My first holiday week I spent in Port Douglas, very much in the north of Australia:

It really is a very long way north – the distances in this country still dazzle me: it was a 3 hour flight from Sydney to Cairns, and then another 1 hour drive from Cairns further north to Port Douglas… I already had to scale up from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom in terms of distances, but this is a completely different scale altogether! See this site for a nice way to visualise the relative scale… basically, all of Europe fits in Australia…

Another fact about Port Douglas: it lies in the tropics. Remember that from geography lessons? That’s the region between the tropical latitudes (“keerkringen” for the Dutch readers): the Tropic of Cancer (Kreeftskeerkring) in the northern hemisphere and the Tropic of Capricorn (Steenbokskeerkring) in the southern hemisphere. And Port Douglas is further north than the Tropic of Capricorn, so indeed lies in the tropics.

What else do I remember from geography lessons? That the tropics are very warm… and humid… and has tropical rainforests… All of that is true for Port Douglas: it was warm and humid, but I had a hotel with direct access to the swimming pool from my room:

Moreover, the rainforest was only a short drive away, and as an added bonus: the Great Barrier Reef is also close by. So there was lots to explore!

Port Douglas

Port Douglas is currently a small town, mainly living from tourism. Most of the buildings are hotels. B&B’s or holiday resorts – nearly all of them with some form of pool access as the weather is always warm, really warm or very warm. Had I mentioned already that it was warm there…?

It was established in 1877, after gold was found in the nearby Hodgkinson River as the main port for importing necessary goods for the miners and exporting the mined gold. However, when the Kuranda railway was opened, the goods were transported to and from Cairns, bypassing Port Douglas, and Cairns took over as main port. And when a cyclone in 1911 demolished almost all buildings in Port Douglas, there wasn’t much left of this once so thriving port. Until the 1980’s, when the first big holiday resort was built, and tourism started to boom.

The “St Mary’s By The Sea” church was one of the many buildings that was destroyed in the 1911 cyclone. A smaller church was built instead:

And this is the local police station:

I’m not sure this is a historical building, but with the verandas it looks pretty laid-back, right? What certainly is a historical building, is the Old Court House:

It was built in 1879, and is currently the second oldest surviving of similar buildings in Queensland. I didn’t manage to visit it, so can’t tell more about it than what can be found on internet anyway.

I think I’ll leave my visits to the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rain Forest for separate posts…