FNQ

We got to know Cairns very well. It was the last chance for trip preparation before heading ‘up country’ and then west, and that meant driving around all over town for some minor mechanical repairs and getting in a few stores. Cairns was the biggest and most cosmopolitan place we’d seen for a while and it took a while for us to decide with which cuisine to spoil ourselves. The Japanese visitor presence is strong and decidedly upmarket whilst the teeming backpackers occupy a different niche. The northern beaches are satellite commuter suburbs with some scenic bits of coast though swimming appeared fraught with obstacles!




Slightly shell-shocked we headed north to the legendary Cape Tribulation named by the hapless James Cook who had run afoul of a nearby reef. It must have really got him down because in close vicinity is Mt Sorrow and other equally despondent names. Our experience was much more positive – as soon as we’d driven off the ferry over the Daintree River we realised we were in a very special place. No stranger to ‘rainforest’ by now, we were blown away by the sheer lushness of our surroundings. In the most part National Park and World Heritage Area, the road north snakes through a tangled jungle that meets the ocean.

Unfortunately the weather still wasn’t being kind to us and it was completely overcast the entire time we were there. So we thumbed our nose at the weather and went out on a boat anyway to the outer Barrier Reef for another snorkel. The day wasn’t so nice, but we had a great snorkel, chasing a big green turtle, marvelling at the giant clams and seeing many colourful reef fish, including parrot fish chewing noisily on the coral. We met a lovely couple from Melbourne, Jacqui and Geoff, and spent much of the boat trip talking to them, and kept talking over a bottle of wine after dinner that night.

The following day we went north on the Bloomfield Track which joins Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield and then on to Cooktown. You might remember that this was a very contentious road when it was built and there were blockades and protests to no avail. Although the story goes that the attention the Daintree got through these protests led to the later World Heritage listing. But you can easily understand the opposition to the road, it cuts off the flow of the forest down to the ocean, and it doesn’t really go anywhere very much at all – unless you lived in Cooktown and wanted to get down to Cape Tribulation the coastal way, or vice versa, it only seems to serve a purpose for tourists such as us. It was incredibly beautiful rainforest, intersected numerous creeks and then the big Bloomfield River and the spectacular Bloomfield Falls.