Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!

Arriving in Cairns immediately reminded me of the Bahamas – the land looked pretty flat (at least around the airport it did) and it was extremely humid and sticky-hot. I started wishing that I was wearing something a bit lighter than jeans… and that I still had that great ice-cream from the plane! (Even though Henk and I snacked on doughnuts before our flight, we made sure we didn’t miss out on the lunch they served, a choice of spaghetti Bolognese or lamb, complete with a free chocolate ice-cream bar dessert!)

We took a shuttle to Cairns City Backpackers, a hostel we found online that was priced much better than the hostels in Sydney or Melbourne, and looked like it would be pretty quiet and not packed with noisy backpackers. And we were right! The location wasn’t bad (a 15 minute walk from the city center) and the rooms, although they didn’t have free AC, were decently spacious and had a large electronic fan that we could keep cool with. Plus, the hostel offered a free nightly dinner at a pub in town! All we had to do was pick up nightly vouchers and wait for the 7:00 pm shuttle to drop us off there.

Which is exactly what we planned for the first evening. Pretty exhausted from flying and a little jet-lagged, (there is a slight time change between Sydney and Cairns) Henk and I relaxed until it was time to get the shuttle to the pub. We opted to buy an extra garlic bread, but we each got a pretty decently sized plate of spaghetti Bolognese! (We usually share meals to keep our costs down, so this was a special treat.) The pub was jam-packed with backpackers – it wasn’t just our hostel that offered a free meal there – so we ate and left pretty quickly.

Anyways, Cairns has a pretty good sized mall with interesting shops and a full food court, so we spent time escaping the heat in there… but we didn’t do much browsing because only the grocery store was really open. We bought some essentials – bread, meat, cheese, chips and soda – and a few cheap extras like a chocolate muffin and sugar doughnuts. Then we came back to relax for the rest of the evening.

The next day (Thursday) we got to sleep in and catch up on watching Heroes, and then we booked our first trip at the reception and headed into town. We wanted to go back to the mall and explore there for a while, which we did, and then we walked through the stores in town and the boardwalk. Henk didn’t have any shorts or flip-flops, and since the weather was insanely hot, he needed to buy some pretty urgently. We found a great deal at TARGET (Kyle, we shopped at Target!!) on some cool board shorts for just $25.00 AUD, and got him a pair of sturdy flip-flops and an interesting cheap T-shirt we discovered.

As we were walking along the boardwalk, we ran into a camera shop that rented underwater cameras for Great Barrier Reef trips. Since that was on our agenda for Cairns, we spoke with the guy running the place for a bit, and decided to come back before our trip and rent one.

We continued walking and exploring the little city, popped into a tour company’s office and learned some interesting things about Bangladesh, (i.e. there are NO tours there, and we should probably consider some volunteer work if we want to have a decent place to stay) and even went to the esplanade and sat by the water admiring the view. The esplanade used to be swampy but was bought up by developers and turned into a modern hotel complex including a lagoon.



After the esplanade, we made our way to the pub for our free dinner again. We found out the free dinner options were the same every night, (spaghetti, chili, or vegetarian pasta) so Henk tried the chili and I got the spaghetti a second time. We had to get up early the next morning, so we packed our day pack and spent some time online, and then went to bed as soon as we could.

The first trip we planned in Cairns was an overnight tour to Cape Tribulation. Here is some information on the area: ‘The traditional owners of the area are the Kuku Yalanji people. The cape was named by British explorer Lt. James Cook on 10 June 1770 after his ship ran aground on a reef near the site, “because here began all our Troubles.”… The Cape is where the reef meets the beach, where the beach meets the rainforest and the jungle, and where the rainforest meets the jungle.’ Sounds really unique!

