Day 30: Heading up to Port Douglas

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Today was the day of decisions! Firstly we booked ourselves a car for the next 10 days, to take us down to Brisbane. After some serious calculations versus the Greyhound, it works out cheaper to hire a car (when there are two of you). We then headed to reef information to book ourselves a trip aboard the boat Tusa 6 on Thursday with 3 SCUBA dives on the Great Barrier Reef. Having picked up our Hyundai i20 (Vernon, he's quite a bit bigger than you are, so I won't be making the switch once I get home!) we headed up north to Port Douglas. This is a pretty little town with a 4-mile beach, unfortunately the box jelly fish mean that you have to swim in a 'stinger net' which is about 40 metres wide, not 4-miles! Our strict budget control for Australia (to allow us to do all the activities we've got our eye on) means that we are now supermarket sweepers. A $5 falafel and humous wrap lunch and $7 BBQ pork stir-fry dinner between us was a good start - althouhg it does mean our cooking skills are put to the test!

Bailey's bit:

The lagoon was very busy in the morning but was nice to enjoy the early morning sun before we headed to Port Douglas. On our walk down 4 mile beach we saw hundreds of parakeets in the trees and they were making some serious screeching. We then found out upon returning to the hostel that they were also located in the tree next to our room! Lucikly after it went dark they quietened down and we were able to get to sleep relatively easliy.

Daily mileage: 5 down to the beach front which had a path running all the way to the harbour. Still fairly warm but the breeze from the sea helped!

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