Cape Tribulation

Cairns’ biggest money-spinner is the number of activities you can do nearby. My travel friend Vicky went white-water rafting on the river Tully and loved it; she also skydived onto a beach book ended by rainforest on one side and the Great Barrier Reef on the other.

Yesterday was Cape Tribulation, a headland a north of Cairns set in the Daintree rainforest national park. We took a river cruise on the Daintree River and saw saltwater crocodiles, albeit from a distance, then stopped off at a number of beauty spots. One of these was Mossman Gorge, a pretty swimming spot on land owned by the Kuku Yulanji Aboriginal community. It is said to have platypus and though I didn’t see any it was still a nice place to watch small fish weave in and around the clear shallows.
We stopped off at Port Douglas, a sweet, if sterile, little place that got rich in the gold rush and nearly perished in a cylone in 1911. Today it’s a resort town with its own golf course and a good trade in tourism. I did like it, but my brief stop felt like visiting an upmarket English coastal town, like Salcombe in Devon, and everything seemed that bit too conservative and old fashioned.
On we went to Cape Trib beach itself, a seemingly isolated (though accommodation is a short walk away), palm tree-strewn beach. It’s just 12 miles from the Great Barrier Reef and lumps of sun-bleached coral are visible at low tide. Going back down, the road, known as the Captain Cook Highway, was beautiful. The water looked lovely and the road twisted alongside the beach on the left and the rainforest to the right. In the distance I could see surfers enjoying the last of week of wetsuit-free surfing before stinger season begins.