Cooktown to the Daintree: On Country with Traditional Owners

Take a 45-minute flight from Cairns up the coast over the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree, landing at Cooktown Airport in the early afternoon. Then, drive south from there, climbing into the ranges above the Annan River to Rossville Retreat, 300 acres of Kuku Nyungkul Country and the base for the next three nights.

Mooks opens with a Welcome to Country in Kuku Nyungkul language and a smoking ceremony to cleanse and ground the group before their time on Country. Then a bush tucker and bush medicine walk: the native plants, what they are used for in food, in healing and in daily life, from a healer who still uses them. The afternoon moves into storytelling (the history of the land, its ancestors, and what holds Kuku Nyungkul identity together) and closes with a ceremony.

Dinner is at the Lion’s Den Hotel, a corrugated-iron pub at Helenvale established in 1875 by Jack Ross and named after a tin mine on the tableland above it. Miners once wrote their tabs on the walls, and the signatures are still there. It stayed in one family for nearly ninety years and turned 150 last year.

Overnight: Rossville Retreat.
Meals: D.

A full day on Country, and the longest drive of the tour, west into the sandstone. On the way, Mooks carries the freshwater and saltwater Dreaming story across the landscape it belongs to; how those forces shaped the land, its wildlife and its people.

Old Laura Homestead stands in Rinyirru (Lakefield) National Park (CYPAL), a timber and corrugated-iron cattle station house whose main building dates from about 1902 on a run first taken up in 1879. It has been on the Queensland Heritage Register since 28 July 2000, and the main house survives essentially unaltered. Mooks was born here, and the stop is his: growing up on Country, the old ways, reading tracks and seasons and knowing the bush from the inside.

Then the rock art. Quinkan Country covers roughly 230,000 ha of sandstone plateau and escarpment around Laura and was added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2018. Researchers have recorded more than a thousand rock art sites, and believe far more remain undocumented. Radiocarbon dating of mineral crusts over art in the Laura region has returned ages from about 1,200 to 25,000 years; excavated deposits containing ochre at Sandy Creek nearby go back 27,000 to 37,000 years. The galleries take their name from the Quinkan spirits painted on them — the tall, thin, long-limbed Timara and the squat, heavy-bodied Imjim. The site the group visits is on Mook’s mother’s Country, and he reads the animals, spirit beings and ancestral figures in the sandstone as knowledge passed down.

Overnight: Rossville Retreat.
Meals: B/L/D.

Travel south and up the range to Buru (China Camp), at the headwaters of the Bloomfield River. The country shifts as the road climbs, from cool mossy rainforest into open sunlit woodland where bird calls carry, wallabies graze the edges and the seasonal signs are legible if you know how to read them. China Camp got its European name from a tin boom that started in November 1881, when Chinese miners working the field came to outnumber the Europeans; the Kuku Yalanji connection to the place is very much older and continues, and Buru is a working homeland today.

CJ, the Traditional Owner here, leads a rainforest walk over about five hours with a picnic lunch. It is a gentle walk and the substance is in what he points out: native rainforest plants and their cultural uses, animal tracks in the soft earth and the seasonal indicators his people have followed for thousands of years, such as which tree is fruiting, which bird has arrived and what that tells you about what to do next.

The day finishes at Roaring Meg Falls, reached by four-wheel drive off the CREB Track, with clear water, cascading pools and a swim. It is a significant place and access is on the terms its custodians set.

Overnight: Rossville Retreat.
Meals: B/L/D.

Mooks walks the group through the invasive plants that have taken hold at Rossville Retreat, and why Traditional Owners and rangers spend so much of their time removing them; then guests help identify, pull and bag weeds. Pond apple, one of the worst offenders in the Wet Tropics, is a Weed of National Significance, and Jabalbina Yalanji rangers have run a control program against it across the Eastern Kuku Yalanji Indigenous Protected Area since 2014.

Then farewell to Rossville and south to Wujal Wujal, where the Bloomfield River drops over a granite face. Wujal Wujal means “many falls”. The community below it, of about 276 people, was evacuated by Defence Force helicopter in December 2023 when Cyclone Jasper dropped more than 2m of rain over the range, and the first residents could not return for six months.

South from there, the Bloomfield Track runs about 30 km through rainforest and coastal range to Cape Tribulation, steep and partly unsealed with creek crossings along the way. The forest on either side holds cassowaries, forest birds, goannas and Bennett's tree-kangaroo, which lives nowhere else on Earth except in a patch roughly 70 km by 50 km north of the Daintree River. The group stops at Cowie Beach, where Mooks walks the sand and talks through the coastal plants, animals and bush tucker found along it.

The last stop is the Bamanga Muruku Tourism Hub at Kulki, the $4.8 million cultural centre the Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation opened at Cape Tribulation on 23 April 2026, built without clearing rainforest. Eastern Kuku Yalanji share the story of their Country with visitors. Spend the final night near Cape Tribulation.

Overnight: Ferntree Rainforest Lodge, Cape Tribulation.
Meals: B/L/D.

One stop in the morning, at Walu Wugirriga (Alexandra Lookout), 10km north of the Daintree ferry on the Cape Tribulation road. It looks out over the mouth of the Daintree River, Snapper Island and the Low Isles, across the only place in the world where two World Heritage Areas meet at the coast: the Wet Tropics of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef.

Then the ferry across the Daintree River, which runs from 5am to midnight every day of the year and is the only vehicle crossing. South of it, the ancient rainforest gives way to coastal lowland and cane, and the road follows the ocean down through Mossman and Port Douglas to Cairns, with afternoon drop-offs at hotels. Mooks closes the tour in Kuku Nyungkul, thanking guests for travelling with him and for the time spent on his Country.

Meals: B.