Barnacle Bill’s and Cairns City Tour

With a name like Barnacle Bill’s Seafood Inn – how can it not be a great place to eat?  After a lazy day on Monday following our epic Daintree coach trip, we walked down town in the early evening to dine al fresco.  After reading all the holiday brochures and glossy mags, this restaurant was on my list of places to visit.  And for the Early Bird Diner there was a discount of 20% off the total bill, so that really suited a couple of OAPs.

Barnacle Bill’s Seafood Inn

It was always going to be fish for me, and Robin toyed with the idea of pork belly.  But then we both ordered the same, Karumba, which was “Bill's famous combination of baked fillet of barramundi, topped with prawns, avocado puree and Hollandaise sauce, served with vegetables and potatoes.”  Doesn’t that sound nice, and it tasted great too.

Dining at Barnacle Bill’s

We had sensibly decided “no dessert” but that idea went out the window when the young waitress brought over a tray of desserts, all looking gorgeous,  to temp us with.  So we ordered boysenberry cheesecake for him and chocolate profiteroles for her, with coffee to follow.  Just as well we were getting 20% off the total account!  And for those diners with unlimited funds, I discovered just the thing, a whole tank of these just waiting to be called up for dinner. 

Australian crayfish

Although Tuesday was an allocated spare day, we decided to fill it instead and  booked ourselves on the Half Day Cairns City Sights Tour.

First stop was a whistle-stop tour of the Cairns Museum where our group was split into two groups and shown around, starting with the history and stories if the indigenous people.  The settlers arrived, and various ventures to support themselves followed.  Gold mining brought many into the region, and later on, sugar cane plantations thrived, as they do to this day.  This was hard work indeed, all done by hand back in the early days.

 

Examples of cane cutting machetes, and single room accommodation for workers

Then we went to view the amazing stained glass windows at St Monica’s Cathedral.   The Peace Windows are in the front of the building and were designed and made by Gerry Cummins and Jill Stehn celebrate the fifty years of peace in the Pacific region since the end of World War Two.  The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first in naval history in which ships did not fire at each other. It was a battle of aircraft carriers and aircraft. As such it became the precursor to modern-day missile warfare.

The Creation Windows by the same artists run down the main part of the building, with twelve panels each side, telling the story of creation and evolution.  Amazing indeed, and need to be seen to be fully appreciated, the photos do not do them justice.

Creation and Evolution

On next to the Botanic Gardens where we enjoyed a Devonshire Tea. Being on a bus tour, we only had time to see a tiny bit.

Cairns Botanic Gardens

Then we headed off to look through the Conservatory.  Lots of lovely lush plants and trees there to admire, along with the butterflies fluttering by.

Seen inside the Conservatory

Back in the coach we went to get driven up a windy hill to “Cairn’s best scenic lookout”.  We weren’t the only ones on the road – local cyclists use this road as a training ground, biking slowly up the hill with muscles screaming, then whizzing down again, as quick as lightning.

From the scenic lookout

Once down off the hill we drove up the busy road, up another hill and Lower Barron Gorge National Park.  Here we saw, away in the distance, Cairn’s underground power station, as we walked across the long bridge.

River looking downstream, and waterfall running down the side of the gorge

We stopped at looked as a bunch of young kayakers jumped in the water and started paddling ferociously.  One of the elderly passengers from the bus remarked that the last time she visited the gorge, her and her husband went white water rafting.  That must have been many years ago, I imagine.

Young kayakers on the water

Our final stop of the day was at Palm Cove, a very trendy holiday destination Palm Cove, full of hotels, cafes, restaurants and shops.  Rather like Cairns, really, on a much smaller scale.

Palm Cove Jetty

The beach, and island off shore

Robin found the rather crowded  motor camp just over the road

That was our last stop of the trip, then it was time to head back to Cairns and drop everyone back at their various hotels.  And what a great afternoon it was – our informative driver Coral took us to all sorts of places we wouldn’t have discovered on our own.