Cairns

We arrived in Cairns and pulled up to our bed and breakfast at night. We stayed in the Cairns Rainforest Bed and Breakfast in a nearby suburb. This bed and breakfast has one of the nicest settings we have seen. The house is gorgeous. The backyard has waterfalls forming deep swimming holes in the middle of the rainforest. They also have a pool for our use. The house has several decks with outdoor dining options. It was nice with the windows open, with a nice temperature, listening to the waterfall and animals of the rainforest while sleeping...it was like listening to one of those nature cds live. Our room was really nice too with beautiful wood floors, a big jacuzzi lined with stone.

The first day, we went scuba diving. The boat ride out left early and was very rocky because it was windy and little rainy out in addition to being in a small boat. It took 90 minutes to get to the outer reef and about a quarter or more of the 100 people got sick, although not us. We went on our first dive. We got in no problem, but the one lady with us lost her flipper right away. We waited for her while looking around under the water. During the dive, we saw a lot of fish, but not as many as we were expecting. The coral was huge...50 feet straight up where we were diving. The colors were vivid and lots of fish were in the anemones (like Nemo). We wondered what the guides spoke about before Nemo came out because they loved to talk about this fish! The dive was forty minutes and there was a decent current we swam into when we were finishing, which made us feel a little sea sick. We were definitely spoiled in Texas because our guide there was awesome. This guide was fine, but didn't point anything out to us, except for Nemo. We then ate lunch, watched the marine biologist feed the fish, and then geared up for our second dive. This time we got on a smaller boat that took us further out and we dove again. The lady couldn't descend this time, so we swam around for about 5-10 minutes in the general area under the water looking at everything. She had actually gotten left behind on a different tour the day before...which is a definite no no in scuba, but more understandable after we saw her dive. During the second dive, we saw a small lagoon ray, many bright colored fish, more coral, and a turtle. Unfortunately, it's hard to describe things, especially since we can't tell a goldfish from a baracuda. We headed back to the boat after this. The boat ride back to Cairns was a little less rocky and less people got sick. We had ice cream and Thai food for dinner, in that order. We then headed back to the B n B and went to sleep.

The second day we woke up at 5 to go white water rafting in Tully, which is two hours away. It was a misty, overcast day, but still warm. On the way up, we passed lots of banana fields and sugar cane farms. There were rain forest covered mountains with mist on both sides of the valley when we arrived. We split into different groups for the rafting. There were 8 boats of 6 people. Our guide was pretty experienced and seemed to be in charge of the others. We went through the grade 4 rapids first, without flipping...even when we tried to flip on purpose. Although really fun, the first half of the trip consisted of us waiting for the other boats to go through. We went through 10 rapids in 2 hours. Right before lunch, he took us through a cold waterfall where we were hammered with water. We then ate lunch (hamburgers, sausage, veggie sandwiches) and started the next half of the trip, which was much nicer as we didn't have to wait as much. We went through many smaller rapids and kept moving. It was a fun trip.

On the bus ride home, we got to watch videos of crashes and flips from previous trips, which was pretty fun. We grabbed some pizza for dinner and came back to the BnB and lounged around.

This morning, we are exploring Cairns. We're taking a twelve hour train trip tomorrow to Airlie Beach. The rental cars didn't work out so off to the train we go. We only have one week left in Australia.