My most frequent subject was our resident peacock – he just loved to show off and made us felt more at home because his frequent calls reminded us of the cats announcing their presence around the house. I love peacocks….especially the colours of the male but I’ve honestly never seen a bigger poo come out of a bird as the one he left on the roof of my car.

And not gorillas in the mist, but roos in the mist instead. There were eastern greys galore up there but also a plenty of pademelons…..we even saw a northern brownnbandicoot coming back late one night from dinner. There was so much birdlife, not all of them I could identify. I believe there were also platypus in the creek at some stage because I could see some old nesting sites along the creek bank when I went for a wander early in the morning.

And a few shots of the property…if you look closely in the first one, the orange area is the house we stayed in WAY down the bottom of the gully. And a shot of the track you have to take to get down there. In the third photo, towards the top of the slope, you will see where the track has been cut into the side of the hill, where the orange soil is exposed. That’s where I took the shot of the house from part way up the hill. I thought I would put it in to add a little bit of perspective

Our nearest neighbours weren’t even a loud cooee away….no landline, no mobile reception and the only noise to be heard were all part of nature. Instead of the hum of the motorway, we slept to the sound of a gushing waterfall and maybe the odd moo of a cow or the crowing of a slightly confused rooster at 3am.

And the best part?? We didn’t even have to lock the doors because let’s face it – who’s going to rob us?? The peacock?

The morning we left Cairns to come home, it occurred to me that while we had some wonderful shots of the region and the various wildlife that we found (mostly in parks), I hadn’t taken a photo of the sunrise or sunset. This is something I try to do when I’m on holidays, particularly if the clouds and sunlight mixture is just right and you get that lovely sprinkle of pinks, oranges and reds through the sky.

So zooming along the highway at 100kph, I decided to take a few shots. The top shot is sunrise just outside of Cairns at around 5:30am….I forget the name of the mountain but if it follows the naming convention of most things Australian (that is, named in the most obvious fashion possible), it will probably be called Mt Pyramid or something like that. The next shot I took around 12 hrs later as we were drawing closer to our stop for the night in Rockhampton.