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Published: November 27th 2010
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The first part of our travels begins in Cairns and if the first two tours we’ve done are anything to go by I’m not planning on stopping any time soon!! I want to carry on travelling – non-stop!!
Landing in Cairns and getting to our hostel was eventful for 1am in the morning. First we find the place closed and locked and no night staff in sight. No one is picking up the phone so we thought we’d try another hostel next door and they were both fully booked. Eventually, we get hold of our night staff only to find that they have given our room away to someone else and we end up sharing a top bunk in a shared dorm with a young blond Scandinavian mother and her two little sons. Come morning a very nice manager defused the whole thing and we got a room but we didn’t extend our stay with them and moved next door to a much better motel for the remainder of our time in Cairns.
Cairns is a beautiful town. We loved Melbourne and its relaxed feel, Cairns is relaxed to a completely different level. Does anyone in Australia rush or
get in frenzy about anything?!? Take the hype away from the backpackers in this essentially picturesque town and you could mistake the slow pace for time standing still. The big hype of activity though is between 7-9pm at Woolworths (the local supermarket); the local tour operators and backpackers stocking up on food supplies for the next day. Food leaves the shelves like they’re all in supermarket sweep and Dale Winton is waiting at the end!
Cairns is an ideal hub, there is a huge amount to do around here. You can use it as a central point to do so many tours and activities around the area. They really push skydiving – apparently the best palace to do it, more so than Mission Beach – the other place that pushes it a lot. Cape Tribulation is a must – one of the tours we did. It is also the best place to do the Barrier Reef trips from. The Barrier Reef is only a half hour to an hour trip from Cairns and as you move down the East Coast the barrier is further away from the coast (up to 8 hours!).
So our first tour from Cairns
was to Cape Tribulation in the Daintree Rainforest where the ocean meets the rainforest. It’s an amazing place older than the Amazon we got told. The first rainforest I’ve ever been to and something I don’t think I’ll be forgetting. The overnight trip started at 07.30 with our driver, Bill – from the US – doing the rounds of the hostels to pick everyone up. Although not a “home breed” he was obviously well rehearsed in the educational guide – and he pulled it off really well. The free cup of Daintree Forest grown tea was the best cup of tea I’ve had in… I think ever! Then came the rainforest itself – an amazing and intriguing place. It’s everything I thought it would be and more. It is so true though that if you wonder of the track even slightly and turn around it is unlikely you’ll find your way back. For that reason they’ve fitted a tourist friendly track which gives the experience a slightly commercial and un-natural feel; however you spend so much of your time looking up and around you, you forget about that.
Accommodation comprised a bungalow in the forest. We are talking back
to basics – Poonam even agreed to fall a sleep even after seeing a lizard scoot from somewhere and then disappear somewhere in the room! However, there isn’t much to do overnight. There is a beach which at this time of the year is quiet and it’s where the beach meets rainforest. What that means is that you can potentially see wild animals on the beach – oh yes we did!!! We saw a Goanna which is a large lizard like thing about 3 foot long and thankfully short sighted (yes just like me!) but dangerous if provoked. It was sitting chilling and sun-bathing on the beach – wait to see the photo!
A must do if you stay the night is the Rainforest Night Tour; a two hour walk through the rainforest at night. I convinced Poonam into doing it and initially she was hesitant (more precisely bricking it!) but really got into it when we got out there. We got picked up by Dick – who has a house on the rainforest land – at 19.30 in the pouring rain and drove about ten minutes to his track. We drove into the heart of the forest and
Dick switches of the headlights and you are in pitch black – we’re talking Blair Witch Project and Poltergeist stuff here! He handed us our high spec torch and off we went for a trek in the rainforest. The rain put a damper on the walk – literally – however we still managed to see some amazingly BIG spiders which I spotted (no idea how that happened considering my eye sight is so poor!). We saw luminous green frogs, spiders of varying sizes and lethal, crickets, creepy crawlies and loads more. We must have walked, maybe even brushed past, sleepy snakes and god knows what else! It’s funny – I was expecting a hype of activity on the floor of the forest, and it wasn’t. National Geographic obviously crams weeks of filming into a short period of time to make it look like it’s all real time. Luckily we took the trip with Dick. If we had gone with another guy we would have ended up getting lost in the rainforest for 5 hours not returning home til 1am as we heard in the morning what had happened to a couple of German girls! Poor girls wanted to leave
the country!
The next day our trip home – this time our guide/drive was a boy racer from Liverpool, so a bumpy ride to say the least. Still, we went through Mossman Gorge, a spectacular place you think only exists in the movies, Imagine the scene, friends take a summer road trip to the gorge and they are chilling with beers, food and jumping off rocks into the clear water surrounded by lush green forest and enjoying every moment of it! Well it exists and I’d call it Mossman Gorge. We then moved on to the celebrity town of Port Douglas; again a pleasant town in the half hour we had to walk down one street and back on to the bus!
We got back to Cairns and we were straight into organising ourselves for the next tour the next day. When we finally stopped and got to our room, we were knocked out.
That brings us to today and our trip with Barefoot Tours. If you are in Cairns you HAVE TO, HAVE TO do this tour. Captain Matty your guide/drive picks you up for a day of visits to five waterfalls and a load of other stuff.
The whole day was so, so laid back – he’s a one man band and it shows in the way he runs the tour; no watch, no school teacher check ups you’re not doing what you been asked not to; no strict time line, so if you get somewhere and we’re enjoying it – we stay! I guess if you like structure and want precise timing and organisation, its not for you but you WILL miss out on the fun!
I can’t put in words the scenes we saw. We went to a place called the Atherton Tablelands and to 5 waterfalls – the best one called Mila Mila Falls. They are truly the scenes you see in the Herbal Essence adverts with those girls washing their hair under the waterfalls. Apparently Peter Andre shot his song Mysterious Girl there. Anyway, in a very lame attempt to make you guys jealous words that come to mind are “wow”, awesome, breath taking, “wow”, I made a dream come true by standing directly under a waterfall, “wow”… I’ll let the picture tell the rest of the story!
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