.....assumed "seasoned traveler" positions on an airplane (give these kids some audio books and an eclectic mix of '90s & Goth music and they're all set).....
...and, a couple of hours later, we landed in tropical North Queensland in what looked like a completely different country than where we'd started.
We actually arrived very late (midnight, due to some flight changes), so the picture above was taken the morning after we arrived. We spent that first (short) night at a B&B just north of Cairns, and the next day we picked up a rental car and drove about an hour further north to Port Douglas. Port Douglas (or just "Port", as it's called by the locals) is a picturesque little town, with beautiful coastline and a scenic marina.
The beaches in and near Port Douglas are certainly beautiful, but to get to them you have to pass signs like these first. Crocodiles are prevalent in this area of Australia, as are several species of deadly stingers (jellyfish) during stinger season--roughly October through May. Welcome to the beach, these are a few of the ways you might die here.
Our first couple of days we took it pretty easy. We took some walks, finished up some school projects, swam in the pool, and C worked on perfecting his Nespresso-making skills (his "business" is Colin's Coffees, and he asked us to rate his product and service each day). Next he's going to ask us to "like" him on Facebook, I think.
We also did stuff like watch George the Groper. Every time I write "George the Groper", I feel like I'm about to start some gross story about a creepy old man, but "groper" is just the Australian way of saying what we Americans know as a "grouper". George is a 250 kg (550 lb) gro(u)per who visits a local restaurant every night to be fed. The feeding has turned into quite the tourist attraction, so we went down there one evening to see what the commotion was all about.
Turns out it was a good amount of commotion for not so much excitement, as George didn't really come out of the water very much for us. But apparently he can put on quite a show, as this video demonstrates.
We took a day trip through the Daintree Rainforest/National Park. We passed many sugar cane fields as we drove north to the Daintree from Port Douglas.
We saw a road sign for a WWII Historical Site, so we took a quick detour to check it out. It turned out to be the Miallo Japanese Bombing Site, commemorated by this memorial.
On July 31, 1942, a Japanese bomber dropped 8 bombs in the area, one landing about where the white speck of a cow is sitting in the photo below. That bomb damaged a nearby home and injured the family's 2 1/2 year old daughter, who was sleeping at the time. She was the only civilian injured on the eastern Australian mainland during WWII but fortunately survived the attack.
We stopped to take a crocodile cruise on the Daintree River. The Daintree River has one of the highest population densities of saltwater crocodiles in the world, so this idyllic river is definitely NOT a place you'd ever want to swim.
But to view crocodiles? Check out this monster croc! Crocodiles' tails are equal to the length of their body from their back leg to the tip of their snout, so there's a whole lot more croc that is not visible in this photo.
We also saw two baby crocodiles sunning themselves in the sun.
There were quite a few different birds and a huge roost of bats along the Daintree River....both birds and bats were smart enough to stay high above the croc-infested waters, though.
After the short crocodile cruise, we took a small ferry across the river to continue our drive through the Daintree Rainforest.
Another new road sign--this one for cassowaries, which someone described to us as "an emu dressed in drag" and according to Google are the "world's deadliest birds" (huh, now all those "how to react if you come upon a cassowary" signs we saw while hiking are starting to make sense.....). While we were on the lookout for cassowaries in the Daintree, unfortunately we only saw the road sign.
We did stop at a beautiful overlook where we could see the Daintree emptying into the South Pacific Ocean. This is where the rainforest truly meets the sea, which is pretty unique in the world.
We took a couple of short hikes through beautiful forested land, stopping to admire the incredibly adaptive and resilient plants we saw.
I think this is one of the coolest tree trunks I've ever seen! The boys were dying to climb it, but being good stewards of the forest we said no.
It was about low tide as we hiked, so we got really good views of the mangrove trees' root systems and are usually all jumbled up underneath the water.
We also saw this giant spider, which a nearby guide said "would make your arm all pus-y" if it bit you.
Starting to head back to Port Douglas, we stopped for a picture of Emmett and......Mount Emmett! The lighting was not great, but E was excited to get a picture with a mountain that shares his name. Emmett seems to be a pretty common name here in Australia, unlike in the United States, NL, or Belgium.
At that stop we also walked out to get a closer look at the coast. There was a little island just off shore and lots of sandy beach.
Here's another variant on the "welcome to this beach, have you considered these might be your last steps" sign...
We had an afternoon treat at Daintree Ice Cream Company, which makes ice cream from tropical fruits grown on site.
There's no choice involved at this ice cream stand--everyone gets a cup with four scoops of the day, which change according to which fruits are in season and ripest. We enjoyed mango (yellow), Davidson plum (pink), wattleseed (white with specks) and jackfruit (on the bottom, unseen). Wattleseeds are edible seeds from any of the Australian Acacia species and were a traditional food of Indigenous Australians. The wattleseed ice cream had a slight coffee flavor, and it plus the mango were my favorites.
We all really enjoyed the Daintree Rainforest, but the adventure we were looking forward to the most was snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef! Composed of over 2,900 individual reefs stretching more than 2,300 km (1,429 miles), the Great Barrier Reef is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms (coral polyps) and can be seen from space.
We boarded a boat one morning and set out for Opal Reef, where we'd be snorkeling at 3 separate sites. The boys had their first taste of snorkeling in Koh Lanta, Thailand, and they were eager to snorkel again.
We got our snorkeling gear all sized up and got ready for the 1.5 hour transit out to Opal Reef, which was about 30 miles offshore.
