You may laugh, but trav­el­ling is quite tir­ing! If you’re any­thing like us then after three weeks on the road day and night you’ll want to press pause for a while. How­ever, you keep at it as after all “This is Aus­tralia” and you can’t just pop back again any­time soon. So our sched­ule has been full of early morn­ings and overnight­ers on the Grey­hound and we felt entitled to take a break from the road and hole out for a few days. Whilst stay­ing at the won­der­ful ‘Dream­time’ hostel in Cairns we were recom­men­ded to go south to visit ‘The Sanc­tu­ary’ near Mis­sion Beach.

As an eco-lodge in the trop­ical forest with a tree-top view of the private beach I can just hear you tot­ting up our expense, but you would all be wrong. In-fact we paid hostel prices here, amaz­ingly! The retreat is based around the ‘Long House’ which was a beau­ti­fully sleek, mod­ern, wooden build­ing over­look­ing the Tas­man Sea. There are plenty of things to do here; yoga classes, swim­ming, guided walks, enjoy­ing the beach and water-based activ­it­ies too. We how­ever chose to do abso­lutely noth­ing here. This was our chance to spend some time (not money!) tak­ing it slowly, writ­ing, read­ing, paint­ing, sketch­ing and chat­ting together. In fact we spent three entire days in the Long House and it was bliss.

There was a slow hum of activ­ity here with quite a few people around, a mix­ture of guests and, as we dis­covered, many WWOOF­ers. They worked all over the com­plex in the kit­chen, laun­dry and huts as chefs, maids, clean­ers etc. This gave us a chance to find out the inside track and pit­falls of WWOOF­ing firsthand. Stor­ies were var­ied in out­come, but noth­ing that put us off.

Each even­ing we all came together (guests and WWOOF­ers) to the sofas to social­ise and play games in the Long House which was fun. We met some lovely people includ­ing a friendly couple from Christ­ch­urch on their hol­i­days for a couple of weeks. They were both very inter­ested in our cre­at­ive and tech­nical expert­ise and we will be catch up with them in New Zea­l­and soon. Renee was a lovely WWOOFer from the UK who has been trav­el­ling for some­time on an open-ticket and is search­ing for her place in the world. A young Ger­man girl with a keen interest in, and a good eye, for pho­to­graphy had a go with my 40D.

The throng­ing wild­life was very much a high­light! Firstly, this small area of nat­ive forest is one of the last areas where cas­sowar­ies live in the wild. Cas­sowar­ies are truly huge, amaz­ing, but rather dan­ger­ous man-sized birds. ‘Brenda’ the affec­tion­ately named aging local cas­sowary paid us a visit one morn­ing by com­ing to drink just out­side the door-less Long House. She was very cool and slightly intim­id­at­ing to watch as we were aware that they do charge humans if they feel threatened. Sadly the 40D was down­load­ing at the time so I couldn’t get a snap­shot. Wild­life of a per­cept­ively smal­ler vari­ety pre­vailed every­where. A frog lived above the kit­chen which came out at night in the space between the wall and the ceil­ing, above the cooker. Per­haps he was a friend of ‘Rata­touille’! Large crick­ets clambered up the win­dows. Geck­oes stalked seem­ingly unsus­pect­ing moths that had the upper hand and flew away with only moments to spare. Ants roamed the outer deck, touch­ing each oth­ers antenna to com­mu­nic­ate their local news. And the ulti­mate example of ‘tag’ was a snake who had bit­ten a cane-toad and the cane-toad had poisoned the snake all pre­served in a jar on the lib­rary shelf!

But unsur­pris­ingly the hot topic here was spiders. Stor­ies of vast Hunts­men and dan­ger­ous Wolf spiders were ban­ded around to scare the guests (our) fra­gile minds. Appar­ently a Hunts­man had been res­cued (not killed) from Room 1 (our room) only the week before. So that night after a port or two J&I ven­tured slowly into our net­ted den, torches search­ing ever inch inside, when SUDDENLY… the largest moth I have ever seen flew frantic­ally around and around the small room search­ing for an exit. Oh my God, the noises from our tent must have had some guests won­der­ing! We extrac­ted the moth and con­tin­ued our search, and thank­fully noth­ing was there. We slept.

Morn­ing broke and we had a little lie-in before break­fast when I decided it was time to make a move out of bed. As I got up and turned towards the bed-head I saw a strange spider look­ing down at both of us from the bed post! It was now time to ‘shake a leg’. Then at break­fast Lee (a Kiwi guest) noticed a spider on J’s T-shirt! James flicked it off, but it landed on his nuts. Oh my god! I’m so glad I was not there. We later con­firmed it was a Wolf spider! Look it up on the inter­net if you dare!

We left here after three happy days hav­ing enjoyed meet­ing new people and feel­ing much rejuvenated.

I knew I was prop­erly relaxed as when it star­ted rain­ing, at the local bus stop we had been given a lift to, I sud­denly recon­nec­ted my brain and real­ised I had left my Rohan jacket behind! Luck­ily for me the man at the bus stop had seen James at The Sanc­tu­ary a few days before and lent us his mobile which had recep­tion for us to call The Sanc­tu­ary. Rob kindly raced down to the bus stop with it and he made it just in time, but in all the con­fu­sion the bus driver star­ted to drive off think­ing we were not wait­ing for the bus at all! I ran scream­ing (like our lives depended on it) down the road after it. The driver heard me (thank you Granny for your boom­ing voice!). Warm and dry again on the bus we laughed with the driver as we recan­ted the tale and reminded ourselves how lucky we were to have neither lost my coat, missed the Grey­hound to Cairns or still been stuck at the local bus stop in the rain. Some things never change!

Cesca

Pop­ular­ity: 1% [?]

Related Posts

• The Great Ocean Road: from Adelaide to Mel­bourne via the Grampian Moun­tains
  A driv­ing jour­ney of great beauty…
• The Ghan train, find­ing Franco and Adelaide
  A train ride to remember!…
• A Basho Film : Aus­tralia
  A short fun film high­light­ing our trip to Aus­tralia, show­ing some of the fant­astic things we saw in …
• Aus­tralia Zoo
  We visit the home of The Cro­codile Hunter, Crikey!…
• The Hunter Val­ley
  All praise the god of wine!…
• A Basho Film: Sydney Har­bour!
  Thanks for all the fant­astic feed­back on the last Basho Film!  Here is the latest, I present Syd…