Australia For Everyone: Canberra

Few Australians know Trinity Bay or could identify where it is on a map, but most would be very familiar with the two towns built on its shores that have become the jewels in the tourism crown of North Queensland – Port Douglas and Cairns. Cairns, at the bay’s southern end, having developed as a railhead and major port for exporting sugar cane, gold, metals, minerals and agricultural products from surrounding coastal areas and the Atherton Tableland region, has become the hub of tourism – both inland and offshore – for North Queensland. The former mining and timber port of Port Douglas, at the bay’s northern end, has grown into an upmarket holiday resort town.

Port Douglas has boomed as a tourist destination in recent years, not just because of its beautiful beaches, many restaurants, golf courses, and five star resorts, but because of its location, being adjacent to two World Heritage areas, the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest. Not far offshore is the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef where visitors flock in their thousands to dive on it during the winter months. Numerous companies run daily trips from the marina to the outer reef and the Low Isles for scuba diving and snorkelling.

Inland is the old sugar town of Mossman, the gateway to Mossman Gorge and the World Heritage listed Wet Tropics area. To the north in Daintree National Park is the stunningly beautiful Cape Tribulation, thus named by Lt. James Cook on 10th June 1770 after his ship ran aground on a reef near the site, “because here began all our Troubles”.

Destinations