Queensland’s North Coast, November 17-22, 2008
The flight from Uluru to Cairns (pronounced “Cans” as best we can determine) lasted about 2 hours, which has been the standard length of time for every journey --- in Australia, everywhere seems to be a 2 hour flight from everywhere else. The area of Cairns is beautiful and picturesque, the only place in the world where two world heritage sites touch. There is the mountainous ran forest of Daintree National Park cascading down to the sea and the Great Barrier Reef. For the next 5 nights we would settle in to explore this area as much as possible.
We were staying not in Cairns (think Myrtle Beach about 30 years ago) but instead 20 km north in Palm Cove.
Palm Cove is indeed in a small cove, a fairly recent community beautifully settled at the foot of the rain forest looking south and east out to the Coral Sea. We got into our hotel around 7:30, and the kids effectively kicked us out of the room as they wanted room service. The plain pasta couldn’t have been that great, but the movies on demand evidently were.
The next morning we visited the Tjapukai Aboriginal Center, which was a little more Hollywood-esque version of what we saw in Uluru. By far the highlight was the returning boomerang and spear throwing (and we learned that boomerangs were first musical instruments and secondly (the non-returning ones) hunting devices; the returning ones have been only recently developed). Afterwards, we ventured to the Kuranda village via the Sky Rail, a 45 minute gondola ride
over a mountain and through a gorge, all the while just skimming the top of the rain forest. Kuranda was not for us (an Aboriginal Tweetsie Railroad), so we were back on the Sky Rail after an hour or so. Looking out over a broad valley on our way down, we spied what was called Cable Ski, a wake boarding park where the riders are pulled on a type of winter skiing T-bar type of contraption; we stopped by for a look, and it was great fun (which goes to show that sometimes the best things are indeed free). Since we had not seen Cairns the previous day on our arrival, we headed in for a walk around; the aforementioned 1970’s Myrtle Beach comparison meant that that we gave it short shrift, and not too much later we were back in Palm Cove playing Hearts.
Wednesday, the next day was a big one for us, as we headed north to Port Douglas to catch the very touristy, but very fun Quicksilver Tour to the Great Barrier Reef. Along with 300 or so of our other tourist friends (and what we think was one very large Australian Rules Football team), we headed out on a catamaran hydrofoil to a floating platform next to Agincourt Reef. Although this reef is visited by probably 2,000 people a week, Quicksilver does a nice job, and the 3-story pontoon structure provided a lot of comfort to some uneasy snorkelers. In addition to lots of snorkeling time in our FULL body lycra suits (we felt like Spider Man), we visited their underwater viewing platform, saw some monster fish come in for a fish feeding, and rode on their semi-sub around to some different reefs. During our semi-sub tour, we learned that although the water visibility was OK, it was not great. The reason was that for a few days each year (after the first full moon in November), the coral spawn, and little coral sperm and egg cells float through the water looking for an appropriate place to land to start nature’s process. We thought that the slightly degraded visibility was a small price to pay for the continued viability of the Great Barrier Reef, and who cared that the odds of visiting the reef during spawning season was probably equivalent to, say, visiting a desert in the summer when it was raining.
It was all good fun, followed by a nice dinner out in Port Douglas before beginning the 45 minute drive back south to Palm Cove. All through the day it had rained on the mainland (although it was beautiful on the reef), and evidently the pesky rain forest toads like to visit the road during the evening after a rainy day. It was truly sickening; there were so many out during our drive that we couldn’t avoid them --- they just went thump thump under the car every few seconds for a few miles of curving roadway through the rainforest The next day we found hundreds of ants on the car enjoying the prior evenings victims. Ugh!
Thursday was a lazy day that began with a visit to the local tropical zoo, the highlight of which was the koala holding (my wife was in heaven). We enjoyed a fun, but thunderstormy afternoon around the hotel, doing work, getting caught up on the blog, and getting a little swimming and exercise. It was like a rainy day at the beach, one of those that you need after too many days on the go. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
On Friday, our last full day in the area, we arranged a 4WD tour up through the Daintree National Park and to Cape Tribulation. Garry was our tour guide, and 2 other single tourists joined us out of Port Douglas. We hiked along the walkways of Mossman Gorge, visited Cape Tribulation (so named by Captain Cook because it was here that many of his trials and tribulations began), learned a lot of fascinating plant information along the way, tried local exotic fruit ice cream, took a Daintree River cruise (we saw only one tiny croc) and f
inished our day with a swim at little-known Dinosaur Falls (it felt little known, even though it is probably visited by tourists like us throughout each day). In the “simpler is better” mode, this quick 20 minute swim at the base of a 100 feet waterfall was probably the highlight of our day.
The next day was Saturday, and our flight to Brisbane was not until after lunch. That called for sleeping in, having a late breakfast and then heading to the airport. We headed south (yes, for a 2 hour flight) to meet family, Rick and Robyn Oliver (Harry, my father-in-law’s nephew and niece and family) before heading back to the States. It would prove to be a perfect ending to our stay.
