Far North Queensland

Beautiful and wild Wonga Beach

As we drove north out of Cairns, we could tell that we had entered a very new world. It's a jungle up here. The scenic drive along the coast to Port Douglas was beautiful. The lush mountains down to the ocean are reminiscent of Kauai or the Big Island of Hawaii, just a lot more of it! We were headed to our home for the next week in Wonga Beach, a very small beach community nestled within the Daintree National Park.

Daintree is a rainforest area that's apparently getting larger as the Park acquires more land. Signs warn you that Wonga Beach is the last petrol stop before Cape Tribulation. You have to cross the Daintree River on a wee ferry to drive the 35 miles up to Cape Tribulation and that's where the sealed road ends. From there its mostly impassible during the "wet" season unless you have a proper vehicle. This is the Cape York peninsula, that pointy part of Australia that aims towards Indonesia. It's wild up here, Daintree is the attraction for visitors but only if you aren't into the rainforest, you stay south in the resort areas of Port Douglas, Palm Cove and the like.
 

Blue dragon nudibranch (wikipedia)

Our home this week is the Reef Cottage. Wonga Beach has a gas station and a pharmacy. Apparently the tavern shut it's doors a few years ago. I think there might be 200 houses here, and what's remarkable to me is the beach front. There is absolutely no development along the beach. The houses stand a good 100 yards from the actual beach with pretty dense forest in between. This gives the beach a wild, South Pacific feel and it goes on for 10 miles up to the mouth of the Daintree River. Not only is it beautiful but it makes a good buffer for cyclone protection. Cyclone Nathan came through here just three weeks earlier. Why haven't we learned that in states like Florida which get hit by hurricanes? Again, rhetorical question.

Daintree is a hotspot for biodiversity, tones of everything here including a few things that will seriously harm or kill you. Crocodiles being the most obvious. The beach is off limits for swimming because of stingers (box jellies and blue bottles) some of which will merely hurt you and one species apparently will kill you quickly. As I was looking up stingers online, I found this amazing pelagic (open water) nudibranch called a blue dragon that feeds on stingers. It is beautiful. Of course there's a YouTube video of one "dancing" (more likely this is how it gets around).

Beach stone curlew

But it's mainly tons of harmless life: incredible birds, butterflies, insects, and reptiles (despite Bill Bryson's exaggerations in The Sunburned Country). In the Daintree there are no native placental mammals, just those monotremes (e.g., playtpus) and marsupials like possums and the tree kangaroo. There is one very interesting endangered bird called the beach stone curlew that seems to thrive right here in Wonga Beach. I have seen a few on the beach and they have this very twitchy way of walking that probably has something to do with food. But they come up onto the streets at night and look for food. It's funny to see them out under that streetlights in the subdivision walking like drunken sailors. September and October are the months to be here for birds, many pass through here or breed here then. My favorites are the kookaburros for their bad-ass look and incredibly ape like call. Gives the place a real jungle feel while they converse between each other.

Shrubfowl nest - at least 15 rt hy 4 ft!

Lots of interesting stuff right outside our door. Behind our house is a heap of leaves and compost. Looks like someones leaf mulch pile but turns out it belongs to a pair of nesting orange-footed shrubfowl.  Instead of roosting on eggs they let the heat from decaying organic matter do the job for them. They will lay up to 15 eggs under these piles and the hatchling will kick it's way out of the shell, dig it's way to the surface (may take two days) and then fly out of harms way, independent from the get-go. Fascinating. Another interesting bird in the hood is the bee-eater, beautiful little bird that eats insects out of the air but burrows in the ground to lay eggs.

I spent a day in the rainforest with Pete Baxendell and learned heaps about how the place ticks. Pete told me lots of stories about how the aboriginal people used different plants for both practical and medicinal purposes. And, amazingly, we were able to watch a cassowary and two chicks briefly as they crossed the road in front of us as we headed north to Cape Tribulation. Whooooooaaaaaa, were we lucky!

Now we are off to Cairns to join the Spoilsport for a week of diving on the outer parts of theGreat Barrier Reef. No internet so it'll be a good break from electrons.

Souther cassowary and two chicks, a rare site as only 48-52 live up in this area!

Wonga Beach sunrise