We have been in Australia for almost three weeks at this point. We’d like to reassure our friends and family that, so far, we are still alive and speaking to each other. This despite
- Sharks on our reef dives (they were really quite small),
- Crocodiles on our river cruise (they appeared bored),
- My driving on the left (by far the biggest threat), and
- Liane navigating while I drive on the left.
We arrived in Cairns on a Thursday and promptly booked a reef dive for the following Tuesday-Friday. Then we figured we had to find a hotel for Saturday-Tuesday. ?Fortunately?, Liane remembered that we had seen another dive trip out to another reef for Saturday-Monday. We made our way back to the other shop and booked another trip immediately preceding the first one. We had a great time despite being jetlagged and, in my case, lightly seasick. I say lightly because while it didn’t feel light at the time, I was much much healthier than many of the other passengers on the boats. To be blunt, I kept lunch. I definitely wished I hadn’t eaten though. We spend a week diving the various reefs around Cairns. Names like Milln, Agincourt, Cod Hole, and Steve’s Bommie come to mind. Overall, I’d say the fish and non-coral wildlife was a bit more limited than we are used to on our other dive sites (e.g. Mexico or St. Lucia) but the coral and sponges were incredible. Some of the scenes looked like they had to be from another planet due to the variety of unfamiliar shapes.
Due to various minor issues we didn’t get many underwater pictures and the ones we got were not well colour balanced. However, here are a few more.
Liane trying to fly.
Me on my way back up to the boat.
After diving we spent a few days in Cairns itself. Mainly sleeping, swimming in the pool and eating at nice restaurants. The main goal of this part of the trip was to recover from the hectic dive schedule. You know you have a problem when the walls of the hotel room are still rocking with the wave motion. We did take a side trip to Kuranda which is a local rainforest area. It was a large tourist trap but the cable car ride down had a great view of the canopy of the rainforest and the ways plants manage to reach the canopy and sunlight. Some vines climb up other trees, some have their seeds germinate at the top and then send out “roots” to reach the ground, while other establish their entire existence at the top of existing trees. We rented a car (the agent called it a “silver bullet” – a very optimistic evaluation of its top speed) and headed out to the wilder rainforest to the north. We spent a couple of days up in Port Douglas and Daintree. One of the highlights of this portion of the trip was a river cruise with a couple of crocodiles like this one.
We then spent three days at Kewarra Beach, which is a resort area just north of Cairns. Unfortunately, at this point coastal northern Queensland decided to offer us copious amounts of evidence of why it was called RAINforest. Even the locals were complaining (although the few we saw in sweaters and heavier coats had taken it a bit far). We cowered on the resort and caught up on our travel planning during the deluges. Not many pictures of that portion of our trip. We decided to flee the rain inland and headed up to the plateau areas 30km behind Cairns, The Atherton Tablelands, in a futile effort to locate sun. Instead we came across a couple of platypus – evidently they like the rain, and several waterfalls, which will surely be enhanced by the rain.
Today we came down from the hills, after consulting the Aussie government meteorological service, and arrived at Mission Beach. Liane went in to book a room for the night while I read email in the car (the iPad is working out very well down here – sorry BlackBerry). She came back out and informed me “I fell in love with the place” so we will be at Mission Beach for the next three days.
That is all for now, keep safe and let us know how you are doing.