Mission Beach

Some food, some travel, lots of photos—I’ll try to keep the words to a minimum.

We started our holiday about 40 minutes north of Townsville at Frosty Mango. They make their own tropical fruit ice creams on site, mostly with fruit they grow there, and about half their stuff is dairy-free. I got a lime & basil cone and Andy got a dragonfruit cone.

The next stop was another few minutes up the road, Jourama Falls. Only 6 kms off the highway and then a 1.2 km walk, we got to a lookout to see water pouring down the mountainside.

Then it was back on the road through Ingham and north to Cardwell. Here we stopped off at the Rainforest & Reef Centre and went for a walk along the jetty to look at their shallow, mucky beach.

From Cardwell we just drove straight through to Mission Beach so we could check into our accommodation. Cassawong Cottages is made up of 6 private bungalows—4 family sized and 2 couple sized. We had a big spa bath, a giant bed, a kitchen, front veranda with a bbq, and a back balcony that looked straight into rainforest.

We took full advantage of the kitchen and bbq area.

For breakfast one morning we had pancakes (I pre-mixed the dry ingredients and brought them with us in a jar), with raspberry jam sauce (also pre-mixed in Townsville) and bananas cooked with orange-mango juice.

Full of breakfast we headed off further north. We went along the ‘Canecutter Road’ and saw lots of sugar cane and banana farms.

Then we arrived at our main destination for the day—Paronella Park. In the 1930s a Spanish immigrant built a castle with some serious gardens next to a gorgeous waterfall, and it’s mostly fallen apart now but it’s still really beautiful.

We continued north on the Canecutter Road and stopped at a colourful produce stall in South Johnstone, where we got a pile of avocados, and a two-headed pineapple.

Then we found ourselves in Innisfail, a small city in the north with crazy traffic—so we left pretty quickly and headed back south. We turned off the main highway to stop at Cowley Beach for some hot chips and great views.

We got back to our bungalow in the afternoon and had a snack on the balcony of olives, balsamic vinegar peanuts, crackers with avocado, and champagne.

A walk on the beach across the street from our accommodation worked our appetites back up for dinner—pasta, bbq potatoes, garlic bread, and grilled tomatoes.

We had to check out of our bungalow by 10 am, so we had all day to explore on the way home. Our first stop was Tully, just inland from Mission Beach, and a major sugar cane processing area.

We climbed up the Golden Gumboot at the centre of town. The boot is 7.9 metres tall, which represents the highest annual rainfall they received in the town, which is the wettest place in Australia.

A bit further south from Tully and back to the coast we found Hull Heads, where the Hull River comes out to the ocean.

Just outside Ingham we stopped at the top of a hill to take in the views of Hinchinbrook Island just off the coast.

Then we turned off the highway again to go out to Lucinda and see the “world’s longest offshore sugar loading facility”—a six km jetty. The jetty is so long it curves with the earth’s surface.

Our holiday ended the same way it began... at Frosty Mango. This time we shared a 5-flavour boat. Clockwise from the hot pink one there is Dragonfruit, Custard Apple, Cashew Apple, Mango, and Mamey Sapote.

Three days and two nights without any phone calls, work, or stresses was definitely what we needed.