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Well, we left off last time having just headed out for a few in Alice Springs and the next day we were flying to Cairns to start our east coast adventures. We hung around the hostel pool and went for pancakes and toastie for brekkie, mmm, then flew out that afternoon around 4. The flight was 2 hours long, with Qantas, less than half full, ridiculously comfortable and we were bombarded with food and free drinks for the first hour, including an in flight meal neither of us knew we were getting. This was the source of much surprise and delight! We took days to get over the surprise! We checked into Dreamtime Traveller's Rest hostel in Cairns that evening, tired and stuffed from our flight so we just hit the pit early.
Cairns is a great place, bit of a holiday resort feel, but still really great place to spend some time. It's full of companies offering skydives, bungee jumps and of course reef diving excursions. There is an incredible outdoor lifestyle here. You can't swim in the sea during the wet season due to stingers (see we're picking up aussie slang, that's box jellyfish to those not here), so there's a huge pool down by the water called the 'lagoon' where people just hang out and swim from 6am to 10pm everyday. So we spent a few days just relaxing there after all our touring and hiking. Obviously it was very enjoyable. It was a really social area, always busy as it was at the end of the Esplanade where all the restaurants and lots of bars are. The area around the lagoon has free to use barbecues, you just bring your meat and sauces etc., set yourself up at a picnic table, and start cooking. It's a great place.
After waking up at 230am on Sunday morning and spending half the night trying to watch Northern Ireland V Poland online with little success, we checked out at 9am and hired ourselves a wee campervan for a few days. Buzzing at the epic 3-2 victory we'd been reading about, we headed north to the Daintree Rainforest and a place called Cape Tribulation. We stayed at a place called Cape Trib Camping, where the rainforest runs right down to the sea, which is apparently one of only a few places in the world this happens. It was a stunning, beautiful, almost deserted beach, with crystal clear water and rainforest on the hills all around. We spent the 4 days there lazing around with the odd spot of Jungle Surfing, basically swinging (safely of course) from tree top to tree top in the jungle canopy, having barbecues and playing cards (Claire always won).
There were plenty of dangers up there, stingers, salties (salt water crocodiles) and massive spiders, and we even had our own chum spider, the size of our hand that lived behind our van for the trip! Claire hated him. We did get to swim in a really nice freshwater rockpool, so no crocs in there, though every leaf that floated by did look suspiciously like croc eyes coming towards us. One morning we got ourselves up at 5.30 to catch the red morning light of sunrise on Cape Trib beach.To say it was beautiful was an understatement and the photographs don't really do it justice.When we woke up there were still stars in the sky and the Pacific glowed and shimmered with the start of sunrise.We were standing on the beach shivering and covered in goosebumps and were later told that it had been about 19 degrees (hehe).The colours that changed through the sky that morning were delightful and when the sun finally peeped its head over the horizon the quick burst of heat swiftly warmed us.On the final night we had dinner out and decided to walk, so we wandered up the road with our torches, darkness ahead, darkness behind, the sound of things moving across the ground beside us and in the trees above us and 15 minutes later were sitting in a funky modern restaurant in the middle of a rainforest. Pretty surreal!
At 7.15 the following morning, probably the only Ulsterman, on possibly the only reliable computer with internet in Cape Tribulation, let out a scream of delight as he discovered his wee country had only gone and bloody well done it again! Top of the group, dare we dream? ….. The road up to Cape Trib is crazy, really winding, right on the water's edge at lots of high slopes and full of signs saying things like 'falling rocks next 5km', 'cassowaries crossing next 10km', signs of people being eaten by crocs, people getting stung or vehicles just falling straight off the side of the road into impending doom and, strangely, signs warning of trucks in places. All this added to it being our first driving experience outside UK, and our first experience driving anything other than an easy to drive car, made things a bit hairy at times! So when we returned safe to Cairns on the Thursday we were delighted!A cassowary, by the way, is a large bird, bit like an emu, apparently the third largest bird in the world - on our trip up the coast we were on guard from all the warnings everywhere for the multitudes of hazards when Claire shouted STOP, and an adult and 2 juveniles walked out in front of the campervan and started strolling across the road - apparently we were very lucky to have seen the very rare birds, and Chris and the hefty campervan had excellent braking reactions.
Friday was a day were we had to get loads of things sorted, getting our Greyhound bus pass sorted, next accommodation along the coast, post stuff home etc. The Saturday we spent the day diving on the Great Barrier Reef as we'd been together 6 years that day (bet some of ya feel sick now!) and it was awesome. All the clichés about the reef are true. It is spectacular. It is mystical. It is like another world. We urge everyone to do it someday if they get a chance! We spent the morning snorkeling and we saw all colour of coral, sea turtles and hundreds of types of fish, including nemo! They're really cool, check out the photos we got too from the underwater camera we hired for the day! Before lunch we got to try our hand at scuba diving to a beginner's depth of 6.5metres for about half an hour. Amazing experience. We thought the coral was stunning snorkeling but if anything, it was brighter, more colorful, more alive this close and there were clownfish (nemos) everywhere! Some people spend days on the reef and don't see any, we saw probably 10 - 15! Lucky people!After lunch it was more of the same snorkeling but really, we could've spent a week doing it and not gotten bored. Incredible place and what an experience! We'll be back…
We went out for dinner that night down the Cairns Esplanade to milk the buzz at the lagoon again.We ate at a gorgeous Italian restaurant, in the open air, then went for an ice cream and a wander along the water's edge and the lagoon. Residents here seem to have everything…except football that is! We left Cairns on Sunday and headed down to our next stop Mission Beach for 2 nights. We're trying to let the budget recover a bit from campervan and reef dive so all he activities available here like white water rafting, sea kayaking and tours to Dunk Island will be passing us by. You can sky dive here too but we're saving that for New Zealand! Other than that there's not much here so tomorrow we're off again down towards Townsville and Magnetic Island. We'll probably blog again once we've done some stuff down there!
Hope you're all well.
Chris and Claire x
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