30th July 2009

On Monday Francesca that I met in Sydney back in my first week came to Brisbane to stay for a couple of days. It was really good to see her again and I can’t believe we’ve been in Oz for over 4 months now! Last night (Wednesday) we flew up to Cairns, the shuttle bus to the airport just had us two on it: the driver was really chatty and he decided to take the back roads. When we were about half way there he pulled up onto a driveway and went into the house – me and Francesca were wondering what the hell was going on – and then he came out with two men that lived there……..earlier on in the journey he had been chatting to us about two Italian guys that he was renting a house to and since Francesca is from Italy too he decided to introduce us to them, how bizarre!! But very friendly! When he left us at the airport he also gave us the phone number of his friend that lives in Cairns in case we had any problems while we were there, and he gave us his own phone number too. Don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that friendly in my life!!!! And probably won’t ever again.

When we got to Cairns we went straight to bed when we arrived at the hostel at 1am. At 7.30am I got picked up for a sky dive!!!! I booked it at Mission Beach which is a 2 hour drive south or Cairns because you get to see the rainforests and great barrier reef when falling and then land on the beach. When the driver had collected everyone from the different hostels to take us down to MB he said there was a 50/50 chance of it going ahead because of bad weather and continued to hand out forms for us to sign which basically said if we died it wasn’t their fault…..I wasn’t nervous, honest!!! When we got there we watched a dvd of other people doing the dive (much better for the nerves!) and were then told that it wouldn’t go ahead that day because it was too cloudy and windy and the chance of rain was too high. I was absolutely gutted! So my booking is left open and I will be returning in October to give it another go. It felt like a bit of a waste of a day because we didn’t get back til later in the afternoon but when we did it was raining in Cairns and Francesca had had a boring day of just walking around the shops – apparently there isn’t much to do there, not even a beach. I got to wander around for a bit and we went into one of the hundred million tour shops there and booked a scuba diving and snorkelling trip out to the Great Barrier Reef for the next day :)

This evening we got a bus up to Port Douglas, an hour north of Cairns, to spend the next four nights and it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. As you can probably tell from the pictures there is nothing higher than the palm trees and the beach here is lovely. There are lots of bars and restaurants but the only down side is that it is so expensive to eat out, not great on a backpacker’s budget.