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Cairns
It was raining when we touched down in Cairns, and it didn't really stop for the whole week and a half that we were there! Anyway, we booked ourselves on to a boat trip the the Great Barrier Reef and hoped for better weather. The weather out at sea on the reef was a lot better than inland but the visibility was still quite poor due to the massive amounts of rain that had fallen over the last week or so. We soon donned our very sexy stinger suits (made us look like demented Smurfs) and we jumped in! I (sarah) also did a brief Padi training session and completed an Introductory Scuba dive!! It was really cool and you could see a lot more when you were 10 metres down, although the visibility wasn't great, it was lots of fun!
The next couple of days we set about trying to find a car to buy as we wanted to drive ourselves down the east coast, so we trapsed around many of Cairns streets! We didn't have much luck at first so we tried a couple of second-hand car dealerships and that's where we found something that suited what we wanted, and Frank the Ford was born! Frank is a 1990 Ford Laser (white) 1.6L - and most importantly he has air-con. So we then set about getting a load of cheap camping gear so would camp now that we have the car and we can save some pennies!! So for the price of 2 nights in a hostel for 2 people we acquired; a tent, a blow-up bed, a pump for the bed, pans, mugs, cutlery, plates, bowls, a camp stove, gas for the stove, a fold-away table/chair, 10L water, an eski, 2 more chairs etc etc! We got some great deals!! So we were all ready to set off on our road trip down the East coast ...only the roads south were closed due to flooding!
So we had Frank so we made the most of him and drove north to Cape Tribulation where we did the Daintree Rainforest walks which ended on long sandy beaches which cost just the amount of the fuel and not the advertised $175 for a day trip! To put that in to perspective too, fuel costs approximately half what it does in the UK!! We also ventured to Mossman Gorge and did another walk by the beautiful waterfall there, through more rainforest which was so green and lush due to all of the recent rainfall. It was stunning. We still couldn't get out of Cairns so we did spend quite a lot of time playing cards, reading and chatting to other travellers who were in the same boat, we also went to the cinema and did a LOT of Sudoku! It was strange at times as were complaining about all the rain and the problems it was causing and there we were, watching the Victoria bushfires start to destroy large parts of the bush there, and unfold in to the worst fires for over 25 years.
After hearing on the radio that the highway south had been re-opened we took our chance and jumped in the car...off we go (hopefully)!
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