Escape from Cairns

I'm on a boat

Port Douglas Yacht Club

Mossman Gorge

Palm Cove Beach

Palm Cove

Port Douglas

Trinity Beach


Last Tuesday we rented a car and took a little side trip a couple hours north to Port Douglas and Cape Tribulation. We stopped at a few beaches along the way to get some sun. It was surprising everything was so close because things in Australia are usually absurd distances away from one another. We stopped at Trinity Beach first and laid around there for awhile. Next we stopped at Palm Cove, which I really liked. It was kind of like a small resort town with nice beaches and good restaurants. It would be a nice place to go back to sometime for a vacation…and when I have more money. Our last stop before Port Douglas was Mossman Gorge which was pretty much just a wide river with some boulders in it and a small swimming hole. We ate at a really good Thai restaurant when we got to Port Douglas and then found where we were staying for the night.

The next day we walked around the town. It was a lot like Palm Cove with the nice resorts and restaurants and made me equally depressed that I couldn’t stay/eat at them. I finally bought some aboriginal art there though. I liked a lot of stuff that this one particular gallery but finally narrowed it down. The lady who worked there was actually really helpful as opposed to some galleries where they can be pretty snobby. She encouraged me to buy what I liked the most as opposed to something either by a more famous artist or that would go up a lot in value. I’m not planning on selling it so that doesn’t really matter to me. What I ended up buying was something I really liked that was still in my price range so I’m really happy with it.

We went down to the beach for the rest of the afternoon. At around 5 we went over to the local Yacht Club because every Wednesday, some of the members take whoever shows up there out on their yachts for free. So that was pretty nice…we went out for about an hour and got back right as it was getting dark. After that, we drove the rest of the way up to Cape Tribulation to go hang out in the rainforest for a couple days.