Atherton Tablelands

We went on a trip to the Atherton Tablelands, named after Mike Atherton. This is a really attractive area in the hills around Cairns. As you might expect from recent posts, it rained all day, very heavily for most of it. But we saw some amazing sights. The Barron Gorge was impressive, especially after the recent rain! Then there were two fig trees.

You might not expect fig trees to be interesting, but these ones definitely were. They are parasitic trees and had 'taken over' other trees, killing that tree off over time. The roots grow down from on high, so they form a kind of curtain. So much so, that one of the trees was called the Curtain Fig Tree. The other one was more impressive. This was called the Cathedral Fig Tree, because somebody had decided that its roots looked like a cathedral. There were some interesting lakes in the Tablelands too, among the tropical rainforests.