Australia! - far north Queensland (5/5)
This post is part 5 of the "au-2013" series:
- Australia! - South (1/5)
- Australia! - the 'classic' outback, up through the middle (2/5)
- Australia! - the 'top end' (Darwin area) (3/5)
- Australia! - heading East (4/5)
- Australia! - far north Queensland (5/5)
I spent nearly three weeks at the beginning of July in Australia. David & I flew into Melbourne (via Auckland on Air New Zealand), and rented a "Voyager" campervan from Britz, for a one way rental, with the intent of ending up in Cairnes. We planned to drive up through the middle of the country, to Darwin, then head roughly east to Cairnes. Overall, the trip was amazing, and exceeded our expectations. I'm going to break up the trip report into several posts, since combining three weeks of info into a single post would be a huge monstrosity. For the curious, the rough route that we drove is mapped here on Google Maps.
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Tuesday:
We did have a nice day, although the weather was crazy. The sky was clear when we left Mt. Surprise at 6AM. But we drove into a storm, and it was foggy, rainy, windy & chilly for much of the morning. Also the terrain was vastly different from the past few days. It got much more mountainous, and verdant as we worked our way gradually northeast towards the coast. It did warm up considerably once we got over the mountains and down to the coast. Also the sun came out for periods of time, then we drove through brief showers. Once we hit the coast it was definitely very tropical and reminded me of Hawaii, with jungle covered mountains, and huge plantations. In this case, we saw bananas growing, and huge sugar cane plantations. Eventually, we needed to board a ferry, to enter the Daintree National Park area. After driving on a very narrow, curvy mountain road for about an hour (in pouring rain), we reached the first turnoff for the day. We did two jungle hikes which were amazing, with all sorts of great plants everywhere. The first hike was the Marrja walk. The second (about 15 minutes further north along the (only) road was Dubuji boardwalk. For the second walk, we also ended up on a gorgeous huge flat beach (Myall Beach), with the jungle behind it. There were tons of chunks of coral all over the beach, and tiny crabs scittering about. By this point the sun had come out, and it was absolutely stunning outside. The drive back down to Cairns was so much easier with nice weather. It took about 2 hours, and we pulled into the campground by late afternoon.
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Wednesday:
The crazy weather persisted, as it rained quite hard for much of the previous night. However, by the time we had packed up and headed out a few blocks to the south, the sun was out, and the sky was clearing. the
thing is, it never rains for long. its like those showers in Hawaii, where it will rain for a few minutes, then the sun comes out, then starts raining a bit later. anyway, the snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reed was amazing. However. parking in this country is retarded. its paid parking in every city, apparently, and
their stupid parking machines only take coins. what kind of stupidity is that? of course i needed to be there for over 9 hours as the snorkelling was a full day, so its not like i had \$20+ in coins. I ended up driving around downtown cairns and having david run into random shops asking for change. thankfully that worked, and i paid for 10 hours of parking. we arrived at the boat, and they had tea, coffee & muffins set out for everyone. the boat ended up having 35 passengers, which sounds like a lot, but this was one of the smallest boats of any that did tours. we saw a few others today, and one of them was huge and had over 100
passengers. when everyone was in the water, it looked like some inner city swimming pool, with people crammed all over the place, crashing into each other. thankfully our group size was fine. Of the 35 people, 6 were Americans, and the remainder were mostly Australians with a few New Zealanders & British mixed in (plus one older couple who were from England originally but were now retired on the tiny pacific island nation of Nauru. i gave david half a tablet for sea-sickness about an hour before we got on the boat, and i took 1 tablet just before boarding. david felt fine the entire day. i felt really queasy on the initial ride out, which took an hour, but after that i was mostly fine. while heading out we saw whales spouting & breaching far off in the distance, which was kinda cool. they offered everyone small wet suits, since the water temperature was around 78F. they were the kind with long arms and short legs. both david & I used the wet suits and they were great, we were never cold in the water. david also used a snorkel vest. they also found me some fairly decent prescription goggles, which gave me reasonably decent vision. the first place we stopped to snorkel was Michaelmas Cay National Park (a coral atoll) which was in the middle of no where, since we were over 40KM from land. It was about a mile long, and maybe 2 car lengths wide, and was mostly covered in various sea birds. the atoll itself wasn't all that exciting, but it was surrounded by reefs. they were amazing. so many colors & shapes of coral, plus hundreds of different fish everywhere. I saw half a dozen types of parrot fish, plus tons of other stuff. once everyone was back on board, they served lunch, which was quite
nice. There were grilled chicken parts, several different types of salads, cold cuts, bread & fruit. it was definitely the best quality lunch i've had on any of the assorted boat tours we've done. We stayed there for about an hour, then when other larger boats started to arrive, we left. We then headed further out on the reef to hastings reef, which is near the outer edge. the water out there was significantly more choppy, although there were a lot more reefs around too. we spent time swimming around, and the coral was beautiful, and some people did see turtles and a few small sharks. but since the water was so choppy, i was getting exhausted following david around. After about 20 minutes of me getting thoroughly exhausted chasing him around, i sent him back to the boat so i could actually see something beyond his flippers.
