frerix

A walk in the sand dunes of North-western Europe before we head of to the sand dunes of the Arabian peninsula. Weather is sunny, cool and windy.... read more

Today we took the Volcanic Valley Tour, a half-day trip around a number of lava tube sites. It started at 08:00 so we had an early bush breakfast with everything. The tour guide told us about the geology and geography of the landscape in the national park and surrounding areas. It turns out that the east coast of Australia is a long fault line that runs from Victoria in the south along the Great Dividing Range up to north Queensland where we are now. This part was stretched and then pushed together many tenths of million of years ago. Some eight to nine million years ago the same part got pressed together to form the mountain range and this sparked volcanic activity in many places. One of the latest volcano’s to erupt was Undara, some 200,000 ... read more

Today we leave Port Douglas for Undara and the outback bush. We packed our bags and had a last breakfast of egg, sausage, baked beans, fried tomato, and toast before we got going. We drove on a small winding road up into the highlands that lay only a few kilometres from the coast. Once up on the Atherton tablelands we headed southwest and past through Mareeba and stopped for lunch in Atherton where we also visited the Crystal Cave. It is a nice shop and display of all type of stone and crystal materials. As we continued the landscape changed and the soil got a strong red colour, the vegetation changed to a savannah type with open grassland doted with trees. The distance between houses and fuel stations got longer and it was clear that we ... read more

We have spent two days at the beach in Port Douglas. It has been very nice to just swim in the ocean and lay on the beach. The boys got a beach rugby ball and played a lot with it. They also rented a large rubber tyre and a paddleboard and had a great time with it. We ended the day at a nice fish restaurant and tried some local fish and seafood. Among other things we had bay bug, a kind of clawless crayfish, which tasted very well. Tomorrow we will go to see the Great Barrier Reef and do some snorkelling.... read more

Alarm went at 3:15, there was no traffic as we drove to the airport and only 6 degrees outside. The check in went well and we managed to score a nice cappuccino before we took off. On the plane we all fell asleep again and arrived in Cairns at 9:15 am. On our way to our resort we made a stop at a Crocodile farm/zoo. It was very impressive to see how big they get and to learn about the different types of crocks. The most fearsome is the Salty, which is not really a correct name for it since they, like all crocodiles, mainly live in fresh water. The oldest and largest at the farm was a male of about 5.7 meters. He is the third largest in the world and has no teeth ... read more