daintree and cape tribulation

cape tribulation

Cape Tribulation is set right in the middle of the World Heritage listed rainforest, and has a lot of great 4WD tracks, so you really get to experience this gorgeous part of the country. The whole of Cape York itself has less than 10,000 people living on it, so development is kept to a minimum. The rainforest is exceptionally unique in that different parts of it represent in living form different stages in Earth's evolutionary history. At Cape Tribulation World Heritage Rainforest meets up with World Heritage Reef.

	The rainforest meets the mangroves here and the water is an incredible colour.
Queenslanders like 4WDing so much, that even on their sealed roads they stick big chunks of rocks in to make them feel like they are on holiday. Or maybe a tyre manufacturer convinced the government to do it.
	The last fuel stop until Cooktown. It is also the only place to get cash out since Mossman, north of Cairns. We've got so used to not using cash that it's hard to remember to keep some on you. Queenslanders also seem to have lots of difficulty spelling 'EFTPOS', even if they do have it.
Self-serve on the Cape.
	This was a glowworm that caught the flash of my camera.
The ferry crossing to get across the Daintree River to Cape Tribulation.
	The view from Cape Tribulation, where the sealed road ends.

bloomsfield falls

The track from Cape Tribulation to the Bloomsfield Falls is a 4WD track, which we were lucky enough to be able to do because the wet hadn't come in yet properly.

It is a really steep bumpy track and I was very nervous about our 20 year-old car's ability to do it but Rusty was very cool. I was trying to remember most of what we had learned in the 4WD course in Anglesea (two months ago!) but all I could think was 'up in second, down on first, don't touch the brakes'. And that Rusty can lean over about 25 degrees, not 40 like the manufacturers say.

I thought Rusty in Melbourne had a lasty knack of shaking my bladder around, but that was nothing compared to this track. When we got to the falls I did a mad dash for a rocky pool, which I accidentally put my foot in first (I took it out in time though). By the temperature of the pool, I got the feeling I wasn't the first one with that idea.

(Neil doesn't think I should tell anyone about peeing in the rock pool, but two litres of water + over an hour of 4WD track + giant waterfall = pee, I don't care who you are.)

	Some rain had come in - enough to give us some muddy puddles to splash in!.
Splish splash, Rusty's taking a bath...
	Me wading in a river to make sure it didn't have any nasty potholes or sharp rocks to hurt Rusty. It was about three seconds later I thought about crocs (or Neil yells out 'CAN YOU SEE ANY CROCS RISS?').
Just before the Bloomsfield Falls after you cross the Bloomsfield River is an Aboriginal mission, which is where these kids were from. I asked them if they were scared of the crocs in the river, but they laughed and said they hadn't seen any today. Wouldn't catch me in there though.
	The road was only 37kms long, but it took an hour and a quarter to get there.

daintree

Daintree Village is a tiny little town with no bank or petrol , and four shops on the main drag. Because some thunderstorms were coming in we decided to splash out and stay in a B&B - and what a great place we stayed at. See more about the Red Hill Bed and Breakfast at Contacts.

There were two American couples there, very excited about the Australian birdlife. Except they don't call them 'kookaburras' as in 'I'm a great cook', but 'kook-aburras' as in 'they're a little bit kooky'. Which is kind of ironic really. I'm surprised they get any birdwatching done with the decibel levels that surround them.

For most of Daintree's existence you could only get up there by boat, which made things quite difficult to keep a school established. Sometimes kids would ride to school, and the horses would eat the lunches out of their schoolbags kept under the schoolhouse. During the war, the bombs got very close (some of the farms had bombs dropped in them), so the kiddies had bomb practice. "At any time of the day the whistle would blow and all the kids would march down the stairs out through the front gate and into the air raid shelter. We each were given a wooden clothes peg to put in our mouth should a bomb be dropped to prevent us from biting our tongue". - Ian Osborne

"Harold Moore was one of the best teachers we had at the school in the early of fifties, because he used to love to go fishing on the weekends. When he came fishing on the weekends, if we wanted a smoke he would give us one, he acted just like one of us. In school if we didn't like what school work he gave us we would say 'Sir, the lawn needs mowing,' so then we would be out mowing the lawn for half the day. This could happen quite often. Then we had another teacher, Tommy Carter, who had an old 1930 car or older, and he used to park it in the school yard under the fig tree. So one day when we came to school he told us all the boys to bring a shang-hi (ging) to school to shoot the peewees so they wouldn't mess on his car".

	The Red Hill Bed and Breakfast - $66 a night with gourmet breakfast.
These frogs crawled all over the walls inside, while you are watching TV. In fact, you can't get free-to-air TV up here - you have to pay for satellite TV.
	We took a river cruise down the Daintree River to see some snakes and crocs. Saw no crocs, but lots of snakes.
No tall boats.
	Next to the nasty road hump. Maybe their cassowaries are becoming extinct because of all the unexpected sharp rocks lying around.

Last updated: 6th January, 2002