Port Douglas, on the North Queensland coast, was our penultimate stop on this two-week Aussie sojourn before departing for Fiji. I had been through this small boating town north of Cairns 33 years ago during my year’s travel around the world … but I remember little of it. No matter, as I’m sure it’s changed considerably; everything in Australia has during those three decades.
We flew from Darwin into Cairns with our Seattle mates, Helene and Terry, and left directly for the house we were renting just off a beach a little south of Port Douglas’s toney downtown. The house was a spacious find: three bedrooms, a roomy kitchen, more space than the four of us could really use, plus a pool and ample outdoor living areas. But we cooked some delicious meals there, and the pool would come in handy in a few days.
The house is owned by a fellow who apparently owns several properties in the area (this one is actually for sale) and has moved to Bali. We had a few hesitations about the place after Kate found it on a rental website, mostly because the owner wouldn’t take payment in the “normal” ways (PayPal, credit card) and wasn’t part of a system like AirBnB that verifies people’s identities and handles money transactions. He gave us his bank account number and asked us to deposit money directly – a bit unnerving, except this was Australia, the land of honest and trusting people.
Anyway, it was a fine spot where we could walk to town by road or beach in about 45 minutes. We had two main activities set up, a tour into the Daintree rainforest, a World Heritage Site, and a day of diving/snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.
Our Daintree guide was a white African who had grown up in Kenya, led hunting expeditions there, and managed a tea plantation in Papua New Guinea. Peter was a character to say the least, full of stories and information, about the medicinal qualities of plants, the good luck of finding a leach on you (no worries, they suck their daily meal and fall off in about 40 minutes, no harm done), how the local butcherbirds figured out how to eat cane toads without dying from the poison stored in glands at the back of the toad’s head (the Aussies imported the toads from Central America to get rid of some pest afflicting their sugar cane, only to find the toads didn’t kill the pests, but killed all the snakes, birds, and other predators that tried to eat them. Another story of human hubris).
Peter, with our other Seattle friends Robin and Bill (who were staying a little south of Port Douglas) picked us up and we headed north for the park. Apropos of our destination, it rained most of the day – indeed most of our time in Port Douglas – but Peter kept our spirits high with his tales and tellings.
We crossed the Daintree River - a fine croc habitat, by the way - on a cable-pulled ferry.
Though we didn’t see the main attraction of Daintree – the massive and feisty Cassowary, a bird that grows to 60+ pounds, has a nasty-looking, bony knob on its head, and can slash a person’s chest open with its claws – we did see its poop and the roadside warning signs.
We also saw massive trees with massive horizontal root systems and strangler figs that wound around and suffocated their hosts, leaving an intriguing hollow structure:
Toward the end of the day, we walked the beach that ran to Cape Tribulation, so-named by the infamous Captain Cook after his ship was gashed by part of the barrier reef he didn’t know.
Next – Kate scuba’s the Great Barrier Reef!
We flew from Darwin into Cairns with our Seattle mates, Helene and Terry, and left directly for the house we were renting just off a beach a little south of Port Douglas’s toney downtown. The house was a spacious find: three bedrooms, a roomy kitchen, more space than the four of us could really use, plus a pool and ample outdoor living areas. But we cooked some delicious meals there, and the pool would come in handy in a few days.The house is owned by a fellow who apparently owns several properties in the area (this one is actually for sale) and has moved to Bali. We had a few hesitations about the place after Kate found it on a rental website, mostly because the owner wouldn’t take payment in the “normal” ways (PayPal, credit card) and wasn’t part of a system like AirBnB that verifies people’s identities and handles money transactions. He gave us his bank account number and asked us to deposit money directly – a bit unnerving, except this was Australia, the land of honest and trusting people.
Anyway, it was a fine spot where we could walk to town by road or beach in about 45 minutes. We had two main activities set up, a tour into the Daintree rainforest, a World Heritage Site, and a day of diving/snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.
 |
| Peter and Kate in a very wet Daintree rainforest |
Peter, with our other Seattle friends Robin and Bill (who were staying a little south of Port Douglas) picked us up and we headed north for the park. Apropos of our destination, it rained most of the day – indeed most of our time in Port Douglas – but Peter kept our spirits high with his tales and tellings.
We crossed the Daintree River - a fine croc habitat, by the way - on a cable-pulled ferry.
 |
| Cassowary poop - the real thing! |
Though we didn’t see the main attraction of Daintree – the massive and feisty Cassowary, a bird that grows to 60+ pounds, has a nasty-looking, bony knob on its head, and can slash a person’s chest open with its claws – we did see its poop and the roadside warning signs. |
| The cavity left by the tree a strangler fig strangled. |
We also saw massive trees with massive horizontal root systems and strangler figs that wound around and suffocated their hosts, leaving an intriguing hollow structure:
Toward the end of the day, we walked the beach that ran to Cape Tribulation, so-named by the infamous Captain Cook after his ship was gashed by part of the barrier reef he didn’t know.
 |
| Cape Tribulation in the distance |
Next – Kate scuba’s the Great Barrier Reef!
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