Port Douglas

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We had a pretty early flight from Adelaide to Cairns, so we were up and on the road before the sun. No real problems, but the Adelaide Airport was a maze of roundabouts getting to the car rental return due to the construction of a huge parking garage, which should be done in another year or so. We got checked in, boarded the flight, and arrived in Cairns mid afternoon. As soon as we got off the plane we realized we weren’t in the Outback anymore. Humidity! As a prelude of things to come, it was also very cloudy and the flight up had been pretty bumpy.

We’re staying in Port Douglas, a small town about 50km north of Cairns and we had a shuttle to take us there. We were off for about an hour’s drive along the James Cook Highway on the edge of the Coral Sea. We arrived at our hotel, the Bay Villas a bit after 5pm, and as expected found the office closed and our key taped to the door. Along with the key were a couple pages of instructions most of which included the words “for an extra fee”. After our experience at the Barossa Views, we were sadly disappointed. In all fairness, now that we’ve been here a few days, we are getting more used to the place. Anyway, after unpacking a bit we ventured to the uptown area about four blocks away for dinner. About a block from the hotel the rain started so we went back for our hats and jackets. You would think a resort town on St. Patrick’s Day evening would be pretty busy right? Well it was surprisingly quite. We had a very nice alfresco dinner at one of the better restaurants in town but even by the time we left it was not even half full.

Early the next morning we were met by Randall, our driver for Tony’s Tropical Tours for our trip into the tropical rainforest. For this trip we had three other couples with us, one from the UK, one from Austria, and one from Houston. First we drove through miles and miles of sugar cane fields north of Port Douglas. The picking of the cane starts in a couple months, so the fields were pretty mature. It was like driving in the Midwest in July, a canyon of vegetation. Our first stop was the Mossman Gorge and Mossman River. The river is pretty short but runs down from the mountains east of the coast. Even though it’s been raining for the last couple weeks the water was clear enough to drink. In fact, all the public water for Port Douglas is taken directly from the Mossman and only filtered before being used for drinking water. We’ve been drinking it for 3 days now, and feel better than Pat did in Sydney.

After the Gorge, Randall dropped us off at a boat landing on the Daintree River, the next big river to the north. This one is actually a tidal estuary for the first 20k or so from the ocean, so it’s the exact opposite of the Mossman, very murky and depending on the tide, salty. These are ideal conditions for the crocodiles, called “saltys”, found in this part of Australia. These are the ones you hear about attacking people, in fact Randall told us that 65 people had been killed by saltys in Queensland including one boy on the Daintree. The idea of the boat trip was to spot some of them. We were successful, sort of. We saw a couple newly hatched ones sunning themselves on tree limbs and one two year old juvenile on the river bank. We didn’t see the big adults that live in the river, just our bad luck.

Back in the van after the cruise we continued to the Noah Valley for a guided walk through the rainforest. Since this is more tropical that we saw in NZ or along the Great Ocean Road, there was actually less vegetation along the ground, but more up in the canopy. Connie had one of the unique experiences for the day as a small leech fell on her arm and attached itself before she noticed it. Fortunately no harm was done. A bit later, a vine hanging across the path snagged Pat’s hat and pulled it right off his head. It turns out it was the root of a creeper palm which is covered with fishhook shaped barbs. Again no harm was done. After the walk we had a creek side BBQ lunch and another short forest walk. At the lunch spot, there is a swimming hole available for the tourists. Unfortunately, all the rain had the Noah Creek running too strongly for swimming, although it was still very clear.

We pressed on to Cape Tribulation which is an unspoiled tropical beach. Unfortunately, a tropical squall arrived at the same time and we had to fight horizontal rain during a quick walk to the beach lookout. Back in the van, Randall cranked up the a/c and we all dried out on the last stop of the day. That stop was the Daintree Ice Cream Co., always a good stop. This company started as a fruit orchard, and when that didn’t work out, started using the fruit to make Ice Cream. Since they mostly sell to the tourists, they manage their stock by only selling a fixed menu of flavors, which consists of one scoop of each of the 4 flavors of the day. While the flavors change every day, we got coconut, passion fruit, wattle seed and black sapote. Coconut and passion fruit you know, but wattle seed produces a coffee like flavor while black sapote is called chocolate pudding fruit which seems like an apt description. It was an excellent way to end a very nice, if somewhat damp day.

On Monday we were scheduled to visit the Low Isles, a few kilometers off the coast, but due to the weather, the tour operator canceled the trip and rescheduled us for Tuesday and upgraded us to the “big” trip out to the actual Great Barrier Reef. We spent the day walking around Port Douglas checking out the shops, but other than food, we didn’t spend anything. Back in the room we were able to make some progress on the blog backlog. Tuesday morning started out with a call from the Reef tour operator telling us that because of the winds they had to cancel the trip today as well. So we will have to add the Great Barrier Reef to the list for our return trip. We also heard from the company shuttling us to the airport that the main road to Cairns was blocked because of a landslide and the only alternative road is blocked due to a flooding river. Effectively, Port Douglas is cut off. This afternoon we’ve been calling the shuttle company and our travel insurance to see what our options are. Despite what we said earlier, the folks at the Resort have been very helpful in all this, including allowing us the use of their VOIP phone to call the insurance in the states.

So now we hope it doesn’t rain anymore tonight, as the shuttle will pick us up at 4:15am and hopefully get us to Cairns Airport for our 10am flight to Brisbane. If we can get this posted today (3/20) we will finally be caught up on the blogs. I think the secret to blogging is being trapped in a hotel room for two days.

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Photos

Salty and Tree Frog
The frog is bright green and the baby salty is hanging into the water to the right of the frog

Daintree River Ferry
We crossed the river on this going southbound

A Tree spider
About 8 inchs leg span. Uggggh!

Jellyfish warning
Another reason not to swim in the ocean

St Mary's Port Douglas
The inside of a small church right on the water

Four Mile beach Port Douglas
Not very impressive after a storm

A Fruit Bat Colony
Less than a block from our hotel