This is our final weekend in Australia, so we decided to end our trip with a scenic drive along the coast and through the Daintree Rainforest to Cape Tribulation. The cape was given its name by the explorer Captain James Cook in 1770 when he scraped his ship up on a reef here and had to pause his voyage for a few weeks while repairs were made. The drive up the coast is really beautiful with lots of places to pull over to see the spectacular coastline and rainforest -- this is a view of Trinity Bay from the Rex Lookout.
Just a 20 minute drive from Port Douglas is the Mossman Gorge. This area is traditionally the land belonging to the Yalanji aboriginal people. To learn more about their culture we booked a guided walk through the Daintree rainforest with a member of the Yalanji community named Cameron.
Cameron welcomed us to his ancestral home by first performing a smoke ceremony and calling out to the ancestors as we walked through the forest to let them know that we were friends. He showed us many of the plants along the path and explained their usage. Cameron called this a Daintree Nut and it looks kind of similar to a walnut.
Aboriginal people in Australia have been using boomerangs as weapons for milennia -- at least the last 10,000 to 50,000 years. He explained that there are two types of boomerangs: a returning one and a non-returning one. Returning boomerangs come back to you when thrown -- through trial and error the indigenous people found the precise aerodynamic shape to get this to happen. These boomerangs were used to hunt lighter prey, like birds. The non-returning boomerangs were heavier and, obviously, did not come back to the thrower. They were used for hunting larger prey or for warfare. It takes skill to throw a returning boomerang correctly. Needless to say, for me ALL boomerangs are non-returning.
The Yalanji people used different ochre and kaolin clays found in the forest to make pigments for rock art or for personal decoration.
These pigments are still used for decorating the skin when doing traditional activities such as dancing. To a westerner it might look like a series of different-colored dots and lines, but Cameron explained that the dots would represent something, like a group of animals, for example. A line drawn around the arm might represent a river or a boundary of the land -- everything has a meaning. We really enjoyed the Dreamtime tour because it helped us to learn to see the rainforest and its people with different eyes.
The Daintree Rainforest is the world's oldest rainforest - 180 million years old (the Amazon is much younger -- only 55 million years). It's a unique place in the world for its biodiversity and human history. The Mossman Gorge runs through the heart of this section of the rainforest.
There are crystal clear rock pools where you can swim, but you have to be careful where and how you choose to get in the water. Signs everywhere advised against jumping and diving in (note the huge boulders and many rocks below the surface of the water).
To continue north from the gorge to Cape Tribulation, you have to take a car ferry across the crocodile-infested Daintree river. Well…I don’t know if “infested” is quite the right word, but there were definitely signs warning that crocodiles were present. Another clue was the presence of several “wild croc cruise” tour businesses. If we hadn’t already been to Hartley’s, I’m sure we would have gone on a croc-spotting cruise but the Agriculture and Fisheries department will fine you for feeding wild crocs by dangling raw chicken from a pole, so it wouldn’t have been quite the same.
After the ferry crossing we continued northward, deeper into the Daintree Rainforest. We encountered signs warning us to be on the lookout for another wild animal — the cassowary. Huge speed bumps have been installed along sections of road where they are known to cross to help ensure that these essential birds aren’t hit by speeding cars.
The road became narrow and twisty as we climbed in elevation up to the Mount Alexandra Lookout. From up there you can see where the rainforest meets the reef.
We stopped several times along the drive to do some scenic walks in among the coastal mangroves. It’s a bit swampy here so we were grateful that the walking paths were elevated boardwalks.
The plants here will do anything to survive, including piggybacking on other plants to get their leaves closer to the sun. There is even a plant called the strangler fig that will surround and slowly kill the host tree. Then it sends out tendrils to neighboring trees and strangles them, too. A strangler fig plant can grow to an enormous size by taking over all the trees in a small area.
It was incredibly hot and humid, but at least we were able to walk in shade thanks to the huge umbrella-like leaves of the fan palms above us.
We didn’t see any large animals, but there were lots of tiny lizards, small frogs, and several beautiful Cairns Birdwing butterflies. The males have iridescent emerald green wings.
We knew we were getting close to Cape Tribulation when I saw the hostel/budget resort I stayed at over 20 years ago on my first trip to Australia. Time flies, but it didn’t look too different from how I remembered it. Ahh, memories!
As we approached the beach we saw a few signs warning us to swim at our own risk due to the presence of box jellyfish this time of year. A sting can be fatal and can kill a person in under 5 minutes; young children are especially vulnerable.
The venom from a sting contains toxins that rapidly attack the cardiovascular and nervous systems. Even if you survive, the sting will be incredibly painful. If stung, get out of the water, call for urgent medical help, and pour vinegar (not fresh water) on the sting. There was no cell phone signal here that I could tell, but at least there was vinegar available at several of these remote northern beaches for those who opted to swim despite the risks.
We were very careful—we went down to the beach but not into the water. No sense in letting Australia kill us with just one day remaining on the trip!
If you’d rather not risk winning a Darwin Award, you can always just swim at a beach with a jellyfish net. This was the beach down at Port Douglas, where we were staying. You can see the white outline of the stinger net in the water. The nets keep out the box jellyfish, but not the much smaller Irukandji jellyfish, which also delivers a whopper of a sting if you’re unlucky. We prudently skipped beach swimming here out of an abundance of caution.
We have experienced (and survived!) an amazing five weeks in Australia. The people we met were welcoming and helpful, the wildlife was incredible, and the scenery here was breathtaking. I do think we saved some of the prettiest scenery for this last week of our trip. North Queensland seems to have it all — rainforest, mountains, beaches, and of course the Great Barrier Reef. We are already talking about coming back sometime in the future. But now it’s time to move on to the next destination — Bali, Indonesia. Cheers, Australia! And thanks for the wonderful memories!
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