Finishing our drive across the Savannah Way, we rocked up at Port Douglas which is, without doubt, a tropical paradise and possibly our favourite town in Australia.  It is probably fair to say that after the arduous trip over from NT we could have arrived pretty much anywhere and it would have been right up there, but PD really ticked every box we could throw at it.  If Broome is where the desert meets the sea, PD is where the rainforest meets the reef.  What is so great about this small resort town all the way up the coast of northern Queensland?  Well, our timing couldn’t have been better as the average daily temperature was between 25-30C, a bit cloudy at times, but generally day after day of warm, balmy sunshine.  The famous Four Mile Beach, with its cerulean waters glistening like diamonds and rolling gently over the soft white sand extending around a bay fringed with palm trees and overlooked by the misty slopes of the rainforest clad ranges.  The town itself has a laid-back vibe but there is no denying that people here have got their act together.  That fantastic holiday feeling is felt almost the moment you arrive and the many restaurants, cafes and bars of Macrossan Street are modern and creative Much of the accommodation and eateries open up towards the sea front, a feature that was sadly missing in Broome, and the main street of shops provides most of what you might need during your stay.  There is little in the way of industrial estates or shopping centres either in, or on the outskirts of, town which adds to the charm.  The finishing touch for us was our stay at the Pink Flamingo.  Centrally placed, this relaxed resort consisted of 10 villas dotted around a communal swimming pool, bar and bbq garden.  Each villa was self-contained with its own kitchen and large tropical garden and use of the washing machines and bicycles was free of charge and they loved dogs!  This place was incredibly good value for money and run by a nomadic family from Yorkshire, UK.  Another credit to Port Douglas is the apparent lack of commercial greed that we have seen so much of in WA and NT where prices have been hiked up to ridiculous levels, taking advantage of trapped Australians who, because of Covid and restrictions implemented by the Australian government, have been unable to travel overseas and are exploring their own country instead.

PD has an interesting history that appears to have moved between boom and bust since the 1870s.  The port was first established in 1877 following the discovery of gold in the surrounding tablelands, and infrastructure followed in the form of Government offices, banks, a courthouse, lighthouse and hotels.  PD became the main port in the area during the peak of the gold rush and up until 1885 when the train link from the mineral rich tablelands took a new route directly to Cairns, bi-passing PD and resulting in the decline of further development.  This bypassing of PD led residents to turn to other forms of income and, with tick fever impacting cattle herds, many farmers turned their land into sugar producing plantations.  Once again the port became viable, with large quantities of sugar cane being shipped south for processing until 1897 when the opening of a cane crushing mill in Mossman (a small town 11 km north of PD) again stymied progress of the town.  A single gauge rail line was built from the mill to the under-utilised PD wharf in 1990 and transport of sugar, freight and passengers revived the town until 1911 when a massive cyclone stormed through bringing 16 inches of rain in 24 hours.  Many of the town's building were damaged beyond repair and by 1920 the business centre of PD had relocated to Mossman and its mill.  In 1933, the Cook Highway opened along the coast between Cairns and Mossman and with the opportunity to transport sugar by road directly to Cairns, the amount of produce transported through the PD wharf slowly decreased, until 1958 when it stopped altogether, leaving PD a sleepy fishing village.  Since the 1970s, construction of the new Cairns international airport, development of a 5-star resort and Barrier Reef tours, PD has become a popular destination for both Australian and international visitors.

We loved PD so much that we ended up staying for the best part of a month but we took some time out  to have a good look around.  It would be almost impossible to miss the thriving sugar production in this part of the country.  Sugar cane was introduced to Australia in 1788 on the ships of the First Fleet, but early plantings in parts of New South Wales were unsuccessful.  It wasn’t until the 1860s that a viable plantation and mill was established further north, not far from Brisbane.  By the 1880s cane crops were being developed further north along Queensland’s tropical coast.  There was a fundamental problem however, as the cost of employing Australian workers to work on the plantations was too expensive to compete with the overseas sugar producers such as Fiji, Indonesia and South Africa.  To overcome this, it is estimated that between 1863 and 1904 more than 60,000 Kanakas (a Hawaiian word meaning ‘man’) were shipped to Queensland to carry out the work.  Recruitment often involved forced removal of young men and boys, aged between 9 - 30 years, from more than 80 Pacific Islands, including Vanuatu (then called the ‘New Hebrides’), the Solomon Islands, and to a lesser extent, from New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati and Tuvalu.  While some islanders were willing volunteers, many workers were enticed onto the European ships, probably under the disguise of trading, as part of the practice of kidnapping labour known as ‘blackbirding’ (‘blackbird’ was another word for slave).  They were brought into the country illegally and older generations recall stories of ancestors being sold like cattle at the shipping docks in Queensland before being transported to the sugar plantations where they were often forced to work and live in poor conditions.  A law was passed in the late 1860s to regulate labour trafficking into Queensland by the establishment of an indentured (contract) labour system but Islanders continued to be exploited with meagre wages and unable to break the terms of contracts that they were obliged to enter into.  It is easy to assume that few of those signing labour contracts spoke English or would have understood how the system worked and what their obligations would be.  It is estimated that 30% of those brought to Australia died young, possibly due to a lack of immunity to many of the diseases common to the European community.  At the turn of the 20th century, in line with the White Australia policy, most remaining South Sea Islanders were deported – the only victims of mass deportation in Australian history. Those able to stay continued to suffer hardship and discrimination. 

