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Published: January 6th 2009
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We strolled off the plane bleary eyed at Brisbane International Airport to greetings of "G'Day, Welcome to Australia: Home of the Convicts" (just kidding, it didn't mention the convicts). With six hours to kill before our connecting flight we found some food and then the best leather sofa in the airport and curled up for an hour's sleep. That was the plan but we didn't really wake up until about two hours before our next flight! When I politely asked the closest check in attendant where we catch our Virgin Blue flight to Cairns, he replied "Well the first mistake you've made is flying with Virgin Blue". That's very helpful. Luckily for him, the second mistake I made was not letting Lizzie undo all the good work at her anger management classes, and his smarmy greasy, permatanned face remained intact. Unfortunately, we did find out from that very helpful gentleman that our flight was actually from another airport, the domestic airport. Whoops! We kind of rushed towards the train station to see that there was a train in a minute, so we thought they were fairly regular, but turns out they were every half an hour so Lizzie was unable to
rest easy, especially as we had no idea how far it was! She was about ready to throttle me as I kept repeating "We'll be alright! Relax, chill out!". Like I said, her anger management is going well.
We caught our flight with minimal fuss in the end and after finally arriving at our hostel in Cairns we searched for some comfort food so we could have a break from the rice, sticky rice and noodles our entire diet had consisted of for the past two months. A few bars and restaurants were out of our price range but we managed to find a food court full of chinese food! Luckily a health bar tucked amongst them dished up fish, chips and potato fritters. Perfect! We sought out a supermarket so we could fulfill our month long dream of a typical aussie BBQ and bought some kangaroo steaks to celebrate our arrival down under! In Cairns itself there's a lagoon by the sea where the locals all go to chill out and sunbathe so we made use of the free pool and 35degree heat, especially as we'd heard it had been snowing at home! Walking through the town was
also really surreal, with the huge christmas tree littered with gold and silver painted flip flops and snorkel masks as well as the Wizzard and Slade timeless Christmas classics being played in the shops!
Cairns is one of the places along the east coast where there are a huge number of tours over to the great barrier reef! This was where Finding Nemo was filmed and diving the reef was on our to do list, so we arranged a day trip on a sailing boat over to Green Island, where our boat was the only one with a permit to dive that location. We didn't want to go somewhere full of other dive boats so this was perfect and despite breaking down about 10minutes out of the harbour, we were at the Pinnacle Reef, just off the Island in no time. We'd hired a camera for the dives, which we took down on the first dive and saw the famous colours of the coral, although it wasn't as condensed as we'd expected. We also saw a huge amount of fish including puffer fish, flute fish, schools of thousands of small fish as well as a huge black ugly fish
about a metre long that the crew called Darth Vader, who turned up every day when they stopped for lunch! After our first dive we jumped back into the water for some snorkelling just as a Reef Shark was having a look around a few metres below us so we managed to get a good look at that. Not quite on an adrenaline level as in Cape Town but still good! On Green Island itself there was a crocodile farm that housed a croc called Cassius, the largest in captivity in the world at 5.5metres. Unfortunately, he was under the green water and all we saw was his nose! That was fairly big, but after looking at my nose for the past six years, Lizzie wasn't impressed. Luckily the trip to the croc farm was made worthwhile by the aboriginal carvings and ornaments, which seemed to be very fond of displaying private parts.
Our second dive after lunch was even better and we were much more comfortable in the water, probably because we didn't have the camera with us to lark around with! There were so many more fish and swimming through a shoal of thousands of fish so
Ian, stay close
Bobbing around uncontrollably again that everywhere you look they surround you was amazing. Our trip back to shore was a little bit rocky and it was my turn to feel a bit queasy, which was made all the more worse by a huge plate of devil food (cheese) being passed back and forth under my nose. Luckily my lunch stayed down while Lizzie enjoyed her cheese and wine on this beautiful sailing vessel! Our divemaster was actually from Derby but had escaped about four years ago. Can't blame him to be fair!!!
Mission beach was next on the trip as we'd heard good things about it. It was a nice place with a great beach that stretched for miles, unfortunately there was nothing really there! We stayed at a hostel in Wongaling with a drive through bottle shop (off license) opposite which I duly visited on my bicycle! We'd hired the bikes to go to the main town of Mission Beach, which wasn't far in Australian terms, but wasn't exactly down the road either!!! So we were knackered!!! We watched the sky divers come down onto the beach, many of them from our hostel and we were tempted to join them but had
to stand firm and save it for New Zealand! Our best part was probably seeing all the wallabies jumping around near the car park of Woolworths (hasn't gone bust over here!). We spent a few days just chilling out around the pool at the hostel before catching the bus to Townsville for our ferry to Magnetic Island.
"Maggie Island" (getting down with the lingo now. Crikey!) was a small island where we just chilled out again for a couple of days, not really much else to do but get battered at the hostel, but as our budget didn't extend to that we just relaxed and watched the guys in the pool learning to scuba and criticizing the instructors! The dorms were like portakabins full of Germans called Agnes and Israelis that looked like Javier Mascherano! The air con was, what's the word, crap, and we were awake stuck to the university style plastic mattresses until about 5am when it cooled down a bit. On our last day we hired scooters to explore the island and went in search of the wild koala found near Horseshoe Bay and weren't disappointed as we got about a metre away from a mother
and baby sleeping in a tree! Aaaaaaaaah! We managed to stay clear of the adders and also found some rock wallabies at Nelly Bay. The best bit were our scooters (boy blue and gay pink, I had the blue one) which went about 15km/h! It was great to get out and about though, instead of wallowing in our own sweat by the pool! Not much else happened that's worthy of writing about to be honest, we just chilled out for a few days before getting ready to hit Airlie Beach and the sailing trip around the Whiitsundays!
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