New trail opens between northern Australia's rainforest and Coral Sea

One moment you're walking through dense greenery, then suddenly a clearing opens up a panorama of the Coral Sea coast. In the tropical north-east of Australia, a new long-distance coastal trail is being developed for hikers and mountain bikers.

The Wangetti Trail runs along the coast of the Great Barrier Reef and through rainforest, and holidaymakers can already explore a first section, just under eight kilometres long, now opened between Palm Cove and Ellis Beach.

The entire 94-kilometre-long Wangetti Trail is expected to be completed by the end of 2026 and will stretch to Port Douglas.

The opened section, for which 17 bridges were built alone, leads through the rainforest and offers countless impressive views of the Coral Sea. The Wangetti Trail is located north of Cairns in the state of Queensland.

The state is perhaps best known for its snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef and the surfing beaches of the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast near Brisbane. If you see you just see one part of Australia, then this may be the best option, since it has the highest concentration of things that make this country so exciting.

Declared a World Heritage Site in the 1980s, Queensland's rainforest is meanwhile said to have been formed 135 million years ago and is considered to be the planet's oldest tropical rainforest.

Head 250 kilometres into the state, south-west of Cairns, and you discover a very different world. You can explore lava caves formed thousands of years ago at Undara Volcanic National Park. There is no forest here, just the odd isolated eucalyptus tree, grasses, sparse bushes and huge termite mounds.