After the slightly hectic visit to the Whitsundays I decided to treat myself to a well-earned day of chilling out in Mission Beach - between Airlie Beach and Cairns. There's almost nothing there apart from miles of tropical beach and then rainforest and cassowaries inland so is a perfect place to do nothing in! Unfortunately it's stinger season so all that beautiful blue sea was out of bounds and with temperatures well up into the mid 30's the beach was a lot less enticing with no cooling off option! So I decided to take the 15minute boat trip over to Dunk Island which is just off Mission Beach.

Once again there's basically nothing there - lots of beach and rainforest - but it has the advantage of having a posh resort complete with swimming pool which is open to day guests. As it's my last week before I return to reality I decided to indulge myself and have a day in the resort using their pool, getting a free lunch and generally trying to look like I belonged and wasn't really a grubby backpacker!

Then, recharged and having topped up my tan that little bit more, it was on to Cairns... Cairns didn't start well. I got off the bus and onto the transfer bus to my hostel only to be told that the woman behind reception remembered taking my booking over the phone but there was no record of it on the system and by then they were full! So I had to trundle all the way back across town to stay in their partner hostel (at a pretty impressive discount after I'd thrown a mini strop!)

The main/only thing I really wanted to do in my short time in Cairns was go snorkelling off the Barrier Reef so I spent an afternoon trawling the thousands of travel shops to find a good day trip and settled on Passions of Paradise (pretentious name but highly recommended!), bought myself an underwater disposable camera and generally got excited about practising my new snorkelling skills!

I hate to say it but it was actually quite a big disappointment. The weather, having been boiling hot and sunny for the previous week, was starting to turn so it was cloudy, windy and rainy which didn't make for a good 2hour boat journey out to the reef. Luckily I was well prepared with seasickness tablets but some others on the trip weren't as fortunate... Then we arrived at our first stop - Michaelmas Cay which is a big sand island and seabird colony. We took a glass-bottomed boat out to the beach and then went snorkelling from there cleverly leaving our stuff on the sand to get covered in bird poo! The snorkelling was pretty average really - you had to swim quite far out from the beach to get into any clear water as the waves were churning up so much sand. Once I got out there it was nowhere near as impressive as the coral in the Whitsundays with fewer fish and less impressive corals so we got back on the boat for lunch a bit disappointed.

Lunch however was delish! And then before setting off the crew set up a fish feed over the side which attracted many more fish than had seemed to be in the water previously including a reef shark and sea turtle. Then in was on to our second stop - Paradise Reef. For this one we were jumping straight off the boat into pretty choppy sea so although there was more coral to be seen, I found it really hard swimming against the waves and as soon as I found something I wanted to look at would inevitably get washed off in the opposite direction! It was good fun though and probably a very good workout even though there was still less to see than in the Whitsundays and my photos will almost certainly all be rubbish!

So that was Cairns - my final stop! Tomorrow morning I have to get up hideously early to catch the 5.45 flight to Sydney for my last couple of days of Australianness...