Sunday April 9th

---

Lo from oz!

We getup early and went down to the Townsville market. This is an open street market, where there is a band, and food is served. It’s the length of a city block, where no cars are allowed. Imagine back home yonge street being closed from Dundas to gerrard, with street vendors everywhere and no cars… that’s what this is like. Bingo, we found a really nice vendor that sells paintings. And we see a gorgeous lorikeet painting. This thing is amazing, only problem is how are we going to get it home…it’s almost 2 feet by 4 feet. We end up buying it, and taking it off the frame and rolling it up, I sure hope it survives the trip back! After the market we’re off to the Townsville aquarium. This place supposedly is the biggest saltwater aquarium in the southern hemisphere. It’s a nice place, where we get to see sharks, and a really cool albino turtle. It’s pretty informative, and the kids have a ball here. There is also an IMAX movie screen here, where we went to see a dinosaur movie. The movie wasn’t just a scare ya movie, it was more of a dinosaur dig expedition. Pretty cool and the kids liked it also. We wanted to see the shark IMAX movie, but missed it by 15 minutes, and couldn’t wait the 3 hours till it showed again. We left Townsville around 2 pm and head north, to our final destination in Australia… cairns (prounced cans) we drive through where hurricane Larry hit innisfail about 3 weeks ago. This hurricane had winds of 280 kms, which is a category 5 hurricane… big-time storm. As we get close the damage is very apparent. It first starts with tree’s being blown down all over the place, next we see houses with tarps over them, then houses blown down entirely. What a sad site. This part of Australia is known for their bananas, and we literally see hundreds of thousands of these tree’s down, with their bananas on the ground, an entire growing season lost. With the amount of sugarcane in this area I would assume they supply the whole world with sugar. I mean sugarcane is everywhere! We drive through Innisfail, and head up to Cairns, about 1 hr away. Cairns is a little resort town, where there are tours galore. Very picturesque little place. We stop at our trailer park and for this site we have an ensuite, which means we have our own shower and bathroom. We’re here for 4 nights, as we have a few activities planned around here. We’re going snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, hot air ballooning somewhere here, and a few other things.

More tomorrow!

Lee

---