It's Good Friday! After 11 hours of uninterrupted sleep we got up and decided to further explore the city. We had the whole day to meander around Cairns before our tour meeting late this arvo (afternoon).

We headed back to the Esplanade. That big swimming pool is called a swimming lagoon. It is 4800 square meters of crystal clear water. It has a massive state of the art chlorination and filtration plant that keeps the water perfect for year round swimming at an ambient temperature. Surrounding the lagoon is parklands with tropical gardens. The Esplanade is a perfect spot for bird watching, biking, walking, enjoying a picnic and people watching. Since this is Easter weekend there are a lot of families who have come for a long weekend. Aussies get Friday and Monday off generally were told.

All along the boardwalk there are all sorts of "attractions". Fogarty Park features an outdoor performance space and links with the Reef Fleet Terminal, the common departure point for travelling to the Great Barrier Reef. There are BBQ stations, fitness stations, families picnicking, teens throwing a rugby ball, dog walkers - generally people just enjoyIng the beautiful day. 

Cairns also has one of the best tropical gardens in Australia. We opted to miss this as we did an extensive tour of the botanical gardens in Rio.

We were told to watch for crocs if we venture off the Esplanade. Apparently they are somewhat protected. Boats and vehicles are not allowed within 10 meters of a croc in the wild - it is illegal unless part of a commercial crocodile viewing tour, to there is a reasonable excuse, like where a creek us less than 10 m wide. There are many don'ts regarding crocs many of which are common sense. But I don't this e have much to worry about in that count as we're sticking close to home today. 

We walked the entire boardwalk from our hotel to past the marina at least twice taking in everything. As I said Cairns is known for its mudflats when the tide goes out. The water goes out quite far from shore just leaving mud. 
 
It was a lazy day just roaming around and stopping for a stubby (375 ml beer bottle) at a couple of boozers (pubs). Because it was Good Friday most restaurants wouldn't serve just drinks. We did find one that wasn't aware of this law in the afternoon. Apparently it's law that you have to have a meal in order to drink and the meal has to occur within an hour of ordering a drink. When we stopped for dinner, our waiter came over after a while to tell us we had to order our dinner. The nerve!  

We we saw lots of birds. This is a very popular spot for birdwatching. We saw what looked like baby pigeons, parrots, many varieties of seabirds, and not birds but megabats called spectacled flying foxes, also called spectacled fruit bats. They are not the tiny winged creatures we have in Canada but are at least 10 - 12" long. There are hundreds of them in the trees. We missed them flying about as we had to leave for our tour meeting. They apparently come yo life around 6:00 - 7:00 pm and can be seen flying all over. Maybe we'll catch them when we come back to Cairns in a couple of days. 

We met Caitlin our CEO (chief experience officer) and the rest of our group in the evening. the group consists of quite a mixed bag - there are 16 people in all - young, old, outgoing, shy - from the Yukon, Ottawa, Ireland, Wales, Switzerland, Germany, and 2 from Britain I think. The Brits were just arriving at the end of the meeting. Hopefully they are as friendly as the people on our Peru tour. First impressions: the Cannucks are going to be the annoying ones. We'll have to stay away from them. 

Tomorrow we're heading to Cape Tribulation (3-4 hours north of here). There we'll go into the rainforest and do some hiking, go to the beach and do some swimming and snorkelling and who knows what else. I think the real adventures are starting today. We're told that there is no internet reception for a couple of days so you won't be hearing from me until we're back in Cairns.