Daintree Rainforest & Cape Tribulation Tour
Oct 23 2008
Daintree Rainforest & Cape Tribulation Tour
What an amazing day today! We went on the “Daintree Discovery Tour” to see the unique Daintree Rainforest and the area, explorer James Cook made famous, called Cape Tribulation.
Our tour guide was a fun auzzie named Grant. He drove our small group of 7 around in an air conditioned Mercedes-Ben Vito (their version of a station wagon) it was surprisingly nice.
Our first stop on the tour was a boat ride along the Daintree River in solar and electric powered boat called the “Solar Whisper”. We saw a small python in a tree, we saw two young crocodile and lots of interesting birds. It was a little disappointing because we didn’t see a big crocodile. But it was still a lot of fun.
Our second stop was Cape Tribulation. Grant setup some seats on the beach where we drank Daintree tea and snacked on Lemmingtons and fruit. Afterwards Chantelle, Reid and two others in our group went kayaking from one end of the beach to the other. Three of us stayed back and walked long the beach listening to Grant’s interesting stories and information about all the things we saw on the beach. It as a lot of fun info and also really relaxing to walk along the beach at our own pace. I ate a leaf from a yellow flower (I forget the name of) but Grant said it was something the aboriginals ate as a form of lettuce. It really tasted like lettuce. It was strange. Then Grant and nearly everyone in the group touched green ant bums to their tongues for a lemon sherbet flavour or something. It was a little too weird for me to try.
Our third stop was at a crystal clear rainforest pool (very small lake). It was a place to swim while Grant setup our lunch in the rainforest. For lunch we sat at a long mahogany table with a tent canopy over top in the middle of the rainforest. Grant had a good sized tuperware container for each of us, fresh bread from a local Port Douglas bakery and various bush tuccker inspired condiments. Including Veggimite which I tried and will never in my life try again. You can Wikipedia that stuff if you want to find out what it is.
After lunch we walked through the rainforest. There wasn’t a boardwalk, or a path, it was just walking through the vegetation. It wasn’t like in the movies where they use machetes, because the trees were too tall for that. But I was very scared of poisonous spiders ad I got so many mosquito bites that I lost count. There are so any beautiful trees and creatures in the rainforest. My favourite were the “Fan palms” which were large palm tree with leaves in a fan position. I also liked the gigantic roots from the fig trees and all the fancy crisscross action of the strangler figs that were killing various trees. We got rained on while walking through the rainforest which was exactly as I had expected. It rained fairly hard but we didn’t get very wet because there were so many trees and their leaves up above us that it kept us pretty dry. It was pretty cool.
Stop number five was at the Daintree Ice-cream Company. They had chocolate covered bananas on a stick or an cup of four assorted flavoured ice-creams for sale.
From there we went to a lookout point to see the Daintree from above and see how it looks like a big valley.
There was a surprise stop on our way back to Port Douglas at a point that extended a small bit into the ocean. I took lots of photos there and had some very tasty pineapple. It was the bet pineapple I’ve ever had.
The main thing to know about the “Daintree Discovery Tour” is that it’s worth every penny. Grant was a spectauar tour guide and it was a fun day. There are so many more details i could type but I’m super tired.
– Bonnie :)
