Our trip up to Cape Tribulation promised to take us away from the well-travelled part of the East Coast to let us experience Australia's oldest rainforest. We had a pretty crappy (can I say that? Sorry Mum, Auntie's etc) bus driver to take us up there. Someone clocked his driving at 150km/h in a town, he nearly crashed twice and he "got some information that I was going to tell you but I've not bothered reading it." Great.

We stopped at the Daintree River for a croc cruise, where we saw a rather large croc called Scarface and a little baby one too. It was really good to see these massive creatures in the wild. Our second stop was at the Maardja Boardwalk ("Does anyone know how many species of Mangrove there are? No? Well, there are 60. I can name 2. One is the Looking Glass mangrove and... um... I can't remember the other one." The boardwalk runs right through some of the areas oldest forest and is complete with insects and all!

Our hostel was meant to be the cheapest one in the area but we only booked that one because we were told we'd be upgraded to the 4 star Coconut Beach Resort as the other one was undergoing refurbishment. Our hotel was really nice, all open plan so you feel that you are actually living in the rainforest. The rain was almost deafening in the evening (yup, it rains in rainforests). We took a couple of days to just chill out, play some scrabble, take advantage of the Happy Hour at the bar and enjoy living in some pretty spectacular surroundings before heading to Port Douglas.

-B