After landing in Cairns Intl, Mrs Gail Simpson came pick me and my parents up at the airport. We had booked two nights at her Bed&Breakfast (my dad keeps calling it Breadfask), in Yorkeys Knob, north of Cairns. Gail was super friendly to us, and she talked about the region and what to visit, where to eat, etc. What a great feeling to go from winter in Sydney to winter in Cairns in just three hours! It was about 18ºC at 10 at night!
Avillagail is a big mansion with the entrance gates on the top of a hill but the house goes all the way down to the sea. From the room window you can see the sea go up to the horizon and the sun rise, after all sorts of birds have waken you up! And the breakfast is placed in the fridge in the room in the evening so you can take at any time to eat it anywhere around the premises. Big plates with pineapple, papaya, strawberries, oranges, melon, etc. Everything peeled and sliced. And then there is all the rest what's usually included in a continental breakfast.
Cairns is a curious place. There are the usual tourist shopping walks, but for example, you can't swim nor even walk at the beach because there are stingers, sharks, crocodiles and all sorts of deadly creatures swimming around. Oh, and we saw hundreds of big pelican birds looking for food at the beach while the flood was low. In turn there is a salt-water swimming pool with beach sand at just meters from the beach with tourists almost piling up in layers! What we loved to visit in Cairns is the church, where they have the most impressive stained glass windows I've ever seen, with scenes from the creation of the galaxies and the kangaroos until the plane crashes in WWII! On both nights we spent in Cairns we had dinner at the Yorkeys Knob boating club, where we ate fresh cached fish in an authentic Aussie ambiance!
For the next day we booked a boat trip to Green Island to go snorkeling in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. It was super windy (at least 30Kt) out there and it was very rough on the boat. I went snorkeling with my Nicole and we saw many fishes and colorful corals, but what really made our day is the sea turtle we saw underwater from very close – I even swam with it and touched it! It was about 1 meter long and didn’t seem to be bothered too much by our presence.
Back in Cairns I bought a cowboy hat made out of cow leather with a crocodile leather band and crocodile tooth sticking out of it for more than 100AUD. I had to have it! Everybody in Queensland walks around in these leather hats. And plus, how was I supposed to do the Aussie salute without the proper equipment! I even got an export certificate because crocodiles are a protected specie and if you are wearing croc leather you have to prove that it comes from an authorized farm.
Then we drove north to Port Douglas with the car we had rented, a Mitsubishi 380. Port Douglas is as touristic as Cairns but with much more style, it has a four mile long beach with coconut trees and eucalyptus and millionaire mansions all over the place. We stayed at the Pelican Motel, a place with large self-contained rooms at walking distance from the beach and the centre. We had dinner at the Iron Bar, another authentic Aussie restaurant.. With really sweet waitresses. On the first night I had a grilled eye-steak, but on the second night I had a dish with three toasted bread slices. The first one had crocodile meat on it, the second one had emu on it and the third one kangaroo!!!
For Wednesday I booked a trip on the SILVER SONIC. I went alone on the cruise to go snorkeling in the Outer Reef. The coach picked me up at 8.00 at the hotel and the boat left the harbor at 8.30. I had my own snorkeling gear but I rented a wetsuit to protect against sunburn and any hazards like stingers/jellyfish. The Agincourt Ribbon Reefs are located at almost 50Km from the coast, so it took us a good 1,5 hours to get there on a the fast catamaran. Once there, I somehow managed to jump in the water in the open ocean from where no land can be seen, to discover that raising in front of me was something that looked pretty much like an island that wouldn’t quite reach the surface, filled with colorful life and bizarre shapes! You have to snorkel around the raising coral castle because if you swam over it you would get stuck on the way. I snorkeled for about an hour before I heard the loud horn of the boat, then I returned on board to have buffet lunch while we travelled to the second of three destinations. At each of the three different reefs I spent at least one hour in the water in each of them. At 24ºC the water was almost warmer than outside!
Apart from hundreds of different species of corals, including anemone corals, mushroom corals, brain corals and staghorn corals, I saw dozens of different types of fishes in all colors and shapes. And with all the clown fishes looking at me alarmed from their anemone nests I totally felt like in the film Nemo for a few moments! I also saw groups of hundreds, if not thousands, of very small fishes swimming together. And then there was this shark, I swam very close to a whitetip reef shark. I supposed that it wouldn’t do me any harm because it wasn’t too big, about 1,5m long and quite skinny, but what an adrenaline rush to see it from close up! And I was all alone at maybe one or two hundred meters from the boat!
On Thursday we left Port Douglas and headed north. There is a fast way to get to Cooktown but it involves unsealed roads, and they had told us that the only way to drive on them is on prepared 4x4’s. We thought we would find a way to get there and that we would give it a try, but when after a couple of kms we found a river crossing the path we understood why we were no better than the folks who had told us it was unsuitable for our type of car! But we saw a crocodile, which we found very exciting. Luckily it was at the opposite side of the river! The only way around it all is a road of more than 300km, and we took it at the break of dusk. Along these 300km there are three townships, which as we learned when we passed through them were a gas station and a farm or one roadside bar. We could see small groups of cattle spread around the region moving free without any fences or limitations. We saw many dead kangaroos on the road, and we thought we were going to be more careful than the people who had run over the poor animals! When the dark night took over the country we understood. We hadn’t seen a single kangaroo in all the days we had been looking for them, and there they were. Dozens of them were eating on the side of the road, some of them even on the road, like frozen when blinded by the light. We had to drive very slowly, and a drunk cowboy in a white patrol offered to drive in front of us to protect us from a possible crash and so we could drive faster. The same guy tried to organize a room for us in the local aboriginal pub, as we arrived in Cooktown at 11pm and everything was closed, but this turned out to be a bad idea because everyone in that place was at least as intoxicated as him and as we learned later there weren’t any rooms at all in the building. And yes, it scared the heck out of me to talk to those people. At the end, and after waking up the owner of the place, we obtained a bungalow in a camping for the night!
Cooktown is a very small town of important touristic interest but with very few tourists, because it is so far north that it’s where all the sealed roads end, you cannot drive any further north with a normal car. The place is named after Captain Cook, who arrived in the XVIII century with the first settlers for Australia. By the way, the name Australia was given to the continent by a Spanish man.
We also visited Hope Vale, a small village where only aboriginal people live. We thought it would be interesting to see it but when we drove around the place we felt a bit like intruders since there were no other white people around. My mum who is a teacher back home managed somehow to visit the local school and was very pleased with the experience.
We drove back to Cairns and on the way back we spent the last night in Port Douglas and today I cached a flight to Sydney. Gosh It's cold down here! It was about 5ºC when I got here tonight. Luckily two of my housemates picked me up by car at the airport! My parents are going to drive south and they're going to catch a flight from Townsville in a week or so.
I totally felt in love with Queensland and I know that I will totally long to return to one of the most beautiful places in the world.
