Back to Cairns, and The Daintree

But the main reason we had returned to Cairns was to visit the Daintree rainforest and Cape Tribulation, north of Cairns. The Daintree is 120 million years old, and has the most species in any single place on earth. So it's a fairly special place to visit, and about a million little buses go there everyday from Cairns holding eager visitors. Our daytrip - the only way we could see Daintree and Cape Trib without hiring a car - took us first to the Rainforest Habitat Centre at Port Douglas, about 40 minutes north of Cairns. Although we did get to meet kangaroos (and pademelons - not a type of melon, as I'd though, but actually small kangaroos) upclose in their large grasslands enclosure, it wasn't a very nice place for the other animals. There was a giant crocodile living in two tiny interconnecting pools, and the koalas barely had a couple of branches to, well, sleep on. I'm not sure how much 'roaming' space a koala needs, but the crocodile obviously needed more space. So that was a fairly depressing experience overall, and left me wishing we hadn't given our money to them, conservation projects or not. If they can't provide proper 'habitats' for their 'exhibit' animals then how can they do anthing effective for wild ones? Keeping wild animals in cages has never seemed right to me; safari parks just about get by because they have so much more space, but this place was closer to 'zoo' than 'habitat'.

But moving on. We continued up the coast to the Daintree, crossing the river on the cable ferry and into the national park itself. The rainforest is ancient, lush and green, and although people do live in there, there are only some concealed hostels, some tiny settlements (powered by renewable power), and, oddly, a small tea plantation.

We walked along Cape tribulation beach, in the actually quite atmospheric cloud and slightly drizzle, past mangroves and the apparently shark, jellyfish and crocodile infested sea (not a place for a nice swim, then..). 'Cape Tribulation' was named by the great explorer Captain Cook on one of his bad days, when his ship had run aground on the reef nearby.
We also went on a wildlife cruise, which really might as well have been renamed 'crocodile cruise' on the Daintree River, where rainforest cascades down to the bank edges on either side. Despite the tide and the weather (meaning it was warmer for the crocs in the water than on the banks) being against us, we managed to see one tiny baby croc, a couple of medium size females, and a quite large female; the last in full view on the bank. They looked stunning up close, powerful and undeniably terrifying if you ever found yourself in the water with one. Not that you'd get very long to be terrified before it made you it's once-monthly meal! We also saw a tiny nectar bat curled up inside some leaves on an overhanging bush, and tiny, purple&green pencil-thing treesnakes.

It was an eyeopener into the beauty of tropical northern queensland, and seeing crocodiles in the wild was fantastic.

written by  LizIsHere on July 3, 2010 from Cape Tribulation, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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