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Hope you are all well.
It's goodbye from Australia....
Sadly we are leaving Cairns today.... to go to Bali in a HOTEL! Not a tent or a sleeping bag in sight....
Since our last blog, we have been to Townsville, a gorgeous and smart city where we visited the beautiful peaceful Magnetic Island, which is on the shot on the postcard. In Townsville of all places we met a guy called Sol originally from Strombi, which is just down the road from where we live in Cyprus, it's a small world really!
It was very very hot in Townsville, but it 's the driest place in North Queensland, and it is winter, we just don't know how people can stand it in summer, the humidy is also over 90%. Had we known what was coming next, we might have stayed longer....we moved onto Mission Beach, a dreamy palm tree lined paradise, where we picked up lovely coconuts just off the beach. However the following day we have a massive tropical downpour due to the tail end of a cyclone that has been brewing up somewhere north of here. We had 18 cms of rain in one day, so it was abandon tent! abandon tent! This is the first time that rain has stopped play. Thankfully, this happened in the afternoon and between storms we managed to get to the dry in a little cabin on the campsite (complete with colour TV, we had almost forgotten what TV looked like) it then poured with rain for 4 days. Thankfully also we met a great family there, who entertained us well, Ali and Mark , with kids Jazzy and Jackson and we had a great laugh. Mark took Gary fishing and mudcrabbing in his boat ( I though I'd pass on that one, those of you who know me well know that boats and rivers and me just don't gel...) and they went off on a great adventure which included sighting a 14ft crocodile just down the bank. They caught several 'muddies' as they call them here and we ate them for dinner! Talk about fresh seafood! I managed to catch up on my usual 'action' pursuits, washing, reading, SUNBATHING and two episodes of the new Desperate Housewives series... I am easily pleased.
The Manager of the campsite took a fancy to our car and made an offer that suited us, so we sold the car and then took the bus to Cairns. This has cut our time in Australia short by 2 weeks, however has saved hassle of selling it, so we were lucky. So we are now car less and home(tent)less! Bye bye tent, sad really not to have said goodbye in better circumstances after over 5 months. Would we do it again? Well never say never we say. We have seen some amazing sights and met some fantastic people on the campsites. It just wouldn't have been the same.
So here we are in Cairns. Gary has been diving on the Great Barrier Reef and also we have been to Kurranda in the Mountains on a train and got the scenic cable car ride over the roof of the rainforest back down again, another unforgettable sight and a hundred more pictures....
But Bali here we come, a tropical beach and shopping paradise, hmmm sounds just like my sort of place. Gary is good at carrying bags and he has had a lot of training in the last 6 months... which will come in mighty handy as I have been saving myself for this ....
So hopefully we can report back in Bali on what is the final month of our big tour, it seems to have gone so quickly....
Love from Dee and Gary XXXXX
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