Jungle bells, jungle bells, jungle all they way!
Daintree National Park, finally some mighty coastline scenery, and This Is The End, Beautiful Friend on the East Coast
Welcome to the jungle!
They ain’t got fun and games here, but they do have crocodiles, and deep dense rainforest. Using another of omnipresent superlatives, Australians claim it to be “the oldest rainforest in the world” (I’m really curious how they measure it…), and while I might be skeptic about the oldest-rainforest award, I was not skeptic at all about its beauty. The stretch of road from Cairns to Cape Tribulation was by far the most beautiful part of the road since I had left Byron Bay. Winding through jungle-covered hills which meet the ocean here, it runs along the ocean (finally, some ocean vistas!) until it dives into the rainforest. And what a rainforest it was! Greenest green, vegetation on every inch, all that wonderful chaos of plants fighting for their share of the sunshine. Creeks and rivers and crocodile warning signs all around. Swimming anywhere north of Tropic of Capricorn is not recommended, because first of all this is a croc territory and unless you are Crocodile Dundee you don’t wanna mess around with salt water crocodile, the largest reptile on planet, and secondly this is also deadly jelly fish playground (although now it’s off jelly fish season).
It sounds weird, that if I don’t count surfing in Byron Bay and in Manly, during almost 3 month which I’ve spent in Australia, and all the time right next to the Pacific Ocean, I was in the water only 3 times: 3 minutes swim in Bondi Beach in Sydney, 5 minutes on the day of arrival to Byron Bay and 5 minutes in Magnetic Island. That’s 13 minutes of bathing in 3 months spend on the Australian coast. Quite shocking statistics...
After 5 150km from Sydney I and “Janis Joplin” reached the end of the East Coast – Cape Tribulation. The sealed road ends, you can continue 7km of a gravel road and then the gravel road sinks into river and from there on the only possibility is to have big bad 4 wheel drive jeep which can challenge the jungle road to Cook Town. There actually is one sealed road to Cook Town, but it is inland detour of more than 250km, so we didn’t do it. And from Cook Town it’s just wild wild Cape York. It must be one of coolest trips on this planet to venture from Cook Town into Cape York with a jeep, but our Subaru is definitely not the car for that and we don’t have time to do it anyway. My visa expires in 2 weeks. So, that’s it for the East Coast, from Cape Tribulation we returned to Cairns - it’s time for the Outback and make it to Darwin. And by the way, if you wonder where did Janis Joplin appear in all of this, well, it’s Helen. She looks pretty much like Janis Joplin, especially in mornings :-)
