Cape Tribulation and The Daintree

One of our first day trips was a jaunt on the ferry across the Daintree River. I’d read about the road online and didn’t think Bertha would fit, so a day trip from Port Douglas it was. In hindsight, we actually COULD have gotten Bertha onto the ferry, and we could have driven up to where the 2WD road ends, but it would have been a bit tight on the bendy roads.

We drove right up to Cape Tribulation and did the stunning boardwalk there. There were plenty of people swimming, but it was so remote, and there were croc and stinger signs up everywhere. We decided we would feel better if the kids swam a bit down the coast where we intended to stop for lunch. Sadly it was very much croc country still. The woman at the café had seen a 4m croc swimming past that morning, and ran out to call some backpackers back in. So no swimming there!

We stopped past the Daintree Butterflies and Bugs place, which was actually a bit of a disappointment. We were expecting live insects, it being in the middle of a rainforest and all! But it was just an ENORMOUS collection of preserved insects and, having visited almost every museum we have passed in Australia so far, we have seen plenty of such collections. They DID have an impressive amount of stick insects crawling on the plant on the counter, but I don’t think it was worth our $25 family entry.

We also stopped past a local vanilla pod farm in the hopes of grabbing some new essence (I've just run out of my stock from our farmers market). We learnt all about how vanilla is grown and bought some ground up pods instead of the essence. Having used it already in my baking, I am not at all disappointed - its delicious! We also stopped next door to taste some organic homemade ice-cream which uses the same vanilla. According to the sign, they had 20 odd flavours, but they only offer pre-made pots of four assorted flavours on any day. Today was black sapote, passionfruit, sour sop and wattleseed. We were a bit taken aback at the lack of choice, but got 2 pots to share between us. It was quite nice, but I had MAJOR issues later in the day due to how creamy it was. Damn that gall bladder! At $6.50 per pot it was rather expensive too, we would recommend trying the OTHER ice cream place in the Daintree.

We moved quickly onto the place that WAS worth our money – the Daintree Discovery Centre. We spent a great couple of hours walking around and learning all about the rainforest wildlife. Did you know the female Cassowary’s total input in any part of her offspring’s life is laying the eggs? As soon as she’s done that she buggers off and the male sits on the eggs, hatches the chicks and raises them!

It was a wonderful afternoon there, even if we did have to climb a HUGE tower in the heat and humidity. It was worth it to hear the birdlife up close and see the many different (living) insects.

Dunc and I both felt like we had achieved another ‘big tick’ in getting to Cape Tribulation. One of those places we’ve heard about and now actually gotten to.