G'day Mate!

We have started our Aussie adventure and we love it already! We arrived in Cairns after an overnight flight from Singapore via Darwin which was made more eventful by Kie suffering a nose bleed during landing! Once we arrived at Cairns we picked a hostel out of our Lonely Planet, Bellview, and headed towards a transfer coach. We arrived at Bellview Hostel and discovered, for the first time on the trip, that we wouldn't be sharing a room as they were single sex dorms. The hostel itself was nothing special and fairly dated but it was adequate enough for our needs, even if the $19 price tag each per night was ten times what we were used to paying in Asia! We spent the rest of our first day getting to know the area and ventured to Peter Pan's - where we booked our trips for the next two weeks, starting the next day!

Morning came with an early start as we had to check in at 7.15am for the Ocean Free boat, a huge sailing yacht built for the sole purpose of day trips like these. The day started with an hour and a half of snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef, where we were able to see sting rays, sharks, turtles and many other very large fish! We were then treated to a beautiful lunch consisting of chicken drumsticks, pasta and salad before heading over to Green Island where we saw more turtles, as well as crocodiles and tropical fish at Marineland Melanesia. In hindsight the discounted price of $13.50 was still a lot of money for what we got. After a couple of hours we were picked up from the island and taken back to mainland. This time, unlike the morning journey, the engines were turned off and the sails raised. So, whilst we enjoyed a glass of wine with cheese and biscuits and some cake, our boat was the only one in Cairns, that day, to make its way home through wind power.

The next day was spent shopping and chilling out before having some food at the Night Market and watching a film with some new friends. We had another early rise as we were due to start our 'Oz Experience' which we thought was a similar service to 'National Express' in the sense that, it just gets you from A to B. We were pleasantly surprised when we were greeted by an excitable and enthusiastic bus driver called Papa Keith! Further surprise came when he donned his microphone and gave us a guided tour with lots of information about where we were and about Australia itself.

Our first stop off was at Boulder Gorge, a huge river in the middle of a rainforest. Papa Keith proceeded to give us another guided tour, again containing lots of information this time specific to the rainforest itself. Our next stop was Innisfail where we had some lunch and visited the Crocodile Farm which not only breeds crocodiles for their meat and skin but also has kangaroos, wallabies, dingos, emus, exotic birds and a couple of cassowaries. We were able to hold, feed and take lots of photo's with many of the animals for $18 each.

After the tour had finished and everyone was ready to leave we set off for our final destination of Townsville where we hopped onto a 25 minute ferry to Magnetic Island - our destination for the next two nights, we'll fill you in on how this went next time!

Hope you're all ok, we miss everyone lots and lots.

Lots of love Sophie and Kie xx