G'day Australia; we have arrived. It was an interesting flight to Brisbane, we were flying right next to an electrical storm, one of the scariest most bumpy and turbulent flights I've had in my life (can't wait for the next one, luckily it's not for 7 weeks), the two girls were fast asleep so were clueless. After we managed to get off the flight, they closed the airport because the storm was so bad, which meant they couldn't offload our bags which caused delays for 2 or 3 flights that had just come in. We didn't mind though, we still had 12 hours until our connecting flight to Cairns!!. After an hour or so we left with our bags and found a big U shape sofa and set up camp for the night. It wasn't to bad in the end, eye patch on, ipod in. got about 5 hours sleep. We said next time were tight on cash and cant afford to stay at a hostel; a nearby airport was going to be our cheap place of rest. Pulling up at our hostel, we wasn't sure if we made the right choice, it's called the Ayslum, and did look like a hippy prison, turned out to be fine in the end, once we got talking to people. Full of Europeans!! A girl from work, Anita, met us there for a few days which was lovely, we went out for dinner and had a few drinks, had my first jammie dodger which was a chambord and baileys, it was actually delicious. The next day we went and had a sun bathe day, cairns town doesn't have a beach so everyone goes to the man made lagoon which is just like a lido on the edge of the coast, they had a girl singing with a band, people drinking and hanging out, just a very chilled. There's a lot of 'Asian hippies' in the town at the moment because of a nearby festival, they've literally taken over the town!!!
We went to a travel shop and looked into all the trips were going to do down the east coast, so we booked; Snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, SKYDIVE (!!!!) over Mission Beach, day trip to Whitsundays (google it, it's laavely) and 3 day trip to Fraser Island (boat party, camping on the islands and driving your own 4x4 over the sand dunes). After booking a skydive, I needed a strong drink, later that night we had an Asylum Hostel bar crawl called an original name of 'mad monday' which was a laugh, haven't done one of those since the girls left uni!
Today we rented a car (nicknamed the inbetweeners car, bright green and a small embarrassment) and went north to the Daintree rainforest, which is the oldest rainforest in the world, we went on a walk through and ended up by a natural waterfall, the other two were the first in for a swim, I took a little while longer and needed a lot of persuading but so glad I did it, I will upload a photo on here. Livy (the brave one) failed to mention that she saw turtles getting in the water whilst we was in there. We then drove down to Wonga beach, my sister lived there for 3 months so we wanted to pay it a visit. Sadly it's jellyfish season so we couldn't go for a swim in the sea but we sat and had our packed lunch on the beach. Afterwards we went to Mossman Gorge, which is in another part of the Daintree, we wondered through the rainforest and came to the Gorge, loads of people were climbing and jumping off the rocks, swimming around, and taking in the scenes and sounds of the rainforest. Picture perfect.
On our way back down south we popped through to Port Douglas, a cute seaside town, parked up the dodgem car and wondered down the main street, came across a tree which was being overrun by birds, they were flying in and out and surrounding the tree, we were so amazed with how many managed to get it in, we carried on down to the marina, found some swings and just listened to the sounds, Kate started to wonder down to the water but I quickly pointed out the huge warning signs for crocodiles in the water. What was turning out to be an animal filled evening, all of a sudden we saw a HUGEEE bat, then within minutes, there was a swarm of bats gathering in the trees, there was literally hundreds of them!! Slightly terrifying - first time I've seen bats, I zipped up my jumper, put my hood up and run out of there flying line. Anita is going back to Sydney tomorrow so we treated ourselves to a restaurant dinner, i had a children's fish and chips meal because it was the cheapest thing of ($10), I gave into temptation on the alcohol front though and ended up buying a Rekorderlij cider, stupidly didn't ask how much it was before the barmaid opened it, $14 dollars later!!!!!!!
We got loads of photos of this day so I'll upload them onto my snapfish soon.