We're in Australia!

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Our 10 weeks in Asia was up and it was on to Australia. Cairns was our first destination, right up in the north east of Queensland and after 15 hours we touched down, bellies filled with Airplane food and free drink and more than ready to go. Our first port of call was the hostel to check in and refresh ourselves. The place was the cheapest we could find, it was called Asylum and all of the people in it called Inmates! Besides the name it was an awesome place, couldn't of asked for a friendlier starting point and they even threw in a free breakfast and tea!

Cairns itself doesn't have much in it other than a lagoon and a promenade but we didn't plan to spend long here. We gave the town a once over covering 75%!o(MISSING)f it in an hour.It is more of a central point from which you can do various adrenaline fuelled activities like skydiving and white water rafting and that was the main reason why people come up here. So we headed for our free tea which we could upgrade for $5 to almost anything on the menu, which we did and savoured every moment of our first proper western meal in 2 1/2 months. We got back to the hostel to be met by one of the long stayers fire twirling in the garden. This was the night we learnt of Goon, the Australian version of Lambrini, 10%!i(MISSING)n strength and 5 litres in volume for an amazing price of $11. It tastes like sweet wine which is the best way to describe it, however the ingredients mentions eggs and fish eggs so its anyone's bet at what really goes into it. They couldn't have been a better set of people in the hostel, and like the say, it soon becomes home.

The second day was an 'sort out what we are doing in Australia day' which wasn't half successful. At the start of the day we had a vague guess of what we were going to do but by the end we were ready for the next 6 weeks. We'd booked a Frazier island trip, 8 nights accommodation for Xmas and New Year, got our Greyhound bus ticket and even managed to hire ourselves a car out to take us up to Cape Tribulation. This deserved a 'few' drinks in the evening!

For the majority of the day we were in a daze. We had gone from living off £30 a day between the 2 of us in Thailand to 5 times that amount in Australia. When people say 'Australia is expensive' and you think 'yeah it will be but it can't be that bad' you are wrong. A bottle of water at home costs maybe £2 max, here they can be $7-9 for a 1 1/2L bottle and $3 for a Mars bar. It's twice if not 3 times more expensive here for something's. But we have been at Uni 3 years and know how to live on the cheap, back to the beans and super noodles it is.

Anyway, we had hired out a car, a Hyundai Getz for $50 a day and able to run off the fumes of petrol alone. It's not a good looking car or able to go from 0 - 60mph in..... a long time, but it will get us to Cape Tribulation and back. It's just over 150km to get there and with stop offs took us 4 hours. The drive there was amazing, winding alone the coastline until we met the Daintree river, where we got a ferry across, and drove into a dense and huge rainforest just like on Jurassic park. We had a stop on the way to check out the Mossman gorge, a big rocky river bed where you could go for a swim. We were too hungry though by the time we had walked to it to go in and opted for the get to the car as fast as we can option to get some lunch. We'd stopped a few other times on the way to try and spot ourselves a crocodile because this was the place where we best had a chance to see one. We think we saw one but can't say for sure, we saw a huge splash in the river followed by some pretty quick meandering movements upstream, the only thing was it didn't surface! That was our only possible sighting in the whole trip and we spent about 4/5 hours looking for them over 3 days.

Cape Tribulation is the place where the rainforest meets the ocean and it looks incredible. The beaches are miles long and the sea, although you can't go in it, and look awesome. It's an incredible place.

Because we had paid money for the car we thought we would make the most of it and sleep in it otherwise we would have to pay more for a dorm room. It's not a big car at all, probably a bit smaller than a Corsa and with the seats fully reclined and pushed back made a decent sized bed. We didn't dare on the first night to sleep with the window down because of all the bugs, spiders etc... so had them wound right up. Needless to say in the middle of the night I woke up a sweaty mess, gasping for air and a fan. The rest of the night continued the same way.

Our second day in Daintree we spent exploring parts of the rainforest, looking for crocodiles, swimming in the rivers whilst looking for crocodiles and driving around the area looking for crocodiles. We might not have seen a croc but we saw a shed load of other things, monitor lizards on the beach, massive spiders that made the one in Thailand look small, and a cassowary, a bird the size of big bird with a multi coloured head and a horn! Besides seeing animals we'd also eaten a whole range of them too at dinner. We got a multi burger platter with the patties made up of crocodile, kangaroo and emu and all of them tasted as good as beef.

Night two in the car was much more successful, we had engineered a method of winding the window down and keeping out the bugs with a towel. The air could get in and out but the bugs couldn't get in. Genius. We even got slightly cold that night so next time we sleep in a car we know exactly how to moderate the heat without using aircon.

The final day with the car we took a big detour on the way back to Cairns via Kuranda and the Granite Gorge. The granite gorge housed a gulley way of huge granite rocks with loads of wallabies on them which you could feed with nuts to! Which we did, for a long time! And then we stopped at Barron falls just outside Cairns, although they were slightly dried out, the water fell over a hundred meters to the bottom. It was by far the biggest waterfall we have seen. And that was it. The next news we were back in Cairns, home at Asylum, eating our free food and getting ready for a 7am bus down to Mission beach.

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