The Wet Season in Far North Queensland

It’s approaching time to head south, its time to leave the rainforest and our safe little camp nestled into the ridge. The monsoons have arrived and the Wet season is promising to settle in. All across the inland the water is at last beginning to flow after a long drought and it is gunna get damp in FNQ. I know this because the ants are on the move and small spots of mould are starting to appear into the crevices in the van. I spend a few minutes each day spraying and cleaning these pesky reminders of living in the Wet Season in the Far North Queensland Tropics.

Those Golden Specks in Cairns – are not sand

I’m basking under the sunshine in Cairns in Far North Queensland, Australia, at the moment enjoying a delusional early return to Spring. When I get back down south I will be back there in the close of the Aussie winter months but for now I can pretend it really is Spring.

They gazetted Cairns 1876, so it isn’t very old in Northern Hemisphere terms but that has an upside. Not many have tramped the escarpment on the lookout for golden dust or even the stray nugget, aside from our brief goldrush days of course. This city, for it is a prosperous city now, was named after some bloke who was then Governor of Queensland. It was to serve as a centre for those headed to the Hodgkinson River Gold fields tracking up through the beautiful Barron Gorge. But the Hodgkinson River gold field served the old miners badly as it was not the alluvial gold they sought but a quartz-reefing field where gold was hard won.