once i was out on my own, i saw tons of stuff. the reef was less than a foot below the surface in places, and i saw so much out there, it was amazing. after a little while, i went back to the boat to get
david, but the water had gotten even more choppy, and i was spending more time spitting out water than seeing anything, so i gave up too. they brought over a glass bottomed boat for people who were interested.
david & I both got on, and they made a big circle through the area. it was ok, but after seeing the stuff while snorkelling this was a bit of a let down. Since they never actually stopped the boat, we couldn't really look at anything fore more than a few seconds at a time. following that, they served afternoon tea, which was tea with fancy little cakes, and some more cut up fruit. it was pretty decent, and david was thrilled. we then headed back to cairns, which took nearly 90 minutes. oddly, i felt fine for the entire ride back, which I was dreading all day, since i felt so bad on the way out.
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Thursday:
We got up early, packed up our stuff, and drove a few miles north to return the campervan. Thankfully, that process went smoothly, and the final tally of distance driven was 9132KM (6045 miles). We walked across the street to the airport entrance. Of course, airports are never where they seem to be, and walking made it so much worse. We ended up having to walk along the airport road for about 45 minutes before we reached the terminal. It wouldn't have been bad at all, had it not been super hot & humid at 8AM, and we were carrying two large bags each. I was drenched in sweat by the time we reached the terminal. However, we still managed to arrive about 20 minutes before the ticket counter opened for the flight. Once it opened, we ended up with this grouchy old lady, who was determined to force us to check our bags, even though we never had any issues with carry-on only on the flights out. She insisted that my bags were over the carry-on limit (7KG), so I started shifting stuff into David's bags which put everything under the limit. However, then she insisted that wasn't permitted, and I called her bluff, and asked her to show me in writing where people in the same group can't move items between bags, and she then backed down. After that nonsense, we went upstairs to passport control, where the real fiasco began. The agent who took our passports got the crazy idea into her head that the covers on the passports were "unusually stiff". Of course I had no explanation for this, because we've never done anything to the passports, and they've always been this way. She started to confer with a coworker who told her to "call it in" if she felt something wasn't right. Effectively, I was being accused of using forged passports. So she called up to emigration and handed our passports over to some other official. We were asked to have a seat and wait. I was annoyed, and David was annoyed, because this was ridiculous. I find it hard to believe that our passports are any different than any other Americans' passports, and surely we can't be the first Americans to go through Cairns Airport. After a few minutes of waiting, the official came out, handed our passports back to us, and announced that everything was fine. No apology for being idiots. Just "here you go, you really aren't criminals". Even if our passports were forged, these are the very same passports that the officials in Melbourne's airport never had any issues with. After that, we went to our gate, where we still had nearly 2 hours to wait. The remainder of the day was mostly just interminable hours of sitting around on planes. We spent nearly 16 hours flying home, but it was thankfully uneventful.
The trip was an amazing experience. David went so far as to proclaim it the best vacation we've ever done. I'm not sure how it ranks just yet, but I will agree that it was an awesome experience.
All trip pictures are posted HERE.
This post is part 5 of the "au-2013" series: