Cairns Extended Cut

So my last post was definitely inadequate for the awesomeness that happened in Cairns. I just wasn’t quite feeling in the writing mood when I wrote the last post, and I had internet to distract me so I’ll go into a lot more detail in this one. I have the feeling this post will be a lot longer than the previous one so if that’s what you’re looking for, read on. If not, then don’t read it. I’ll never know who reads this and who doesn’t, unless you post a comment and those are always nice. Lets me know that people are enjoying and actually care about what I’m doing/how I am.

So our flight for Cairns was departing at 7 am so we had to wake up pretty damn early. I basically slept the whole way on the plane because that’s what I do on planes, fall asleep before or during take-off, and wake up when we land. It makes the whole flight seem a lot shorter because I’m asleep the whole time. Now I’m gonna complain a little bit here because I enjoy complaining and if you know me well enough, you know how often I complain just to complain. So this plane is perhaps the most uncomfortable plane I’ve ever been on. The seats were terribly shapes so you’re sitting in this super awkward position with your back pretty far back and your neck push forward pretty far, almost like they want to conform your spine to a nice C-shape. Now after the accident and apparently my years of poor posture, this seating arrangement is super uncomfortable and terrible for my back. Add to that the blasting A/C while everyone is wearing shorts so I’m cold AND uncomfortable. Well that’s what I was thinking when I was awake, which was probably like a total of 30 min of the 3 hour flight.

The flight lands and right as we get inside, it starts pouring rain, the raindrops are huge and the ground is soaked within seconds. But as we continue through the airport and claim our bag the rain has come to a complete stop before we have to leave the airport. As a side note, we initially hadn’t planned to check any bags, but between the two of us we needed to check one baggage to get our liquids like shampoo and sunscreen through the airport, silly security. We get a shuttle to our hostel and drop our stuff off as we’re not allowed to check-in until after 2pm. We do, however get to drop our bags off so we aren’t walking the city with our hands full. Unfortunately, when I dropped my bags off I forgot to take my camera with me further illustrating my inexperience with taking pictures though I am getting better. I do seem to take the most pictures of the random meals I eat though… Something about be and food. But I do think that’ll slowly come to a close because we’re moving into the Milano tomorrow and I get to stop paying out the ass for food to some degree. I know I wrote that in the last post, but eating out 2 meals a day adds up REALLY fast. Over just this week I’ve spent about $400 on food and other touristy things IN ADDITTION to the money I already paid before for accommodations and plane tickets. Pretty damn expensive vacation for one week… and there’s still more things to pay for… Well, I’m only in Australia once, that’s why I picked Melbourne as my 1^st choice.

I think at this point this post is already as long as my previous post and I’ve only covered the damn plane ride. Well, whatever, that’s what the extended version is for anyways. I get to tell you guys every tiny little detail of what I’m doing. Hell I might even include some pictures in this one. Then you people can really see my amazingly amateur picture taking skills.

So we walk the city, and everything is pretty much closed because it’s too early. We walk along the beach and boardwalk and kind of just observe the beauty of nature. The city itself isn’t really cityish. I mean it is, but there are trees sprawled in the middle of the roads and the backdrop is rolling mountains of green in the distance as pictured below.

Really pretty sweet. The beach itself is kind of nasty as it’s kind of marshy, but that makes for lots of cool animals. Different types of birds that can hunt in the shallow waters, crabs fighting for territory and dominance. Then there’s the Lagoon. Because the beach is so nasty, they filter the sea water and remove the brown-ness of the water and you get a nice crystal clear blue saltwater swimming pool along the ocean.

The real ocean is the deeper blue water in the background, that sand you see is what they have on the land to simulate a nicer beach to make up for the nasty one they actually have.

We walk around a little more and come across this building with a large glass dome on top of it. Intrigued we walk over and discover that it’s a zoo on to of a casino. In this casino there’s the most amazing little restaurant. The meals themselves are $12.00 at the most, and the portions are almost American-sized and pretty high quality.

Pictured above is tempura-battered Barrramundi, which is a local Australian fish. Fish and chips, oh and a beer. As you can see that beer is pretty damn small, it’s a “pot” of beer which I don’t think we have in the states, but then again I could be wrong because I have no knowledge of how alcohol works anywhere. I tried three different beers for the three meals I had here and the one above was Toohey’s Extra Dry and I actually really liked it. From what I’ve tried so far I seem to prefer “dry” beers though I have no idea what that means. I’ll look it up at some point but that beer was pretty delicious. So the meal total comes out to $15.50 which is RIDICULOUS here in Australia. A full-sized meal AND pot of beer for that little? MIND = BLOWN.

And I totally skipped the zoo on top of the casino because we were so hyped about this cheap, delicious restaurant. So yeah, it’s just a big dome with lots of trees around simulating the rainforest. The main attraction is the huge 4m salt water crocodile, most of which actually live in freshwater. But he’s actually pretty boring, just kinda sits there and does nothing. My favorites here were the Kookaburras. They actually have an albino Kookaburra named “Snowy” and they’ve got a nice little family of four of them. Apparently Kookaburras can’t be alone because they get all depressed and starve to death so they have to live together in a family. Also these birds eat meat and swallow chicks and mice whole. It’s really quite attractive.

