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World Trip 2005-06
Cairns!
Our 1st port of call
Great backpackers ambience, surrounded by like minded travellers hitting Australia for sunshine, extreme sports, beaches, kangaroo's and nightlife. 1st thoughts are that the country is full of chilled out people who love their beer and wild antics.
There are so many different creaters here, according to good old travel writer and fact man 'Bill Bryson'; 80% of the all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exist nowhere else in the world! with over 100,000 insects its crazy to see all these new creatures flying and crawling around. Apprarently it also has the highest number of dangerous animal, you cant go in the sea at Cairns due to the crocodiles and further down the road you cant go in the sea becase of 'Stingers' that will give you a heart attack if they manage to sting ya. Bit scary.
Cairns however, offers an awesome port lagoon where everyone in the area chills out and swims throughout the day, its special as you can see from the photos.
We arrived in the area on the 6th Jan and immediately settled into JJ backpakers, who offered free airport pick up and free meals. The following day was Brides Birthday!!!
Birthday of the year 2006
Brides awoke to an array of gifts carefully selected by yours truely, including a bottle of 'ARAK" bought fresh from Bali, a budda toy, 'the fog' dvd and a BUNGY JUMP which he was to do on the monday. That day however we had other plans. We managed to get ourselves on to a free trip with the rest of the hostel for a guy who was setting up a new day trip and wanted us to be on his promotional leaflets etc! (which was nice), turned out to be an awesome day, we took in the sights, chilled in a river lagoon and did a 10metre cliff jump into a river. That night we went out and wilded out in cairns centre with two of the guys in our hostel. Martin from Holland and Marcus the German Snitz (he ordered a chicken snitzel for dinner which we all found humerous cos it was very german, but i guess you had to be there). We celebrated the bulk of the night in PJ O'briens and ended up particapted in the annual bar topp dance off! I intially volenteered Brides to compete since it was his birthday, but i ended up getting called up to perform and accidently outshone his Oasis based dance moves and knocked him out of the semi-final only to be beaten in the end by a guy who we later found out worked there! fix.
Sunday: chilled
Monday: Day of the Bungy! Brides was scared man! but he got right in the end! We turned up about 11.00 along with the Dutch dude Martin and spent about 4 hours there. It was an awesome day. Brides ended up doing 4-5 jumps in the end, he was loving it. 45 meter drop, he had a crazy adrinaline rush. I enjoyed watching but ended up losing my brand new sexy sunglasses, watched them fall 45 meteres into the pool at the bottom never to be seen again!
Tuesday - Sat
That week we resisted temptation to do any day trip as Greggy was to join us all the way from Blackpool on the Saturday. we spent the week enjoying the lagoon, organising the camper van, and biking around the area, checking out the local neighbourhoods and the Botanic gardens.
Saturday: Neil Gregson arrives in fine style!
All the way from Blackpool to Hong Kong and then Australia Neil arrived approximatly 2.30pm, sporting a new crew cut and a pale face he seems ready to live it up as soon he arrived! which we did, after quickly checking him into our hostel and giving him tour of the area, we hit the town. wicked night of crazy drinking, people and dancefloors.
Sunday; chilled
Monday: The Great Barrier Reef
Fantastic day trip throughout the beautiful coral reef.Today we got a boat trip out to the great barrier reef. After a truely horrendous journey in which andy was throwing up over ther side, neil was there next to him but managed to keep it down. to have brides peering over the side too would have been an embarrasment to the three of us. After stopping th boat we were offered the chance to dive in the barrier reef, neil obliged but andy and andy decided to just do the snokeling. Neil was a little nervous and consequently his dive was shorter than expected because he sucked up all the air in his tank.
the water's really shallow for miles so we took a smaller boat out to a little sand island- just a sand hump no more than 10m squared poking out of the water in the middle of nowhere. The waters clear so you see tons of fish swimming around you, at one point they were eating food out of our hands that we'd took form the boat. If your quick enough you can touch them. Nevertheless the best bit was the wine and cheese on return.
So thats Cairns over and done with! tommorow we pick up our Camper Van and start our adventure down the coast. Its gonna be a crazy ride!
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