Hinchinbrook Island

Hinchinbrook Island is the largest island national park in Australia, and it looks the part — a spine of granite peaks, the tallest topping eleven hundred metres, rising straight out of mangrove-fringed channels that separate it from the mainland by only a narrow strait. There is no resort, no permanent settlement, nothing but wilderness and a walking track that has developed something of a cult reputation among Australian hikers. I came for the Thorsborne Trail, a roughly four-day, thirty-two-kilometre walk down the east coast of the island, and it remains one of the more physically honest hikes I have done anywhere.

Permits are strictly limited — only forty people are allowed on the trail at any one time — which meant that for most of four days I saw almost no one, just rainforest creek crossings, granite boulder scrambles, and beaches so empty I could see my own footprints from an hour earlier still sitting undisturbed in the sand. I camped at Zoe Bay beneath a waterfall that drops straight into a swimming hole ringed by paperbarks, and swam there at dusk with fruit bats streaming overhead in long silent ribbons toward the mainland.

The island’s channels and fringing reef are part of the broader Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and boat-based access on the western side reveals a different Hinchinbrook entirely — quiet mangrove waterways good for spotting estuarine crocodiles from a very respectful distance, and calmer bays where the fringing coral starts almost at the boat ramp.

When to go: May through September is the only realistic window for the Thorsborne Trail — cooler temperatures, lower creek levels, and permits that must be booked months ahead given the strict daily cap. Avoid the wet season entirely; creek crossings become dangerous and the trail can close.