Welcome to Queenland

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Australia is so strict about quarentine! they x-ray your bags when you enter the country but not for metal but for biological stuff. They stopped me and searched my bag because they'd seen something on the machine, turned out to be a packet of soothers and mud on my shoes, which they then proceeded to claim was manure and i was like, if it was manure it would smell like manure, that's just mud, but the women still saw fit to shout across the room 'oi Sheila! yeah we've got some shit on shoes, can you hose them off for us?' which would have been really embarrising if i wasn't increadibly jet lagged.
So Cairns is HOT! but also increadibly wet half the time as ,and nobody told me this before hand, it's monsoon season and i actually flew though what was almost a cyclone.
Cairns is cool, don't know how you can call it a city when it's the size of mansfield. There's not much to do there besides go on tours elsewhere or go out and get pissed, which means it's not a great place for the man on a budget. But i still went out with the guys from my dorm, an Egyptian guy called Ahmed, a Canadian called Dave who was a real stoner but he was into the mars volta so i thought he was a dude, this welsh guy called Tom who was a great drinking buddy and a Sweedish guy called Magnus, all these guys were like 23-26 and i still havn't very mant people my age, where are all the gap year travellers?

That week i booked myself a day trip out the the reef on a sailing yacht. I had to be at the marina at 7:30 am but it would've been ok because there was a free bus leaving from the hostel at 7:10; yeah, would've been ok, if i had realised my clock on my phone was running five minutes slow. I sat there for five minutes wondering where the hell this bus was before someone told me it was 7:15 and i'd missed it! So i panicked, took off my flip flops and ran all the way to the marina (about 2 miles) in about 15 minutes, barefoot. I got there just in time but my feet were in bad shape, they got really ripped up on the pavements as i was running.
Anyway the tour was really cool, there was no wind so we had to motor sail to the reef, but the reef itself more than made up for it, it was stunning. The first thing i saw when i jumped in the water to snorkel was this huge sea turtle swimming below me, rightous (finding nemo pun there for you guys to enjoy), people who snorkel hardly ever see them and i was pretty much the only one in our group to spot him. The water itself is like 30 degrees so it's like jumping into a bath. Eventually i got rid of the snorkel and just started to dive closer to the coral; it's breath taking, every colour you can imagine, long floating soft coral, giant clams about 5 ft across and fish about 4 ft long in there hundreds. My second favourite moment, the first being the turtle, was when i dived about 10 ft down and swam through this underwater ravine between two reefs about 25 ft long and just had walls of colour and life either side of me.

The boat then took us to green island, which has this super expensive resort full of japanese people who ambush you and talk your head off about where you're from and where you're going (actually there very nice about it, you just can't get out of the conversation very easily).
On the island there was this crocodile farm and we got there just in time to see them being fed, when they snap at there food it makes a sound like slamming a door, they're terrifying, we even got to see the worlds largest croc at 18 ft, massive, he could have swollowed someone 5 time as wide as me, maybe even a whole american. We also got to see some sea turtles close up, you know they can live for up to 150 years!
i'm pretty sure Desmond from Lost was crewing our boat, he was this guy, long curly hair, Scottish, sailor, sails from australia. Sound familiar?

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Comments

[Kerry]

Knew you should've listened to us and got some sensible merrell sandals.