My coach to Townsville doesn't leave until tomorrow morning, so I decided to use my last free day in Northern Queensland by taking the Scenic Train to Kuranda. This, if you are just passing through the area on your way further north, is considered the traditionally touristy thing to do. The village of Kuranda is a small outpost at the northern end of the Atherton Tablelands which happily thrives on the influx of tourists to its Zoo, Aviary, Butterfly Farm and ou...

Many people outside Australia get Cape Tribulation and the Daintree rainforest confused, and use them interchangeably to refer to the same place - probably because tourists heading for the Daintree often stay at the Cape. In fact, Cape Trib (as it tends to be known) is actually a relatively small township on a headland within the much greater Daintree rainforest. Although there are other places to stay, the Cape is probably the most popular destination in the rai...

For our stay in the rainforest, I had taken a good look on the internet and come to the conclusion that the Cape Tribulation Resort and Spa at Coconut Beach (which I'm going to refer to as Coconut Beach from this point on so as not to wear my fingers out) would fit the bill nicely. It seemed to be a perfect romantic retreat with just enough of a back-to-nature feel without requiring us to lose some of the home comforts we were used to. Besides which, there's som...

By the time we came to the end of our stay in the rainforest at Cape Tribulation, Eloise and I had exhausted most of the plans we'd had for Australia. Back when we were sitting at a table in a dirty corner of a local pub in north London and planning this trip, my suggestion that we should spend at least a month in Australia had initially been greeted by Eloise with extreme doubt. Having never been to the continent before and not really knowing how much of eve...

Strange as it may seem, we hadn't seen any aborigines on our trip so far, and as it was Eloise's first visit to Australia, she had been asking me where they were all hiding. In reality, most of the true aboriginal settlements are either scattered across the middle of the country, in northern Queensland or the Northern Territories - so many visitors who arrive in Australia intending to spend weeks sunning themselves on the gold coast never get to experience any of...