In fact we arrived in Cairns a day before Fiona and Gordon, checked in at the Bellview (where the harassed concierge asked what flight we'd been on and confided that he had two rooms left, including our own, but then two booked couples still to come!)
and spent the morning at the Cairns Regional Gallery,
some modern interpretations,
some more traditional.
And we then took a turn around the waterfront,
where some magnificent fig trees provide shade for a lunchtime picnic.
where some magnificent fig trees provide shade for a lunchtime picnic.
The tide was most emphatically out
of which the local birdlife seemed to approve.
Further along the esplanade, the Cairns war memorial marks the time on Sunday, 25 April 1915 when Australian and NZ troops landed on Beach Z, called Ari Burnu at the time, but later of course known as Anzac Cove (formally renamed as such by the Turkish government in 1985)
Dinner was an - though I say so myself - excellent fish stew, eaten on our hotel terrace.
Then a good night's sleep before being collected on Friday morning by Gordon with the car to start our drive to Daintree NP and up towards Cape Tribulation
Lovely views along the coastroad
stopping for coffee and a panorama at Port Douglas
And 20 minutes on is Mossman Gorge, part of the Daintree Rainforest
The key word is RAINforest - three minutes into our walk, the heavens opened...
but it was short(ish)-lived, and the walk, though damp, was beautiful
Onward towards Cape Tribulation, passing field upon field of sugar cane, processig factories fed by trains running along narrow-gauge tracks next to the plantations
Was this
as close as we were going to get to a southern cassowary? (Quick fact - apparently, though improbably, closely related to the kiwi, both families diverging from a common ancestor 40m years back)
Over the Daintree River
and into Cape Tribulation
for our splendid ecolodge home for a night of rustling in the undergrow outside and bright stars
The prospect of the water on next morning's drive was tempting...
OK, perhaps not so tempting after all!
Regular roadside warnings lured us into thinking that a cassowary might be just around the corner. Though when in fact he turned ou to be there,
he scarpered into the bushes before we could snap!
Back in Cairns, we found our swish apartment, with a great view from the balcony over the marina and speedy access to our boat for tomorrow's outing to the Great Barrier Reef
This was the kind of gorgeous view we got before donning mask and fins and hopping into the water (this sandbank is a bird santuary of which only a part is accessible)
Sadly no underwater camera for us to catch the turtles (this giant clam was taken through the glass-bottomed boat)
but luckily the team who took us out to the reef was able to oblige
including a make-the-hand-gestures-for-your-favourite-fish photo at the end (mine's a turtle (of course); Gordon went off chart and made up his own: the groper...)
Our last day in Queensland, we hired a runaround to visit the nearby Atherton Tableland area. The Cathedral Fig Tree
some beautiful waterfalls
but alas not time for the Mt Uncle Rum Distillery!
Back to Darwin
for two more nights at Robyn's flat and a last day in Darwin tomorrow...
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