Tales from Brisbane – III: Cairns
Cairns. A little north Queensland town that has only three things: hotels, bars/restaurants and tours. We did all of these things over the course of two days. Here's how it went:
Day 1: Wake at 4:30 am. Fly into Cairns at 8:30 am. Check into hostel. Book Skyrail tickets. Take Skyrail up through the rainforest to the small tourist market town of Kuranda. Wander. Take historic rail back to Cairns. Eat at Mexican restaurant. Go to bed.
Day 2: Board catamaran at 8:30am. Zoom out to Great Barrier Reef for 1.5 hours. Get to first reef, snorkel around, become seasick. (no barfing, though. We were medicated.) Feel queasy for next 4 hours or so. Finally at third reef site, I feel better. Zoom back to Cairns. Discover that I'm sunburnt. Get grumpy. Search for chemist for soothing gels. Eat sushi. Go to bed.
An exhausing, expensive, whirlwind tour.
Hey, sorry that you got sea-sick with grumblies. But the photos are amazing! Very vivid colours. Bonus for trains.
Weird that they have a statue of a British revolutionary infantry down there.
Hey thanks. Confession: I tweak the colours a bit. But, in my defense, I try to push them to something more like what I saw, rather than what my crummy camera captured. The forest was really quite green and dense, and the clouds quite poofy. Maybe it's a little more real than real. But then, all my photos are.
I'm counting on you to tell me about the soldier statue, because we had no idea why he was Heil-ing up the street.
You forgot to mention that we saw two sea turtles and a reef shark! Definitely a highlight for me.
Yeah, I didn't really mention how beautiful and different the Reef environment was. It's hard to describe, and I don't have the pictures to prove it. The fish look like they were stuck in the '80s, all bright neons. Really remarkable.