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Something must be done, our blogs from Asia were getting in excess of 200 views, some even getting more than 350, but since leaving Asia people seem must have lost interest. These days we’re lucky if a blog gets more than 70 people looking at it. Therefore, in an attempt to try and spark some excitement in our travels again, this blog includes a couple of pictures of me wearing nothing but Helen’s thongs (well, in one I have socks on). It’s sad that we’ve had to stoop this low and, as I’m sure you’ll agree, they are a little small for me, but I’m happy wearing them and therefore I think it’s only right that you all see me in them.
Good, now that I’ve got your attention, I can tell you all about our adventures in Cairns! Well, I say adventures…for the first 5 or so days we did pretty much nothing… Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself…
The flight from New Zealand was as painless as a 6am flight can be and, after a brief stop in Brisbane, we arrived in Cairns. Our hostel then kindly picked us up and took us to our accommodation for
the next few days, a rather faceless place that was clean, big and full trendy looking people tanning themselves by the pool, much like everywhere in Australia.
Our first few days were spent endlessly trying to decide what we’d do for the next few months in terms of transport. We’d originally thought we’d buy a car, drive it down to Sydney and sell it there. After all, everyone had been telling us that Cairns was a ‘buyers market’ and we’d be stupid to not take advantage of this. We spoke to a couple of people though and it soon turned out that buying a car wouldn’t be very sensible - loads of taxes, it could break down and selling it again at the end could be a nightmare. This therefore left us with 3 choices: To hire a car, hire a camper van or get a bus pass.
A bus pass didn’t appeal much as neither Helen nor me enjoy spending our time standing in the rain waiting for buses to arrive, or spending time on a bus full with drunk 18 year olds who are too young to drive. Hiring a car didn’t really work either as
we just couldn’t afford the cost of a hire car whilst still having to pay for accommodation. Therefore, only one choice remained… to get a camper van. Those people who know me will know that camping is not how I’d choose to spend my free time, and the idea of camping in Australia was even less appealing. Not only do you have to put up with having no space, cooking outside, sleeping on an uncomfortable ‘bed’ but in Australia you have to put up with masses of huge insects and scorching hot temperatures. Despite my reluctance, a camper van it was, and we managed to secure a pretty good price of $42 (£21) a day to hire a ‘spaceship’ camper van, which came with a DVD player, a fridge and extendable back.
We had a couple of days before we picked the camper van up and we used one of them to do what most people go to Cairns to do - visit the Great Barrier Reef. We took a tour that made two stops, the first in open water where both Helen and I tried scuba diving. We hadn’t planned to do so, as Helen is usually a
bit scared of water, but it was only £35 so we figured it’d be worth it, if just to say “I’ve done scuba diving in the great barrier reef”. It was actually surprisingly easy, and after a brief introduction where they made sure you could do basic things such as take the air piece out of your mouth and put it back in again (whilst underwater), we were away. On our 30 minute dive we saw giant clams, little nemo fish (of course, Helen’s favourite) and a ton of other brightly coloured sea creatures.
The second stop was less successful. We were taken to an island that was also a bird sanctuary. Unsurprisingly, it was filled with birds and all of it held a huge fine if you even stepped on it, except for a small patch of the beach that people could snorkel from. I was eager to get snorkelling so I told Helen that I’d go and have a quick look at the coral and then come back. Helen originally agreed, but then decided that she wanted to come in too, so we both slipped our stinger suits on (like wet suits, but designed to stop Jellyfish
stinging you, rather than to keep you warm) and hopped in. After a bit of swimming around together, we got separated and I headed off back to where I’d been told the turtles hung out and then back to the boat as I needed the loo. By the time I’d managed to get back to the boat, unsuccessfully look for turtles and then swam back to the island, our time was up. It didn’t really matter though, I’d had a great time looking around the fantastic coral and I’d seen tons of wildlife, including some really big fish. When I got back to Helen it turned out that she, on the other hand, hadn’t had seen quite so many fish as she had been waiting for me on the beach for 30 minutes due to something of a miscommunication between us.
Needless to say Helen wasn’t too pleased and she didn’t say much on the trip back. If any of you speak to her about this experience, then do me a favour. Tell her that you spoke to me and that I said the coral was rubbish there and that the closest thing to wildlife I saw was an
old tyre. Even though, in reality, it was probably one of the best places to snorkel that I’ve ever been to.
The next day we walked for 40 minutes or so to the other side of town to collect our camper van. Despite them being a hire car company they couldn’t pick us up… Having completed all of the forms and signed away several hundred pounds of our hard earned money we drove away “Agrabah” for the first time. We’d been hoping to get a camper van with a cool name like “Black Star” or “Doctor Evil” but “Agrabah” (which we later found was named after the desert in Aladdin and therefore still a fairly cool name) it was.
Agrabah’s first destination was to Cape Tribulation and as North as we would go in Australia for the rest of our trip. Cape Tribulation is only accessible by a short ferry and the only electricity over there is created through generators, making the whole area feel pretty remote. Thankfully the campsite we chose for the night was decent, but this still didn’t make the camping experience pleasurable. That night, as we baked in the back of our van, we
managed to frequently hit into each other, contract sore necks from the rubbish pillows and were woken up periodically from the rustlings of bush turkeys outside. By the morning, neither of us was in a good mood.
The rest of the day was spent going around the island doing anything that was free. We went to some lovely beaches and watched tiny little crabs roll balls of sand out of their homes, we did a couple of walks through the rainforest, met a lovely bat called “Sunshine” at a local ‘bat house’ and went to a view point. There was one clear highlight of the area, that afternoon we popped into a little café to get something to eat and, after a little while we heard some commotion and someone pointed out a large bird to us that was slowly walking by. This bird was no normal bird though, it was a Cassowary! A huge endangered bird that can grow 2 meters tall, looks a bit like a more interesting emu and is only found in a few northern parts of Australia. It wasn’t a fully-grown bird, but it was still pretty cool to sit eating our lunch, as
a wild one padded not far from us.
After Cape Tribulation, we headed back south, this time to an area west of Cairns, known as ‘the Tablelands’. I’m typing this whilst sitting in a caravan park in Brisbane and, to date, it’s my favourite area we’ve been to in Australia.
It didn’t start too well, Mossman Gorge, a National Park and our first stop, was rammed full of tourists jumping on and off their tour buses, but most other places we visited afterwards we had pretty much to ourselves. Over the next couple of days we visited tons of waterfalls, went swimming in a freezing cold lake, saw some turtles (on a walk around the same lake) and saw some more Kookaburras (this time of the laughing variety). We also tried to go on a self-guided nature spotting night walk but failed pretty spectacularly and only spotted one frog. Oh and we, of course, spent more time eating with insects, waking up a bad moods and cursing our tiny little camper van (don’t listen to him, camping is great! - Helen).
Like Cape Tribulation, the highlight of the tablelands was animal related. As we made our way
around we noticed a place that claimed ‘guaranteed platypus sightings’. Helen was keen to see one and it was on my ‘list of 10 animals I want to see in the wild before in Australia before we leave’ so we pulled in. Just in case anyone is wondering what else is on the list, then here it is:
1) Koala
2) Cassowary - Seen!
3) Platypus
4) Sea Turtle
5) Kangaroo
6) Kookaburra - Seen!
7) Possum
8) Wombat
9) Massive Spider - Seen!
10) Snake
We were greeted by Asian lady, who busy was being shouted at by a bloke somewhere behind her.
“Iron wire - Where’s the bloody iron wire!!?”
“I’m not su…”
“What?! Iron wire woman! Where is it”
“I don’t know what you mean..”
“You know IRON WIRE! I-RON WI-RE!”
After a little while he went off further back to see if he could find the elusive iron wire and she spoke to us. For $10 each her husband would give us a tour of the area in which the platypuses were. Shortly afterwards, the husband, and the man doing the shouting, came out from round the corner.
“Right! What do you know about Platypuses then?!”. A friendly English chap, who was doing the tour with us, perked up “Erm.. that the best time to see them is in the morning or late afternoon?” “Wrong!! You clearly know nothing about Platypuses!”
There followed a tour where the seemingly angry, but actually quite friendly, bloke showed us to a pond where we watched as maybe 4 or 5 platypuses swim about. In terms of cost, it was the best tour we’d done all trip. The bloke’s knowledge of the creatures was great and he was also an expert at spotting them, something that isn’t all too easy. We left pleased and just before we went he recommended a “night tour” to us in which we could see a host of other animals including snakes and possums - two of the creatures on my list!
Unfortunately, our phone had no signal so we spent a little while driving around looking for a pay phone. When we eventually found one it was in a tiny ‘town’ that had about 2 shops and looked like it hadn’t changed in the last 80 years. We tried calling the guy who ran
the night tours from a phone box but all we got was an answering machine message that had another phone number on it. So we stored that number in our mobile and then used the pay phone again to ring the second number, still with no success. It was unfortunate, but we decided to give up on the night walk and drive 2 hours to our next stop, Mission Beach.
By the time we arrived at the Caravan Park it was getting late and the reception was closed. There was a number you could ring for late check-ins so we decided to call that.
“Helen, where’s the mobile?”
“I don’t know, I thought you had it”
“Nope, I thought you had it”
So we searched for the phone before coming to the conclusion that we’d left it in the phone box, 2 hours away in the Tablelands…. After making 5 or 6 calls on another local payphone we eventually managed to get through to a woman who worked in the local pub to where to phone was left. She, after originally saying she wouldn’t walk 2 minutes out of the door to look to see
if our phone was still sitting in the phone box, sent someone out to look for it. We phoned again 5 minutes later and they said that they’d looked but it wasn’t there. We almost decided to drive back anyway, to have a look ourselves, but first Helen had one last look in the car - and found it sitting happily under the passenger seat…
We went to sleep that night tired. But not before Helen had poured boiling hot oil on the floor (and on my leg) having had a massive insect jump on her head as we were cooking dinner.
3 of 10 animals seen so far, it was a good start to the trip! In fact it had almost been 4. One night we’d put out some apple at the back of our camper van and sat and waited to see if anything turned up. After 15 minutes something did turn up…a rat… then something else! Another rat. That night Helen woke me “Dave! There’s a possum at the back!” I got up to see. “Helen, that’s just a slightly bigger rat”. “Oh”…
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Spaceships
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Hey guys, been enjoying your blog. I linked to it in Twitter as part of a new thing I'm trying "Spaceship blog of the day". Sad your bed fell apart, was there velcro on it? I made the same mistake with the bandicoot, by the way! Australia has some weird animals.