Third Age Travel Adventures

“Me Tarzan you Jane” (17^th November 2014)

We drove north up along the coast towards the Daintree Rain Forest. The countryside exhibits a lush and fertile plain on the coastal side and mountains on the inside. The farmers grow sugar cane in large quantities and further north the famous Daintree tea.

Carriages filled with sugar cane

To service the sugar cane harvest there is a narrow (2’ 6”) gauge railroad that enables the farmers to transport the crop, although the carriages, being much wider than the rails, look highly unstable and easily toppled.

Daintree Ferry

The plains largely terminate at the Daintree Ferry and one enters the Daintree Rain Forest. The road north of the ferry twists and turns through the rain forest and is the only part of the Daintree Rain Forest that meets the coast. Along the way there are numerous accesses down onto the beach as well as warnings of cassowarys, a very large Australian bird looking very much like an ostrich. (The Daintree Rain Forest is known to be between 110-200 million years old, compared to 7 million for the Amazon).

We stopped off along the way at the Daintree Discovery Centre. This has aerial walkways with lookout platforms at all levels up to the canopy top at 70 ft.

Sheila in Daintree Rain Forest

At the top the tower houses a micromet weather station, where the temperature was 36.7C. The base is much-much cooler, probably 10 degrees or more.

Weather station

There are scores of nuts and fruit that are poisonous and ones that could easily be mistaken for raspberries. The poisonous nature of the fruits and nuts has an impact on their propagation through the forest by bats and birds and one tree called the “idiot fruit” is so poisonous that the only mechanism for transportation is via gravity, which confines the distribution to a very limited area. Some fruits are poisonous to humans but not all animals.

Butterflies can be seen at the lower levels, flying through the trees and one very striking one is the blue Ulysses but it never stays still for long enough to capture a photograph. All through the different levels of the forest one hears a variety of birds singing but right at the top the cacophony is almost deafening.

The variety of species is staggering, over 2000, and some 700 unique to this rain forest. There are many examples of epiphyte plants that grow on their hosts but are not parasites. These plants are attempting to reach the tops of the canopies to catch the sunlight but don't have the physical structure to reach such heights unaided.

Epiphyte example

From the Daintree Discovery Centre we travelled north to Cape Tribulation but called in at the Daintree Ice Cream Company where, as a birthday treat, Sheila elected to stop to try a mix of ice creams including, mango, soursup, passion fruit and wattleseed. The latter, at least, being part of the aboriginal diet - “bush tucker”.

Cape Tribulation was named by Captain Cook after his ship scraped a reef north east of the cape. Cook steered away from the coast into deeper water but the ship ran aground, on what is now named Endeavour Reef. He later re-floated the ship. Cook named the Cape after all his troubles on the reef. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful beach and very inviting place to swim but crocodiles inhabit the shoreline as do Box Jelly Fish at this time of year. Their sting can be fatal.