Cairns and Australia zoo

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The weather
We arrived in the middle of the biggest rain storm I had ever seen! Great I thought, why have we travelled almost 13 hours on a bus for this. It soon cleared up over the next few days, with highs of 36'C on our final day.

Cape Trib trip
Hev and I booked a day trip to Cape Tribulation (Two hours North of Cairns). Ren our tour guide/bus driver handed his ipod around the bus for the passengers to create a playlist for the trip ahead. The first stop was the port of a merky river for a croc hunting boat trip. We spotted one after just 10 minutes, only small but you wouldn't wind him up about his mum's weight, thats for sure! We identified lots of wildlife in the surrounding mangroves but unfortunately no more crocs, they were obviously scared of me! We then travelled to the world's oldest rainforest, the Daintree national park. The tour guide took us through a wooden pathway showing us hollowed out trees, massive spiders, mud crabs and nests, he stopped next to an ants nest and asked if I knew the difference between a tourist and a traveller. I responded 'No!' He then described that a tourist is someone that simply ticks things off but does not truly gain the full cultural understanding that a traveller primarily seeks. He then asked us: 'Are you a tourist or a traveller?'
Stupidly Hev and myself answered 'I am a traveller.'
He held out his hand and passed us an ant with a green bum, 'In that case, you wouldn't have any problem with licking that ant's arse.'
As I began to wish I was just a tourist I stuck out my tongue and gave the ant's backside a good old licking. A tingly zesty lime numbness came over my tour for the following 3 hours... bloody tour guides! The bus travelled to a stream similar to that of Jelly Beanin the Blue Mountains but with a speedy current travelling through the centre between two strips of sharp rocks, we jumped in up stream and travelled down them, these were pretty cool and I only walked away with a small bump on my lower back. AS we were about to leave I jumped up on a rock and sang Mysterious Girl by the Cairns born Peter Andre, much to the shock of the surrounding aboriginal children (see facebook vid). Bet settled with Alyssa, job jobbed! En route home we stopped off at Port Douglas and I bought some kangaroo meet to munch on for dins that night, we passed a film crew and screamed at them out the window attempting to get ourselves on TV. After a few scenic view points we made it back to our hostel where we met with Guy and we watched the Australian open final between Federer and Murray. How we laughed at the KIa motors guy trying to speak english and confusing his L's with R's and Murray's tears. Federer was on his game and deserved to win. I was so glad that I had found that ticket on the second day of the championships and was presented with the opportunity of watching him.

Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef
The next day we awoke early and jumped on a boat out to the infamous great barrier reef, I met an Aussie personal trainer and he gave me a few tips about creating your own business in this field and the best target groups for fitness. Our first dive of the day, the instructor took us around a coral reef shaped like a figure of eight. The coral displayed an immense variance of beautiful bright colour, especially near to the surface. We spooted the usual with parrot fish, dory fish and moorish idols but the dive wasn't as good as I had bigged it up to be. The second dive Guy, myself and our new dive buddy Eddie dived without an instructor for the first time. We had hired an underwater and I was becoming snappy happy when Guy spotted a 1.5m white tip reef shark swimming alongside us, I filmed it as it swam along the sea bed. This was the first shark I had seen whilst diving... incredible! That night we had free pizza and beer waiting for us at the backpacker bar in town 'The Woolshed'. We played backpacker bingo and Guy won, he cleverly (or so he thought) passed it to me to collect, expecting me to have to perform an embarressing act to receive his prize. They asked me to pick a member of the crowd for an activity, I pointed at Guy and his face dropped. We had a minute utilising an inflatable red cylinder shaped prop to perform as many sexual positions as possible. The bar record was 12, we managed 11 in hilarious fashion. Guy won a canyon swing that he did the following morning. We also got a free pint each, score!

Australia zoo
Our last couple days of Australia were now here, what an exciting six weeks it had been. We spent our last two days back in Brisbane where we visited the late Steve Irwin's world known Australia zoo. There were so many memorials to him andhis catchphrase 'Crikey!' was painted on half the walls. The animals here seemed to be so happy and well looked after. We watched the koalas being fed and Hev got a picture of her holding one. He wandered around and saw many animals including Tazmanian devilsd and Dingos that I hadn't previously seen before. We visited the crocoseum for a croc and bird show. Tropical birds firstly flew all around our heads, these were so gorgeous. Then a large croc swam out into the pool and the zoo keepers fed big strands of meat to him as he jumped around and paraded them. Our last stop of the day was in the kangaroo park, the vending machine for kangaroo feed had broken and the nice guy who was locking it up gave us double the food for our money. We wandered around and found a big group of them, they were very hungry and were very well trained. We took many photos of us feeding and Guy spooning them. Great day and perfect way to bring our Aussie experience to an end. We had one day to recover from the thousands of miles we had travelled, pack up our bags and relax and then we flew to Fiji.

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