A totally laid back day, consisting of lots of sleeping, some swimming and a small amount of laundry duty! The daytime temperature is about 30 degrees and the humidity is really high, so it’s good to just relax round the pool and have a dip every now and then. A brief venture to the beach as a small flotilla of ships appeared on the horizon, then back to the Su Doku! By the way, our apartment is on the second floor between the two big palms in the photo - unfortunately, it’s behind the two smaller palms but you get the picture! So, not much happening, so perhaps this is the time for us to start ruminating on our experiences in The Land Downunder... The first thing people will tell you proudly is that Australia is ... read more

Yes folks, a day on the Great Barrier Reef - the World’s largest living ‘thing’ - and can be seen from space! A big sigh of relief when we woke up and found the promised improvement in weather had arrived just in time for our big day out on the Great Barrier Reef. The 90 minute transfer over to the Marine World platform seemed to take an eternity but we finally arrived, quickly put on our masks and flippers and were soon out in the water. Amazingly, one of the first sites was a gigantic blue fish about 3 foot by 2 foot closely followed by a scuba diver with a camera. Unfortunately, this rather unsettled Valerie, who hates having her picture taken at the best of times, and heralded a rapid return to the ... read more

When I got up at 7.00 this morning the sun was streaming into the apartment. By half past, the clouds had come over and I thought uh oh another wet day - but no! By 10.00 it was gloriously sunny and we were debating whether to try the pool or the beach first. We called in on Karen, the Manager, to organise the next few days’ and stopped to discuss Fijian curries - and came away with some of her curry spices out of her freezer ... so you can guess what I’m cooking up for tonight! I suppose we’d better come clean and confess that we’ve decided that we aren’t going to rent a car and charge up to Cape Tribulation, neither are we going to do the same, but stop at Port Douglas instead ... read more

If we do say so ourselves, a very well organised packing and cleaning morning saw us on the road to the airport on schedule (a master of planning!) I’ve got to say that planning the route to the airport was fraught with problems as we knew there was a toll road that would automatically charge us, but it didn’t appear on any of our maps. I’m still hoping that we didn’t actually drive on it without noticing!! One thing did strike me, we’ve referred to the Suffolk place names in South Australia, followed by the Irish ones in Victoria - well, amongst others, Sydney and outskirts does have a flavour of home with Woolwich, Greenwich and even Canterbury and Bexley (I’m still a Kentish girl at heart) - there are places with more exotic names and ... read more

(couldn’t resist this title - its being used on one of the radio stations to advertise an Easter sale and it did make me grin!) Woke up this morning, and looked out excitedly - most disappointed that the tent had actually lasted the whole night!! Ah well! Last night John managed to load all of our blog entries, so those of you that subscribe will feel overloaded the next time you log on, it was the excitement of getting WiFi access after a dearth of McDonalds! We were also hoping to be able to Skype, and went over early (for us) this morning to see if we could find anyone on line back in the UK, but no luck! Ah well, hopefully we’ll have access in the hotel in Cairns next week, so please do try ... read more