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Rain in the rainforest during the rainy season?? surely not...
After our last greyhound bus (sob sob!) to cairns we made our way to our hostel in cairns - Gilligans! well actually it is more of a resort than a hostel, with a club, swimming pool, beauty salon - jo and i felt very at home! we didn't get to cairns till the evening so we just had some food and got our bag packed for a couple of days in the rainforest. We had booked 2 nights at a random hostel in the middle of the rainforest with a few extras thrown in. With a nice early pick up at 7.30am we climbed aboard the bus to be greeted with a rather energetic bunch of people which were all really cool and we looked forward to the activities ahead. Already Jo and I had been named as trouble, don't know why?! but hey we rolled with it and travelled up to our first pit stop - a croc. farm/river...an over enthusiastic guide who gave jo and i prime seating on the boat took us up and down the river searching for crocs...personally, we think 'scarface' just sits there all the time and is not that much in the wild - any hoot - we took into consideration as requested by the guide the size of it...and when someone shouted "oh its moving..." the guide replied "no its not that's just the motion of the water"...we thought great another non-moving croc...welcome once again the repeat at australia zoo!! Again jo and i wanted to throw something at it - only thing we had were cups of tea and as we were quite enjoying our cups of tea- we opted not!
anyway after that we carried on up to the rainforest and then our bus driver (possibly the worst guide in the world as he could not remember anything!!) took us on a kind of informative walk through the rainforest...interesting and amazing to see - apparently its one of the oldest in the world about 350 million years - (don't know whose counting though!!)
We rocked up to our hostel about lunchtime and checked into our dorm / or tin shack shall we say - lets just say furnishings were not one of the hostels plus points!! it was fine though, we made it what is was and just had a good time! A guy that was in our room at gilligans ended up to be doing the same trip as us and ended up in our dorm which was cool! we worked out that we had actaully done the exact same route and have paths have crossed so closely that we have just basically missed eachother. we were in the same mini bus in brisbane! Anyway the bugs were disgusting and being greeted by a spider the size of your hand is one thing i'm looking forward to not experiencing again! The rest of the day we spent the day at the watering hole (that's a lake by the way not a pub) swinging ourselves off ropes and throwing ourselves in from trees - good fun!!
That evening it decided to rain A LOT!! think of rain, think of some more and times that by about a million and your nearly there - stupid amounts which just bought out a very vocal group of animals making noises all night - ohh don't you just love nature?!
The next day we went fruit tasting - trying all these random fruits, one of them was a bread fruit and when you roast it and season it - it tastes just like chips! we were in our element and jo and i went back for thirds! Thought about asking for mayo but thought that was going a bit far! The fruit was gorgeous and we tried 10 different types, well Jo only tried nine, till she found a bug in her bit and suddenly felt full - couldnt eat a thing! poor girl, i on the other hand found it pretty funny!! The rest of the day was spent walking in bin bags to cover ourselves from the rain - we designed them ourselves!! we looked goooddd!!
That evening we decided to relax, well i fell asleep for hald an hour to recharge the batteries while jo caught u on her journal - with not much to do we spent ages cooking our dinner then Greg our roomy, did a dash for choclate timtams and demoilshed them with a cup of tea! the evening programme was based around an ipod singing songs from musicals and a few old favourites, such a funny night!
On our last day we had booked a morning doing jungle surfing - basically your harnessed up and you go over the tree tops on a zip line- we were given names on our helmets so they can call us when they needed us - so please let me introduce to you for the morning - Paris Hilton aka Paz (Jo!!) and me...Stifler's mum. It was so funny being thrown down the zip line really fast then randomly stopped in the middle so you can take photos from the canopy - about 80 metres think we can remember....the last one we did, we did upside down which was loads and loads of fun!!
we headed back to cairns that day and checked back into our 'resort'?! we had ANOTHER early start as we were were diving the next day - so we took the time to make our clothes smell sweeter...washing - oh yeah!
brings me to where we are now.Basically from Fraser Island i've been showing Jo a diving day that we could do and admittedly the food was the extra bonus but it looked like loads of fun and as our day dive thing in cape trib. had been cancelled we decided to do it - the day was fantastic! and the food was too!! we all had to fill out our forms, me who is PADI qualified had to do a small test to see what i could remember, PRESSURE!! 10 questions and it took me a while but i got 10 out of 10 so quite pleased with that! Jo hadn't done any diving before but she was going to do a test one to see if she liked it. When we were getting all put into groups for one reason or another, i got informed that out of 60 people on the boat i was the only qualified diver! awesome!! so basically it was me and one instructor, Manuelle to take to the barrier reef and explore as much as we liked!! It was incredible, and the more i think about it - i was so lucky that i was just me! we went so far and my first dive lasted 55minutes! went down to 15 metres and saw things such as sting rays, nemos, sea cucumbers and loads of other crazy stuff that i cant quite remember! Upon getting back to the boat - Jo had done her first dive and had also done her introductory dive!! she was so pleased that she did it and loved it!! basically she did a 10min experience dive, then when the diver asked if she was going to do the introductory she was umming and arrhhing and then he just said too late...your coming down!!! sounded pretty funny!! she also saw loads of cool things too and now wants to do her PADI!! we both had an awesome time and that built our appetite! (p.s food was yummy!!!) after lunch i went and did a second dive - which entailed just walking off the back of the boat while it was still moving and 'just keep swimming!!! so much fun - again so lucky, poor Manuelle think he had his hands full i was just away with the fairies amazed by the reef - Jo went snorkelling this time but unfortunately the water was a bit rough so she came back to the boast and basked in the sunshine! Had an awesome day and the crew were really cool, bit tired now and in a desperate need of a shower to de-salt ourselves!!!
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