Rainforest and Reef

Coconut Beach, at Cape Tribulation, is where two world heritage sites--the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef--meet in one dazzling landscape. It's three hours by plane to Cairns and then another three hours by car from the airport, including a ferry ride over a croc-infested river and a winding one-and-a-half lane road through rainforest and along palm-lined beaches. It is literally where the pavement ends. Past Cape Tribulation you need a 4WD to make it over the rutted gravel roads. When we walked out onto an empty Coconut Beach last Thursday my first thought was that paradise was closer than I'd imagined. I'd thought you would have had to travel to the ends of the earth to see it. My second thought was that I had, in some sense, travelled to the ends of the earth. It was here, in 1770, that Captain Cook, the first European to find Australia, had run his ship into the reef. He wrote in his journal that "here began all our trials and tribulations," and henceforth this beautiful spot was called Cape Tribulation.

Just a few yards in from the beach is the "longhouse" of the Coconut Beach Resort, a place which has perfected high-end eco-tourism. The rooms are all individual cabins hidden in the rainforest, from which you see nothing but green and hear nothing but breeze, rain and an abundance of birds. We saw a lot of the orange-footed scrub fowl and the bush turkey, and heard a lot of the butcherbird, but we didn't catch sight of the elusive and endangered cassowary.

In the tropical climate, the weather isn't warm or cold, but wet or dry. One of the pleasures of the constant warmth is that all restaurants and many stores and homes have pleanty of roof but fewer walls than you'd expect, so that the distinction between indoors and outdoors sort of melts away. Our cabin had no windows, just screens and shutters. It was an opulent camping experience--falling asleep and waking up to the sounds of rustling leaves, a cacophany of bird calls and an occasional pounding rain.

The palm canopy inside the rainforest. The Daintree has no large predators, except for the wild pigs that were brought over from Asia a few hundred years ago and have been mercilessly rooting up the rainforest ever since. There are however plenty of colorful birds, lizards, frogs and snakes and many strange and marvelous botanical sights: trees whose trunks flower; strangler figs that germinate in the canopy, send roots down to the forest floor and take over a hundred years to kill the host tree; undulating vines; the purple cassowary plum; native varieties of nutmeg, walnut and mahogany; buttressed tree roots; and the oldest known flowering plant, the ribbonwood, which has been growing in the area for the past 120 million years and which the aborigines called idiot fruit because it is posonous to all animals. Lucy really rolled with the punches during this trip and missed a lot of naps, but it was in the peaceful green world of the forest that she lost it, had a good 15-minute meltdown, frightened away all the wildlife and finally fell asleep in my arms.

On the boat, coming back from our first day of snorkeling. Jake is already asleep. Everyone snorkelled except Lucy. I can't begin to convey what the reef looks like close up. The coral alone was Seussian in its fantastical array of colors, shapes, textures, and sizes. There were orange dinnner plates big enough to serve up an adult, purple antlers, green heads of lettuce, pink boulders, shimmering yellow tentacles, and blue spikes, all made of coral. And the parrot fish, angel fish, clown fish, giant clams, blue sea stars and giant turles weren't shabby either.

After three days at Cape Tribulation, we headed down Captain Cook Highway to Port Douglas, a sweet beach town a couple hours south of Cape Trib, where we spent a few more days after Matt's parents left us. The place has a peaceful easy feeling, long beaches of soft sand and warm water and a lot of good restaurants. A block from our hotel was the Beach Shack, which had only outdoor tables, a sand floor, hanging lanterns, great food and Van Morrison on the stereo. We ate there two nights in a row. We also found a terrific breakfast place--Soul 'n Pepper--right on the warf, which is now Jake's favorite restaurant of all time because his scrambled eggs and toast came with a mountain of eggs. They must have used 5 or 6 eggs. Being as eggs are Jake's favorite food, he announced that his own personal heaven would have a Soul 'n Pepper on every corner.

I love this picture of Jake, taken after his third snorkeling trip. He and I had a great time floating in the water, holding hands and silently pointing out the magical sights to each other. He spotted a giant turtle and we followed it for awhile. We watched the clams with their thick green and purple lips close up when they felt the current change. An enormous angel fish came up to us sideways to check us out with one eye.

We knew Jake would love the rainforest, and he did, but we weren't sure how well he'd take to snorkeling. It can cause a little vertigo at first, breathing underwater and inhabiting a world so unlike our own, and it took him awhile to get a feel for it, but once he did he was addicted and wanted to go out as many times as possible. He and Matt were out snorkeling in a coral cove just off Port Douglas the same day Steve Irwin died at a reef not far from there.

Our last afternoon in Port Douglas, after one of the best weeks of our lives.