Wonga Beach

Friday 25 September… We have left Cairns for a while to travel as far north as we can in our biscuit tin. We would love to go to the top of Cape York but it is four wheel drive country, and there are no sealed roads north of Cooktown. In the meantime before we visit Cooktown we have based ourselves at Wonga Beach, handy for Daintree National Park and Cape Tribulation. We are about 100K’s north of Cairns. The major part of the journey up was along the coast road where mostly the road is no more than a few metres away from the sea. It’s a spectacular drive, one we did before but somehow cannot remember anything about it. In 2003 we were driven from Cairns to Daintree and back again but the journey remains a mystery. Daintree doesn’t, we remember it well. We took a short detour off the Cook Highway to have a look at Port Douglas a destination for the rich and famous. It is full of boutique hotels and spa hotels, all extremely posh. They do allow us mongrels into the town as there are a couple of van parks and backpackers hostels. The beach was the busiest we have come across in the whole of Australia. We know it is half term but where have all these people come from? Port Douglas is miles from anywhere! We stayed long enough for a coffee and nobody recognised the famous drought busters ---so we left! The rich and famous are welcome to it.
Here at Wonga Beach the park is set in woodland and is teeming with birdlife, mostly birds we have seen often enough though there is supposed to be a sunbird nesting in the paperbark tree above our van, but we haven’t seen it yet. We are just 2 mins walk to the beach where they say there are some very nice views but we haven’t seen them either as we still have the dust haze.