Monday, 5th March 2018
Weather still good when we woke up and actually I felt quite sad to leave this park – so peaceful and close to the natural surroundings – the ocean on one side and the rain forest with the Cassowaries, parrots, cockatoos and green frogs just behind our camper van. Anyway, Cairns is only some 150 km away and we found a similar campsite to stay but on the way we wanted to stop at MaMu Forest to walk the Tropical Skywalk.
We weren’t even half an hour on the road when we came across another sight worth visiting – The Paronella Park – when I had read about it briefly, I thought it was a fake castle just built to make it look old and next to a waterfall. Well we were in for a surprise! It was a dream come true of a Spaniard, Jose Paronella, who emigrated to Australia and landed in Innisfail in 1913 to work in the sugar cane plantations. Jose dreamt of bringing his fiancée out to Australia once he had enough money to go and collect her from Spain. That took 11 years and as he was not a writer (he never wrote one single letter), and by that time his fiancée had got married to someone else. Anyway, his family arranged that he met up with his ex-fiancee’s younger sister, Margarita and it was love at first sight and they got married and travelled back to Australia. They continued building their castle of dreams as by this time, Jose was a wealthy man buying and selling sugar cane plantations and inviting loads of people to come and stay at his park next to the Mena Creek water falls and rainforest!
Anyway, we crossed the wooden swing bridge where we also saw a sign that rather alarmed us – beware of crocodiles!!! But the waterfall was magnificent and we wanted to see further so we bought tickets to the park and we had really made a good choice!
So we decided to spend the day here and join the tour – Cathy, our tour guide gae us such a great description of Jose and Margarita’s love story and also their love for their Paronella Park that often (and seeing the ruins) I had to think back to my home, Villa Frere. Nowadays this park is owned by Mark and Judy Evans and they are spending a lot of time restoring the park and buildings – the museum contains quite a number of photos of the Paronella family and I did actually get quite emotional about it all. This was a person who believed in his dream and made it come true! And now Mark and Judy are continuing that dream!
When we bought our tickets for the tour, we were also told that we could spend the night free of charge on the park’s campsite. We also got ourselves a combined ticket to visit the MaMu Tropical Skywalk just half an hour further up the highway. So we would be doing this tomorrow.
After our tour, which also included that we could feed the turtles and fish, we parked our camper van on the campsite and had a bit of lunch and siesta. Later in the afternoon, we went on a tour of the hydraulic driven generator, which Jose had bought as scrap from the Australian government and installed it to generate all the electricity need to run the house and park. The new owners had this generator revised at a grand price of 340k Aussie dollars – just about the same price they paid for the estate!! All very interesting and our guide Yeng, was knowledgeable enough to give us a good explanation. We also visited the museum which is full of film equipment and film reels which Jose used to show in his little cinema and invite friends over to join him to watch movies.
That evening we joined another tour of the grounds and this time we all had torches and the grounds were lit in very special areas including the grand house! That was a really magical moment and I’m sure wherever Jose and Margarita are in the starry skies, they must be enjoying that their beloved park is still being visited by so many people and that Mark and Judy are carrying out their dream! We met Mark later on in the evening (and his daughter is married to a Maltese Australian with the name of Aquilina!) and he even gave us a lift to the pub (which also belongs to him) so that we could have our evening dinner.
We had such a lovely and unexpected day and by the time we walked back to the park I could imagine the ghosts of the past were lingering around enjoying the beauty of the park!
Tomorrow, we’ll be visiting the Mamu National Park, before we get to Cairns!
