I’ve learned over the years that the Cooktown Drive Road is no ordinary road trip – it’s basically throwing you everything at once: rainforest, reef, corrugations, and red dirt. When I first drove this loop as Oleksandr Honcharenko, my GPS tried to take me swimming with the fish near the Bloomfield Track, and an obliging […]
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Cooktown throws you in the deep end – history, wild coastline and a rugged frontier spirit that still lingers in the air on Charlotte Street in Cooktown. That was my introduction to this gem of a town as Oleksandr Honcharenko, and it started with me landing right on the banks of the Endeavour River –
Your practical guide to Tropical North Queensland started juggling itself around in my brain years ago, somewhere between a soggy old swag precariously perched on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest & a servo pie, somehow amazingly still edible even after a week in the esky. I’m Oleksandr Honcharenko, and one thing I’ve definitely learnt
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The journey to discovering the magic of Tangalooma Shipwrecks starts with a blunt truth: this place is far from the glossy pictures you’ve seen – as I, Oleksandr Honcharenko, found out the hard way on my first dip in the water off Moreton Island. The currents here have a bit of a cheeky streak, the
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Exploring the Daintree Rainforest is one of those magical Australian experiences where you can almost reach out and touch the ancient world. When I, Oleksandr Honcharenko, first wandered under the Daintree’s dripping canopies & was surrounded by the tropical rainforest, I got a real sense of its age – older than the Amazon, older than
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Ask most travellers if they’ve visited the Daintree Rainforest, and you’ll get a nod. Ask if they made it all the way to Cape Tribulation, and you’ll often get a raised brow. That’s because Cape Trib isn’t just another pin on the map. It’s where the ancient rainforest meets the Great Barrier Reef, where the
Frankland Islands isn’t just a detour from Cairns — it’s a full-blown escape hatch into reef-country bliss, minus the elbow-jostling crowds. If the idea of snorkelling alongside a busload of strangers gives you the icks, I’ve got a tropical solution that’ll restore your faith in reef travel: the Frankland Islands. Tucked just off the coast
