Port Douglas to Cairns

Today we checked out of our room and hung around the pool, again praying for sun and finishing the Cairns entry to the award winning journal you are currently reading. As you can tell by these pictures, the sun is still disappointing us.



At 4:30 our tour bus will pick us up again and take us back to Cairns where we will get to bed early for our 6:00 am flight to Sydney to catch our flight to Auckland. At this point, nothing interesting today has happened.

Only 1 or 2 more entries to go until we are home!!! Aren’t you excited to be done reading this??!!

A little more around Port Douglas

As our vacation draws to an end we spend our last full day in Port Douglas hanging out and hoping for sun. We went into town and got our coffee and started finishing our literary masterpiece (the blog) and waited for the sun to come out...we waited and waited until we finished posting the last weeks of our time in New Zealand and no sun was found.




So, to entice the sun more to come out we headed back to the hotel and waited by the pool




It did not work so well. By this time it was dark and dinnertime. We took a bus back into town and got some subpar Mexican food for dinner. Then we walked around town and Marian found our first item she wants to register for:



If anyone wants to find a sparkly Buddha as seen in the picture and get it for the wedding Marian would be very excited…John is making no comment at this point.

After walking around town we took a bus back to the hotel to get a nightcap at the bar and say good bye to the vacation.

Second Day at the Reef: The Opal Reef

To our delight, we woke up at 7:00 today for our second trip to the Great Barrier Reef. This tour headed to the Opal Reef from Port Douglas. We were not as lucky with the weather this time around:



Once the tour was at the reef John waited to go on his introductory dive and Marian met a friend who took her to see a “Bombing” (a coral canyon given its name due to the sound of a boat hitting the coral). To John’s disappointment the guides did not let him take a camera on the first dive for safety reasons…or to me an obvious marketing ploy to encourage a second dive. But we snorkeled together for a little while after John’s dive and got some good picture including a GINANORMOUS Maori Wrasse that John chased:



Here our some other highlights from the first snorkeling experience:




We then had our lunch and reef talk as the boat headed to what we believed to be another part of the Opal Reef. John fell for the marketing ploy and went for a second dive. The highlight was a stingray:



Here are some other fun pictures from that dive:




After the dive we snorkeled a while together and saw some cool reefs.











Overall it was a fun trip even though the windy conditions did not produce the clearest water we had been in.

We were then dropped off at the hotel and met Bozo the hotel cockatoo for a picture.



We cleaned up and headed into town for our favorite meal…THAI FOOD!! We met some nice Kiwis that we chatted with and exchanged photographer skills.

Rainforest Day 2 and onwards to Port Douglas

Today we woke up and packed our belongings so we could go for a quick hike before getting picked up and heading to Port Douglas. Once we were packed and fed we went off to Emmagen Creek. It was a quick 50-minute walk up the road to the unobvious trail off the road. We were looking for the white gate, which signifies the turn off of the main road… but there was no gate just two rusty poles that could have held the gate at one point in the last 20 years.

We headed up the trail and quickly made our way to the swimming hole. Now, it was cloudy again so we were not planning on swimming. Which was fine with us since the bushy trail and creek bared the resemblance to what could have been the beginning of a crappy scifi/horror movie. Here we are:




Overall it looked nice…just a little creepy being there alone.

On the walk back we stopped off at the giant strangled fig tree:



We then continued out way back on the beach, which ended up being a rocky road to the hostel.

We rejoined the tour and headed to Port Douglas. On the way we stopped off at the Alexandra lookout of the surrounding area. The highlights included the Daintree River flowing into the ocean, Snapper Island and the Low Isles (where Steve Irwin was SCUBA diving and stung by the stingray).




The next stop on the tour was the Mossman Gorge. Here is Marian with the main Gorge viewpoint we saw:



Then we were rushed back on the bus and dropped off at our hotel in Port Douglas.

Rainforest

The following morning we had to wake up early again (WAH) to get on a tour bus heading to the rainforest. After several people in the tour didn’t show up, and caused delays, we were out on the rode. Our guide, Malc, informed us of various things as we drove up the coast to the Daintree Rainforest. It is a World Heritage site, as is the Reef, so this is the only place in the world where two World Heritage sites meet. He told us about the nasty jellyfish they have in the waters in the area. One was the box jellyfish, the other being one the size of your thumbnail. Basically, they are both incredibly venomous, particularly the thumbnail one, and if you get stung you go straight to “hospital.” We are here during the “dry” season, so evidently they are not as big of a threat right now. We stopped off at a café for a break, and Marian thought this sign was funny.



We then were taken to the Daintree River, where we got on a tour boat to spot crocs. The males grow to be massive and finally at the end of the tour we saw “fat Albert,” but we was half hiding in the water and as the boat charged towards him, he slid back in. Here are the lovely crocodiles we saw.







We also were rushed through a boardwalk tour of part of the rainforest. We learned about some palms that were incredibly old (1000 years old), and about cassowaries. They are an ancient bird that stands up to 2 meters tall, and incredibly colorful. We learned that “cassowaries become very agitated with cameras with flash,” so if we saw one, “don’t take a picture with flash, because they become very agitated and may have a go at you.” Sadly, we didn’t see the creature. Here is a pic from the internet.



Here we are being rushed through the hike:


We were then dropped at our accommodation at Cape Tribulation. Marian had been sleeping off and on all day on the tour bus, partly to avoid motion sickness, partly because of the early wake up. At the lodge, Marian asked John, “Do you know what makes me tired?” John, “Rainforest?” Well, kind of true. Marian took a nap. After the nap, we went on a hike, but got the downpour. Pretty sad because we are supposed to be here during the dry season. Although, it was the warmest downpour we had ever been in.





Oh yah! We also almost ran over a big old frog that night with our shoes. Luckily we saw him.

First Day at the Reef!

Since the major attraction here is the Great Barrier Reef, we booked two tours on separate days, with different companies, to see as much of the reef as we could. Today was our first day out! We were really relieved to see that the day was really beautiful. We went first to Michaelmas Cay and then to the Hastings Reef. John even got to do an introductory dive, (Marian is a little scared to try.) Needless to say, the Barrier Reef is incredible. Its like putting your head underwater and seeing a different planet. So many beautiful colorful fish and coral. We felt quite spoiled. At Hastings Reef John was following a fish over some coral and ran into a reef shark! Well, not really. He saw it in the distance, and reef sharks have never killed anyone. He did get a little freaked and quickly swam back to the group though. Later he was able to get a shot of the shark in the distance. Here are a few favorite pictures from the first day.


















Can you find the shark???


Here is the first reef we went to, Michaelmas Cay. It was an inner reef and had a little bird sanctuary on it:


At the end of the day we saw cockatoos flying around! Crazy. Here is the clearest pic we got of them...



But here is what they actually look like.