The sugar plantations then saw a new breed of canecutter, young European migrants coming to Australia to “make their fortune" in the cane plantations.  Italians in particular provided much of the workforce and made a strong contribution to the growth of the Australian sugar industry into the mid 1950s.  During the 1950s the sugar industry boomed and mechanical cane harvesters were introduced so that by the late 1960s, more than 85% of the crops were harvested by machine reaching 100% mechanical harvesting in 1979.  Today, Australia is internationally recognised as one of the most efficient sugar producers in the world.  We didn’t go on one of the many sugar cane tours offered, but as we were there during cane cutting season we did see the single gauge locomotive pulling 33 giant carriages full of cut cane en-route to the Mossman mill for processing.  Approximately 95% of Australia’s sugar cane is grown in Queensland and 80 to 85% of Queensland’s raw sugar is exported.

In Australia everyone is familiar with the cane toad problem but for everyone else – the story starts in 1935 when 102 cane toads were introduced into northern Queensland from Hawaii.  They were imported by Sugar Research Australia in an attempt to control Australian native beetles which were damaging sugar cane crops.  They were intended as an alternative to pesticides such as arsenic, pitch and copper and by March 1937 around 62,000 toads were bred in captivity and then released.  Unfortunately, the hardy amphibians had little impact on the beetles they were expected to control as the beetles tended to live in the upper stalks of the cane plants and the toads were unable to jump that high (2 feet is thought to be their average range).  Instead, the voracious cane toads went after everything that they could catch including insects, bird’s eggs and native frogs, taking food sources away from native species.  They also had an alarming effect on any would be predators as their high toxicity levels proved fatal to snakes, goannas and freshwater crocs.  Since their release the toads have proved to be amazingly adaptable to Australian conditions and now number over 200 million and have spread into the Northern Territory and Western Australia and it is currently estimated that they are moving into new areas at the rate of 40-60 km per year.  They are adapting to dry, desert conditions as well as cold climates and are also starting to breed in salt water.  

There are many initiatives in place to try and eradicate these, now unwanted, toads including introduction of a viral/bacterial toad pest, toad musters, smearing with haemorrhoid cream which acts as an anaesthetic, spraying with Dettol, freezing or hitting them on the head with a flat hammer.  In true Aussie fashion, sports have developed such as cane toad golf, cane toad cricket, cane toad racing and the annual “Toad Day Out” in Townsville when prizes are awarded for the largest toad caught and the heaviest weight of toads caught.  Interestingly, one native species, the Torresian crow has learned how to kill and eat the toads without ingesting the poison, a quick flipping of the toad onto its back followed by a bill jab to the throat where the skin is thinner, thereby giving access to the toad’s non-toxic innards.

There is a great 47 min doco., Cane Toads: An Unnatural History which was released in 1988 scoring an impressive 88% on Rotten Tomatoes!

Travelling away from PD, on the other side of Mossman, is the car ferry that crosses the Daintree River.  It is a quick 10 minute crossing that provides a good viewing platform to observe the basking crocs that lie on the river banks.  Driving off the ferry you are immediately surrounded by the Daintree Rainforest, one of the few unspoilt pockets of lowland rainforest left in the world and also the oldest, as it is thought to be around 130 million years old, very much the older sibling of the 55 million year old Amazon.  Covering an area that extends north from the Daintree River up to Cape Tribulation and west as far as the Great Dividing Range the Daintree is a narrow, 23km strip of tropical coastal lowland rainforest, two hour’s drive north of Cairns.  It is estimated that half of the rainforest has been cleared and much of what is left has been selectively logged.  What remains is exceptionally high in biodiversity and conservation value as it contains an almost complete record of the evolution of plant life on earth.  The Daintree is part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland covering an area that is less than 0.1% of the continent yet contains 40% of bird species, 35% of frogs, marsupials and reptiles and 65% of bat and butterfly species. 