There were 25 knot winds the whole day which made the transit to/from the reef bumpy, to put it mildly. About 10 minutes after we left, crew members came through the boat asking, "Have you ever gotten sea sick?" Anyone who ever had was urged to move to the back lower deck, which would be the most stable spot on the boat. I got seasick (for the first time ever) while whale watching in Mirissa, Sri Lanka, so I took a spot with the sickies.
As the boat lurched up and down, crashing through waves that sprayed over the windows of the bridge, I tried my best to 1. Avoid looking at the people getting sick all around me and 2. Keep an eye on the crew members, who were relaxed as could be as they handed paper bag after paper bag to puking strangers. They weren't freaking out, so I told myself this must be within their realm of normal (I have a similar strategy on planes when turbulence starts to make me anxious).
Fortunately, the travel sickness medicine I took + lots of staring out to whatever horizon or land mass I could make out meant that I didn't get sick and felt completely fine on the transit in and out (which was a bit easier, since we were headed with the waves that time). The picture below was taken on one of the calmer moments.....
The rough ride and puking strangers were worth it to get to.......the Great Barrier Reef!!! This was a world treasure that we'd had on our travel bucket list for a long, long time, and it did not disappoint. The Great Barrier Reef has been in the news a lot lately, with news organizations like the NY Times running articles about how large sections of the reef are dead. On the boat rides between sites, the crew painted a less dire (though still cautionary) picture of the reef's situation. They were clearly concerned about conservation of the reef as they gave us informative talks on the life cycles of coral in the reef and patterns of growth, "bleaching", and regeneration have been observed as time progresses. It's hard to be certain exactly what the truth is as to the state of and immediate future for the Great Barrier Reef, but hopefully efforts to conserve it are successful because it was a pretty incredible sight to behold.
We weren't able to capture photos of all the amazingly colored fish, coral, and other things that were in front, around, and under us, but here are some of the ones we were able to catch on film.....these pictures really don't do the beauty of what we saw justice, though.
This is an ENORMOUS giant clam! It was easily 4 feet (1.2 meters) across and was covered in these fluorescent blue spots. We could see the giant muscular matter inside the clam swaying back and forth, and it opened and closed some as we watched.
And the coral!!! So many absolutely incredible colors underneath the water, in all kinds of shapes and configurations. The Great Barrier Reef is home to hundreds of different types of coral, and it was just incredible to see examples of this variety as we snorkeled along Opal Reef.
And the fish!!! Trying to catch fish on a basic underwater camera can be an exercise in frustration, but we got a few worthwhile photos. We saw schools of hundreds of fish, fish with long razor like noses, fish in every single color, some fish with seemingly every single color on their one body.....it was just breathtaking to watch all these diverse creatures just going about their day in the South Pacific Ocean. Both the number of fish, as well as the incredible rainbow of colors that we saw, is by no means well represented below. Underwater photography is clearly not our calling.
We could hear these parrotfish chomping on coral with their beaks, and the boys were excited to see one poop.
I had the fortune of seeing two reef sharks (one with each child, so that worked out well). They are very skittish so while I tried to get a photo both times, I was never quick enough. E was able to follow one reef shark for a while, which he was very excited about. And Bob and Colin were elated to see this green turtle! They even got a really cool video of him gliding through the water.
We took some photos of ourselves, too.......we're wearing anti-stinger (jellyfish) suits over our bathing suits. While the crew stressed that it was highly unlikely that we'd come across jellyfish this far out at sea, they also stressed the importance of wearing the anti-singer suits. Since it was still technically stinger season, we were happy to wear them.
This is an above-water shot of one of the areas that we were snorkeling in. It's amazing how the treasures below are invisible in this photo. The water was not deep--sometimes less than a meter (3 feet).
E was even able to nap a bit on the ride back to Port Douglas.
On one of our last days in Port Douglas, the winds calmed down a bit and we were able to enjoy a full afternoon on 4 Mile Beach.
The white berm on the ocean is a swim net, set up by the lifeguards to make a crocodile & stinger-free swimming area. The waves were crashing over the berm, though, which seemed to render the net somewhat useless. However, the lifeguards told us that the winds were 1. Too strong for the crocodiles to want to be in the ocean and 2. Coming from the wrong direction to bring the stingers, many of whom are already making their way on to the next location they'll terrorize. So we played in the water and survived with neither a crocodile nor a stinger encounter. Whew.
On our final night in Port Douglas, we checked out a locally infamous, love-it-or-hate-it event at the Iron Bar--Cane Toad Racing.
Cane Toads are a nuisance animal in Australia. 102 toads, introduced by the British to try to combat a beetle that was eating sugar cane, have since become BILLIONS of toads (and they did nothing for that beetle problem). The female cane toad lays up to 25,000 eggs at once--and can do that twice a year! Cane toad racing involved "toad jockeys" encouraging their assigned toad to jump from the middle of the table onto their hand. Then the toad was placed into a bucket, and the first toad jockey to complete this task was the winner.
The first round of toad jockeys was chosen by lottery from the entrance tickets sold. The second round of toad jockeys was selected by auction, with one guy paying $60 AUD to secure a spot in the craziness! We were content to just watch.
After the races were over, the boys were able to hold some of the toads.
Our week in Port Douglas was a fantastic combination of relaxing, quirky local sites, and taking in some amazing world wonders located of this tropical part of Australia!
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