So I didn’t get any pictures of the croc feeding because I didn’t actually have my camera with me when we were there for that… But I made up for it? No not really, the croc feeding was pretty awesome and I apologize for my noobness in picture taking. To make up for it, here’s a picture of a friendly bird perched on my shoulder.

Please excuse the shiny face. It’s pretty damn warm and humid in a rainforest and it’d been a long day. Also, the events of this dome are spread out among 3 visits as the tickets are for 5 days total, pretty sweet deal if you actually go back as many times as we did. Not really much else to do in Cairns anyways. Most people just kind of use it as a launch pad for the GBR and the rainforest.

Speaking of the GBR, that’s what we did the next day. Now here’s the thing. In Cairns there are three types of shops, food, souvenir, and booking agency. So walking around the city we ‘d seen a lot of different companies that take people out to the reef, but we hadn’t seen the one we booked it with. So we’re pretty anxious/wary for whatever reason that we might’ve been scammed as illogical as it is. We’re trying to reassure ourselves because it was on trip advisor and had a large number of reviews, but the doubts are still there in the back of our minds.

So we wake up bright and early for our pick-up scheduled for 7:15. There are two other groups of people outside waiting for their shuttles and as each van comes up and takes them away, I’m getting more anxious as to whether or not our shuttle will actually arrive. But alas it does arrive and we get shuttled away to the greatest experience of my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a water-proof camera. I was very close to buying a disposable one for $20 but I ended up saving my money and not doing it, which I’m kind of regretting at this point. All the photos I have are pretty boring as you can really only see different shades of blue. And I don’t know how my blog is going to like having pictures scattered all over it. I might have to host them all online which would be a pain in the ass so I won’t include a blue picture. (Yes indeed I had to upload all of them so an extra picture would've taken an eternity longer on library free wifi.)

So in my last post I pretty much just went into the most detail of the reef because it was amazing. I don’t really know what else to say but for the sake of not repeating myself and writing even more seeing as I’m at 1600 words and I still have Kuranda to write about, I’ll just refer you to below and reiterate again that the puffer fish was damn amazing. I also have underwater hockey to thank for my mastery of the snorkeling gear. Also the the GBR made me realize exactly how crappy the gear we have at school really is. I was able to freely swim around and not worry about learning how to use the snorkeling gear which made my time that much more enjoyable. I was also unfazed by diving below the surface to get a closer look or chase some fish around. I will never forget the time I had at the GBR and maybe someday I’ll come back and get certified to dive and dive the reef even though snorkeling it was amazing.

So after our day on the reef, we came back around 5:30 pm walked around the city a little more, showered the salt off our bodies and grabbed more food at the casino. We then came back and decided to kick it in the TV lounge. As we entered we were greeted by 2 ladies studying for their PADI’s, which is a dive certification course. They were from the UK and Denmark. We spent the rest of the evening just talking to them and chilling. The girl from the UK was actually an engineer and both of them were taking a year off and traveling. It seems pretty popular to do that in other countries, to just travel and backpack around for a year. So we had a nice evening of conversation about music and then they departed and we never knew their names. A lot of meetings like that seem to happen in hostels. It’s pretty cool yet kind of sad at the same time. You meet a lot of people and just talk about stuff, but then you leave and never get to see them again and you don’t ever share your names. It’s just kind of like, ‘Where you traveling from?’ and it goes from there. We’ve met a handful of people and received no names. Such is life, it’s not like you’ll ever see them again. You share the traveler’s bond and go on your way.

The next day we booked Skyrail and our shuttle arrived at a more reasonable hour of 9:00. It takes you basically from Cairns to Kuranda and it was nowhere near as amazing as the GBR but what can you expect? I mean it was still pretty awesome to be about 15-20 meters above the forest floor riding above the canopy and seeing the green spread as far as the eye can see and seeing the water falls. I tried my hand at some more “artsy” photos here.

Got that nice close-up of the ant on the plant with spikes all over it, the stem had even scarier looking spikes and a lot more as well. The trip up was a lot cooler than the actual town itself. Well then again we only had a few hours there and we didn’t really get to go to any of the cool things like the Butterfly Sanctuary. I really wanted to and I even wore red to help attract the butterflies, but it wouldn’t have been worth it to pay for a ticket for only about an hour of time in the place because we had to catch our return bus at 15:00 and the ride back takes about 45 minutes. Most of our time here was spent at a brain teaser stall in the market trying to figure out the puzzles.

Then we grabbed lunch and made our way back to Cairns.

Not the greatest picture, but it gives you a really good idea of what the Skyrail is.

We got back to Cairns pretty early, spent another hour or two in the casino dome zoo then went back to the boardwalk so I could get my pictures. Spent a good chunk of time just chilling on the boardwalk watching the tide come in and the animals do their thing. Really relaxing despite the nasty brown water and litter floating about.

Now we’re back in Melbourne and our holiday is winding down and the project is about to start. I hope you’ve enjoyed this enhanced version of my blog with pictures and everything. I definitely enjoy writing them but I choose to do so at non-ideal times. It’s about 1:00 AM here and I have to check out before 10 AM and I’m on the top bunk with a stranger from Quebec sleeping below me.

P-P-PEACE