Innisfail is a sugar town, and you can tell from the smell: sweet, slightly burnt, drifting over the cane fields when the mill is crushing. It sits at the mouth of the Johnstone River in the wettest part of Australia, where banana and cane farms run up to the foot of the rainforest, and rainfall is measured in metres rather than millimetres.
The town has an unexpected architectural claim. After a cyclone flattened much of it in 1918, it was rebuilt in the 1920s and 1930s with a distinctive streak of Art Deco, and many of those buildings still line the main street. Later cyclones, including Larry in 2006 and Yasi in 2011, hit the coast hard, and the town's resilience is evident. There is a large Italian and Chinese heritage here, from the cane cutters and market gardeners who settled in the early twentieth century, and it shows in the food: good coffee, good gelato, and Chinese temples tucked in unexpected corners.
The ride in from the Tablelands, down the Palmerston Highway, is the real attraction. The road drops from the cool upland through a succession of bends carved into thick rainforest, with the air getting warmer and heavier as you descend. The Palmerston passes through Wooroonooran National Park, where cassowaries, those large, flightless, blue-necked birds, still roam; road signs warning of them are not decoration, and a slow approach at dawn and dusk is wise. The surface can be damp and slick, leaf litter is common, and fallen branches follow storms. In the wet season, roughly December to April, flash floods can close roads, so check conditions.
Innisfail itself has all the services of a regional town: fuel, supermarkets, takeaway, and accommodation. Nearby, Paronella Park, a Spanish-style castle built in the 1930s by a Catalan immigrant, is a curious ruin among the tropical vegetation and a good place to spend an hour.
Come in the dry months, from May to October, for the best chance of clear skies. Stop for a coffee in town, and watch the afternoon thunderheads build over the ranges.