Sunday 29 September 2024 – With nothing formal on the itinerary for today, our plan was to explore Port Douglas, a town about 16km further North! up the coast – apart from anything else, we were down to our last half dozen Earl Grey tea bags. Before we went out, though, there was the small matter of breakfast, which would be served in the main lodge. Our accommodation was among the select group of cabins that were furthest away from the lodge,

so this entailed a 300-metre walk through the rainforest. It’s not a level walk, though, oh dear me no.

I realise that in absolute terms, the ascent is not daunting; it’s just that, somehow, it’s not particularly welcome as a pre-breakfast workout. We had our first wildlife encounter of the day en route, with a many-striped skink which could give Phoebe Waller-Bridge some useful lessons in side-eye.

Our second wildlife encounter was to see a bird taking a bath; I suspect that the bath was specifically set up so that punters like us could watch from the restaurant.

Later in the morning we headed towards Port Douglas, which is a mere 20-minute drive away. The scenery really makes it clear that one is in the tropics

and we passed a crop that we think is sugar cane,

although it looks different from the sugar cane we saw in Madagascar earlier this year.

Port Douglas is a compact town, with all of the major commercial activity concentrated in a couple of streets

and an architectural vernacular – corrugated iron roofs on a steel frame – speaks of the need to withstand cyclones (as did the signpost en route to the town pointing to a cyclone shelter).

There are many bars and restaurants

and, of course, the obligatory aboriginal art outlet.

On the town beach, there’s a wharf called Sugar Wharf,

which supports the probability that the crop we saw earlier was sugar cane. Its use for loading sugar cane ceased in 1957 and it’s now an entertainment venue.

We stopped in the town for a coffee at the Grant Street Kitchen, which is a bakery

proudly advertised around the town as “award-winning”. Jane said that her almond croissant was the best she’d had so far on this trip, and the place was very popular, with a persistent queue out of the door,

and an interesting selection of customers,

so the claim would appear to have merit. They clearly do a good line in pies, which appeared to be the meal du jour among people sitting outside.

Port Douglas is world famous in North Queensland for its market – every Wednesday and Sunday. It being a Sunday, we pottered over (it being very humid and hot enough, at 29°C, to put anything more energetic than pottering out of the question) to take a look. It’s obviously a flourishing concern.

Immediately neighbouring the market is a delightful little church, St. Mary’s by the Sea,

and behind the church, a tree which is remarkably laden with epiphytes.

We did our necessary shopping and headed back to Thala Beach. In the grounds, we stopped to examine something that had been pointed out to us on yesterday’s stargazing expedition.

This is not a small heap; let me show you the scale of it.

Believe it or not, this has been made by one pair of birds, orange-footed scrub fowls.

The male starts the mound in an attempt to woo a passing female by showing off his nest-building skills; the pair then continue building and managing the heap each breeding season. If all goes according to plan, she lays eggs in the heap, which is big enough to foster internal warmth from rotting down and thus incubate the eggs. Once they’ve hatched, the chicks then dig their way out. This strikes me as being like something out of the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch: “We were evicted from our hole in the road. We had to make do with a pile of rotting leaves.”

The rest of the day passed in blissful idleness; we have two days of relentless tourism coming up and one has to build up one’s reserves, after all. Stay tuned to find out exactly what these two days of tourism actually entail.