Farewell to Australia

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So after spending an afternoon in Tully (no sniggers please) we headed off for our final Australian destination - Cairns. We’d managed to score ourselves some cheap accommodation by using the last of the vouchers we’d been given when we booked Fraser Island and Whitsundays, so for $40 a night we were getting a private double room with free hourly shuttle buses into town and a free evening meal (free, providing you bought a drink). Result.

After a few initial teething problems with the room (a dead cockroach in one corner, and a live one in another corner and the distinct stench of cheesy feet in the carpet, a bit like Infernos in London we scurried into town in search of this ‘free’ evening meal, only to be pretty disappointed to be paying $8 for our drinks ... you get nowt for nowt and they were only cans of diet coke too, huh. Underwhelmed by the small portion of chicken and apricot curry we’d just wolfed down we headed to Woolworths in search of supplies, food shopping when hungry is always a mistake, but we surprisingly headed out of the shop with only one big bag of sweeties each - travelling is surprisingly bad for the waistline! But we’re on holiday, so it’s okay. Oh and we have no wedding to diet for either so what’s another pound or two?

We didn’t do much in Cairns well, we did want to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef ... but when we went to look into it were told that there was a cyclone heading our way, which meant 40 knot winds, 3 metre swells and not much chance of any diving happening. This was partly to my relief as I was still as inept at diving as during our Thai adventures, but Cate was understandably pretty gutted, we’ve quickly learnt that there’s nothing we can do about the weather though. With diving off the cards and sky diving and bungy jumping never having got anywhere near being on the cards, this left us with nearly a week to kill in Cairns. So we visited the Qantas office, paid them a ridiculous fee for pressing a few buttons, and moved our flights around a little bit - we’d be leaving Australia four days earlier, spending a day longer in New Zealand, two days longer in South America and coming home to England a day earlier - a shame, but the only way to pay for the flight changes was to reduce the trip length! Anyway, as Cate was saying, we didn’t do much in Cairns but thought that we would take a road trip up to Cape Tribulation instead so we organised hiring a car which turned out to be a right old banger, a Ford Festivia or something like that - a bit rickety, no power steering and certainly not a car hire type car but it was relatively cheap and didn’t break down so it was fine. As we went to pick up the car from the hire place at 9am, the heavens opened and we once again experienced a tropical rainstorm and consequently got soaked! It didn’t matter though as pretty much as soon as we stepped into the hire shop, the sun appeared and it turned out to be gorgeous weather for the rest of the trip.

Our first stop on our little adventure was at a place called Port Douglas. We had been told by the lady in Qantas when we were altering our flight dates that we should go to see St Mary’s by (on?) the sea (a church) in Port Douglas. It was quite beautiful, bright white, right next to the sea and had a clear window behind the altar which overlooked the shimmering waters beyond. It was cool to say the least and Matt did ask me why we didn’t get married there. I had to point out we were in Australia so no-one would have been able to come to the wedding and also that we had never even heard of the church when we were planning our wedding, to which he responded,
“Well we should go in there and renew our vows now then. I can say them to you, you can say them to me.” We didn’t. There wasn’t much else to see there so off we set again. My wife is so unromantic hey?

After a good hour or so of driving along the tropical coastline we reached the Daintree National Park, we were now deep in rainforest territory, and decided to celebrate this fact by taking a little dander within said rainforest. Stopping off at Mossman Gorge we headed off to investigate the trees and to test the temperature of the water in the river running through the gorge before deciding whether to take a dip or not. The water was absolutely freezing! But despite this we headed back to the car to get (swim)suited and booted ready for a dip in the river. There were whole families in there, if a five year old kid could bear the cold then surely we could? Whilst I was getting changed in the toilets, I saw my first wild hairy spider trying to hide in the corner - it wasn’t very big but it was very tarantula-like - I decided to keep away from it and keep one eye on it. I graciously offered to stay ashore for the first few minutes to take some photos of Cate getting into the rainforest river (pretty idyllic surroundings), it definitely had nothing to do with me avoiding the cold water. Anyway, whilst Cate was very VERY slowly inching herself into the river, letting out yelps of pain as the cold water hit her skin, I could see that she wasn’t getting anywhere near fully submerged (she was just over knee deep and understandably hesitant to get any deeper )... luckily there was a young boy of maybe five or six playing in the water nearby with his family who needed little encouragement from me to start splashing Cate with the cold water. It was for her own good, honest. Don’t I have such a thoughtful husband?