The Daintree region was originally home to the indigenous people of the Kuku Yalanji tribe who were living in scattered camps along the creek and river banks when the Daintree River was discovered by Europeans in 1873.  It didn’t take long for gold and tin prospectors to arrive in the area along with timber cutters and dairy farmers and whilst businesses progressed on the southern side of the river the northern side proved much slower given its isolation, ruggedness and remoteness.  However, the region did contain valuable Red Cedar and regular transport across the river began in 1956 with a road built through the Daintree and up to Cape Tribulation in the 1960s for the purpose of timber transportation.  In 1983, local government moved to extend the existing road further north which triggered concerned locals to form the Wilderness Action Group with an intention to stop the road being built.  It was in December 1983 that the Daintree Blockage began, one of the biggest environmental protests in Australia at that time.  The Blockade came to a head in August 1984 as protestors chained themselves to posts, climbed trees marked for felling and buried each other in the path of the road building bulldozers.  The road did go ahead but the protests attracted a lot of media and public attention which resulted in far north Queensland’s Wet Tropics, including the Daintree, being added to the World Heritage register.

We were in the Daintree on 30th September 2021 when the news broke that an historic deal had been made whereby the land had formally been handed back to the custody of the Kuku Yalanji people, the result of a long battle with the Queensland government that started back in 2016.

Leaving the ferry, the narrow bitumen road meanders through the thick, lush, green canopy of this staggeringly beautiful area.  Gravel side roads head off to the left and right leading to hidden residential and holiday accommodation.  If you didn’t stray off the main throughfare, you really wouldn’t see much infrastructure as the rainforest lines the road on both sides opening out only occasionally to allow access to a small café or fuel station.  There is no public cell reception which adds to the feeling of remoteness and outside of the car the sound of the many insects and birds is a constant accompaniment.  Many of the small local businesses were closed, probably due to the lack of international tourists as well as internal border closure with much of Australia and, whilst it is sad to see people struggling, it was an ideal time to visit without the crowds.  We were extremely fortunate to spend a week at Prema Shanti yoga and meditation retreat who not only opened their doors to us but also to Leroy, a new experience all round.  We also challenged ourselves on the Mt. Sorrow Ridge walk, which proved to live up to its name.  The track is beautiful as it climbs from the coastal lowlands of Cape Tribulation up through the rainforest-clad ridge to a metal viewing platform overlooking the beautiful Daintree coast.  It took us 4½ hours to complete the 7.5 km return trail which should give you some indication of difficulty – no we didn’t stop for a 2 hour lunch break.  It was so steep in parts that progress required a certain amount of rock scrambling, utilisation of narrow tree trunks to pull ourselves up and a conveniently placed rope to navigate a particularly tricky section.  It was well worth the effort and definitely recommended if you find yourself in the area.

Our stay in the area would not really be complete without a visit to the Great Barrier Reef.  We had visited some years ago when we stayed at Lizard Island, one of the more luxurious options from which to explore the Reef but with a view to protecting our financial assets as long as possible we opted for a snorkelling tour out of PD.    We chose ABC Charters, a small operator, rather than one of the “big boys” for our day out.  The advantages of a smaller outfit is they only take 12 people out at a time and provide 2 marine biologist snorkel guides who accompany the group for the entirety (2 hours) of time in the water.  Another good reason to go with these guys is that they have access to areas of the Reef that the big commercial boats are not permitted to go, so you end up seeing areas of pristine coral and associated marine life.  Just for comparison many of the larger operators, in a typical season, take two boats out to the reef per day each time carrying between 300-400 passengers.

It is difficult to get a good perspective of the entirety of the Reef as it is comprised of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands, stretching for over 2,300 km over an area of roughly 345,000 square km.  It is the world’s largest coral reef system and the biggest single structure made by living organisms.  It was selected as a World Heritage site in 1981 and labelled as one of the seven natural wonders of the world in 1997.  

Our trip included two snorkel sites and at both of these the reef looked to be in great health with beautiful coloured coral, masses of fish, eels and giant clams.  However, a 2020 study has found that over half of the reef’s coral cover has been lost between 1995 and 2017 and that doesn’t take into account the effects of a widespread bleaching event that occurred in 2020.  Higher water temperatures, as a result of global climate change, are having a detrimental effect on the percentage of baby corals being born alongside many mature breeding corals dying.  The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) now has the Great Barrier Reef marked as “crtitical” so yet another of the world’s amazing offerings that you might want to bump up your list of places to visit.