After an early birding walk, Lilach took the kids to a nearby Car Museum maintained by an elderly guy called Tom Prior, while I stayed behind for some maintenance chores. I met the man later in a local hardware store – pretty easy to recognize thanks to the name-tag on his dirty overalls, but pretty hard to understand due to an incredible accent and almost complete lack of teeth. Anyway, they seemed to thoroughly enjoy it, and he took pride in his old cars, and actually turned them on for them – including some World War II amphibian vehicle – and let the kids sit inside them etc.
We left Chillagoe and headed back to Mareeba, stopping on the way at another section of the Chillagoe-Mungana NP – the “Ramparts Section”. We followed a side dirt road, through dry bush with scattered eucalyptus trees, then continued for several few minutes by foot along the worse continuation of the same road, the reason for the section’s name became apparent – in front of us was a tall mass of stone, bearing clear resemblance to a rampart or fortress. The place was a ritual site for the aboriginals, and at the top we saw some paintings resembling “shooting stars” on the ceiling of an overhanging rock. We also saw some beautifully camouflaged spiders on the coarse rocks.
After a restocking stop in Mareeba, we returned to Granite Gorge, which by now felt a little bit like homecoming. We managed to squeeze in another visit to wallaby rock before sunset, where the kids prepared treats for the wallabies from the leaves of a nearby tree which Tamar discovered that they especially like. A lamp-lit nocturnal survey revealed several possums, including a mother-and-joey pair of common brushtails. It was amusing to see the joey hiding behind its mother every time it sensed some danger, peeping behind her back to see what was going on.
Family Trips 