CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A one-way ride of 205 km, Cairns City to Innisfail - roughly 3 h 10 in the saddle. The stops in between: Kuranda, Mareeba, Atherton and Millaa Millaa. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 800 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 30 km this is Captain Cook Highway, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Cairns sits in the tropical far north of Queensland, with the Coral Sea on one side and a wall of rainforest mountains on the other, and the whole town is organised around the idea of being a launch pad. Boats leave daily for the Great Barrier Reef, small planes head for Cape York, and the road north runs up to the Daintree, where the oldest rainforest on earth meets the beach. The town was founded in the 1870s as a port for the goldfields at Hodgkinson River and later became a sugar and tourism centre. It is not especially pretty in the old-town sense, but the Esplanade, with its saltwater lagoon, mudflats full of waders and cheerful backpackers, has a relaxed tropical air.
Read the complete Cairns write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cairns is where the day begins. Next is Kuranda.
Kuranda sits above the tropical lowlands of Far North Queensland, a village of about three thousand people in the rainforest on the Great Dividing Range, reached from Cairns by one of the most unusual commutes in Australia. The Kuranda Scenic Railway, built by hand in the 1880s and 1890s, climbs the range through fifteen tunnels and across high bridges, past the Barron Falls, and the Skyrail cableway glides above the canopy. By road, the Kuranda Range Road winds up through forest in steep bends.
Read the complete Kuranda write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kuranda comes up about 30 km into the recorded legs. Next is Mareeba.
Mareeba is the dry side of Far North Queensland. The town of about eleven thousand lies on the Atherton Tablelands, a plateau behind Cairns, but it sits in the rain shadow, and so the lush rainforest of the coast gives way to open eucalypt woodland, grassland and cattle country. The change is dramatic when you ride up the Kuranda Range from the coast: in an hour you go from wet tropical forest to red earth and dry savannah. The country here was long a tobacco-growing district, and the old kilns are still visible in places, but today the crops are coffee, mangoes, sugar cane and tropical fruits.
Read the complete Mareeba write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 69 km into the recorded legs you reach Mareeba. Next is Atherton.
Atherton sits at about 760 metres on the Tableland behind Cairns, and the first thing you notice after the climb from the coast is the air. It is cooler, drier and smells of cut grass and woodsmoke instead of mangrove mud. The Tableland is a high plateau of old volcanic soil, rich enough that the area grows maize, peanuts, potatoes, bananas, coffee and tea, and the countryside looks more like a patch of rolling green dairy land than the tropical north. Cattle graze under big, spreading trees, and crater lakes fill the hollows left by ancient eruptions.
Read the complete Atherton write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Atherton, about halfway. Next is Millaa Millaa.
Millaa Millaa is a dairy town on the southern Atherton Tablelands, about seven hundred metres above the Coral Sea, and it has the look of a place that grows grass for a living. Paddocks roll away in all directions, a deep, volcanic red where the soil shows, and Friesian cows stand in them with the placid air of animals who know how good they have it. The cloud often sits low on the ridges here, and mornings can be damp and cool, a surprise after the heat of Cairns.
Read the complete Millaa Millaa write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Millaa Millaa sits at 199 km, late in the day. Next is Innisfail.
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.
Read the complete Innisfail write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 205 km.
Cairns → Kuranda is 30 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kuranda → Mareeba is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Mareeba → Atherton is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Atherton → Millaa Millaa is 43 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Millaa Millaa → Innisfail is 59 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.