Due to the nature of my travels (backpack + hostels = amazing), I have had limited internet access over the past couple of weeks. Now that I'm safely back in Melbourne, I get to share with you all the rest of my spring break adventures. We left off on a hazy Friday in Airlie Beach, so I'll continue from there.
Saturday (nine days ago), Lara and I hopped on another Greyhound bus for the ride up to Townsville. Before the bus ride, we explored the morning markets, which had fun crafts and clothing and such. As the bus was an hour late, we could have perhaps had more in-depth exploration time, but we instead sat in a full bus shelter in the middle of a parking lot enjoying the music and scents drifting out of the nearby beachside markets.
After a long (5+ hours), largely uneventful bus ride, we arrived at the Townsville ferry terminal. This was the perfect drop-off spot, since the ferry was our next destination. We rode the ferry out to Magnetic Island then took a bus to our hostel on the northeast corner of the rather large island. (For a sense of size, it took about 25 minutes to traverse the east coast of the island by bus.) We checked in and settled into our bungalow accomodation, then walked down to the beach for dinner, sitting in the sand, and watching the second rugby league semi-final. It was in this game that we discovered the amazingness which is Melbourne Storm rugby (the Storm being Melbourne's one elite rugby league team).
Sunday morning, we woke up at 5 AM to head down to the beach to watch the sun rise. This involved lots of serenity and beauty, both of which I quite enjoyed. We then took a two-hour nap from 7 to 9 before checking out of our hostel, leaving our bags, and heading back down to the beach. We wandered through Horseshoe Bay's morning markets (Australia has tons of amazing markets) then sat in the sand for awhile before making our way slowly back to the bus terminal for our final Greyhound encounter. We spent the entire afternoon and much of the evening on this next bus, travelling further up the Queensland coast from Townsville to Cairns.
Monday was another bright-and-early morning, as we woke up shortly after 6 to make our way down to the docks for a cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef. We took a day boat out to the boat on which we'd spend the night, then spent the rest of the day snorkelling. Between our overnight and our day-boat return, we snorkelled the reef six times in two days (at three different sites). The snorkelling was amazing. Highlights include tons of gorgeous fish and coral of almost every imaginable color, seeing a reef shark (they're small and generally dislike hanging around people, but I was lucky to watch one pass by a few meters away), and following a sea turtle with Lara as it swam across the coral. There's not a much more idyllic spring break moment than watching a sea turtle float placidly over beautiful coral on a warm day on the Great Barrier Reef.
Tuesday was spent, much like Monday, out on the water. When we returned, we found Jodi (Lara's roommate and my wandering buddy) in our hostel room and joined up with her and Cassandra (my roommate) and Isa (another Arcadia/Melbourne friend) for dinner. We enjoyed one of the many $10 meal deals which abound in Cairns before heading out for a bit prior to sleep.
On Wednesday, Lara, Jodi, and I walked to Cairns' botanical gardens. It was a hot day and the gardens were about an hour from our hostel, so we decided to keep to the short loop (about an hour long walk) once we got there. We climbed lots of steps on the loop up to a couple of beautiful lookouts over the city. We enjoyed our lunch at one that looked out over both Cairns itself and the airport, where we could watch planes taking off and landing. The gardens themselves consisted primarily of open forest with some bamboo forest and such mixed in as well. We returned to the city along the Esplanade, an oceanside walkway, and I spent a quiet evening in the hostel recovering from many active hours in the sun before we all met up again to sit by the pool before bed.
Thursday began with our final early pick-up, a 7:05 AM bus tour up to the Daintree rainforest. The tour took us to a number of scenic spots throughout the morning, including Cape Tribulation. Cape Tribulation is notable because it's the spot where the Great Barrier Reef comes into the shore and the rainforest meets it at the water's edge. Both the reef and the rainforest are world heritage listed sites (a big deal), so Cape Tribulation gives you the opportunity to put one foot in the water and one on land and thus simultaneously stand in two world heritage listed sites: both reef and rainforest. Pretty cool. We had lots of fun on the tour chatting with Will and Dawn, two fellow Americans who had been on our same reef overnight.
In the afternoon, Lara and I got an early tour drop-off since we were staying in the rainforest for two more nights. We checked into our hostel, which was both charming and fabulous. The hostel, named Crocodylus, is literally in the rainforest itself, each bungalow accomodation surrounded by giant trees, vines, and wildlife. We wandered down the road to an ice cream shop just over a mile away (I got to try goji berry ice cream, which was delicious), then returned for dinner at the hostel restaurant (the nearest food store being over 10 miles north of us).
Friday was spent wandering up the road a bit further to both a picturesque cafe for lunch and another ice cream shop. This one, the Daintree Ice Cream Company, is cool because the fields along which you walk to reach the shop are filled with the trees from which the ice cream flavors are made. Many of the trees were labelled - macadamia, mango, and more. This time, we got to try delicious ice cream samplers, which included black sapote (a chocolate-flavored fruit), wattleseed (wattles are a very common plant across the country), coconut, and jakfruit (a greenish-shelled fruit larger than a pineapple). In the evening, we returned to our hostel for a night walk through the rainforest. Our guide, Possum, explained lots about the trees and plants to us and we got to see three adorable sleeping birds and lots of spiders in intricate webs on our multiple-hour, flashlight-guided trek through the trees.
Saturday, we made up for our lack of large-animal sightings on the nightwalk during an hour-long loop through the rainforest behind Crocodylus. The Orange Rope Trail took us on a loop through the trees guided by numbered signs along the way and a thin, orange rope which ushered us along the trail. During our walk, a big lace monitor lizard, perhaps four feet from head to tail, scampered across the path in front of us and into the trees. Along with hundreds of mosquito sightings, many of them on our bare arms, we also saw a feral pig with four or five squealing piglets. The pigs were in a dried-up segment of creek bed when we spotted them, but quickly made for the far treeline when they heard our footsteps along the path. The giant monitor lizard was my favorite sighting of our rainforest ventures, but all the animals we saw were pretty cool. Some of the plants, such as the fan palm, which can live to be 2 1/2 to 3 THOUSAND years old, were also rather amazing.
In the afternoon, we joined that day's version of the tour we'd left two days earlier for the final segment, a stop at the Daintree Discovery Centre then the drive back to Cairns. At the Discovery Centre, Lara and I did all the mid-level and aerial walks through the rainforest before climbing up the five levels of the canopy tower to the top lookout over the treeline. We enjoyed getting to see the rainforest from above after days surrounded by it. In the evening, we went out for a final spring break meal in Cairns then watched a fire show done by a street performer on the Esplanade.
Sunday, we got up at the lovely hour of 3:30 AM for a shuttle to the airport and a 5:45 AM flight back to Melbourne. The flight was quite smooth and we were settled back into dorm life by early afternoon. The rest of the day was spent procrastinating, reacclimating to College life (by College, I mean UC), and watching the rugby league Grand Final. As it should be, Melbourne won.
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