Saturday 28th July
After taking off from Heathrow around 10:30 on Thursday evening, and a few hours in Hong Kong airport, we landed in Cairns around 6:30am Saturday (10:30pm Friday UK time). Even though Hong Kong and Cairns are international airports, and the former is a large one, we were struck by how not-busy and quiet they felt, even though there were lots of people around, and the staff at Cairns were friendly. Go to Heathrow or Gatwick and you're hemmed in like sardines and greeted by staff who never smile.
We were met at the airport by my aunt Tracy and her husband Rob, who moved to Australia ten years ago, and they took us to Rise & Bake, a creperie on the outskirts of Cairns, for breakfast. I had a crepe with smoked ham, egg, cheese and garlic mushrooms - yum! It was then an hour and a half's drive up and over the mountains from Cairns back to their house near Lake Tinaroo on the Atherton Tablelands.
It's winter in this country but here in the tropical north it's still warmer than average UK summer temperatures - as we left the airport it was already in the low twenties and warm enough for a summer dress, before 8am. The Tablelands is covered in farms and plantations growing things like sugar cane, bananas, mangoes, avocados, peanuts, etc. It's the only place in the world that produces everything you need for a cuppa - tea, coffee, sugar and milk.
After a couple of hours relaxing at the house we went for a drive into Atherton, the nearest town, about fifteen minutes away, stopping at a viewpoint at Halloran's Hill on the way. We went into the tourist information centre, got some leaflets to look over, and just wandered up the main street and back. There were a couple of colonial-style buildings, and an old hotel on a corner looked like something out of an old Western film, and, as is typical across the whole country, the pavements outside the shops and other businesses on either side of the wide streets were all covered to provide shade from the strong sun. The majority of buildings are single-story, or two at the most, partly because there's so much land so one can build out instead of up, and because single-story buildings are less susceptible to cyclone damage.
On my first visit here with my grandparents in 2012, I was (to my enormous delight) given a recipe for "lemon butter squares" at one of the places we went to; my aunt had kept a copy of it and we made them after getting back from Atherton. Then we all just relaxed on the deck before dinner, which was a simple but fresh and yummy grilled chicken salad, eaten outside, before going to bed at 8pm. By that time I hadn't slept in 51 hours, so thankfully fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and woke up 11 hours later.
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