The water was really cold but it didn’t matter as we were in the middle of a rainforest in our swimwear, in the beautiful clear river water. Once I had submerged myself, I went for a short swim past the boulders that sheltered the entrance into the water only to find that this river had quite a current and I would end up in the waterfall if I didn’t swim a little more energetically. Eventually Matt’s wimpy little ass decided to join me and although he squealed with the cold getting in, I was more preoccupied by the big perch that were congregating around us. I watched as a lady threw small bits of bread or something similar into the water and the fish jumped out of the water to catch them mid-air - very clever. This is how they eat - they catch bugs above the water. Seeing a rock across the river that we thought we might be able to climb onto, we swam over to it and sat there for a while taking in the stunning scenery, (well Matt managed to climb onto it but I kind of clung to it with the bottom half of my body still in the water, the top half sliding all over the place.) There are photos of me on this rock, but my body is so reflectively white that the camera couldn’t focus on me! After not too much longer, we took a walk up to the lookout point, and headed back to the car where we sat at a picnic table with some bush turkeys hassling us for our dry tuna sandwiches. They are pretty aggressive with each other, horrid creatures.

We drove off further north and eventually crossed the Daintree River (home to lots of big crocodiles!) on a cable ferry and headed into the Cape Tribulation section of the Daintree National Park ... a rainforest that is over 135 million years old (the Amazon is ‘only’ 40 million years old apparently). After driving around some dicey bends, stopping at a few lookout points and buying some ridiculously expensive bottled water we’d made it up to Cape Tribulation in time for a little mooch around the rainforest and frolic on the beach before we needed to head to our accommodation for the night.

We were having a play around on the beach, taking photos of our shadows, when this random young couple came up to us and asked to take our picture; they’d apparently been travelling up the East coast from Sydney and were trying to take as many photos as couples in love as possible on their way up. A decidedly unlikely sounding tale, or just plain weird. But when two perfectly nice (if somewhat weird) people ask you to take your photo you can’t really so no, so we did. God knows what the real story was behind the random photo, but if anyone happens across our photos on www.aussie-swingers.com suffice to say, we didn’t put them there, it was probably those two little tinkers. Yeah that was kind of strange. They also talked about creating a calendar - they said we would be January as we looked so in love. I don’t know what that is all about!

Anyhoo, we had booked our accommodation for the night so we drove there to find that it was a really lovely place called Ferntree Lodge - cute little cabins with ensuite bathrooms. We had opted for a dorm room because of the high cost of private rooms, and found ourselves sharing with three other girls who had taken a tour which sounded pretty rubbish from what they told us, so we were glad we had hired our little banger and taken the trip ourselves. After a particularly disgusting meal of ‘oriental’ noodles (which incidentally tasted of nothing) and scraping the tuna from the remaining dry tuna rolls from lunch to try to give them SOME flavour, we blogged then headed to bed for the night as we had some excitement to look forward to the following morning.

The next morning we arose and got ourselves ready to swing like monkeys from the incredibly tall Daintree Rainforest trees. We were going Jungle Surfing! Jungle Surfing is basically a series of ziplines running from tree to tree high up in the rainforest emergent layer. Harnesses were placed on our bodies, helmets on our heads with names on them (Matt was Kong Kong, I was Barbie - yes I know, surely nothing else could be further from the truth, ahem) and we were set to go. After walking up to our first treehouse, we were attached to the wire and levered up (on an upwards zipline) to the next treehouse.

I was kind of looking forward to it, and kind of apprehensive ... but in truth it was pretty tame (as we should’ve guessed from the tagline “people from 3 to 103 can do it”; it consisted of four downwards ziplines (two taken as a tandem, and two singles) ranging from 22m long to 76m. The dudes running the show controlled the ropes so controlled the speed, and never really let you go so there was no massively quick ziplines (which was probably for the best). The best ziplines were definitely the last two (which you got to do by yourself rather than in pairs) ... the first one being a speedy one on which they made you let go of the ropes, and the best was the last one on which they made you hang upside down and let go (a very weird but exciting feeling). One of the girls we’d been staying in the dorm with the previous night had already been Jungle Surfing and had billed it to us as “huh, it was alright” ... and to be honest she’d pretty much hit the nail on the head, it was ok ... not really enough of a thrill for $85 each, but still good (just a shame that it wasn’t all as good as the last two ziplines.) I really wanted it to be more thrilling, to be faster, higher and for longer, but as Matt said, it just wasn’t and with hind sight, perhaps we wouldn’t have bothered to do it at all. Still, the hanging upside down was good and being way up high amongst the trees was definitely cool too.

