Once we got through immigration and customs (and had to depart with our beloved trail mix from New Zealand because of the nuts), we headed to the car rental company (which we booked last night). For Australia, we are paying less for a more luxurious car (they didn’t have any smaller cars).
Colin prefers the little Toyota Vitz from NZ, but I love the ride in the Toyota Camry. It is a bit more difficult to maneuver into small parking spaces, but since we will be driving fairly long distances on the “highways,” I think it will be valuable.
Upon talking to the car rental guy, we found out a big rain storm (think monsoon!) is heading into the area tomorrow and will be very severe tomorrow night. We had intended to go up to Cape Tribulation during the afternoon and stay overnight, but heeded the warning and changed our plans. It is the rainy season (peak summer) up in northeastern Australia, an area also called Northern Queensland. It is very tropical and we certainly felt the heat and humidity as soon as we stepped out of the airport. We only have 8 days to get ourselves about 2000 km down the coast to Brisbane, so we didn’t want to get stuck north of Cairns (plus neither of us like rain!). In addition, you can’t swim in most of the waters in northeastern Australia because there are many jellyfish, called “stingers” here, whose sting can kill.
Our next stop was the mall to get an Australia SIM card for our cell phone, bug spray, and a few groceries. We headed into Cairns and went into a nicely air conditioned mall, but spend a tiring hour finding the best cell phone deal. It certainly was not as easy as finding a good deal in NZ (but that may have been due to Boxing Day sales). We decided on a card that charges us $0.30/minute in Australia, but it is over $1/minute to the U.S. In NZ, we were only charged $0.22/minute anywhere in the world. So – to our families reading the blog – we won’t have the luxury of calling as much (or as long) as we did in NZ. We’ll try skype more often from the free internet access available at McDonald’s.
When we finally finished at the mall – which seemed so late, even though it was still only 1pm – we checked out the town of Cairns by foot. We had a delicious burrito meal at a place called Lillipad, which was recommended by the guidebook we have as having good vegetarian options. I did get a chicken burrito, but Colin got a tempeh breakfast burrito. Both were delicious!
After lunch, we took our hot, swollen limbs for a walk along the waterfront. There were quite a few people enjoying the “lagoon” on the waterfront, since you can’t swim in the ocean.
On our walk back to the car, we stopped by Rusty’s Market to check out the local fare.
We picked up some peaches, grapes and varieties of bananas. There are three different kinds of bananas sold here – regular (Cavendish), small yellow bananas called “monkey bananas” and small green bananas called “sugar bananas.” More on the bananas soon.
From Cairns, we headed south with hostel reservations made at Mission Beach, two hours south of Cairns. The drive was beautiful and, like in New Zealand, we saw many grazing animals in the fields and drove by impressive natural beauty. We stopped at two places, each about 7-8 km off the main road. The first, called The Boulders, had a refreshing calm pool of water where we cooled ourselves down.
The second stop was more impressive than the first, with a pool of water at the bottom of waterfalls. We didn’t have much time to stop since it was getting late (the sun sets up here around 6:30pm), but Colin managed to go down the “waterfall slide” a few times!
Our accommodations for the night was the YHA Treehouse hostel. We arrived in the dark so we didn’t get a good view of the entire treehouse. We were ushered to our room, a cozy one bedroom. Our zero-sleep time was quick indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment