|
|
|||||||||
| Other countries sue_and_nathan visited in yearaway |
| Australia (4) |
| Cambodia (2) |
| Czech Republic (1) |
| India (6) |
| Indonesia (2) |
| Japan (1) |
| Malaysia (6) |
| New Zealand (2) |
| Singapore (1) |
| Thailand (7) |
| United Kingdom (2) |
| Vietnam (4) |
| ||||||||||||
| After a four hour flight we finally arrived in the hot steamy part of Australia, Cairns, in the north east. It’s just amazing that you can fly for four hours and still be in the same country. Cairns feels like a made-up place for tourists – and there are plenty of them! We quickly headed north to Cape Tribulation in the ricketiest hire-car in existence. We booked into Cape Tribulation Retreat, a large open wooden house right on the edge of the Greater Daintree rainforest. This is unspoilt primary forest much like we expected to see in Borneo. Our hosts Chris and Denise made us feel amazingly welcome. The breakfast there was fantastic, not only the usual fry-up, but also croissants and a huge selection strange tropical fruit, the like we’d never seen or heard of before. They even gave us a free nature walk in their backyard, which is about eight acres of rainforest, where we saw ugly (and I mean UGLY!) cane toads, white-lipped luminous green tree-frogs, the sort of spiders you wouldn’t want to meet on a nature walk in someone’s backyard, bats and something that rustled in a bush which we were quite pleased we never found! During the first night at the retreat I half awoke with a feeling of sweat dripping down my back, but it was a very hot and humid night so I didn’t think anything more of it. Later, I was awoken by something crawling on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see a huge cockroach looking straight into my eyes. The next half hour was spent trying to catch it and a couple of its mates. I realised then that it wasn’t sweat dripping down my back earlier, but...I didn’t really want to dwell on that. In the morning we relayed this story to our hosts who told us about other creatures that had appeared. They have huge monitor lizards that appear out of the forest and come up their back steps when the smells of bacon are wafting through the air. But, our favourite tale was of a three metre python that made it’s way into their ‘open’ living room and attacked the cat at 4am. Chris then teased the snake out of the house. I didn’t ask how you actually ‘tease’ a three metre python with a mouth full of cat fur out of your front door! One hot and sunny morning at the Cape we headed into the forest where we found a lonely creek which looked exceptionally inviting, so we dived into the cool waters for a swim with the fish. It was lovely, only us, the sounds of the forest and the odd streak of blue in the air as the kingfishers darted into the waters for fish. We were told later that where we were swimming was quite close to the estuary, so we were lucky that we weren’t sharing the creek with the odd croc too! But, talking of creatures of the deep, we must mention our trips out to the Great Barrier Reef. Our first trip was out to Agincourt Reef, one of the thousands of reefs which stretch 2000 kilometres down the Queensland coast and make up the Great Barrier Reef, the biggest structure made by living organisms in the world. We snorkeled from a huge pontoon with ropes and resting stations for us novices. It took quite a bit of coaxing to get Sue in the water, but after her first sighting of the wonders below the sea I couldn’t get her out! We spent about 4 hours watching the coloured corals and amazing fish. The fish were totally undisturbed by our presence and just swum over or around us – it was like we weren’t actually there at all, but were just looking in. But, in a strange way, you also feel part of their world just for a short time. A few days later we stopped in Airlie Beach which is a totally misleading name as it’s actually a harbour and only has a small man-made beach. Australia is full of strange town names. Some have been taken from the UK like Ipswich, Guildford and Coventry. They also name towns after people, both Howard and Keith made us chuckle and we almost made a 1000km detour to see what a town called Banana would be like! Anyway, in Airlie Beach Sue booked one of her surprises for me – a trip to Hardy Reef on a seaplane via Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island. I thought this was a bit strange as she absolutely hates flying and as soon as we got onto the seaplane she went the same colour as one of those tree-frogs we saw in the rainforest! I sat as the co-pilot as we flew over the turquoise waters through which you could see the shapes of the reefs – one famous one is heart reef (well, we are still on our honeymoon you know!!) We landed on the water by their boat from which we snorkeled. The coral and the fish were more abundant here, probably something to do with the small groups and they swum right up to you. You could even feel the tickle of their fins as they brushed past. Poor Sue, it really wasn’t her day. A wave caught her and smashed her into some coral, luckily the coral was okay, but left Sue with a cut up leg. Then on the way back in the plane she felt so sick that she had to take her camera out of it's case in preparation...fortunately the surprise champagne lunch we’d had earlier stayed put! That night we laid on the beach in shorts and T-shirts and watched an excellent fireworks display which marked the end of the ‘Reef Festival’. Half way through the ‘ooohs’ and the ‘aaahhhs’ Sue pointed out that the next day was the 5th November and everyone at home would be wrapped up in hats and scarves and holding sparklers! What a bonfire night this one was to remember! | ||||||||||||
| Previous Entry: | Next Entry: | |||||||||||
| 25 Oct 2001 : Adelaide to Melbourne - Australia | 19 Nov 2001 : Gold Coast - Australia | |||||||||||
| The Great Ocean Road | Home Comforts | |||||||||||