WWOOFing, Cairns, Port and the Great Barrier Reef

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Hopefully this will fill all those of you (interested enough to read a long blog) in about what we have been doing for the past 3 weeks!
We left the farm on Monday the 7th of April having had an absolutely awesome time there. The family were so lovely. Pip is the oldest (70) and was the one who started up the idea of the Hermitage. Her sons are Pete (50ish) and Andy (38) and she is married to Rolie (a German who went there as a WWOOFer, went back and then never left!!). Andy has a partner - Pollie (28) who is like a sister to the girls and is in charge of the shops! Pete is married to Cookie (who is really lovely and an amazing cook, sadly she wouldn't fit in our backpacks) and they have 4 girls. Ned is the oldest and disappeared off to Findhorn in Scotland 2 days after we arrived at the farm, Rosie who adores gardening and took us under her wing before we got entrusted to Steve, Amy who we sadly didn't get to spend too much time with until towards the end and who has a hilarious and dry sense of humour and Steve, real name Annie! Steve got called Steve because she called Alex a girl and Alex was then Alice and Annie was Steve (her real name is Stephanie). After the first couple of days we were passed on from Rosie to Steve and things went from bad to worse - we're not sure we did that much other than make Steve laugh with horrendous jokes, but they kept telling us we did loads and that we were enthusiastic!
We thought that WWOOFing would give us a truly authentic Australian experience - so we WWOOFed with some Brits!! Pip spent her childhood in old colonial India and then moved back to Wales where her parents started farming, Pete was born in the UK, but Andy was born in Oz. Cookie is Australian and the girls were born in Oz but have dual nationality. So all in all - really Australian - not!
The farm was great, absolutely huge, but we barely saw any of it. When there arrived there it had been a pineapple farm, infertile and there was only 1 tree (a massive fig tree), now the farm is two thirds forested and really fertile. They make furniture by either taking apart and remaking asian furniture, using the wood from some badly made Asian furniture or by using their own trees, namely Eucalypt which is very similar to oak I think! They also have a garden and grow lots of vegetables and they make pickles, chutneys, jams, quiches, breads, etc which they then sell at markets.
Whilst we "worked" (it can't really be called working because it was so much fun) we did plenty of things like kumquat and rosella picking and processing, jar and food labelling, pineapple planting, cherry guava planting, weeding, vegetable preparation and lots more. The work was easy because of the company and we got to see some amazing things. We saw the most humongous earthworm whilst moving sawdust! It was about an inch thick and about 50cm long when not stretched out! We saw spiders as big as and bigger than our palms - Golden orb spiders, Blue triangle butterflies, Granny's cloak moths, Silver Orb Spiders, a wolf spider (that eats cane toads), a night tiger snake (venemous), cane toads, green tree frogs, worms, the most humongous horse flies and the list goes on. We saw a saw shelled turtle (which pooed in the creek we drank from!), a dingo running along the road in front of us, a huntsman spider (albeit a small and dead one!), kookaburras (that sound like monkeys!) and we heard loads and loads of whip birds and amazing wildlife. I got woken up by possums fighting on the roof (Alex slept through it) and we saw one of them wandering across the gravel bit outside the kitchen on a cable above our heads. We saw spiny leaf insects whilst working in the garden, amazing caterpillars and we walked into innumerable spider's webs and then jumped around trying to get rid of the horrid things and hoping we didn't have any spiders on us!
It wasn't all fun and games, there were a few injuries to go with it - namely mine! I caught Alex in the face with my elbow once, which I'm sure hurt and we had to bend his glasses back, but I got a basket (luckily an empty one swung into my face) and I got the handle end of a shovel up into my eye socket, leaving me with a nice gap in my eyelashes (which have thankfully grown back) a lump and puffy eyelid and a nice bruise for a couple of weeks!
We started off being petrified of everything, we didn't like sticking our arms into the trees cos of the nasty beasties but towards the end, we generally knew that they weren't going to get us. We saw spiders that make your skin rot and loads of venomous ones! On one of our last days, Steve and I picked kumquats (Alex wasn't feeling very well) and we held cool caterpillars that shoot out red smelly horns when warning you off, but they also leave a trail of silk wherever they go (all over my hand), I let an evil looking spider wander up my arm so Steve could see it (I blew it off when it started looking more evil - I don't need to be bitten!) and then I wandered off into a field full of holes by myself to pick more kumquats from an isolated tree which I thought was quite brave of me. I didn't like it though because I was counting the holes in the ground around me... about 40.. and Steve said that probably only 10% of holes are snake holes and most are cane toads... that still meant 4 evil snakes within a couple of metres of my bare legs...
We got to watch Cookie at work, making bread and all the wares to sell at the market, as well as cottage cheese.. 10l of milk, 1ml of rennet! We drank milk fresh out the Jersey cow, made mango smoothies and stupidly shaped biscuits! I shared my birthday with Steve (her bd is a day before mine), we had a lovely dinner on her bd and then on mine we went out dancing and we were taught (by the others) to Merengue, we got back to the farm at about 12.30 and had to leave at 4.30 to go and set up Saturday market - we were knackered!
They had lovely animals - horses, cows (we now know how to milk cows!), 2 dogs, 1 cat and a dog that doesn't consider itself a dog! 2 dogs, Monty and Floss, guard the workshop, are lovely, affectionate, wonderfully trained and go mad when you throw their ball for them. Ginger the cat sleeps mostly and wants to be stroked and get where he shouldn't be the rest of the time. Rufus is special - very special!! She's a nutty golden retriever, lives in the house and gets smelly every week. She doesn't see herself as a dog and gets Annicures - Steve washes her every week (with conditioner and a blowdry!!). Rufus also makes funny moans and groans whilst she's sleeping and is more nocturnal than diurnal, she'll also eat anything a human eats!
It took a while to get used to seeing frogs and toads every time you got up in the night to go to the bathroom and showering with worms but all in all we had a great experience and were sad to leave.

