Our last stop in Australia was Port Douglas in northern Queensland, one of the main towns for tours out to the Barrier Reef and also the Diantree rainforest.

It’s a small town of just 3,500 inhabitants but doubles in size with visitors in the peak season. It’s harbour is brimming with super yachts and tour boats, it’s Main Street filled with restaurants and bars.

A short walk from the town is Four Mile beach, lined with palm trees it’s a fabulous beach to walk along but for swimming you are limited to an area overseen by life guards and sectioned off with nets. It’s great fun to swim there but strange to see such a beautiful beach yet be contained in this way, however it’s a sensible approach given the environment.

The nets are intended to stop ‘stingers’, jellyfish from getting in but also assist with other possible threats as the beach sign show below!

There is a nice river cruise provided by the Lady Douglas that takes you along the Dickinson inlet to see the mangroves and occasionally crocodiles too! We were lucky to see two crocodiles cruising along the riverside.

The mangroves are an essential part of the salt water river’s ecology. Interestingly the green leaves are interspersed with a few yellow, dying ones. The tree deals with the saltwater environment by directing the salt content to these sacrificed leaves to allow the rest of the tree to flourish.

We opted to go with Wavelength cruises (wavelength.com.au) for our outer reef trip. They focus on snorkelling trips and you get lots of time in the water on three different reefs, guides join you should you want them to show you around and provide insights on what you are seeing underwater.

We have snorkelled on a number of reefs, including some great ones in Indonesia but the expansive nature of the Great Barrier Reef trip was so impressive. The variety of fish, coral and the colours, sizes, numbers and scale of what we encountered was just fantastic.

A truly amazing experience, that’s another bucket list item ticked off for us!

Credit to Wavelength for most of the pictures above, we are just starting to get to grips with our GoPro for underwater photography and are certainly not there yet! Their excellent team can free dive so are to able to dive deeper and longer than I will ever be able to do!

We didn’t make it to Daintree unfortunately but we did take the Skyrail trip which was really good.

You ride a cable car up to a number of stations on the way to Kuranda, a small mountain village, gliding above the rainforest for a unique view down onto the forest canopy below and the mountains around you.

At the stops you get to take short walks through the rainforest, we spotted these ‘critters’ along the way. The third one is a very long and incredibly odd looking stick insect.

We took the scenic train journey from Kuranda down the mountains to Freshwater to complete our trip back to Port Douglas. It’s a one and a half hour journey or two hours to Cairns, including a 10mins stop at Baron Falls.

It’s a spectacular journey with great views of dense rainforest, steep ravines and picturesque waterfalls within the Barron Gorge National Park.

You pass through 15 hand built tunnels, 37 bridges, seeing waterfalls and the stunning Barron Gorge.

Finally, I can’t resist showing you Dave’s a fish and chip shop on the man street in Port Douglas. Run by Dave, he offers customers, able prove their first name is Dave, a 10% discount and the chance to join his gallery of Daves! He has over 3,500 Daves declared so far!

A world of Daves!

So that’s the end of a fantastic six weeks in Australia, now to New Zealand!