Heading up North

Our first foray into the Australian road trip took us a little way north of Cairns to a lovely town in heart of the rainforest, Kurunda. You can get there by scenic railroad, cable car or a looooong windy road up through the mountains with numerous sheer drops at the sides of the road to keep you on your toes. Excellent driving by Mark, I was just concertrating on not getting too car sick!

Kurunda itself is a bit of a tourist destination - the last train back leaves at 15:30 and literally five minutes later the shops are shutting up for the day.

Around the town are a few walks taking in either the river, the rainforest or a combination of the two. We stumbled across the local bat sanctuary for sick, injured or orphaned fruit bats - never thought we'd say it, but the little fellas were damn cute! Furry critters about a foot tall with an amazing wing structure that's similar to the human hand apparently - they also have reasonable sight too, you learn something new every day!

Following on from Kurunda we sped further north to Port Douglas for our first night camping in the van.

We'd prebooked a powered site for one night at the Tropical Breeze Camping and Van park and the place was pretty packed, van's and caravan's pretty much on top of each other. The failities we're pretty good and clean however and it was a very short walk to the beach and into town.

Port Douglas itself is an up and coming town, lots of holiday homes and new developments with the necessary cafes, bars and up market restaurants to boot. It had a really nice feel about the place though, more than one bar had cane toad racing during the week which we'd unfortunately missed...no doubt catch up on some of that later on our travels though!

Looking back we wished we'd spent longer in Port Douglas. Come night fall we we're both pretty bushed (yeah, check us out getting the lingo), so cooked up dinner in the camp kitchen and then called it a night.

Next stop the Daintree river and on to Cape Tribulation...

The Daintree village is up more bending roads and we stoped here to have a spot of lunch, we even tried a 'gator wonton! You won't be suprised to hear that it just tastes like pork. Then back down the road to take the chain link ferry across the river to get back onto the main road, this is the only place you can cross via the road and then continue on your journey.