We decided to have a slow day today, just doing things around Daintree Village and perhaps a bit further afield on the south side of the river. This was because there was a vehicular ferry that crossed the Daintree which was $32 return and so we didn’t want to go onto the other side of the river until we were ready to go with the van.

We bought tickets for the cruise which was just near our van park and went on the 9am cruise which went for an hour. One advantage of the cruise company we choose was that it gave you a multi-pass voucher, so you could go on the cruise as many times as you wanted in a period of about 5 days. And the cruise departed from 2 different areas – from Daintree Village where we were and also from near the ferry terminal further upstream where there were more mangroves. We thought we would do the one near the ferry terminal either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

The cruise in the morning was almost a private tour – there was our family and one other older couple on the boat. The tour guide, Lex, was a local guy who actually grew up only just across the river on a farm with cattle and pretty much spent all his life in Daintree. I couldn’t imagine growing up on a river where crocs were prevalent.Lex was very much a small town guy with such a slang accent, it was sometimes hard to understand him. We saw the big croc again that we’d seen the day before on the river bank – apparently he was the ‘big daddy’ of this part of the river – there were some other smaller crocs in this area too and we saw another 2 on this cruise. Lex was amazing at being able to spot birds and wildlife in the trees beside the river. We would just see trees, but he would suddenly stop the boat and point out a tree snake or a frog-mouth bird (both of which were camouflaged on the tree and quite hard to see, even up close). He also knew the plants around there very well. He went close enough to an hibiscus tree for us all to pick a flower and then showed us how to pull it apart to eat the bottom part of the flower. I enjoyed the tour very much. We got off the boat just after 10am and walked the 50m back to our van and had some morning tea.

The kids played outside for a little while and then we had an early lunch, because I wanted everyone to have a rest after lunch today. Bethany and Hannah seemed to be getting tired a lot – we were having fairly full days. We all lay down and put on an audio CD to listen to for a while – I ended up having a bit of a sleep, but Hannah and Beth didn’t – they had a quiet time at least. 

Around 3.30 we headed off in the car to have a bit of a scenic drive. We followed the road which ran beside the river downstream a bit. There was quite a bit of cattle around in the pastures – they were Brahman cows are Brahman crosses – they looked a bit more like bullocks than cows. We drove past some hills which the kids called ‘tiny wings’ hills (after the game on the iPhone/iPad) – they were smooth rolling hills with lots of little humps. We drove south again past Wonga beach and to an area just north of Mossman which had a scenic drive. There was also a WW2 historic site where a bomb had been dropped by the Japanese. On the way back towards Daintree we stopped at one of the beaches beside the road and went for a walk along it. Then back to the car and back to the van park. It was shower time for the younger girls while Lauren and Sam did dinner (BBQ meat and salad and bread). Usual night-time routine.