Advertisement
Published: April 11th 2007
We arrived in Cairns around the middle of the day and taxi’d down to the Travellers’ Oasis hostel. From here we spent the rest of the day sorting our a rental car and hostel for Port Douglas. The next morning we picked up our car and headed north.
Our first day at Pt Douglas we drove right up to Cape Tribulation. Here we hiked around on the beaches a bit and walked a couple boardwalks in the park. Pam showed off her amazing ability to find wild animals again this time by stumbling across a couple Cassowary chicks and their mother! This was a little scary because everything you read about Cassowaries makes sure to let you know that they are quite capable of killing a human and have been known to be vicious when they have chicks. Fortunately these ones couldn’t care less that we were about 6 feet away when we noticed them… and of course had to stop and take pictures. Afterwards we realized that is probably exactly how the tourists we make fun of for chasing the bears at home get into that situation…
A quick comment about the climate in Cairns / Pt
Douglas - it’s absolutely brutal. Humidity like we’d never experienced in our lives coupled with 30 degree heat and random rainstorms which were so heavy that you couldn’t hear each other talking inside the hostel!
Our second day at Port Douglas we went out on the Aristocat Dive boat to the outer Barrier Reef. Amazing I think is the only word for this! We went for 3 snorkels throughout the day on the Agincourt Reef system. Best of the day was probably the second stop but unfortunately we only have pictures from the first and third dives.
The next morning we drove up to Kuranda for lunch (in the mountains behind Cairns) and visited the butterfly sanctuary. From there it was back to the Travellers Oasis at Cairns for the night. Also this day we picked up the rest of the camping gear we needed (J&J supplied the tent! Thanks!) having decided that we could save some cash by abandoning the hostels in favor of caravan parks.
First day on the road we stopped off for lunch at Misson Beach before carrying on to Townsville. Arriving in Townsville we could feel the climate becoming dryer again so
we decided to push on to a campsite about 50k south of the town. This little eco-park was pretty cool with wallabies etc hopping all over the place. However, because it was the first night we went camping in Australia, it was a difficult sleep. Eventually we ended up in the car for the night because of all the weird sounds we heard all night. We slept only 20 meters away from bodies of water, so Pam was terrified that there could be a crocodile lurking around. It was a particular animal sound at night that got us in the Corolla, a deep growling noise, similar to a dog but sounded as it was made by something way bigger than that. The next morning we asked the camp manager if they had ever found crocks around the area and he said nonchalantly “Oh, they found a three meter salt water one a few days ago 500m away from here.” That would be the last time we’d stay in an eco-park.
The next day we arrived in Airlie Beach around 4pm looking for a standby rate sailing trip in the Whitsundays. We narrowly missed a really good deal of 3
nights and 3 days, so had to settle for a trip leaving 2 days later. We found a campsite 50kms away from Airlie to the north called Hideaway Bay. This was a cool little caravan park. The neatest thing was its outdoors communal kitchen. The only animals bugging us at night were wild bush turkeys that were scratching around our tent all night much to Pam’s relief. We stayed for 2 nights while we waited for our sailing trip in the Whitsundays out of Airlie Beach.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.072s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0439s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
