Prepare yourselves, this is going to be a long post! I will try and write as little as possible and put lots of interesting photos and videos in to keep everyone entertained, but at the same time some people do want some advice on where to go and how to do this trip... so I'll include a bit of that too. Sorry 'bout that!
CAIRNS
Oli (or should I say, Olive!?) and I flew up Cairns and collected our Wicked Van from the depot in the city. We were given the whole briefing about insurance blah blah blah and then headed off to go meet up with Harry, a friend from home who we hadn't seen for 10 months as he has been working on a station in the outback for a while. No one had heard anything from him in months, so it was a big surprise to get a Facebook message from him saying that not only was he alive, but that he'd be in Cairns at the same time! Happy to be reunited again, we kidnapped him and set off on our road trip together as a three.
Olive!?
Found him!
We hung out in Cairns for a few days, exploring the city and meeting other backpackers. Oli and I slept in the van on the street by the man-made lagoon they have on the Esplanade (you can't swim in the sea because of crocodiles and jellyfish etc.) and Harry was in a hostel called Gilligans. You have to be quite sneaky about where you park in Cairns as it's hard to find somewhere where they won't fine you, but we found somewhere that was free from 6pm - 8am and then moved the van during the day. There were also free showers and loos just the the lagoon which was pretty handy! In the mornings we would get up and have a swim in the lagoon.
Hunting for crocs
PORT DOUGLAS
We then began our road trip by actually going north up to Port Douglas. Oli stayed there for a long time when he was last in Australia with Joss, and so we went and said hello to a couple of people he'd met a few years ago (special shout out to Grant the barman!). Port Douglas is beautiful but pretty sleepy, and very smart with lots of resorts and golf clubs. We spent some time here on the beach and looking around the beautiful marina which is full of very snazzy boats, and had an amazing bbq at sunset in this little grassy area surrounded by palm trees.
Our bbq spot.... not bad eh!?
MOSSMAN GORGE
After a couple of days in Port Douglas, we headed up even further north towards Cape Tribulation, stopping off on the way at a place called Mossman Gorge. We parked our van at the information centre and walked up into the rainforest for a nice walk around, collecting freshly fallen mangos for snacks along the way. Mangos here taste completely different to back home, and we kept a stash of them in our van for breakfast every day. Yummyyyyy!
Mangos mangoooos
We took a break from walking to have a nice swim in the fresh water river. It was amazing to be in the middle of a rainforest, just swimming about and relaxing and sunbathing on the huge rocks, and no jellyfish here!
CAPE TRIBULATION
After our adventure through the rainforest, we drove on up to Cape Tribulation to stay there for a night. The drive was really fun and there were loads of places to stop off and have a look. We stopped at a really famous place called Alexandra Lookout which had an amazing view of the Daintree River, and asked a nice Aussie to take some team snaps of us.
TEAM!
Oli found his creek....
We stayed in a nice hostel up there underneath this amazing red tree and chilled out on the beach for a bit. We thought about doing a rainforest night tour but in the end we decided it was too much money and I got the eebie-jeebies about all the spiders, and so we just chilled at the hostel and played a crazy game of water volley ball with a hilarious group of Aboriginals. They were very nice but a little bit nuts and couldn't count for shit, so scoring the game was pretty interesting....
DAINTREE RAINFOREST & THE WATERFALLS
After our night in Cape Tribulation we then finally started our journey down south. As we had been driving up the coast so far, we decided not to just repeat our route in reverse back down, and instead to head inland a bit through the inner rainforest and visit some of the famous waterfalls. We also visited this place called Curtain Fig Tree which is this crazy root formation from one fig tree growing on top of another, forming this big 'curtain'.
Harry sleeping like a plank in the back of the van
Curtain Fig Tree
Millaa Millaa Falls
Zillie Falls
That evening we continued down to stay at a place called Paronella Park which is the ruins of an old castle which some rich Spanish bloke built for his daughter in the middle of the rainforest. We did a night tour round it which was interesting but scared the crap out of me because of all the creepy crawlies and the huge fruit bats overhead. It was a bit of a bizarre place but the castle and the waterfall itself were beautiful.
PART II COMING SOON....
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