Totally Tropical Taste

After all the excitement of the Red Centre, we bundled off to Queensland in search of some sun and sea and fishes. The Great Barrier Reef stretches some 2,300 Km along the coast of Oz, and it was our first and foremost reason for visiting Tropical North Queensland. We flew into Cairns on Sunday afternoon, and picked up our hire car to travel about 20 mins up the coast, to a seaside village called Yorkey’s Knob. No joke with the name and despite the locals’ best efforts to casually refer to it as Yorkey’s, the local store had “The Knob” painted on its side wall.

From here we took a trip out to the Low Isles, about 20 miles out into the reef. Despite me being seasick for the first time in my life (and boy, was I sick) when we got to our island destination we were straight in the water for a guided snorkel of the reef, in some very snazzy, blue Lycra bodysuits. Due to the wind picking up the current did increase somewhat so Tash went back to land (I personally think this was a ruse so as to get more sunbathing done), but I managed to see loads of giant clams, parrot fish and cool coral – a variety of which secretes a mucus when the tide lowers to stop it drying out, that has an SPF of 60! But it smells of dead fish. We even got to touch a sea cucumber and see it pooh out clean sand. You’ve probably all heard me rave on about snorkelling in Egypt and to be fair the concentration of different fish there was amazing. It was also a lot warmer and clearer there but the weather conditions in Oz probably affected our dive. However, on the reef I did get to see a turtle and a lagoon ray. It’s impossible to describe how amazingly graceful they both were and even more saddening to know that turtles are still hunted for their shells and to be made into soup. The ray was gliding along when it saw me, and just wriggled itself into the seabed to hide. None of this attacking human bollocks that some sickos along the coast are using as a reason to chop their tails off and leave them to suffocate on a beach. The island we were on was totally tropical – coral sand looks a lot nicer than British pebble sand, but slightly crunchier. So we chilled for the afternoon then hopped back on the catamaran for possibly the WORST hours sailing ever. Whilst cats are very fast and unlikely to tip over, they do rock with even the slightest wave and as the wind had been slowly picking up all day the waves were fairly huge. We got totally soaked by the waves crashing and how neither of us threw up again is still a mystery. Needless to say any more boat action will only happen on a very calm day.

We also got out discovering the other unique feature of Queensland - Rainforest. Despite being somewhat smaller than those in South America, the Australian rainforest is considered to be the oldest in the world. As we’d already seen Cape Tribulation from our sea journey we went to explore the area around Mossman Gorge, in the south of the Daintree National Park. This was mental; obscenely clammy and dense when you actually get in the rainforest, but suddenly dropping off to the beaches & ocean. I was tempted to have a go at swinging on some jungle vines, but I don’t think Tash was too impressed with the inevitable scenario of explaining to some ambulance men that I was trying to be Tarzan. There were also loads of huge boulders sitting in little streams which created these really cool pools for swimming in.