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Published: January 4th 2011
Wednesday 12-29
Got up waaay too early today (4am) to catch our flight into Cairns (pronounced "cans"). When we got to Cairns were able to hitchhike into town thanks to the generosity of a very nice lady who took pity on us and our giant backpacks. Most of our day was spent hanging out at a free public beach-side pool known as the Cairns Lagoon. It was pretty nice but it started to rain, which interrupted our nap on the grass. Cairns is a little trickier of a place to visit than we thought. Our initial draw was to come here and snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, which we plan to do on Sunday (one day is all we could afford). But there’s very little to actually due in Cairns (most of the beaches and attractions are outside of the city) and even less to do that is free or even cost effective on a budget. Sadly, we are discovering that starting out in 1st world nations (especially expensive ones like NZ & AUS) was probably not the right start for us. We’ve already gone over our $150/day budget in these two places and it’s added stress to this trip which
we don’t need. Ugh. Oh well, not much we can do about it. Could’a, should’a, would’a. So we bit the bullet and rented a car for a few days (thanks for the extra b-day cash Mom & Dad!) to drive around and see the beaches outside of Cairns. Nick did an impressive job of driving a manual car on the left side of the road for the very first time. He’s much braver than I am! Did you realize that EVERYTHING is on the opposite side? Thank goodness the clutch is still on the left hand side! [Nick Note: Also the gears are in the same order. So in the US 1st gear is close
to you while here it is farthest away.]
Thursday 12-30
Today we start our driving tour! Side Note: You know this is a country that loves its drink when you get pulled over at 10:15am for a breathalyzer test! Northern Queensland is very tropical and quite similar to Costa Rica (funny how we keep comparing tropical places to CR ;o) We made a circuit NW from Cairns on the Atherton Tablelands and it was a beautiful drive. (Our one hot, sunny day in Cairns – we’ll probably regret not going to the beach this day, but oh well!). We drove to Kuranda, where we stopped at Barron Falls and Henry Ross & Wright Lookouts. The rivers are gushing here right now during the wet season. It’s great for us as tourists, but several parts of the state are in severe flood warning (some rivers are rising over 15 meters!) We moved on to Mareeba, where we stopped at a
small town heritage museum with an old railroad ambulance. It was so small even I couldn’t stand up in it! You can only imagine how small it was for Nick! I’m not sure why mid-20th century nurses were so short… Anyway, following some tourist road signs, we stumbled upon Granite Gorge – an AWESOME find! We hiked a little around some huge boulders and the best part was we got to feed wild wallabies! They look like miniature kangaroos and they were very welcoming of our little bag of wallaby feed pellets. They were so cute and bounced right up to you to feed from your hands. They even let us pet them. Sadly, I had the bad luck of sitting in a fresh pile of wallaby poo, but the animals themselves didn’t seem to mind. The BEST part was that we saw a mother wallaby with a little baby joey coming in & out of her pouch! I couldn’t believe it!! We just sat there and watched her and were so fortunate that she didn’t run away
from us! SO COOL! We ate lunch at the gorge and met a nice family from Boston, whom we continued to run into on and off for the next four days! We were definitely on the same tourist circuit.
Driving south through Atherton, we stopped at Tinaroo Falls and waited an hour at Platypus Park to see the so named creature, but sadly it never showed up. So we moved on to Yungaburra (love the names!) where we stopped and saw a giant strangler fig tree known as the Curtain Fig Tree because it took down and ended up covering three different trees in the forest. We had much better animal spotting luck at dusk along Peterson Creek. We got to see a platypus (albeit it was dark and we couldn’t see it clearly, but was totally there!) swimming around the marsh and we even got the bonus of little bats flying all around. It was a great idea to rent a car and drive around. We don’t get
to see much of the beaches here, but that’s OK most things in the ocean would kill us anyway. By driving around, we’ve been able to see the tablelands of NE Australia and all the quaint small towns.
