We were pretty excited to be revisiting the Atherton Tablelands. After spending so much time in the outback heading into luscious rainforest and rolling green hills was going to be a wonderful change. Last trip we were a little hamstrung as Griffy was with us so all of the hikes through the national park were off limits.
The tablelands themselves are made of several towns and we decided to stay in the town of Atherton as there was a campsite right beside mountain bike tracks. The campsite was absolutely heaving which we knew was going to be the case but it was still a little bit of a shock being so crammed in with everyone after our recent outback experiences. Though it was very lovely with to have grass under our feet again!
We split our time over the next week between hiking and biking. The mountain bike tracks were really fantastic and they had an awesome 10km flowing single track that we predominantly spent our time on. We had an absolute ball. We did have to spend a little bit of time on our bikes before we rode as they were absolutely covered in red dust! We might have to rethink how we travel with them in the outback, especially after seeing fellow campers with their fancy mountain bikes and they were making us very jealous so we might have to upgrade!
If we weren’t biking we were hiking. We hiked Mt Baldy which was just behind our campsite. Unfortunately for us there was a controlled burn happening down the road so we didn’t get views from the top.
We were chatting with a local and he mentioned a hike called Lambs Head and told us that it was his favoured hike so we thought we would give it a go. We definitely were not disappointed though it was tough. There were serious uphill stretches through dense rainforest. Hilariously when we got to the top the clouds came in and we couldn’t see the spectacular views all the way to Cairns that were promised. Regardless we still rated Lambs Head as our favorite hikes.
Some of the other hikes we did were Jungal Jungal walk at Lake Tinnaroo, Windin falls and around Lake Barrine. All three lovely hikes through diverse rainforest areas. The highlight of those was definitely seeing a cassowary in the wild on the Windin falls hike.
The diversity of Atherton Tablelands is astounding. We didn’t even scratch the surface on the hiking front in the area. It is definitely an area that we will come back to again and do some more investigating! S