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28/01/2011
For the next couple of days I chilled in Cairns and was organising what me and Chris were going to do in the next part of our adventure! There is a nice lagoon where everyone goes swimming so it was good to spend a few days there. The humidity level in Cairns is so high, which made it extremely hot!!! At night I watched the mens semi-final, womans final and mens final of the tennis! I was very sad when Murray lost! If he had won his first grand slam there I could say I had seen him in the second round!! Oh well ... theres always wimbledon!!
01/02/2011
I was back in the travel agents this morning using the internet and the woman starts boarding up the windows! Curious, I ask why! She tells me that the cyclone (there had been talk of a cyclone for a few days but nothing serious!) was a lot more serious than everyone thought and it was due to hit in the next two days!! I go back to the hostel and spoke to my roommates and they tell me we have to go and get cyclone prepared! The hostel said we have to go and get food and water as we could be stuck in there for at least three days!!! OMG! I then decided to watch the news and it was saying that the cyclone is picking up speed and its going to be devestating blah blah!! Oh dear getting really freaked out now! We walked to the supermarket and all the shop keepers are out putting sand bags in the doorways and boarding up the windows and the supermarket is packed - people buying torches, batteries, all the food they could get their hands on - the place was going crazy!!! So me andd my roomates decide to make the best out of a bad situation and have a pre-cyclone party and had a good night chatting about what to expect in the next couple of days!
02/02/2011
Got awoken early by housekeeping as two of the girls had to extend their stay at the hostel - they were supposed to fly tonight but the airport was already shut! Had breakfast and watched the news - I have never seen the tv room so busy, I think everyone was getting a bit worried. The news said it was going to be a Category 5 Cyclone (the worst it could be), how it was bigger than Hurricane Katrina and it was describing the effects it could have! We were not allowed to leave our hostel after 11 in the morning so we sat about for the whole day chatting. The wind picked up late in the afternoon and by this time many people were panic central! We were told our hostel was cyclone proof! And a lot of residents living in the local area were moving into the hostel so this was reassuring! Cyclone Yasi has got everyone a bit worried - thank god I had amazing roomates who could laugh and joke through the whole situation. I suppose it was worse as none of us had ever been in that situation before so it was the 'not knowing' that was getting to all of us. At 10 at night we were asked to go to our rooms and stay in there - so we all left and sat in or room where we could hear a bit of rain and wind but tried to forget about and get some sleep.
03/02/2011
Awoke in the morning about 7 and heard one of my roommates come in from the tv room, I quickly asked her what happened, she said that the cyclone's pathway had moved in a strange southerly direction and Cairns hadn't got hit as bad as they thought it had!! What a relief! After all that worry, we were ok. We did watch on the tv all the smaller towns that had been hit.. Townsville, Tully, Mission Beach - A lot had been completely destroyed! It looked as if all the houses had blown off the town and some houses had been completely destroyed! The harbours had been ruined and millions of dollars worth of damage had been caused. There was a lot of rainfall during the day and it caused a bit of flooding which destroyed some shops and homes - what a year Australia has had...the Queensland and Victoria floods, the bushfires in Perth and now Cyclone Yasi hitting Queensland!! :(
04/02/2011
Today we had an after cyclone party!! Me and my roomates were celebrating how lucky we were! It was a lot of fun to hang out with Nick, Chloe and Irish Aisling and they will always be remebered as my very special Cyclone 'Yasi' roomates! :)
3/2/2011
Well after a month on the farm it was time to meet up with Kirsty in Cairns. So I packed my bags and after a nine hour train ride I made it to Sydney. I spent the night in a hostel before getting my flight up the coast to Cairns. I just chilled out with some of the people from my room in the hostel as I was getting up early to catch my flight up.
4/2/2011
After getting up ridiculously early I headed out to the airport to get my flight. Once I arrived at the airport I tried to check in at the on-line check in desk, however it did not register my booking or the reference number. Therefore I was then sent to the manned check in desk where a less than helpful woman and man tried to book me on the flight only to tell me that they had no record of me being on this flight. I was then sent to the service desk where again I was told they had no booking for me. After showing them my confirmation email and some heated discusions with the stupid woman, she finally conceeded that there had been a mistake and she would get me on the next available flight. Unfortunately the next flight wasn't until the following day, so I had to spend another day in Sydney. So I went and met some friends that were in Sydney and we went for a nice Indian meal at night.
5/2/2011 - 8/2/2011
So after getting up early again and making the trip back out to the airport I finally got on the plane and up to Cairns to meet up with Kirsty. As the cyclone had just ripped through it the town was still in the stages of clearing up and getting back to normal. The weather was still rubbish and it rained for the whole day. So we just spent the day chatting and catching up on all the stories we had to tell each other. This was to be the pattern for the next few days, we managed to get out and go for a walk round the town inbetween showers but as the weather was so poor there wasn't much to do. On our last day in Cairns the weather brightened up which was good for us as we were going out on a boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef to do some snorkling and scuba diving. Once we got out to the reef we jumped straight into the ocean to start the snorkling. The coral and the many varieties of fish we saw were amazing and totally unbelievable. This was just a taste of things to come because we were going to scuba dive later in the afternoon. After our briefing on the various hand signals and how to operate the equipment we were ready to get in the water and explore. It was fantastic and we got to get up close to a whole array of tropical plants and sea life. It was really cool but as it was our first ever dive the instructor couldn't let us go away on our own. So we decided to go down for another dive as we had so much fun on our first one. This time we could go off on our own and explore, it was amazing as we got to touch some of the coral along with giant clams. We got to see Nemo, sting rays and lots of other fishes. The funniest fish we saw was a fish that looks like Elvis. Once the trip was over we got back to the hostel and packed up our stuff as the road down the coast was now open and we could travel to our next destination the following day.
8/2/2011
We left Cairns on the first bus and travelled all the way down to Arlie Beach as this is where our sailing trip round the Whitsunday Islands was going to start from. An early bed was had as we had been travelling all day and we wanted to be fresh for our two day sailing trip.
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