An hour after midnight on June 11 1770, Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, struck the coral reef off the shore of what is now called Tropical North Queensland. As the ship came off the reef, a large piece of coral broke away, plugging the hole and stopping an inrush of water – which would have sunk the vessel – and giving the crew time to plug the hole. For three days, gale force winds prevented the vessel from putting in to shelter. Cook gloomily named the nearby headland Cape Tribulation. “Here,” he wrote, “began all our troubles.”

Today, Cape Tribulation has shaken off its troubled image. If the Daintree National Park, home to one of the world’s oldest tropical rainforests, is the crowning glory of Tropical North Queensland, I would say the stretch of coast running north from the Daintree River up past Cape Tribulation is the jewel in that crown. How many other places are there where the rainforest comes right down to the coral reef? At Cape Tribulation, two World Heritage Sites – the Daintree Rainforest and Great Barrier Reef – converge and the result is little short of miraculous.