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Published: March 7th 2010
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Armed with my new weapon against the world, my friend Helen who is from Wales, but sounds like a scouser, we flew from a very wet and humid Darwin to a very hot Cairns. This was to be the starting point of my east coast trip. I guessed that everyone who does the east coast would be about 10 years younger than me, but on the flipside that meant all the girls would be 18/19, so with every silver cloud... right.. Helen is only a year younger than me too so I wasn’t going to be the oldest by much. Our hostel in Cairns offered us a free airport pickup service. A nice shiny BMW X5 greeted Helen and myself at Cairn domestic terminal, which was a good way to start our trip. The transportation could only go downhill from this point. The hostel was also full, so they upgraded Helen and myself from a penny pinching dorm room to a twin room. The man upstairs was either being very nice to me, or my welsh scouse lucky charm was working. Our flight was 70 minutes delayed, which at 5.05am, it is something that peeve most people off. This duly got
blamed on Helen as she booked the flight.
After breakfast and a shower we headed into Cairns to organise our itinerary because my time on the east coast was limited. Within the hour, we had stopped off at Peter Pan’s Travel in Cairns and had booked out Greyhound bus tickets, self drive trip on Fraser Island and our Whitsundays boat trip. Everything was organised and we knew exactly what time we had in each place. Before we headed south we arranged a trip to go north to visit Port Douglas and Cape Tribulation. We decided to hire a car as it worked out the same to go via public transport and meant we could go at our own pace.
The next day I picked up the hire car, we packed up and heading north. The drive to Cape Trib would take about 2.5 hours, and we would stop off at Port Douglas on our way back. Cape Tribulation is located with the Daintree National Park. It was named Cape tribulation by Lt. James Cook on 10th June 1770 after his ship, the Endeavour hit a reef as it passed over the cape. The drive up to Cape Trib
is like that of the Great Ocean Road. The road leads north alongside the ocean and if the sun is out the drive is just as good as Cape Trib itself. No mobile phones work in the area, which sounds strange in this age, but when you were the last thing you wanted to do was speak to someone on a phone. We stayed at the Ferntree lodge which comprised of hotel rooms and dorm rooms. For the penny pinching backpacker, they offered rooms for $28 a night, which meant you could use all the hotel facilities as well.
After we had unpacked the car and checked in we headed down to the beach and took a walk. The sun threatened to shine towards the end of the day. The views here are spectacular as the ocean meets the beach and the beach meets the rainforest. After some sightseeing we headed back to Ferntree to head down to the bar for the evening. At the bat we met two girls, Carlina and Louise, so we swapped travelled stories of some drinks. They had both lived in Oz for a year and were doing some travelling before then headed back
to the UK. We met up with them again in Byron Bay and Cairns. Just was we finished our last drinks and were about to call it a night, we spotted a giant female orb spider not far from where we had been drinking. This spider was huge and the web it had built was just even bigger. There were two ways back to the room, one, not lit and 20 second shorter, or the way we came, which was lit and you could see where you were going or what you were stepping on. This is very important when you are somewhere like the rainforest when you don’t know what is lurking around the corner. It wasn’t spiders or snakes that I was concerned about, it was cane toads. Cane toads are a pest in Australia. They were introduced to take care of the cane beetle problem in Oz, but since have bred to a point where these animals are a pest. People actually go out and collect these toads, freeze them and then use them as golf balls on driving ranges, I kid you not. On the way down to the bar, there were hundreds of them just
sat on the walkway, and it didn’t matter if you were going to step on them, they wouldn’t move. Helen wanted to take the quicker route, whilst I was happy to be able to see where I was stepping so I took the lit, slightly longer route. I gave Helen about 10 seconds until she started screaming that things were around her feet and she couldn’t see what they were before she came the way I was walking.
We drove back to Cairns the next morning, stopping at Port Douglas for an hour to look around. Port Douglas is a nice town, but an hour is plenty of time to look around and then head back on the road. In my eight years of driving, I have never picked up a speeding ticket, or been fined, until I found out about 1 week ago when my mum emailed me to say that I had been given a $200 fine for speeding in Cairns. I was photographed doing 70kph in a 60kph zone. To say I was a little bit pissed off was an understatement. I have until March 17th to pay this fine, which I can appeal. I think
a letter will be compiled saying that I think they have made a dreadful error and that I could not have possibly been speeding. If anyone has got any good stories they think I can use then let me know because for going 5mph too quick on a dual carriageway in the middle on Cairns is a bit harsh. I could understand if I was speeding outside a school or somewhere hedgehogs crossed the road.
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