Cairns and Port Douglas in three efficient days

I'm a scuba diver and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef while it's still there, it's been a childhood dream of mine to hold koalas, and I had like 4-5 days to kill between weekend appointments with people, so I headed up to the northeast to Port Douglas. I stayed at the Port Douglas Motel which was kitschy, cheap, centrally located, and great.

First, heads up. I feel like this is really not well publicized, but although this is a tropical part of Australia, you cannot really safely go swimming in the ocean, or even 100% safely hang out on the beach near bush or near the water particularly at dusk or dawn because (1) there are saltwater crocodiles and (2) all of the summer is "stinger season" in which you can get stung by all sorts of animals.

What are marine stingers?
Stingers are potentially lethal jellyfish that typically inhabit the waters off northern Australia. The most feared is the box jellyfish or Chironex fleckeri. Distinguished by its large box-like bell and trailing tentacles, the box jellyfish is responsible for about 80 confirmed fatalities in Australia since records began in 1883. The jellyfish's bell grows up to 30cm in diameter and extrudes about 60 tentacles, each measuring up to three metres in length. The Irukandji jellyfish, by comparison, is a pint-sized predator with a transparent bell measuring just 12 to 20mm and four small tentacles. There are numerous Irukandji species and two recorded deaths.

I literally only found out about any of this as I was take a shuttle from the airport in Cairns up to Port Douglas. By the way, I really recommend staying in Port Douglas, which is a charming tourist town, rather than Cairns which feels a little like not a place for tourists at all. My shuttle driver was talking to some locals about the two most recent crocodile deaths from the past 6 months -- an older woman who took a wrong turn while on a walk around her retirement home and a German young woman who was know to like to skinny dip.  For the elderly woman, apparently the family of the deceased pleaded with authorities to not kill the animal. Let's not make this a tragedy of two deaths instead of one!

Day one I checked in with my dive company for the next day then rented a bike and went to the Wildlife Habitat, which is a little small and a little kitschy, but also sketchy in all of the right ways like holding koalas and other animals and feeding various animals in a little bit of a free for all. I biked back to the motel via Four Mile Beach (pictured above). The sand is so packed, you can just bike on the beach itself, and probably safer with the crocodiles. At the Port Douglas end of Four Mile Beach, there's a little hill you can climb up to an ok lookout.

Day 2 I did a three dive tour to the outer reef using the ABC Dive Company, which seemed the most reputable and the smallest groups? The trip was nice, there was a shark apparently that I didn't see. I did see a lot of great coral, rays, an eel, a ton of little jellyfish. Basically it really did look like Finding Nemo, which I didn't expect for some reason. I think I had forgotten that Finding Nemo takes place at the Great Barrier Reef, so of course all of the same fish would be there.

Day 3 was not good. I had heard that the other great thing to see is the rainforest. Now this is like my third or fourth (fifth?) time doing tours of the rainforest, including the heart of the Amazon as well as other places in central and south America. I've done a ton of jungle tours and safaris and this one not only sort of sucked, it felt like I was trapped, which made me super grumpy. Daintree Discovery Tours. It was so bad that I was all set to post a bad review of it online, but then I started reading other one star reviews with my same complaints (basically just driving around in a car all day doing nothing of interest or no value added from the tour), and the response from the company was mainly to address the complaint that people had that they could have done the trip much cheaper themselves. The company responded by saying it would actually be around as expensive to do it yourself. But really, I just sort of wish I hadn't done it at all. My general impression was that either Daintree is not that cool of a rainforest to see, or no tour company has been able to highlight its charms well. It's sad, because apparently it is the oldest rainforest in the world? There were interesting things to see, I guess, but like 1-3 hours worth of interesting. Also, same notes as my post on Sydney about the service industry being a little lackluster in Australia. It felt like there was a lot of phoning it in going on.

Day 4 I did this Kurunda package that was pretty good, something like this in which you're basically just shuttled around on a bus from attraction to attraction. There seems to be no difference in the tour operators, so just choose the cheapest one that includes the little destinations you want to see, e.g. yes or no on the butterfly sanctuary. Rainforestation is worth seeing, so is the train and the skyrail. I had this terrible customer service encounter with a skyrail person who was yelling at people. I almost lost it for a second, and it reminded me that I'm for whatever reason most likely to lose my temper while traveling.

I did learn something interesting on the rainforest tour. Mangrove trees (pictured above) can grow in salt, but salt is still poison to them. They adapted a special root system that keeps most of the salt out, but salt still gets in. To keep the rest of the tree alive, the three designates a "sacrificial leaf". It puts all of the toxic salt in that leaf until it is full and then the leaf drops off. The leaf turns yellow.

I thought about how James Fallon has argued that sociopaths exist in society to essentially take care of the "dirty work" that is necessary and unavoidable in our society, work that give normal people PTSD if they had to deal it themselves. Kevin Dutton has made a similar argument about sociopaths being great soldiers, surgeons, and spies, I believe. Anyway, thanks to all of you sacrificial leaves out there taking one for the team!