Lake Placid Rainforest Retreat — Local services in Caravonica

We are currently staying at Lake Placid Rainforest Retreat and I cannot speak highly enough of this park and its staff.

We first stayed here for a few nights on our way up to the cape. We were those disorganised travellers who arrive in town in peak season in the late afternoon with no accomodation booked. The staff in the park bent over backwards to move things around to fit us in.

This time around I was airlifted from cape York to cairns after experiencing a medical emergency. My mum had flown from Perth and my partner and friends needed a place to base themselves so they could be with me in hospital. Again, the staff went well out of their way to accomodate us. We have been here nearly 3 weeks this time and I couldn’t have asked for a nicer place to recover.

The staff have been so compassionate, generous and attentive.

The amenities cannot be faulted. There is a beautiful pool area with BBQs and a camp kitchen that is kept extremely clean.

The toilets and showers are beautifully clean with new upgrades to the showers.

My mum stayed in a bungalow cabin with all you need for a comfortable stay. Housekeeping was on point!

The park itself is lovely. Set below rainforest mountains across the road from a lovely running river. The caravan sites are grassy and spacious and gardens are kept beautifully. It even has a delightful little cafe that serves a mean smashed avo and great coffee! With close access to shops, doctors and tourist attractions such as white water rafting, the skyrail, a scenic train through the mountains to the waterfalls and lovely walking trails it’s an ideal base to explore Cairns.

I honestly could not fault this place.

Thank you Lake Placid Rainforest...

Clean, large amenities with baby bath and full length mirror. The shower cubicles were small making it impossible to not wet the dressing area. A mop was provided to clean the showers after use but no water in the bucket to rinse the mop! Decent and basic camp kitchen. Two large kitchen sinks with hot water although one sink was squished into a corner. We had no TV reception due to being surrounded by hills on three sides. There were no plugs in the laundry tubs. Plenty of room in the laundry for sorting clothes. I liked that part of the clothesline was sheltered so I could dry my bath towel overnight or if it rained. The biggest downside was that they made the hand dryer non-functional every day from 2200-0700 and there was no paper towel to compensate. They think one doesn't go to the toilet during the night?? Another annoyance was the loud screaming of the bush stone-curlew bird at night time. They were seen following people around the caravan park so clearly guests were feeding them, encouraging them to hang around. The caravan park is some distance from the centre of Cairns and we chose to stay here only because it was close to the Skyrail terminal. It cost $43 per night for a powered site; cheaper than a lot of other caravan parks when most are in excess of $50 per night. I would be reluctant to stay here again and instead test out a cheaper option closer to the city centre that I had initially chosen but was scared away from because of some negative reviews given that we would be staying for...

DO NOT STAY HERE IF YOU HAVE DOGS! I am never one to leave a bad review, but we put our chilled out, placid, calm dog out of the van this morning to pack up and she did a poo.. (wow, right?) ALL caravan parks state to clean up after your dog, some are even nice enough and give you a treat and poo bags. THIS CARAVAN PARK expects you to know when your dog needs to poo and wee every time and take them out of the caravan park to do it’s buisness. Not only did the manager Ian yell at my partner that you need to take them out to do their buisness when my partner was picking it up and disposing of it, he then left and got the “rule page” and literally waved the piece of paper in our face and told us we need to learn how to read and do the right thing- and was NOT maintaining the recommend 1.5m social distance when yelling at us. He spoke to us so rudely and kept going at us. We were honestly horrified. We explained this has never been a case at any of the other parks and his only concern was that people who don’t like dogs but stay here for three months MIGHT complain. This never happens. Horrible management and will never ever recommend this place to anyone after the way management handled this not warranted situation. If you don’t want dogs in the park, don’t have dogs in the park! Pretty simple. Also they need to update their signs through out the park if they expect dogs not to poo or wee at all in their park- it says if they have an accident to clean...