Atherton Tablelands

The tablelands were beautiful, they reminded us of Scotland but with palm trees. It's so different from the coast. It was also much colder than down at the coast, one morning we woke up and they ground was covered in frost!!! Coldest winter in 50 years. Great. Everyone kept saying to us you guys will be used to this though, coming from Scotland but we were frozen. Forgot to pack the woolly jumpers and socks! Silly us...haha. Anyway, had a great time up in the tablelands, celebrated my birthday which was good. We lazed about at Lake Tinaroo fishing for barramundi with no luck because of the cold. We visited they huge curtain fig tree which was quite an amazing site, it's one of the most visited trees in the world. It is in excess of 500 years old and has 15 metre roots coming down to the ground from the branches. In Atherton we went to visit Atherton Chinatown where all the Chinese used to live at the start of the 20th Century in the goldrush. The only thing that still remains is the temple which we got a guided tour of. It was excellent. From there we went to the Crystal Caves. Haha, what a laugh we had. A guy has built an artificial cave to house his massive collection of precious gems and crystals and opened it to the public. We even got our own miners hard hats and a guide to all the crystals. Loving it! The tablelands also has loads of waterfalls, so we did the circuit of them which was good. Some of them were really impressive. At one of the waterfalls there is also a gigantic volcanic crater which was pretty cool to see.
After having a really good time in and seeing most of the sights we decided to head back down to Cairns "again" to try to get out on the reef..........