We had seen this old ruined Spanish castle, set in a tropical garden, on tv recently (the tv show linked to is an old one; the hydro-electric plant it referred to is now working again) and decided to visit as it was only one and a half hour's drive south of Cairns.
The place had an intriguing story of a Spanish immigrant who came to Oz in 1913 as a sugarcane cutter, made a fortune and built his dream of a pleasure garden with the castle. It had a ballroom, tennis courts, a tunnel-of-love hewn out by hand, waterfalls, its own hydro electricity and cinema.
The above photo shows the waterfall with a suspension bridge above and, on the right (and below), the building that housed the hydro-electric turbine.
In a part of Queensland which had no electricity at that time, this hydro scheme provided electricity for the park. The cinema projector is now in the park's museum.
Some other garden shots:
Bats on the ceiling on the old Tunnel-0f-Love.
Some of the lovely ferns among the ruins.
We saw baby Golden Orb spider (so called because the web is golden, not the spider), which, when fully grown can catch and eat small birds.
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Undara - The Lava Tubes
Undara is about a 4 hour drive west of Cairns. The landscape here is different, no longer tropical rain forest, but savannah grasslands.
In this privately run National Park, we stayed overnight in converted railway carriages.
I've never seen so many kangaroos in the wild and so close up.
We came to Undara specifically to see the lava tubes.
A section where the roof has caved in.
Moonrise over old volcanic craters.
Cheryl took this shot of bats flying out of the lava tube after sunset.
We also took a walk up to the rim of the Kalkani Crater
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