Mission Beach

Mission Beach sits at a strange and wonderful junction — it is one of the only places on earth where two World Heritage sites touch, the Wet Tropics rainforest coming down almost to the waterline and the Great Barrier Reef beginning a short boat ride offshore. I came expecting a beach town and found something closer to a village that happens to have a beach, strung out along fourteen kilometres of coast with no real centre, just clusters of houses among the palms and a general unhurried disregard for anyone’s schedule but the tide’s.

The cassowary signs are not a joke, and I want to be clear about that because I assumed they were, at first — bright yellow warnings with a cartoon of a large black flightless bird, posted along every second road. Mission Beach has one of the healthiest remaining populations of the southern cassowary, a bird that stands over head height, has a reputation for aggression when cornered, and is critically important to the rainforest because it is one of the only animals large enough to disperse the seeds of certain enormous rainforest fruits. I saw one on my second morning, ambling across a driveway with two chicks trailing behind it, utterly indifferent to the fact that it had stopped traffic.

The reef access from here is quieter than Cairns — smaller boats, fewer people, trips out to Beaver Cay and the inner reef platforms that felt considerably less crowded than the pontoon operations further north. I went out with a local operator running a boat that took maybe fourteen passengers, and spent an hour snorkelling a bommie thick with anemone fish and one enormous, unbothered Maori wrasse that followed our group around like it was supervising.

When to go: June to October brings the driest, calmest conditions for both the reef trips and rainforest walks. The wet season (December to March) turns the region genuinely lush and green but also brings cyclone risk, so check forecasts closely if you travel then.