Mark Boulton

After an unevent­ful overnight flight from Perth, Emma and I arrived bright and early at Cairns air­port. There’s noth­ing to do in most air­ports, but Cairns is the excep­tion. There is abso­lutely noth­ing to do, espe­cially at 4.30am. Even sleep­ing was out of the ques­tion due to the con­stant beep­ing of the xray machine as hordes of tour­ists for­got to remove their belts. Any­way, we waited until 8am then went off to pick up our camper­van for our six day trip in the trop­ical north of Aus­tralia.

The camper­van itself was a great bit of kit. A long wheel­base Mer­cedes van con­ver­ted to com­fort­ably sleep two — It even has it’s own shower, toi­let and fully equipped kit­chen. It took a bit of get­ting used to driv­ing some­thing so large, but after half an hour or so, things were fine. That was until it star­ted raining. 

Cairns, and where we were head­ing, The Dain­tree National Park and Cape Tribu­la­tion, are situ­ated in the trop­ical north east of Queens­land. Like most trop­ical regions, there are two sea­sons here; wet and dry. We’re at the tai­lend of the wet sea­son and with impec­cable tim­ing, we’ve man­aged to coin­cide our trip with an impend­ing cat­egory three cyc­lone called ‘Mon­ica’, which was due to hit land about 300 miles north of here. The winds were quite light, but I have never seen so much rain. Ever. It has rained non stop for four days. Not your typ­ical Brit­ish ‘fine rain’, but big, fat, soaks-you-to-the-skin-in-two-seconds trop­ical rain. Mind you, I feel sorry for the people who live here, appar­ently it’s been rain­ing for about sixty days. More on that later. 

So, Monday was spent driv­ing to Port Douglas to find a camp ground to get settled in before our trip up to Cape Tribu­la­tion the fol­low­ing day. An uneven­ful night really, it rained. 

Woke up to light rain on Tues­day, which quickly turned into heavy rain, and we headed off up the coast road to The Daintree. 

The land­scape here is simply stun­ning. The Dain­tree National Park is the world’s old­est sur­viv­ing rain­forest (no idea how they know that, but they do appar­ently). The road winds its way past huge trees sup­port­ing the rain­forest can­opy hun­dreds of meters over­head. The cross­ing over the swollen Dain­tree River was inter­est­ing, in part because of the large ‘Beware: Cro­codiles’ signs present on the side of the river. We stayed in our van. Cape Tribu­la­tion was dis­ap­point­ing though. In part because the amount of time it took us to get there, the weather and because there’s noth­ing there; not even a pretty beach or a view. Maybe that’s the point. 

Wed­nes­day and Thursday were shock­ing days weather wise. Mon­ica hit the top end in the early hours of Wed­nes­day morn­ing with winds up to 240km hour. Appar­ently nobody was hurt, but there’s been sub­stan­tial dam­age to the forests. It con­tin­ued to rain, heav­ily. Emma and I headed up to the Ather­ton Table­lands from where we were stay­ing in Port Douglas. The drive was ter­rible; couldn’t see a thing. What we did see was a very dif­fer­ent land­scape. Lush rain­forests made way to rolling hill­sides and fields. In fact, it looked a little bit like the UK in parts which was very odd. 

The good thing about record rain­fall is it makes for spec­tac­u­lar water­falls. On Thursday we vis­ited Mir­raa Mir­raa falls, which was ok, but the Bar­ron Falls, just out­side of Kur­anda, were awe­some. A trip to the but­ter­fly sanc­tu­ary in Kur­anda also made for an inter­est­ing hour, even if to escape the rain for a while. 

Stor­ies of the cyc­lone were on everyone’s lips over the next couple of days. Cairns had suffered (and con­tin­ues to suf­fer) record­break­ing rain­fall and flood­ing. The Bruce High­way is closed going north and south out of Cairns. This is one of the reas­ons we’ve had to can­cel the reason for this trip to the north of Aus­tralia: diving on the reef. After my bust wrist in Por­tugal and now a bloody cyc­lone, some­thing is telling me I’m not destined to dive. Although I think we made the right decision. Two metre swell and 30–35 knot winds does not make for a good day on a boat. 

We can­celled our flights and are now fly­ing into Sydney a day earlier. This way we get a full day on Sat­urday in Manly before meet­ing up with old friends on Sunday for a BBQ and a few drinks. It’s been an adven­ture and we’ve mostly enjoyed our trip up here but we’re look­ing for­ward to get­ting out of the rain and back to a place where we lived for six months over seven years ago.