Afterwards we bundled into the car and got ready for the long journey back to Cairns, but there was still one thing left to do on the way back, the Cape Tribulation rainforest boardwalk ... basically an hour walk around the ancient rainforest. Bearing in mind that I’d thus far managed to spend the whole time in Australia without encountering any big, scary, hairy spiders I was pretty apprehensive about this little jaunt into the rainforest, as it was pretty much the last chance I had of encountering something of the sort. (We’d seen big spindly spiders on Fraser Island hanging on fences, but that didn’t really bother me). However, as we neared the halfway point of the boardwalk it was all going pretty well spider-wise, in fact there was pretty well nothing to see in the rainforest apart from some very big, very old trees ... Just as I was making some witty comment about it being a “bored” walk I felt something very horrible and very much like spider web on my face. I’d been so busy looking out for creepy things on the ground that I hadn’t noticed the rather large spider web spanning the path ... Spinning round to see what I’d just walked through, assuming it was just a little web I saw a mahoosive big spider, THANKFULLY not of the hairy variety in a now half destroyed web. Being the big brave man that I am, I squealed at Cate to stop taking photos of me and to come and check if I had a big-ass spider on me. He was freaked out and hostile, angry with his little mishap and it was my job to get the sticky yellowish web off his face, neck and ears, oh and out of his hair. The spider really was huge, much bigger than any other one I have seen and I was secretly very pleased that he had been walking ahead of me. Not one minute later, as we gawked as this huge spider, an old couple who had been walking through the forest at a similar time to us came towards us, the woman stopping first next to us as I warned her of something in the trees, and the man charging straight through the spider’s home for the second time that day - not a good day for the spider. The man then pulled at his face trying to get the webbing off and the woman copped onto what we were looking at, losing her balance and literally falling off the boardwalk into the surrounding forest. Luckily for her it wasn’t a high boardwalk, and luckily for him the spider hadn’t attached itself to his head, but it was very amusing for us. Well, for me at least. Matt was still freaking out a bit.

There’s not much more to say about Cape Tribulation (or Australia to be honest.) We drove back the way we came, and stopped at Dominoes Pizza that evening for a well earned (and particularly tasty) treat, eating it in one of the many outdoor public bbq facilities by the ocean - not a bad end to the day.

Once we’d returned the car the following morning we still had most of a day to kill before our 5pm flight to Brisbane ... which would arrive into Brisbane at 7pm, and our connecting flight to NZ wasn’t until 8am the following morning, time for another night sleeping in an airport! Despite having the whole day to get sorted and get to Cairns airport, we still had a kerfuffle at the end when the shuttle bus we’d booked left without us, despite the receptionists “best attempts” to find us -it had come 20 minutes early, stupid bus. With some degree of panic (as even with getting the shuttle bus we were still pushing it for checking-in for our flight) we called a taxi and made it to the airport in time. We don’t make life easy for ourselves.

Without wanting to go off on too much of a tangent I’ve just got a little story to tell you about, about my lovely wife who of late has been getting a little confused when speaking to people about hostels, tours, bus booking or whatever ... when they try and tell us that it’s ok for us to go and do something, Cate’ll think they’re saying we can’t; when someone was saying the visibility on their reef trip was dreadful Cate thought they were saying it was great ... you get the picture. This culminated (very amusingly)in a discussion with the receptionist at our final hostel saying that we could book another night at our discounted rate, which Cate of course took to mean that we couldn’t get the discounted rate. So I rather calmly explained that she was getting it mixed up, and Cate’s response (completely deadpan, without even realising at the time) “oh, I’m always getting the wrong stick of the end at the moment”. Bless her. Just call it a Cate-ism.

I have something to say too. Throughout our time in Australia, for some strange reason, people kept coming up to Matt in whichever kitchen we were in to ask him if he had a tin opener (as none of the tin openers in the hostels ever worked). Matt has a Swiss Army knife which has an opener on it and even though he rarely had this out, they would always choose to ask HIM for help, and as it’s a little tricky for people who haven’t used it before, Matt would always end up opening their tins for them. And their tins were ALWAYS tuna. Hence Matt’s new nickname, Tuna Boy.

A couple of other things that I want to say about Australia are that it is really cool that all along the East Coast as there are gas BBQs that people can use. They are in picnic areas in National Parks, along beach fronts and anywhere that people congregate and might want to have a BBQ. They are free to use and always clean and I think it’s really nice that people can just go and use them whenever they want. Also, another thing that is cool but kind of strange about Australia is the number of absolutely MASSIVE bats that roam the skies at night! It’s actually a little bit eerie. They hang from the trees and swoop down low over vehicles. And when I say they are massive, I mean MASSIVE! And finally, just a quick note on the Aboriginals that we noticed on our travels up the coast - they have unbelievably strong Aussie accents - so much so that it’s kind of difficult to understand what they say at first.

