  This was particularly sad, as I am sure this is also a by product of Covid… 

The other area we noticed it was around the lagoon area.  Last time we were here the place was pretty packed, with markets all along this area and with the lagoon full of swimmers.  This time there were only a handful of people in swimming… Great for us, but noticeably different from our last visit.  


 We had bought our togs and towels with us, so this time with a good couple of hours to spare here I decided to have a swim.  The water was beautiful.  Steve didn’t feel like a sim so he went for a little walk along the ocean’s edge to photograph some of the many birds that had congregated along the water’s edge.  He got a few good photos of a spoonbill, and pelican’s feeding…

We left this area of Cairns around 2.30pm.  We had a couple of addresses of some rather impressive street art that we wanted to see before and we ticked off a couple of more big Aussie Icon’s whilst here, including the big scout hat that was just visible now on a scout den as it was under a rather large mango tree that had just about covered the top of the hat and building… We were unable to photograph it as we were driving when we spotted it and would have had trouble photographing it anyway due to the large tree.

 

We also needed to go and pick up a new driver’s door handle for the car that Steve had rung about and ordered before we left, as out driver’s door handle is pretty much on it’s last legs now.

It was close to 4pm by the time we had picked it up so decided to was time to head towards home as we wanted to take a drive up to Lake Morris and check out Copperlode Dam which was completed in 1976 and is the major water supply for Cairns.

The drive up to the Lake was 18kms of very winding road  which climbed steadily along the face of the Whitfield Range.  Magnificent scenic panoramas  offered us some stunning views over Cairns city as well as other various landscapes. We stopped in a couple of different places to take photos of the city.  The road was quite narrow in places but beautiful as we drove through areas of pristine rainforest on our way to the summit.  Had to believe such a beautiful Dam is at the top of a mountain.  

 

There are BBQ facilities available near the dam but water activities (swimming, boating etc) are not permitted.

It was after 4.30pm by the time we arrived so we drove down to the Dam wall first.  Our initial plan had been to have some afternoon tea up here…  As we drove in, we noticed that this area closed at 6pm with a big iron gate cutting off access to the road. 

 
 
 
 
 

We spent almost an hour down at the Dam wall, walking out along the bridge to the observation tower and photographing this area. Again, we noticed quite a lot of bird life out here, although they were mostly around a pontoon out on the water and a little too far away to get any decent photos.

By the time we got back up to the picnic area it was almost 5.30pm so decided to give afternoon tea a miss here as we would no sooner have it unpacked, have to gulp down our drinks and be back in the car and out of the gated hour before 6pm, so in the end just decided to head home and have it there. 

We’ve had a lovely day out today, a much more relaxed kind of day, I think being near water always makes you feel much more relaxed.

We had a few jobs that Steve wanted to get done this evening, mainly trying to fix the handle of the car door.  His first option was to use some bondit and try and glue it back together again to see if it would get us home.  This can only be done at night as UV ray bonds the glue immediately, so he needed to do it without the sun around…

We only have one more day left in Cairns… We haven’t planned to do to much on our last day, we have washing that needs to be done before we leave and we want to start the packing…

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