Port Douglas & Cairns

After the Daintree, we worked our way down the coast to Cairns where we stayed for a week. On the way, we stopped at the beautiful resort town of Port Douglas.

Port Douglas

We only came here for a day trip, but it was enough to walk around town, do some window shopping, have ice cream and watch the sunset. I’ve always like Port Douglas – it has a really chilled out, tourist holiday vibe. But, I don’t think I could live here in the summer with really hot days and incredibly high humidity. On a beautiful winter day, like we had, it is great.

There’s a great little church just by the park on the waterfront. They had a funeral there shortly after these pictures were taken, but I think it would be a great place to get married. It doesn’t come out in the photo below, but the window behind the altar is a view of the sea.

The drive south along the coast to Cairns is fabulous. I’ve done this drive many times now, but I still am in awe of how beautiful it is. It winds its way, hugging the coastline with some really great views.

Cairns

We spent a week in Cairns in a caravan park they everyone said is one of the best in Australia for kids. The Ingenia Big 4 Coconut Cairns. It was wonderful and absolutely HUGE! There were two different heated pools, 2 jacuzzis, an amazing kids playground, two jumping pillows, a games room, mini-golf, a cafe and the biggest and cleanest amenities block we’ve seen yet! The toilets were a bit of a hike from where we were parked though – probably about 150 metres/yards. Here’s a photo of one of the pools.

(Our son wrote a blog about our favourite caravan parks – see his post for more info on this park.)

We went into town one day and walked along the waterfront:

and the wonderful lagoon (which is the only place you can swim since there are dangerous jellyfish and saltwater crocodiles in the ocean):

We also walked along the marina and saw one of the boats that I used to work on 15 years ago (the Diver’s Den boat) and some of the superyachts that were in town.

One of the evenings we went to the night market and had a walk through town the evening. It was very pretty – all lit up.

BUT, we agreed that the town feels dead. Every time I’ve been here before, it’s buzzing with tourists. But this time, because the borders are closed, it was empty. Most of the restaurants, tour operators and shops were actually shut with For Sale signs on them. Only one bar was open at night and only a limited number of restaurants. It was sad to see.