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Published: June 13th 2006
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Lucy, Russel and Jayne
Ready for a night out in Sydney, I worked with Russel and Jayne, Lucy is their flatmate, don't they look gorgeous?! Apart from the cold in sydney, I felt i had stood still too long and when a chance to get back on the road again came, I took it! Am travelling now with Roopa (a girl I met in Tasmania) and Eun Hye (also known as Eva, a flatmate of Roopa's in Sydney) from Cairns down the east coast. However no trip from Cairns is complete without a little trip up north to visit Cape Tribulation- we have booked an open ticket travel deal with Peter Pan adventure travel and took a 3 day, 2 night tour up there. This roughly translates into a one day tour over 3 days which gives you2days to do with as you please up in Cape Trib! Our trip happened to fall over the inaugural England world cup game and our accomodation did not have a television as it was unable to get tv reception! Disaster! Those of you who know me, know I don't really care about football until its an international competition, and then I become fiercely patriotic! So we and a few other english people staying at the Cape tribulation Beach house found our torches and followed the road through the rainforest,
Chris And Jen in Russel, Lucy and Jayne's flat
I went to uni with Jen and Chris and now they are here in Sydney, brilliant! including crossing bridges with water running over them for 45 minutes at night - now that's dedication!
On our way up to Cape Tribulation we took a cruise on the Daintree river to search for crocodiles! More specifically the saltwater or esturine crocodiles - you cannot swim in some of the rivers and lakes in this part of the world because of the risk of a crocodile attack. As you can see from the photo's, the weather was more appropriate to an anaconda movie and possibly appropriate for the task in hand too! We managed to see two and quite a few logs we almost thought were crocodiles initially! I was the first to spot the big crocodile -hee hee!We also went on a walk through the rainforest on along a boardwalk before driving onto the accomodation. It is beautiful and amazing. The rainforest only takes up 1% of Australia's land mass but is home to 60% of its indigenious species, in particular a bird called the Cassowary. According to our guide the rainforest would cease to exist almost without the cassowary as it is the only species responsible for spreading the seeds of a particular tree as the
fruit is poisonous to all other species who try to eat it and these trees make up a huge part of the rain forest root system and there is no other way to spread their seeds. Another random fact - there is a very poisonous tree in the rainforest called the stinger tree which unsuprisingly gives a very painful sting, the shock of which has been known to kill people - the national parks authority now cut these trees down if they ever see them, they only grow on the edge of the rainforest so are easy to find. Ironically the leaves of this very painful tree are the same shape as humans use to represent love, i.e. they are heart shaped.
Whilst there, we spent our time exploring the beach and the surrounding rainforest and when it was raining particularly hard just chilling out. The people who ran the Cape tribulation beach house were lovely, friendly people who went out of their way to help you so i would recommend it! Cape Tribulation was amazing and definately worth the trip!
On our return trip we visited the Daintree Ice cream factory and for $4.50 thats 1 pound
80 pence we got 4 scoops of icecream -the flavours were; mango, cinnamon, black sapote(chocolately) and wattle seed (kind of mocha flavour) these are all rainforest fruits which are obviouskly locally grown on the ice cream farm - yummy! We then visited the daintree lookout which gave us views toward port douglas accross the rainforest and ocean before our trip to mossman gorge. Mossman gorge was again, beautiful, check out the photo's and we had a quick walk around here before heading onto port douglas for a quick stop and then back to Cairns. Today we were supposed to be doing a trip to the Great Barrier Reef to go snorkelling and possibly do an introductory dive but unfortunately this was cancelled due to gale force winds! Never mind, hopefully we will manage this somewhere else down the coast. We've stayed at a couple of nice places in Cairn's -Cairn's city backpackers and Koala's beach resort, places to remember when you come to Cairns. So until next time............
Sarah xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Jen
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Jealous!
Ooooh, you're in sunny Cairns and I'm in cold, rainey Sydney flogging credit cards! May have to come and join you!! Screw Customcall!! Hope you're having loads of fun. xxx