Daintree – Cape Tribulation – Wonga Beach

11/07/2015

Sunshine woke me up in the morning in Port Douglas. Quick breakfast and I hit the road to be at Mossman Gorge at a reasonable time. I tried the Queensland Blue coffee beans from Coffee Works, and was not fully convinced, but maybe its because I drunk it black, without my normal ration of butter and Upgraded XCT oil. I'll try my normal mixture tomorrow.

My timing was great, there were very few people at Mossman Gorge and I enjoyed the 3.5km rain-forest hike and took some lovely photographs.

A tiny spot of sunlight touching the forest floor

Nature's Cathedral

The Cassoway and me

This part of norther Queensland is very wet and has some of the oldest, world heritage protected rain-forest around. Incredible how many different green tones can be found in a dense rain forest and there were creeks, little streams and gorges everywhere. It was an eerie walk through this ancient place, often times I heard some animal sounds but couldn't spot any. This park is run by the local aboriginal community which has been around this area for incredible 50 000 year.

While it was only about 25 degrees, due to the high humidity I broke a good sweat hiking the trails. On the way back, when the tourist masses just arrived, I ordered a coffee at the visitor center and I think it's the first time that I had an aboriginal barista preparing it. I was quite impressed with the result, while by far not as good as the coffees I had in Cairns, it was definitely far above the average that I had over the last few weeks!

Continuing on towards Cape Tribulation, there is a ferry ($25) that brings you across the Daintree river. The road to Cape Tribulation was extremely windy, narrow at times and mostly a 40 or 60 kmh zone. I did most of the rain-forest and boardwalks that were to be found and enjoyed them a fair bit.

On the ferry

On the ferry too

It must be quite extreme up here when the wet season and the higher temperatures are on! There are many beautiful beaches to be visited and the rain-forest, Daintree National Park, goes all the way to the ocean. The vegetation is so thick that the air stands still in the forest and there is only a tiny bit of sunshine. I found it quite difficult to take some decent pictures at times.

The ferry back

I stopped at Pinnacle Village, Wonga Beach, for the night, enjoyed a big and healthy dinner and a cool down in the pool. According to my phone I hiked close to 20km all up today, but the lack of mobile phone coverage at times might have screwed up the distances taken by the device.

Beach access from the camp site

Distance traveled: 140km