So that is it for Australia. Our stay was shorter than we’d imagined and the weather was wetter than we’d imagined, but everything else certainly made up for it. On our way around at no point did it feel as special to me as Asia, but I think that was largely due to Australia being similar to home in so many ways, and because Asia was our first stop. But when I think back to all the amazing places we’ve been to and all the amazing things we’ve done ... it’s been a pretty special five-and-a-bit weeks, Australia’s such a cool place and it will certainly be cool to go back there one day to continue our surfing education, see some of our koala friends and hopefully spend a bit more time in Melbourne. Yeah Australia is wicked. We met lots of friendly people, (apart from an evil lady in Specsavers) the weather was really warm even though it was wet, I loved being able to wear shorts and flip-flops nearly every day, I got to meet Neighbours actors, walk along the Home and Away beach, and get really close to so many special animals. Looking forward to another trip there some time.

So once we reached Cairns airport, we checked in and got on our flight to Brisbane. The flight was quite uneventful thankfully, we ate some of their flight food and in a couple of hours we had reached our accommodation for the night - Brisbane Airport. After collecting our bags, we found a comfortable looking spot to sit and sleep - two brown leather couches opposite each other. Next we, well I went on a chocolate hunt and then whilst Matt went off wandering somewhere, I got talking to the couple sitting on the leather couches nearby. The man, very kindly, came over to me and asked whether I would like the boxed cake and banana he was holding in his hand. Of course I couldn’t refuse and knew Matt would probably polish off the cake anyway so I accepted them gratefully. They were an “older” couple from Wales and had been travelling up the East Coast visiting friends. After our short conversation, we lapsed into silence and they began to get themselves sorted to leave for their flight. The reason I am telling you this is that after we had said goodbye and they started to walk away, the lady rushed back to us and said comically in her Welsh accent,
“I must say, you look tremendously tidy for backpackers! I always thought that they were scrotty and dirty but you look very clean.”
I replied with a dumbstruck “Thankyou” and proceeded to giggle to myself for the next ten minutes at her words and the fact that she felt she needed to tell us that. Very amusing.

So after that, we went to sleep on the quite uncomfortable couches, listening to chairs being scraped across the floor, some lightweight construction machinery and the lady over the tanoy telling us some sort of nonsense at certain intervals, and then we rose bright and early to check in for our flight to Christchurch at 5:45am! And that was it for our Oz journey.

Cate and Matt xx

Tallies - End of Australia
Aussie phrases we heard:
“Thanks darl”.
“How you going?”
“Ah pretty good thanks.”
“Hey?”
“Beaut!”
“Up by the dunnie.”
“Thanks heaps.”
“He was being such a drongo.”
“G-day.”
“I was such a dag!”
“Strewth!”

Arguments: 1 or 2.

Number of bites: Once again, we lost count with this as we had too many to count.


Injuries:
Cate - Cold, ear ache from airplane pressure, slipped over and pulled muscle in leg, elbow pain, slipped over and stubbed toe which bled, inflamed coral cut. Sound like a hypochondriac don’t I?
Matt - stubbed toe which bled. Felt sick.

Hostels: 15.
Greyhound overnight buses:3
Tents on Fraser island: 2
Brisbane airport.

Ice-creams:
Cate - 4
Matt - 5

Things lost/stolen/broken:
Cate - Lost other earring.
Matt - mobile phone!
Fixed:
Cate’s glasses.

FREE:
BBQ - Greenhouse, Melbourne, Half pint of beer each at Neighbours night, Fried breakfast - Greenhouse, Melbourne, 2 tote bags, calendar, t-shirt, 2 small soft rugby balls, cap, sweets, beach ball, suncream, massage. 1 hour internet - Sydney, 2 beer vouchers, 2 blue mountains day trips, 2 monster ripper energy drinks, hold of koala and photo.

Transport used:

Airplane: 3
Shuttle bus: 4
Neighbours tour bus: 1
Hire car: 2 (Outlander and Festivia)
Tram: 4
Greyhound bus: 12
Public bus: 5
Ferry: 4
Tour bus: 2
Rainforest train: 1
Minibus: 25
Boat hire: 1
Kayak: 1
4 x 4 Stargazer: 1
Avatar Catamaran: 1
Dingy: 9
Taxi: 1

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