Our driver was Alex, a fun (slightly crazy) eccentric guy who knew a good deal of information he relayed to us throughout the trip. Although not everyone liked him – we later heard that one of the hostels complained to the company about his supposedly erratic driving, hoping to get him fired, so the company asked us to write down our helpful comments. After Alex picked us up, he drove around gathering everyone else for the tour, and a short while later we headed out to Cape Trib.

The first stop of the day was Mossman Gorge in Daintree National Park, a World Heritage Site. I have to admit after seeing so many rainforests they do start to blend together! I can’t wait until we get to Uluru where the nature changes dramatically to red sand and giant rocks. But still we learned some interesting things! The rainforest we visited is the oldest continually surviving rainforest on earth. We spent time looking at some fish through the extremely clear water and got some pictures.











Next Henk got to meet a Cassowary! When we were looking through the brochures for the tour, he told me about these birds excitedly – they are bright blue and are pretty large and strange-looking, somewhat like emus. Sounded weird! When we went to the Daintree Mangrove Animal Sanctuary, our guide asked for a volunteer to feed it; Henk accepted and got to meet his bizarre bird. Later, we also met a baby Cassowary.









Next we saw some fresh water crocodiles (which Alex provoked slightly and we got to see jump out of the water!) and a ‘crocodile farm,’ which housed crocs for their skin and meat. Alex also pointed out a giant spider web made by thousands of tiny spiders working together. Awesome! Before we left, we spotted some colorful Gouldian Finches.









Alexandra Lookout was the next destination. Named after Princess Alexandra of Denmark, this mountain lookout gives a great view of the coastal ranges and Coral Sea. As we were driving away from the lookout, our guide pointed out an extremely unique sign to us – one that had been graffitied by a local who apparently really wanted to warn everyone to be wary of hitting cassowaries! We continued driving and reached the Marrdja Botanical Walk, where Alex took us on a little journey through the forest. Boyd’s Lizard was the first creature we came across, sitting on a tree among some ‘prehistoric’ ferns.







Henk and I remembered back to our trip to Costa Rica this past March when we saw the next tree: it was a strangler fig! The first 60 feet (20 meters) of the tree were completely hollow, because the tree the fig had wrapped itself around died and rotted away a long time ago. The next interesting tree we saw was a ‘mutated tree’ – this tree has an important chromosome missing from its DNA, and as a result it does not repel insects (no defense mechanism against them) and thus the insects are able to freely enter the tree and build their nests inside. Those nests are the strange bumps we see on the tree!







Alex pulled us aside at this point to tell us the story of the only American-Australian fight during the Second World War. The Aussie women took a liking to the American soldiers and started seeing them, which obviously wasn’t in the interest of the Aussie men in the area. The men decided to get their revenge by replacing the soft leaves the Americans were using as ‘toilet paper’ with an identical looking leaf with a special quality: it was extremely poisonous! The leaf had little ‘needles’ on it, which hooked into and entered anything they touched (i.e. the American’s cheeks) leaving a stinging pain in the person for 3-6 months. This pain would be ‘reactivated’ every time the person’s skin tightened or loosened, such as when the temperature would change. As a result, the Americans started a fight with the Aussies – thus the only American-Australian fight.

Scrub fowls were next! Alex explained that these very fast, orange-foot birds work in monogamous pairs, creating huge compost-pile ‘nests’ out of leaves and sticks. They then bury their eggs in the huge pile to keep them safe from predators (such as Lace Monitors) and so the rotten vegetation can keep the eggs comfortably warm until they hatch (they don’t ‘sit’ on their eggs like other birds). Finally we were done with our walk, and Alex dropped us off at our hostel around 1:30 pm.



We booked into PK’s Jungle Village for the overnight (which had the cheapest double, but was also a bit of a party hostel and played music through the night) trip. Henk and I decided to walk down to Cape Tribulation beach. When we got there, we discovered a cute little crab species on the sand! Everywhere we looked, there were tiny holes in the sand, each surrounded by centimeter size balls of sand. Looked so strange! We walked along the beach looking at these creations, wondering why the crabs were making them. Looked like quite a bit of work for them when we caught one of the crabs and realized exactly how small they were.



