Lost & Found #46: Drive-In, Port Douglas 2010

Drive-in Cinema near Port Douglas, QLD

This week's Lost & Found is from a trip I won (on Twitter!) to Cairns quite by accident, when I was living in Wellington in 2010. If I recall correctly, Air New Zealand was adding direct flights to Cairns for the first time, and asked people to tweet something about how they'd get there. I sent a glib reply (along the lines of 'in a plane, duh!') without actually intending to enter, and somehow or other wound up winning!

I'd never been to the northern reaches of Queensland before in my travels in Australia, but it actually wound up winning me over - that area is a great way to get a taste of what Australia has to offer, in a much smaller package than you'd find anywhere else. Within a couple of hours' drive (which believe me, is a VERY short trip in Australia) you've got red desert, tropical rain forest, gorgeous beaches, and of course the Great Barrier Reef itself.

The pro tip seemed to be to stay in Port Douglas (where the reef trips mostly depart from), which is a lovely town in itself, and then venture out from there. The coastal drive up from Cairns is beautiful enough on its own, but the other adventures in the area are even more amazing, and you can get back home by nightfall easily.

Anyway - one day I ventured inland a bit, and amongst many other things, came across this vintage drive-in cinema. I think I only ever went to one drive-in when I was young in Toronto, and by that point you were tuning your car stereo to the frequency of their transmitter to hear the soundtrack - not mounting a large, cabled, metal lump on your car window! So I loved the design & shape of these when I saw them, and stopped long enough to get a closeup of one.

Bonus image from the same trip - a bright red termite mound in the Daintree Rain Forest north of Port Douglas. Amazing colour of the earth up there!

Termite Mound, Daintree Rain Forest, QLD