Australia is a big beautiful play land. My last stop before I left was to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. You can't really spend 6 months living in Australia and not make it to its biggest attraction. Thankfully I was heading there during off season when it was 'cold' and by cold it was in the 90's the whole time and I left with a sunburn despite the buckets of sunscreen that I applied.
I missed my plane because they changed the gate and didn't announce it to anyone. So everyone at the wrong gate had to book a whole new flight. It was a really frustrating experience as I only had two whole days in Cairns and was fully booked for both days. It was a bad start to the weekend but I got it sorted.
When I finally got there I went and had a walk around the city which had a great market to wander around in. In the morning I went to the docks for my day trip out onto the Great Barrier Reef. One of the highlights of the trip was actually the ride to the reef where we were surrounded by whales for a whole hour. It was amazing and such an unexpected surprise, of course no good pictures were taken because that is an impossible task to get a good picture of a huge animal in the distance.
When we got to the reef we stopped off at several different snorkeling locations. The water was shallow enough that it would have been a waste to scuba dive. The rest of the day was spend boating around and getting an inevitable sunburn.
The next day I went on a tour of the Daintree rain forest. On the way we saw wallabies and kangaroos. We went stomping through the marsh in search for kangaroos and crocodiles. There were wild turkeys everywhere at Josephine Falls and had amazing food at an all you eat buffet.
The highlight of this trip was seeing all the baby crocodiles on the side of the riverbanks. You never think of them as being as tiny and adorable as they are. Many of them don't make it to adulthood, but the ones who do are quite impressive. They don't move much as they spend most of the day lounging on the riverbanks. But even so they are really exciting to see!
