The Daintree Rainforest

Today we explored the world's oldest rainforest - the Daintree. It's also unique in that the rainforest meets the Great Barrier Reef at the coast, so two World Heritage sites are next to each other. We explored it as a day trip from Port Douglas, Queensland, our base this week.
We followed "trails" on the maps, but often were alone in the bush. Thankfully we made it out unscathed. We spotted some really unique animals in the wild, two in danger of extinction.

Saw a cassowary in the wild - very unique birds with a special job in the rainforest.

"Where the rainforest meets the reef."
We didn't stick around too long, we didn't want to meet a crocodile!

Look what else we found!

Caite spotted a living dinosaur! The Boyd's Forest Dragon 

Caroline spotted this well-camoflauged stick bug - over a foot long!

And we tried some rainforest ice creams! There were many flavors made from tropical fruits we don't have at home. Wattleseed tastes like chocolate.

We were fortunate to have made the trip to Daintree when we did. In the afternoon storms started rolling in, which were from what ended up being "Tropical Cyclone Nora" (a hurricane) which hit farther up the coast from us, but dumped even more rain than usual for "rainy season" and caused severe flooding and landslides, closing the roads and making Daintree inaccessible for the next week. It also 'complicated' our travel plans 😆... more on that in a later update.