• Discovery | Travel & Learning
• Travel
• Cairns to Port Douglas

Cairns to Port Douglas

This corner of far north Queensland offers numerous opportunities to meander through dense jungle, to swim in mountain streams, to gaze from lookouts at azure seas or to simply leave footprints in the white sand of an empty beach.

• Rating:
• 
• (0 votes)
• Rate this!
  Rate this!

  Rate this feature

Cairns

Cairns is the main gateway for north Queensland’s tourist traffic (by both air and cruise liner) and a major sugar-shipping port. Its tree-lined streets are a mixture of colonial and modern architecture and its parks and gardens are thickly planted with ferns and palms and bright with tropical blooms. To the east the Esplanade and Wharf Street run beside Trinity Bay, edged with mangrove flats bustling with birdlife. Charter fishing boats and reef-tour catamarans bob at moorings here, and there is also a man-made swimming lagoon.

The Flecker Botanic Gardens, with flowering creepers, rare trees, lily ponds and an orchid and fern house, is a startling reminder of the lushness of tropical vegetation; similar plants can be seen in a natural setting at the adjacent Mount Whitfield Conservation Park, which preserves a pocket of rainforest close to the centre of the city. Both are passed on the left as the drive heads north out of Cairns on the Cook Highway, before swinging inland to the rainforested slopes that rim the western horizon.

Barron Gorge National Park

To reach the rugged gorge country, Barron Gorge Road follows the rail line west through a patch-work of sugarcane and pineapple plantations. The rich, red fertile soil of the coastal plain is the result of erosion on basalt rock, a legacy of past volcanic activity, and its colour is due to its high iron content. The small town of Redlynch, surrounded by canefields, was for 34 years the home of novelist Xavier Herbert who lived opposite the railway station. From here the route begins the climb through the scattered forest cover of the lower slopes.

A sealed road continues for 4 kilometres beyond the Barron Gorge National Park boundary through lowland rainforest and groves of casuarina trees up to Barron Gorge Hydro-Power Station. Birdlife here is abundant, from the brightly coloured noisy pitta, frequently spotted hopping quickly across the forest floor, to parrots and pigeons that can be seen and heard high in the forest canopy. The historic township of Kuranda is about 6 kilometres upstream, just beyond the top of the falls, but there is no way up the rocky bluffs for vehicles. The road to Kuranda backtracks past the waters of Lake Placid and then heads for Smithfield, at the foot of the range and the setting for the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park. From here the route veers west and climbs through more rainforest to reach the town.

Kuranda

Perched on the edge of the Atherton Tableland, Kuranda became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a summer retreat from the humidity of the coast. Despite developments such as wildlife parks, cafés and tourist shops, it has retained much of its relaxed, country-town charm. The town’s lively and varied crafts and produce market has proved so popular that it has become a daily event. Barron Falls Lookout, 3 kilometres south of Kuranda at the end of Barron Falls Road, deserves a visit, if only to imagine what a spectacle the 250-metre drop would be had not most of the Barron River’s flow been harnessed for the generation of hydro-electricity. Here the air is sometimes rich with sugary scents wafting up from coastal plantations.

A graded track – about 1 kilometre return – provides access to the railway line and Barron Falls Station. Each day Kuranda’s fern-bedecked 1915 railway station up the line welcomes sightseers who have travelled from Cairns, via Barron Gorge, in a vintage train. Some choose to return to the coast the fast way, and so for 7.5 kilometres skim the treetops in the exhilarating Skyrail descent to Caravonica on one of the longest gondola cableways in the world. But by road, there is time to savour splendid rainforest-framed views as the route is retraced to Smithfield, where it turns onto the Cook Highway and heads for the sea.