Cooktown to the Daintree: On Country with Traditional Owners

Fly from Cairns, over the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree, to Cooktown Airport in the early afternoon. The drive south from there climbs 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 in Helenvale, established in 1875 and named after a tin mine on the tableland above. Miners once wrote their tabs on the walls and the signatures are still there.

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, and 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. 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, not as pictures to be interpreted.

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 to open, sunlit woodland. 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 - which tree is fruiting, which bird has arrived, what that tells you about what to do next.

The day finishes at Roaring Meg Falls, clear water and cascading pools, with time for 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 Wet Tropics' worst offenders, 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 travel south to Wujal Wujal, where the Bloomfield River drops over a granite face. Wujal Wujal means "many falls". The community below it was evacuated by helicopter in December 2023, when Cyclone Jasper dropped more than two metres of rain over the range.

South from there, the Bloomfield Track runs through rainforest and coastal range to Cape Tribulation. The forest on either side is home to cassowaries, goannas and Bennett’s tree-kangaroo. The group stops at Cowie Beach, where Mooks walks along 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. Spend the final night near Cape Tribulation.

Overnight: Cape Tribulation.
Meals: B/L/D.

One stop in the morning at Walu Wugirriga (Alexandra Lookout), 10 km 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 board 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 drop-offs at hotels in the afternoon. Mooks closes the tour in Kuku Nyungkul, thanking guests for travelling with him and for the time spent on his Country.

Meals: B.