Back to Ozzie. Cairns, Cape Tribulation and Dougie

Back to Australia. Cairns, Cape Tribulation and Port Douglas.

Stepping out of the aircraft in Cairns was quite a shock. In Christchurch it was hot, around 25 deg, but Cairns brought hot to the next level. The day I arrived it was 35 deg with a humidity of 95% and the minute I got out of the aircraft I felt sweaty already.
I found out on Facebook that Helen, the previous travel partner of Brendan, was also in Cairns. So I called her up to hang out and we walked around Cairns a bit. We went to Rusty's, which is a big tropical fruit market and saw all the fruit lying around and I could not resist to buy a bit of dragonfruit.
Helen unfortunately works in Cairns but quite fast I found some cool people again. In my hostel there were two girls, Mette from Denmark and Goody from Thailand that studies aerospace engineering in Melbourne. On the first day Goody was doing a trip so Mette and I hung out next to the lagoon and went to Rusty's to buy some tropical fruit. We bought a dragonfruit and a kind of papaya and shared it at the hostel. It was quite fun to taste the differences.
On the third day we went on a day trip in Kuranda, a little town just out of Cairns in the middle of the jungle. We walked around quite a bit and eventually saw Barron falls. Because of the rain season the waterfall was massive and very impressive, no waterfall in New Zealand would be this powerful I recon.

Next up was Cape Tribulation, about 3 hours drive with a 4x4 north of Cairns and located in the middle of the Daintree rainforest, the oldest tropical rainforest on earth with the most amount of biodiversity apart from the Great Barrier Reef, which is located next to it.
When I arrived there the heat was unbearable, nothing I've ever felt before. Darwin was nothing compared to this and I got quite dizzy.
To save some money I decided to sleep in my tent to save some money. I actually had a good sleep, however I was sweating like a pig in there because the temperature hardly went down during the night.
I did do a 2,5 hour night walk through the rainforest. It was quite fun to walk around with torches and look for spiders, snakes, dragons and bugs. Except for the snakes we saw all four of them and I was pretty satisfied with the walk.
My second day in Cape Trib was a full one. In the morning I went snorkelling in the Great Barrier Reef. Because Cape Trib is not touristic especially during the whet season we were on the boat with 9 people. And ocean safari goes to a reef no other company goes to which meant that we had the entire, almost untouched, reef for ourselves. Within the first couple of minutes I saw a scorpion fish. Everybody knows it from pictures and it is known to be one of the most deadly fishes on our planet and it swam about 2 m below me.
Then 5 minutes later there was a big shark about 3 m away from me. It was quite big one, at least 2 m, but when I tried to make a picture my camera broke. Within the first 10 minutes of my trip my waterproof camera broke and I was so pissed. I do have some pictures taken by the instructor but most, except the scorpionfish are not mine.
About 5 minutes after the shark, which was a "black tip reef shark" I saw my first sea turtle. I could go so close to it and it didn't mind at all. Eventually I could've touched it with my elbow if I wanted to, but didn't.
I stayed swimming beside it for a while as it was so breathtaking to see such a gracious animal so up close.
After the turtle I swam around a bit hoping to see the shark again (I didn't) but enjoyed the entire reef. It is quite fun to hear the water as it sounds like someone is walking up your doorway on gravel or shells. Actually the fish that are eating the coral are making the sound and if you come close to a parrotfish you can hear it chew.
We went to two other locations but both were not as good and diverse as the first one was. I did end up seeing 4 different sea turtles though and some stingrays as well. All in all the trip was really worth it and I recommend going here instead of Cairns or Port Douglas, as here the boat takes 25 people max and down there they have boats that carry up to 300 people which means you have shifts and that the reef is more damaged there.
Directly after diving I decided to go fruit tasting. There is one local farm that has over 150 kinds of fruit all over he world and we tasted 10 of them. Most of them were quite nice but one was not so nice.
At first we had a couple of west-Indian lime drops in our water and it was so sour. These limes are so much stronger than normal and everybody was showing his/her sour face. The last fruit however was called the miracle fruit. We had to suck on it for a minute and then we got an entire lime for ourselves. I bit in the lime sucking all the juices up without it being sour. The miracle fruit disables all tastebuds apart from the sweet ones, so the lemon tasted sweet and the quite sour/bitter Davidson plum became sweet as well and the salak (snakefruit) had a different taste as well.
Later that day I met some cool people and did a nice walk to Cape Tribulation beach.

After Cape Trib I went to Port Douglas, a rich-ass coastal town where a lot of Australian celebs have their holiday home.
Apart from that it is known for its beaches.
I didn't do much, walked around a bit and spent time in the pool, but I have one cool thing that I did.
On my 3rd day in Port I went to the four mile beach (where Port is famous for) and decided to read a bit in a palm tree. All around me there were old coconuts lying around and I thought by myself: "how cool would it be to get my own coconut". At first I was throwing things at some hanging coconuts, but that didn't work. I then found a big palm branch I poked the coconuts from the ground, but that didn't work either. I eventually climbed in a fallen tree with another stick and about 3 m of the ground, balancing on a branch about to break. The stick had a v shape at the end and with that I could pull of the coconut.
After one hour I finally got it. I walked with my coconut to the hostel, all proud, and opened it up for a nice drink. After that the flesh was delicious and I was quite satisfied with it all.

Now I am back in Cairns planning for my tablelands trip.