Today was very busy – like one of the Vietnam tour days. It was Tony’s Tropical Tour, although our guide was Chris, an extremely knowledgeable 30-something, with an uncanny resemblance to Tiny Tim – remember him, tall, skinny, pony-tail, Tiptoe through the Tulips???
We’d chosen this tour because it was another small tour, a four-wheel-drive tour for a group of just six, so there was us, a couple from Northamptonshire and a couple from Washington State.
We started with a drive alongside the massive sugar cane fields (Australia produces some 40% of the world’s sugar, something I never knew before, so watch out, Trivial Pursuits!) to Mossman Gorge National Park where we had a walk along some platforms around the very pretty gorge.
Chris gave us commentary all the while about the flora, fauna and wildlife. We saw this Boyds Forest Dragon, amongst many other things. Then it was on to the Daintree River for an hour-long cruise, again with commentary, but no crocodiles! Wrong season – they’re very happy to swim underwater at this time of year as the water’s warm in the summer. Come the Winter, the river is full of sightings. 
Back to the Landcruiser for a crossing on the Cable Ferry – exactly the same as the Poole Ferry and the King Harry Ferry in Cornwall, and onto the Daintree Rainforest.The Daintree is the world’s oldest living rainforest and was just as I imagined jungle/rainforest would be. Again, it’s one of those sights that can’t be captured in photos (although as you can see, I tried),
but we took lots of video so I hope that does it justice. I now have a bit more time for Sting and his rainforest campaigns!
We then moved on to the Noah Valley, which is a private property with World Heritage listing, with a good ‘platform’ walk around the rainforest, down to the water then back up for lunch.
The day was rounded off with a drive further north to Cape Tribulation – named by Captain Cook who had a spot of bother with his boat here. The marketing for Cape Trib today is ‘where the reef meets the rainforest.’
Well, Cap’n Cook’s boat hit the reef and he was stuck in the area for two months for repairs and so named it Cape Tribulation.
A really good tour, another Tripadvisor ‘hit’. I’m going to try to find a wireless internet place this evening to post this and pick up any emails you lot may have sent me.
This is later. After I’d had a frustrating time trying to access the blog and post in town, without success. Just too slow. So we had a bar meal, which was nice and came back to the hotel, where I succumbed and decided to try their internet. Well, it’s really fast, not as expensive as I’d thought, but as they don’t have wifi and I can’t connect my laptop to their computers, I thought I’d have to retype everything – the girl on reception said I couldn’t put a CD in their computers so my plan to save all these past few days to CD and copy over wouldn’t work. But it does. So after retyping so that I could post some last night, I’m now about to save this to CD to post tomorrow. Here’s hoping!!!
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