Cairns

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16/2

We got up and checked our of our hotel, then walked to the sky bus to get to the airport. We hadn't walked with our rucksacks for a while, it was got work, but luckily it wasn't too far to walk. It took about half an hour to get to the airport, and we checked in for our flight, and had a McDonald's for our lunch. (McDonald's monopoly in Oz, yay!).our flight went fine, but it was quite long. We arrived in Cairns and got a taxi to our hotel, which wasn't too far away. We checked in with the lovely, camp manager at our hotel, and he gave us lots of good information about different tours we could do in our 2 days in Cairns. We dumped our stuff in our room and went back to reception to book our tours, going with the recommendations of Martin. We managed to do some washing using the machines at the hotel, after a little wait- they were popular! There was a Vietnamese restaurant on site, so we ordered a take out from there to have in our room and watch the Lion King on TV! There was actually a bath in our bathroom, which made a change, so I decided to have a bath but the water ran so slowly, I only made it to about 4 inches of water before giving up! Not quite the relaxing soak I imagined!!

17/2

We had to be up early today for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef. We booked on a trip on a boat called 'Passions of Paradise'. It cost us $149 each for our trip, about £100. We got up at 6.30 and left the hotel at 7am to get to the check in area for 7.30. On the way we heard a lot of screeching, which we thought were birds, but turned out to be giant bats- horrible- one of my least favourite animals. They were huge, about the size of a buzzard, and some were flying, they made my skin crawl, there were so many of them just hanging in the trees upside down- yuck. We made it to the reception area and checked in for our trip, then headed to the boat to board. We filled in our safety forms and got a cup of tea and some mini-muffins for our breakfast. We were soon on our way and had our safety briefing- most people on the boat were sat on the top deck, sunbathing- like us! We headed out towards Michaelmas Cay for our for our first stop. It was a little sand island protruding out of the sea. We put on our stinger suits as it was jellyfish season, and put on our snorkels and fins and jumped into the ocean, right over the Great Barrier Reef. The sight was like nothing I've ever seen before, completely amazing. The colours of the coral were outstanding; purples, greens, oranges, fluorescent, just shining out up at us. We saw giant clams, moving, some big enough to be able to get in! Just the coral alone would have been enough of a sight, but then there were the fish- every colour of the rainbow. Small ones, big ones, one about half the size of us. It was just phenomenal. It was like being in Finding Nemo! The colours were just fantastic, we couldn't take it all in. We even saw a spotted ray on the ocean floor, which I tried to dive down and take a picture of, but managed to choke in the process, which wasn't fun. This is one of the best sights I have ever seen in my life. After a while of following fish and exploring lots of different bits of coral, we swum back to the boat and clambered on board. We all had lunch next, which was a lovely buffet of hot and cold food and salads etc. After lunch we had another snorkel in a different area, right in the middle of the ocean. The coral was. a lot deeper here, so it wasn't so easy to see so many fish and colours, though there were still a lot of fish swimming around. I dived down quite a few times for a closer look of lots of fish, including some clownfish (Nemo). We headed back to the boat, tired but very happy. We headed back into Cairns on the boat, we had the best day and would love to come again one day, with good underwater cameras and maybe dive too, it was incredible. We walked back to the hotel and showered, then headed out for dinner in the town. We had a lovely burger and a koppaberg cider, which was a mistake, as, with the feeling of still being on the boat, and a tiring day, it made us extremely sleepy. We headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep!

18/2

Today we had booked a trip to the rainforest. We had to check out of our hotel before going on our trip, so we left our luggage and got picked up from our hotel for the trip at 8.45. We stopped at a few other hotels to pick people up, then we were taken to the train station to take the Kuranda scenic railway, which would take us to the village Kuranda, in the rainforest. The train took almost 2 hours, and was very slow and hot, and we had assigned seats for the group, which were just bench style seats facing each other. It wasn't very comfortable and with the heat, it wasn't the best journey, and I got very sleepy and found it hard to concentrate. The train stopped briefly at Baron Falls, where we all got out and had a good view of the waterfall. It was good to get off the train for a bit too. Then we chugged on to Kuranda. We had around 3 hours to spend in Kuranda to wander round and explore at our leisure. There was shops and little markets,- though one wasn't really open-some cafes and restaurants. There were a couple of wildlife parks, but we didn't go in any of them. It was a little disappointing on the whole, and we had been expecting a bit more, it was just made for tourists really, and didn't have any history as I had expected. We had lunch in a restaurant that over looked the rainforest, then had a wander around another market where we bought a few little bits. We got the cable car back down, which our trip included. We really enjoyed this part, the views were absolutely stunning, looking over the rainforest canopy and seeing the different trees and some birds. We made 2 stops on the way down, and had a little walk around a bit of the rainforest and saw the other side of the waterfall and stopped to take some photos. The noises coming from the rainforest were great, you could hear all the wildlife. The cable car ride took about 45 minutes in total to get to the bottom (plus the stops), and we had all our gondolas to ourselves which was nice. We got to the bottom station and had a look around the shop there. We got collected by the tour bus and taken back into the town. As we didn't need to go to our hotel, we asked to get out closer to the town so we could have a look around. We found the bus stop that we needed for our bus tonight- our first Greyhound experience, then went to look around the night markets, where we bought a couple of bits. We then walked back to our hotel and had a drink in the restaurant there. We killed a bit of time, then collected our luggage and walked into town. We found a fish and chip restaurant that was showing My Kitchen Rules, so we sat down and had some dinner and watched that. We then wandered around, trying to kill time until our bus which wasn't until midnight. Yawn! We somehow managed to fill the time and then headed to the bus stop to wait for our overnight bus.

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