We awoke to breakfast with the wallabies again, without a Cassowary this time, which was great because we got to see the joey!
Today we had booked a water taxi to take us over to Dunk Island, which used to have a luxury resort on it until cyclone Yasi redecorated it in 2011 and destroyed most of the buildings. Plenty are still standing in disrepair and there is a beautiful hiking path to an old World War 2 lookout, so we decided to make a day of it.
We got to the water taxi and went across in about 10 minutes, and would have the whole day on the island, so we set off.
Manja had been here 4 years before and back then there was a nice little bar/cafe shack there. Unfortunately that had since stopped being run, with only a few remains of the space there. I imagine it must have been beautiful though!
We decided to walk all the way up to the tip of the island, while there was low tide because it would be submerged when the tide changed later.
Happy Manja is happy
Along the way was a few coconut trees starting to sprout from coconuts. Looked pretty cool!
Beached coconut… Growing nuts at the beach… Spirit of the island… Too many possible captions!
Then we head off to the inland trip. The beginning of the path was nicely re-built by the parks and wildlife service and was available for campers. When we got to the resort front, we could see what remained from a stretch of beach we walked along. Then we passed a luxury mansion with a big “private property sign”. Crazy, so much destruction and some rich dude just re-builds a mansion….
We kept walking for a bit and got to “family beach” which was pretty and completely empty save some crabs.
This shot cost us a serious sunburn. But how could does this dude look?
As we continued the walk, we spotted a few more critters too.
From here, we headed over to Muggy Muggy beach, where we saw some black crabs:
Not that much later we started to hike up the hill in the rainforest. After a few minutes we saw a frog climbing the wall!
rrrrrrrribit
We had underestimated the humidity a bit and our water supply was dwindling, so we rationed ourselves and set a steady pace to the top. It took a while, but we got there eventually, and it was a pretty spectacular view.
After some recuperation we slowly made our way back down.
When we reached the beach it was already getting toward the time of the water-taxi pickup, and we headed to the location where it would be. Depending on the tide they would anchor on one or the other side. About 15 minutes before a bunch of tourists carrying snorkelling gear were dropped off on the beach, confusing everyone who thought that the boat was there to pick us up. Eventually the water taxi arrived, tried to anchor, changed its mind and anchored at the other spot. The ride back was nice. While it was really nice on the beach, we did get ourselves a good shade of sunburn waiting all that time.
Water Taxi is dropping anchor
Back on the mainland we headed back to the Airbnb, re-hydrated and cooled our sunburn in the pool. Toward dinner time we were getting seriously hungry, having hiked in the humidity a good portion of the day. Yesterday we had seen a small burger joint place next to the pizza place joint, so we decided to check it out. It was called The Shrub Co which was a-okay, but not quite as good as yesterdays dinner. Tough competition though 😉
Full of food we walked along the beach watching the sunset and full-moon rise, before heading back to the Airbnb.
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