Since Henk and I were already wearing our bathing suits, we decided to take a quick swim in the ocean. It was SO warm! Lukewarm bathtub water… pretty awesome swimming. We didn’t stay in for too long though – one of the boats traveling past tipped us that there were some ‘large reptiles’ swimming close (i.e. crocodiles!) and we weren’t too excited about getting closer to them. :P







We returned to PK’s to lay down for a while, and some time while we were resting I saw something small and fast scurry up the wall of our cabin. Henk took a closer look – it was a little lizard! We found a second one later on as well. Feeling pretty full from our late lunch of sandwiches, Henk and I skipped dinner that night (plus the meals were all pretty $$) and caught up on our much needed sleep.



The next morning, we decided to go on a second walk, so after we checked out of our room, stored our luggage, and grabbed a quick Panini from PK’s bar, we went to Myall Beach (next to Cape Tribulation Beach but separated by a Cape) – this time by another route. We walked through the Dubuji Boardwalk learning about the extremely rare and shy ‘tree-kangaroo’ which lives in looking glass mangrove trees-- but sadly we didn’t see any. But we did discover an awesome animal on a tree next to the boardwalk.



Henk was walking slightly ahead of me, and saw something large and reptilian scurry across the ground and latch itself onto a tree, climbing quickly up. In shock, we stepped back and looked at it – it was a huge lizard! We had found a Lace Monitor over 5 feet in length (1.5 meters) and enjoyed pointed it out to other tourists passing by. I loved watching their eyes widen in surprise! We spent a lot of time making sure we got awesome pictures. We continued our walk down to the water, learning from one of the signs along the way that the waters we were approaching were adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, thus only limited fishing was allowed. But that’s alright; we weren’t going fishing this time.





We were way too busy admiring the awesome view! We were standing on the beach; it was right in front of us. The waters were filled with coral and other ‘reef’ life. In front of us on our left was the wet rainforest, and adjacent to its right was the jungle. It looked amazing – so many different environments in the same area; Mother Nature’s pretty crazy sometimes. :P





We returned to the hostel to make sure we didn’t miss our pick up, which was around 2:00 pm. The bus arrived, but we didn’t have Alex anymore, we had an Aboriginal guide named George. He was pretty awesome, his commentary included a slightly dark, and sarcastic sense of humor that was entertaining. The first place he took us was the Daintree Ice-Cream Company, where for $5.00 we were able to sample some ‘exotic fruit’ (and some regular fruit) ice-cream – 4 different flavors: Jakfruit, Wattleseed, Raspberry, Macadamia.



Everyone got their ice-cream and jumped back on the bus in record time. We were heading to swim with the crocodiles next! George joked that we were going to go kayaking with them; ‘3 people to each rickety boat’ but in reality we were taking a ‘crocodile cruise.’ We saw 3 Estuarine Crocodiles in the wild, which is a really good amount because none of the cruises before us were lucky enough to see a single croc. Our driver pointed out some mango trees, beautiful golden orchids, a bright blue ‘Little Kingfisher’ bird, and he explained to us that 31 out of the 37 types of Australian mangroves could be found in this area.













We enjoyed some tea and biscuit cookies after the cruise, marveling at this bizarre picture of an Amethystine Python with a wallaby in its stomach. Finally, we had our long drive back to Cairns… but Henk and I had a great idea! We asked George if he could drop us off at the pub rather than the hostel since we already had our meal tickets with us. He said that was fine, and we enjoyed another spaghetti and upgraded ‘American BBQ ribs,’ chips, and veggies for an extra $8.00.

That night, we recovered from our trip by catching up on a few episodes from some of our favorite series – House and Gossip Girl – and got a good night’s sleep.
Coming up! The Great Barrier Reef… so stay tuned!

Cya everyone,

Francesca