Our next morning we headed up the main highway to the edge of the Daintree Rainforest for our crocodile river cruise. It felt like we were in the movie Anaconda just cruising the river looking for danger to come. Our guide told us since it was a warm morning most of the crocodiles were likely to stay in the water to stay cool. For our hour tour, we were only able to catch one crocodile lying on the bank of the river but was still a great cruise nonetheless. After grabbing a couple of pictures of her, we headed back to the marina. One of the tourists did point out a baby crocodile swimming near the boat and I was able to catch a glimpse of him before he swam into the reeds. 

Our guide told us that the crocodiles in the Daintree usually spend more time on the banks in their winter months so as it was still warm we would have to keep looking for heads poking up out of the water. He said it’s illegal in Queensland to feed wild crocodiles unlike in the Far North Queensland where they do things a bit different. Sounds like people in the FNQ are the “rednecks” of Australia. 

Although we weren’t successful in seeing more crocodiles, it was still an insightful tour. We also learned a new Aussie word “budgiesmugglers”. Definitely one everyone should look up and add to their vocabulary (more so because it’s a funny word for the term). We heard it when he was describing a guy in Far North Queensland trying to get social media likes by dressing in his “budgiesmugglers” near crocodile water and his dog ended up getting snatched and killed.

After our cruise, we drove onto the ferry for the short cruise across the river before heading up into the rainforest to Daintree Discovery Centre. Before arriving at the center, we stopped by Alexandra Overlook to take some pictures. A big tour group was analyzing something over by the edge of the parking lot so once they cleared the area we headed over to take a look. Turned out to be a large golden orb spider sitting on her web. Grant took some photos of the spider (even though the long zoom kept trying to zoom past the spider into the trees behind) and we headed up to the discovery center. 

It was a small center with several walkways going between the rainforest with guides discussing the different fauna located there. They also had a canopy tower you could climb up to get an aerial view of the rainforest. It took about 2 hours to go through and listen to most of the guided tour along with viewing the reptile center and aquarium attached to the center. As we headed out, we asked for recommendations from one of the center’s workers who suggested we grab ice cream at one of the local places and continue our drive up to Cape Tribulation, or “Cape Trib” as he called it – Australians love to abbreviate any word they can we discovered.

Our first stop was the ice creamery he had mentioned and we tried their taster. It was a small cup with four scoops of the following flavors: coconut, jackfruit, passion fruit, and wattleseed. Our favorite was of course the passion fruit, but the wattleseed had an interesting hazelnut like flavor to it and was local to the region. 

We continued our journey winding through the rainforest up to Cape Tribulation. We stopped at the Kulki lookout and walked along the beach. It was surprising how many beaches we walked on that were nearly empty if not completely desolate. Guess people really don’t want to visit them if you run the risk of running into crocodiles or marine stingers (jellyfish). We stopped by a local market to grab some waters and snacks for our drive back to Cairns and hit the road for the 2 hour journey. 

On our way back towards Cairns, we made a quick pit stop at one of the beaches along the coastline to get some more drone footage. Of course the beach was completely empty (like most of them were that didn’t have any marked swimming areas). We think most people in Queenstown really abide by the no swimming areas since they don’t know where “Salties” (aka saltwater crocodiles) may be. We stopped by another beach spot to let Grant take his drone out and fly it around. We were the only ones on the beach except for one guy that drove by on his 4 wheeler with his dogs. 

Grant had seen Mossman Gorge previously on his research of Cairns so we stopped by to see what it was about. As we didn’t have the best service on the drive, we couldn’t get an exact answer on when it closed. However, when we arrived, we overheard the worker telling a group the last shuttle back to the visitor center was at 5:30 leaving only about 10 minutes to explore the area. As it was $45/person for us to visit, we decided it wasn’t worth it for that little of time so we headed back out on the road.

Getting back into Cairns, we headed straight to the airport to drop off our rental car. We had been told that if we arrived back into Cairns after 5pm to drop it off at the airport instead of the city center for an extra charge. The lady we gave the keys to was so nice and said that she would change the drop off time to 5pm so we didn’t incur any extra charges. We grabbed an Uber back in town and had some dinner before prepping for an early morning on a boat headed to the Great Barrier Reef.