Great Tropical Drive - Britz

Five nights and 869 kilometres in a loop from Cairns in a campervan, north to Cape Tribulation and Cooktown and back over the Tablelands.

Palm Cove and Port Douglas come first, then Mossman Gorge, where the river runs over granite boulders and the Kuku Yalanji run guided walks, and Cape Tribulation, where two World Heritage areas meet: the oldest continuously surviving rainforest on earth running down to the Great Barrier Reef.

Wujal Wujal and the Bloomfield Falls follow, then Cooktown, where Cook beached the Endeavour for repairs in 1770 after holing her on the reef. The route then turns inland over the Atherton Tablelands, with the crater lakes at Yungaburra, the fig trees and platypus viewing nearby, and the Millaa Millaa waterfall circuit, before Innisfail, Mission Beach and the run back into Cairns.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. The Bloomfield Track north of Cape Tribulation is 4WD only and generally not permitted in hire campers, so the route to Cooktown runs inland on the sealed road instead. The Daintree River ferry carries vehicles and queues in peak season. Six days is a reasonable allowance, and the wet season from December to March closes some of the northern sections entirely. The Tablelands leg is the one visitors underrate: a thousand metres above the coast, several degrees cooler, and full of waterfalls, crater lakes and dairy country that feels nothing like the tropics below it.