The Detour Diary

We had planned to drive from Daintree back down to Cairns for a day or so before continuing our trip south in Queensland. On the morning we left, we decided to head a bit north to check out Daintree Village since we hadn’t seen it yet. At this point, it’s pretty much our style to head north to go south! It turned out that Daintree Village was really quite small…as in really only a general store, post office, couple of restaurants kind of small…

Since there wasn’t a ton of exploring to do there, we decided to check out a little side road that was headed out into the country to see what we might stumble onto. The side road quickly turned into a dirt road and the main attraction was lots of cows along with some scenic views.

 

 

Right before we were getting ready to turn around, we saw a sign for Tranquility Falls and decided to keep going to check them out. Once we found them, we had a short hike through the woods to get back to the falls. It was a beautiful hike through the rainforest with beautiful trees and lots of colorful butterflies, including Jack’s favorite the bright blue Ulysses butterfly. It darts around so quickly that it was impossible to get a good picture of one!

When we finally got to the falls, we found they were smaller, but had a great watering hole. We didn’t have our swimsuits on, but that didn’t stop Jack! The only other people there were two older English couples that Jack took an immediate liking to. They were great with him and even let us borrow some sunscreen so we could stay a little longer since he was having so much fun. He had a great time lounging in the waterfall and making waterslides out of some of the rocks.

After Jack had his fill of swimming (scratch that, it’s more like we had to drag him out of there…), we got back on the road and started heading south toward Cairns. We decided to stop on the way at Mossman Gorge. Mossman is a picturesque little town set amid sugar cane fields. As soon as you enter the town, you see beautiful mossy trees, which I’m assuming is how the town got it’s name. That doesn’t seem like too much of a limb to go out on, I mean does this tree look like a mossy man or what…

The gorge is set within a steep valley of the Mossman River where the water flows through huge boulders. The land traditionally belonged to the Kuku Yulanji indigenous people, so it has cultural significance as well. I think we’d been spoiled during our time in Daintree in the sense that everywhere we went, it was mostly just us. If there were other people, it was usually only a few. The Mossman Gorge experience was very different. There’s a huge cultural center and you can get different tours with some of the indigenous people to learn more about their connection with the land and the history. Unfortunately for us, it was getting late in the day at this point and to make it to Cairns, we really only had time to head out to the gorge. We went for a swim here as well, making it Jack’s second watering hole of the day! He loved exploring and climbing all over the huge boulders.

 

 

After that we got back on the road to Cairns. We still didn’t have a hotel booked and I was losing the connection on my phone when I kept trying to book one. Matt pulled over in a parking lot by the ocean where I finally had a good signal so I could get something locked down. Of course this ended up turning into a third and final swim of the day for Jack! At first he was just wading in the waves, but as he got wetter and wetter we just gave up and let him jump on in! The moon was starting to come out, but the ocean was so warm it felt like bath water. Disclaimer…this area had a swim net up to keep any crocs and stingers out, so it was safe. 🙂 I think after seeing all of the beautiful beaches and not being able to swim, he was excited to finally get in!

So just a few detours along the way, but after that we finally made it to Cairns that evening (oh and I finally got a hotel booked…I’m sure you were still concerned about that). 😉