Saturday, April 17, 2010

Free in the Daintree

In the interest of saving $350, we elected to tour the Daintree on our own. Free to stop, hike, and go wherever we wanted, we elected to take a 1.5 hour wildlife cruise on the Daintree River. We spotted hatchlings (baby crocodiles), juvenile crocodiles, and even a 3-meter adult female. We also saw a baby fruit bat, many birds, and the largest hanging peas I've ever seen! It wasn't an overly thrilling cruise, but we enjoyed relaxing in the sun.


A baby crocodile that we spotted on the shores of the Daintree river
In order to enter the Daintree coast, one must take a ferry (what'cha call me?). It had to be the world's least fancy and most unnecessary fairy, but we paid our $20 to cross (with return). The river wasn't very wide and I'm really not sure why they didn't put in a bridge, but you can guess what ensued with 2 engineers and 10 minutes to kill-- that's right, a cost-benefit analysis.
Our first stop was at the Alexandra lookout where we had views of Snapper island, the Daintree river, Low Isles and even Port Douglas. We also saw our first "Cassowary Crossing" sign. It was at this point that we became on a mission to find one of these rare and endangered giant flightless birds. Dave also wanted to see a tree frog, so our new forest chant became "Cassowary!?" ... "Tree Frog!?" It became almost a Marco-Polo type game between us. We never did see either one in any of our hikes.

Our first hike was at the Jindalba boardwalk. We saw tons of really large and unique trees including ones that looked like snakes were wrapped around them, one that were slanted with geometric patterned holes, and of course, the fan palm trees.


Noah's Creek
The second boardwalk hike we did was our favorite. The Marrdja boardwalk let to a lookout platform at Noah's Creek that yielded green bluffs reflecting in calm water. After hiking, we had become pretty hungry and with not much along these windy coast roads, we picked Mason's Cafe where we enjoyed chatting with the owner about the area while eating very yummy sandwiches.

Our last hike was at the Dubiji boardwalk where a group of locals warned us of a blue snake off the trail that had us focusing so much on finding him that we missed out on enjoying much of this hike. We never did spot him, but as we reached the end of the loop, the remainder of the trail going back to our car had been made impassable by flooding from recent rain. We weren't thrilled that we'd have to hike back the entire distance we had just covered when we could see our car just meters away. Luckily we found another route that saved us from hiking the entire distance again.



We reached Cape Tribulation by early afternoon and spent a few minutes enjoying the view and walking on the beach. We walked to the Kulki lookout and ran into what must be Australia's version of a turkey. They ran away from us quickly though.
On our way back, we knew we wanted to stop at the Daintree Ice Cream Co. where numerous books, locals, and brochures and recommended we sample the tropical ice cream. We made it there just before they closed and had passionfruit, waterseed, macademia, and mango ice creams. I prefer the less-healthier flavors of ice cream, but it was nice to have a fresh-picked and homemade treat on such a hot day.
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