Cairns and Port Douglas

Today we were up early as we were spending most of the day in the Daintree rainforest. We had a huge breakfast in Mossman (just out of Port Douglas) and headed north.

First stop was a croc tour on the Daintree River. We were loaded onto an electric boat and motored around the river for an hour or so. The tide was very high and the weather warm so that tends to mean the crocs don’t get out of the water too much as they don’t need to - they are already warm enough from the water. We spotted a small one which was under a metre and a bigger one that was a couple of metres long.

Lots of people on small tinnies on the river fishing for barramundi - I’m not sure I would want to be in a small boat on a river with a lot of crocs! Especially when barramundi is one of their favourite foods.

After our tour we had to cross the Daintree River. Keeping in mind this is the main coastal route north on the Captain Cook Highway I was surprised to see we were going to have to get on a punt. Anyway it was a pretty quick trip and we were in the rainforest.

People tend to think the Amazon rainforest is the oldest in the world but it isn’t the Daintree is more than twice as old and has trees and plants dating back 120 million years. That means it has lived through the times of dinosaurs, giant mammals, and humans.

We stopped off at a couple of interesting places for photos and had lunch in a resort located in the rainforest.

After lunch we went to visit a couple who live in the rainforest and are passionate about its preservation. The Daintree Rainforest was declared a World Heritage Site in 1988 but there are still some privately owned blocks and of course the owners are very limited in what they can do with their land.

Ange and Neil Hewett have lived there for 30 years and run walking tours through a section of the forest. The property they own is about 65 hectares and used to be an exotic tropical fruit orchard. Up the road is a tea plantation and there are also a few small farms located in the rainforest area. The government is buying back to properties as they come up for sale but some people don’t want to sell to the government so a number of private properties remain.

Most of the fruit in the rainforest is actually very toxic having evolved this trait over such a long time as a defence mechanism. Some fruits have high concentrations of cyanide others have strychnine. Given the forest receives around 4 metres of rain per year the soil is very poor as any nutrients quickly get leached away by the rain. This means everything in the forest is in careful balance and one of the most important creatures is the Cassowary.

Cassowaries have a bad reputation as being very dangerous birds but this isn’t really justified. Yes they do have a huge toenail that can do some damage but they will only attack if you mess with their chicks when they are very small. Most of the time they will just look at you and move on. The Cassowary is important because it has a very simple and fast digestive system so it can eat these toxic fruits and then drop the seeds in different parts of the forest before the toxins can affect them.

The aborigines also played an important role spreading seeds. They had worked out how to process the fruits to remove the toxins, this might mean cooking the seeds or placing them in water for a long time to leach out the toxins.

It was a really interesting walk and we managed to see a Cassowary bathing in a small creek with its chick.

The low levels of nutrients means most of the forest is very slow growing and some of the plants and trees we walked past were a few thousand years old. There are many ephithite orchids and ferns that attach to taller plants and draw moisture from the air.

It was really interesting and educational.

After the walk we drove up to Cape Tribulation for a look. This was named by Capt Cook in 1770 as the Endeavour ran aground near here and all his trials and tribulations started. To now we have been really lucky with the weather though it did rain a bit at Cape Trib.Read more