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Published: September 3rd 2009
Another reason for coming to Port Douglas was because we are celebrating our 15th anniversary of meeting. Coincidentally, we had been in the same part of the world (
Mission Beach) in 2005 for our 11th anniversary - you may remember, it being the second time the weather prevented us from Skydiving...
This year, for obvious reasons, we had planned a much more sedate day. We started by having side-by-side massages at a local spa - relaxation for Em, deep tissue sports for Tim...
Afterwards we grabbed a coffee from 'Re:Hab' which was purportedly the best coffee in town. We found out why - they served supreme coffee, a NZ roast, and therefore understandably better than any Aussie brew...
We had planned to spend the afternoon on the beach (as so far we had had no beach time whatsoever) but instead we had one last mission to accomplish...somewhere out there were wombats, and we needed to see 'em!
That mission was to be accomplished at Cairns Tropical Zoo, but first we headed back to the apartment to cook up the rest of our supplies for lunch. Think beans, baked potatoes, fried potatoes (hah, if the German's won't make
'em for us we'll make 'em ourselves!) with green beans and peppers and olive oil and more mixed herbs, mexican rice, tuna, corn and anything else that we had left from our bbq stash earlier in the week. We had to use everything up because customs regulations mean that very little can be brought back into NZ. Finally, the huge bag of baking potatoes were gone! We were free!
So, over-stuffed with carbs, we drove down to the aforementioned
Cairns Tropical Zoo, home to at least 3 wombats (one hairy-nosed and a couple of common). Wes was delighted to finally meet some of his fellow aussie critters (see pictures) and we were delighted to see that the hairy-nosed wombat was busily tucking into a bowl of carrots (see blog entry "What does a wombat eat?" from 2005). We also finally met the elusive rainforest cassowary, the huge bird that we were always warned to be on the look out for up in the Daintree. They also had some cute crocs, both freshwater and saltwater, a good collection of sweet extremely-deadly tropical snakes...
On the way out though was the highlight...the Koala's had a maternity ward and it was
full of new mini Koalas...altogether "Ahhh"...
We left when the zoo closed and they were locking the gates and considered buying a $100 giant wombat from the zoo shop, but Tim's argument for sense and reason prevailed and we left stuffed-wombat-less, except for Wes, of course...
That evening we had booked a fitting anniversary dinner at 'Finz' an excellent seafood restaurant, where Em had the
zuppa di mare and Tim had a delicious, but strangely white (and therefore, presumably, saffron-less)
paella.
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