The day after we left, we flew up to Cairns and were decidedly unimpressed. We went for a wander along the Esplanade the first evening and our impressions were that you either go to Cairns to go out on the reef or get drunk (e.g. Magalluf). The second day we mostly organised our next week as there wasn't much to do, we saw lots of drunk natives and a drug dealer - nice! The day after we came up to Port! Port is Port Douglas and it's a nice little place. We arrived, wandered about, got food and sorted a trip on the Quicksilver Silversonic out on the Great Barrier Reef - which is what we did all day yesterday. The boat departed at 8.30 and got to the first snorkelling site (on the Agincourt ribbon reef) at about 10. We snorkelled for about an hour, saw giant clams about 1.5m long, so decades old, little nemos, blue starfish and lots more. At the second spot we had a light lunch and waited a little before heading out snorkelling, we saw loads of Barracudas, massive fish, more nemos, starfish, clams, etc and a white tipped shark! The third and final stop was where we had a snorkelling tour and we swam around with a guide who picked up stuff for us so we could touch it without harming the reef and he took us to the good spots and pointed stuff out. We got to touch and hold different types of corals and also a sea cucumber - which was really odd, almost felt like a hot loaf of bread - it was heavy and chunky and the longer you held it the more it drooped! We bought a disposable underwater camera so hopefully we'll have a few beautiful shots of the reef!

The beach here in Port (4 mile beach) is .. surprisingly..!! 4 miles long and lovely. There are loads of little sand balls on it and little holes, made by tiny little crabs and they had taken up vast areas of the beach, astonishing when the biggest ones appear to be less than an inch across (including legs)! Tomorrow we hire a car and head up to Daintree, we'll go on a croc river cruise and then stay the night near Cow Bay. From there we go up to Cape Tribulation for a night before coming back to Port via the Mossman Gorge, we'll stop for a night then drive down to Cairns, hopefully in time to hop on the train bound for Kuranda and then we'll return by Skyrail (cable car) in time to sleep and then catch our plane to Sydney the next day!

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