Daintree Village
There’s a lot to see here and we’re one day shorter than planned, so after a quick breakfast, it’s back in the car. We’re headed to Daintree Village, a small settlement just outside of the national park where they offer crocodile spotting tours on the river. Having been to the Everglades and on an alligator tour, I don’t have a real burning need to see crocodiles, but we’re here and it’s a popular thing to do, so what the heck. By the time we arrive, it’s surface of the sun kind of hot though (the tar is literally running in the streets, creating pools of it wherever there are depressions), which we’re told makes for pretty poor croc spotting (they would rather cool off in the water than pose on the shore for tourist photos). What does catch our eye is a ride through the rainforest in an Argo (a quad kind of thing, but with eight wheels instead of four).
Our guide is a cattle rancher named Peter, who uses the land we are touring to graze cattle during the rainy season (during the dry season, there is another pasture down by the river, but when it rains, the river floods and washes any cattle away that haven’t moved to higher ground). He stops frequently to tell us about the different trees and how the aboriginal people used them for food and medicine. There are also discarded stone tools around the property, like these ones used to break open the hard nuts of the candlenut tree.
Up on a ridge, we take the opportunity to stretch our legs and grab a few photos of the amazing scenery that surrounds us.
It’s a great tour, and one we would highly recommend should one find oneself in Daintree Village, but too soon we are bidding Peter farewell and heading back into Port Douglas for dinner. On the way, we take a quick detour to the lookout above town for some great views of Four Mile Beach, which runs south from Port Douglas past our hotel.
After a tasty meal of fish and chips, we are driving back to our hotel when swarms of black birds start streaming by above us. Pulling over to grab a few pictures we realize they aren’t birds at all, but big flying foxes, fruit eating bat with a three foot wingspan. They’re perfectly harmless, but seeing hundreds of them fly by against the darkening skyline is more than a little Hitchcock-esque.