My favorite part of the day: around 8pm we were treated to NPR’s Morning Edition on the radio! I literally jumped up & down in my seat with joy to hear Steve Inskeep’s familiar voice. Such a lovely treat :o)
Friday 12-31
One of the great things about driving around the Australian bush is the fantastic road signs! In the U.S. we have boring road signs: deer crossing, cow crossing, etc. Here they have kangaroo crossings (proven that they exist by the road kill that we saw), cassowary crossings, tree kangaroo crossings (they have kangaroos that live in TREES), and the BEST one was car tipping – think cow tipping and then think about how the cows could get revenge!
Today was a very rainy day – as Nick put it: the rainiest New Year’s Eve we’ve ever had. I think we may have been soaking wet more hours of the day than we were dry. [Nick Note: The
rains was coming down by the bucket and it surely tested my newly learned driving on my left skills. But fortunately no accidents ] We did another driving circuit SW of Cairns to visit more water falls. Again, since there’s such heavy rain here, the falls look great, but not all of them are swimmable as they normally would be. We visited another giant fig tree, this one known as the Cathedral because it its canopy spans the length of two Olympic-size swimming pools! We hit Malanda Falls (not very exciting) and then were treated to Millaa Millaa Falls – a tall curtain of cold water that felt really refreshing in the hot sun! We continued on to Zillie Falls & Ellinjaa Falls before heading to
Tarzali Lakes. In Tarzai, we took a tour that “guaranteed” platypus sightings. It was pouring down rain, but we were determined to see these guys clearly … and we weren’t disappointed! We got to see a female swimming around the lily pads searching for food. She was so cute! I had no idea they were so small, only about a foot long (I seriously thought they were much bigger). She chased her tail around in the water – SOOO CUTE! We learned that the females hate the males & they are rarely seen together. The males use their venomous spine not so much for defense but to drug and sedate the females while they rape them during the breeding season. Sea otters, sharks and now platypus are female animals I would never want to be.
We continued our loop and headed to Dinner Falls and Mt. Hypipamee Crater. [Nick Note: We stopped at a lookout for lunch and met an Australian couple who were visiting the husbands hometown
nearby. He recommended Hypipamee crater saying it was huge giving an estimate which he then caveated by saying “but maybe since I was a child it seemed bigger.” The crater was big but we think there must have been some of that child’s size perspective t work for it wasn’t nearly as big as he described at lunch.] We were hoping we’d see cassowaries at the crater, as we heard that there were frequent sightings, but we got caught in a huge downpour and I’m pretty sure the cassowaries were hiding in a dry spot wondering why the crazy humans were walking around in a thunderstorm. Since it was raining so hard, we decided to cut our scenic drive short and head back to Cairns for the New Year’s festivities. Fortunately, on the way home, it did stop raining long enough for us to get out and see Josephine Falls, which were by far my favorite. They were beautiful, cascading falls nestled in a lush rainforest. Ugh, you could smell how green it was in there! I love la selva – there is no better place I’d like to be! On the drive back, I was able to hang our
soaking wet clothes out the car window to dry. Not safe for buttons, but a surprisingly effective and fast way to dry clothes when driving at 80km/hr.
Back in Cairns, we stopped at a Chinese all you can eat take-out place – a very dangerous proposition. You were only allowed one plate with one visit to the buffet but you could take as much as you wanted. I would like to state that I successfully walked way with at least a good 5lbs of food for Nick and I to share. I later proceeded to treat myself to free dessert by walking around to the different ice cream shops and having a taste of each flavor. Hey, no judging; if you’ve gotta go cheap, it’s a way to go and it’s not like they were lacking for customers on a major holiday! Anyhoo, we staked out a spot in the public ocean-side pool for the fireworks display. They had two shows: one at 9pm for families and another at midnight. The 9pm show was HUGE! Spectacular displays and we had a prefect vantage point from the pool (our little waterproof camera bag works wonders!); we were surprised more people
weren’t in the pool to enjoy the view – mostly just us and the kids. I actually got pretty choked up at the display. It finally hit me where we are and what we’re doing on this trip and all the amazing things we’ve seen so far, with still so much more to come! It was awesome and a New Year’s / 10 year anniversary with Nick that I will not forget. The midnight show was not as dramatic as the first one but wow, did they put on a finale! One of the best displays I’ve seen outside of Boston 4th of July.
