cairns - day 1

So we haven't exactly been great at keeping up with posting regularly, have we?! That should tell you we are enjoying ourselves and have been too exhausted to post at the end of each day. That said, let's try to get caught up on our time in Cairns, which is located in the northern part of Australia, called Queensland, and is quite tropical. The weather for much of the time we were there was in the high 80s to low 90s with very high humidity.

Monday, November 28th (Happy Birthday, Molly!!)
We spent the morning looking around the local shopping center and checking out a great little farmer's market where we picked up some great fruit for lunch. We then headed to the Chrystal Cascades to do a bit of hiking (or bush whacking as it is called here). We found a website that said the locals like to keep this place hidden from the locals because of its swimming holes. We were almost there when we were stopped by a road crew who was fixing the road and said the road would be closed for another hour. Instead of hanging out in the car, we redirected ourselves and headed to the Flecker Botanical Gardens, which were created in 1886, so much of the flora and fauna are quite mature and very beautiful. Tim got a bunch of great photos of the plants with his big camera, but I can only post those that I got with my iPad camera. Tim will likely create a slideshow with the photos he took so we'll post that when it's done. Anyway, the plants and flowers we saw were all very tropical and many were similar to those we have seen in Hawaii due to the similar climate. We also saw several HUGE spiders that pretty much made me get the heck out of their vicinity!

After we finished at the gardens, we headed back to the Crystal Cascades and were happy to be able to make the whole way this time. We saw a great "kangaroo crossing" sign on our way up too, so I took a photo of it and it's posted below. The Cascades were beautiful and the hike came with a well deserved dip in one of the swimming holes. We did note that the locals haven't done such a great job of keeping this a secret, there were 2 your busses there when we were leaving! After the Cascades, we made our way back to the condo, making a pit stop at the bottle shop for a bottle of wine, the to the supermarket for dinner supplies. One interesting note - beer, wine and spirits are not sold on grocery stores or supermarkets here, they are only sold in separate stores called bottle shops.

We got back to the condo and made a great dinner of chicken and veggie stir-fry, the went to bed early since we had to get up early to drive to the wharf in Port Douglas to meet up with the dive boat that was taking us to the reef. And that's the subject of the next post! Stay tuned!

Now for some photos of the day: