Another trip into the rainforest today at Mossman Gorge. Gee its changed a lot in the last 24 years. You used to drive up to the 'beach' area and park than there were several viewing areas and that was it. Now you park in a large car park near the town next to a modern info centre/restaurant /gift shop developement. Then you are bused 3km into the forest ot the old car park where ther are now several walks to chose from of varying lengths from a few hundred metres to nearly 3km. As you would expect from your intrepid explorers we did them all and they were great. A few less school kids bounding around would have been nice but the holidays are over this weekend so this part of the world will revert to the locals, us grey nomads and the odd foreign tourist or two which will be nice

Whilst on tourism we cannot beleive that nearly every tourist customer service job in this area seems to have a British person employed to do the work. Most waiting staff, almost all pub staff and most tourist bureau staff and many guides are British or Irish. The odd European too and the very occasional Aussie. There are adverts in a lot of shops in the main St for staff. This coupled with the volume of property and busineses for sale at what seem to be quite cheap pricing for what you would expect from a premier tourist region might indicate not is all well in Port Douglas. In fact there was an article on the internet from a Cairns paper that would seem to back that theory up. Maybe the recent dive in the dollar might help things along a bit keeping Aussies at home and inticing more O/S tourists. It does seem that the Chinese and Japanese miss this area largely though. It seems they go to Cairns for a couple of days but not get up here. So it seems to be an oldies and backpackers haven, neither of those groups being big spenders hence the problems