Day 4
It was eerily quiet at 6:30 am Wednesday morning at the Mercantile Hotel pub (claiming to be the oldest Irish pub in Sydney), quite different from festive celebration of Ireland’s win with Scotland in Rugby World Cup match Sunday night. In no time, we were at Circular Quay, train T8, bus 420 and at SYD for 3-hour Qantas flight to Cairns. We took Uber to ☞ Apollo Motorhome Holidays rental center on the edge of the airport to pick-up pre-booked campervan (Vivid) and drove to Coles in Smithfield to buy food for 5 camping days. It all took us longer than expected, so the rest of the day was just driving to Port Douglas and settling for the night at ☞ Pandamus Tourist Park. We walked along Four Mile Beach for a while chased out of the sand by really high tide and returned after dark via town center (bought Australian beer at Davidson Street Port Douglas Bottle Shop near Pandamus) to cook dinner (kangaroo steaks and veggie stew with gnocchi) at the campsite’s well equipped and quite busy kitchen/dining facility.
Day 5
Snorkeling on Great Barrier Reef was one of the reasons we decided to visit Queensland. To hedge our bets against bad weather and rough seas, we decided to take two trips: different day and different reef. First trip was with ☞ Ocean Safari in Cape Tribulation. We drove there in the morning from Port Douglas, crossing Daintree River by ferry and stopping for an hour-long Dubuji Boardwalk with brief visit to Myall Beach (just on the outskirts of Cape Tribulation). It was very interesting introduction to Queensland’s tropical rainforest. At Noon, we checked in at Ocean Safari/Tourtle Rock Café for half-day snorkeling trip to Mackay Reef (some 25 km out to Coral Sea, straight East of town). It was well organized. We boarded the boat from Myall Beach geared-up to jump in the water as soon as we arrived at the reef. The sea was quite rough, but at low tide we were protected from waves and wind by the reef’s band of sand. We explored two nearby sites (over an hour for each site), rather than visiting second reef (Undine) which would take too much time riding against the waves. We landed on the beach and started second snorkeling from there. We had good partially sunny weather, but the boat ride back was even more bumpy. We were back around 5 pm, enough time to change, take shower and drive to Noah Beach Campground (recommended), operated by Daintree NP ☞ Noah Beach camping, for the night.
Our reserved site was occupied by squatters, who not only took our spot but tried to chase us away behaving quite unpleasantly. Did not work. This was the only negative experience during our entire trip. Apparently it is quite common among Australian travelers trying to save money, our neighbor had the same problem day earlier.
Snorkeling with Ocean Safari (recommended) was really great, different from our previous experience on Galapagos and Caye Caulker, not affected much by the bleaching and poor condition of the reef in general. What the reef looked like when it was in perfect condition?