Hope everyone else around then world had a safe, happy and healthy new year! Happy 2011!
Saturday 1-1
Ugh, traveling during the holidays can really suck. Everything is closed today – including our hotel. Yup, all the staff are gone, the kitchen is closed and the bathrooms after a night of New Year’s partiers is utterly frightening. This is not cool. How can all the hotel staff take the day off at once?! Thank god there’s at least ONE shared bathroom with some toilet paper left.
We decided to spend the day at
the beaches but, alas, it appears that we and beach time are not meant to be on this world trip. We were deprived of our designated beach bum day yet again due to the rain. We headed to Trinity Beach just to check it out. They have a sea jelly net set up and you’re supposed to swim only within the boundaries of the net or potentially suffer a painful but quick death from the ever present box jellies this time of year. you are only to swim in this tiny (maybe half the size of an Olympic swimming pool) area that has been netted off. Cairns has basically no beach so really the beaches here are very poor if you come from Costa Rica where you can swim in all the beach.] So in the end, maybe it’s better that we didn’t get in the water….although we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the weather is better tomorrow since it’s our only day out on the reef!
So instead, we spent the day in our hotel room, eating the last of our groceries and futzing around on the internet. It’s amazing how much time internet takes up while you’re on the road. At home, it’s the last thing I want to do once I’m at home because I’m on the computer all day at work. When traveling, however, it’s more like a seductive vortex that sucks you in for hours on end! At least we’re getting our money’s worth in wi-fi ;o)
Sunday 1-2
The Great Barrier Reef is frickin’ AMAZING! I have never seen a reef so alive and healthy! I’m sure it helps that it’s so huge, but wow! Bright colorful corals far as you can see – SO many colors! Tons of fish (not too many invertebrates outside of the corals)! We saw big fatty sea cucumbers, a green sea turtle, HUGE Napoleon wrasses (males & females), innumerable other wrasses, surgeonfish, schools of parrotfish chomping on the reef and pooping out future beaches, just a few clownfish (not too many anemones), lots of damselfish, bannerfish, butterflyfish – it was intoxicating – all the life and all the colors, all the species! Seriously amazing!
AOP people: you need to come here! My only regret is that we only had one day on the reef. Had we more time and deeper pockets, a live aboard for several weeks would have been awesome ;o) Nick got some great underwater pictures and fortunately, my ears stayed intact, which was good. It was overcast all day but not rainy, so thank goodness the weather held up for us. I’m still in awe at all that we got to see on the reef. Just spectacular!! It definitely lives up to its reputation.
Monday 1-3
Travel day from Australia to Vietnam and of course, just our luck, it’s absolutely gorgeous outside! It would be the perfect day to head out to the beach or get back on the reef :o( I’m actually pretty sad to be leaving Australia – there’s so much more to do here that we didn’t get to see and I’m dying
to go back out onto the reef. Oh well – maybe in another dozen years we can come back and explore some more :o) Had a 4 hour layover in Darwin; probably the worst layover we’ve ever had. Not because it was long, but because, for 4 hours, they had us trapped in a single room with 4 other fights leaving out of the same gate. Why we weren’t allowed to stretch our legs and walk around the airport, go to a food court, etc., I have no idea. It made no sense why we’d be confined to one room and a small duty free store. Sucked! We got to Skype with a few folks this morning, though; it was nice to talk with family and friends back home. Sorry that we can’t do it with everyone. Now, on to Ho Chi Minh City to see Jane & Raelene!
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emily
non-member comment
it's not an invertebrate, but it's still cute.
i want to touch my nose to its nose.