Far North Queensland
The northeast corner of the continent, from Cairns north into Australia's last great! frontier, is nothing short of heaven for backpackers and outdoor adventurers. The Great Barrier Reef snakes close to shore here, luring divers with shorter boat trips and longer visits to the spectacular corals of the reef. The reefs biological diversity is complemented by that of the vast swaths of tropical rainforest, pressed up close to the Coral Sea by the craggy mountains of the Great Dividing Range.
As with most places in Australia, it wasn't nature but the promise of gold that first brought European settlement here, as a steady stream of prospectors advanced from Townsville to the then-tiny villages of Cairns and Port Douglas. The legacy of the gold rush lives on in Cooktown, Queensland's northernmost outpost. For the most part, divers have displaced miners in recent decades, and Cairns now caters to travelers with city comforts. Still, the more remote parts of this land remain untamed wilderness. The Captain Cook Highway, named after the premier European explorer of these lands, leads modern-day trailblazers north into the rainforest, which becomes impenetrably dense around Cape Tribulation. Wilder yet is the Cape York peninsula, starting beyond Cooktown and stretching all the way to the Torres Strait, which separates the Gulf of Carpentaria from the Coral Sea and Australia from Papua New Guinea. On Cape York, only the most rugged of tracks allow humans to venture into the ordinal landscape of hungry crocs and unforgiving bush.
Featured Destinations from Australia
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