HOWDY! I am currently halfway through my Australian summer excursion. Please ignore possible misspellings and grammar errors. This is a German keyboard I am using (I never realised how many times I use the letter Y before) and my English has gotten worse since I´ve been away from uni and with all the international students. I guess that means that I am in dire need of a trip back to the States :)
I have been travelling for a week so far on the east coast of Australia. Our trip is from Cairns to Brisbane. At Brisbane I will leave the others, but they will continue and reach Sydney by New Years. And then it´s goodbye, travel buddies- within a few weeks they will be on their way back to their home countries. So I really only have a week left with these people, which sucks quite a bit, but a week is better than nothing.
I arrived at Cairns on the 28th of November. Cairns is barely a city. It really only consists of three streets along the ocean. There is no beach, but there is a ton of rainforest. The city has a luscious backdrop of hills covered in all sorts of rainforest flora. While we were there, we stopped at Daintree National Forest a few hours north of the city and Barron Gorge, which was only a few kms away. It being the wet season and everything, the rainforest hike was a bit wet. I like to call it authentic.
Cairns also has a bat problem. By problem, I mean that bats will take to the sky in hoards once the sun drops. They make this awful sound, and they are so big that even when they are a few meters above you, you can see their outline perfectly. They only eat fruit, but that doesn´t mean that they´re not horrifying...I feel like someone should put this as a disclaimer on all their travel brochures.
Next stop was Airlie Beach. The town is so sleepy, even smaller than Cairns, and even with the name, there isn´t an actual beach. Weird. I guess that doesn´t matter much, though, since barely anyone goes to the beach out of fear of a) skin cancer and b) jellyfish. The jellyfish aren´t common on the beaches, but if they sting you, well....just hope that they don´t.
Right outside of Airlie Beach are the Whitsunday Islands. After a few days at the "beach," we took the Atlantic Clipper for a 3 day cruise around the islands. The islands are brilliant. We went to Whitehaven Beach, which has the whitest, purest sand I have ever seen (you can brush your teeth with it!) and the clearest water. We went snorkeling around other islands and saw fabulous fish and coral. One of the girls on our trip took pictures with her fancy underwater camera, and so I will upload them as soon as I get them. But if you ever have a chance to see the Great Barrier Reef, do it. It´s amazing. Just don´t brush your skin against the coral. The bacteria can give you an unpleasant rash like the ones I have on my feet right now. Yuck.
Tomorrow we drive 8 hours to Town of 1770, where we will spend a nice quiet night before driving the rest of the way to Rainbow Beach and then Brisbane. So don´t worry mom and dad, I can´t die from alcohol poisoning tonight or even get drunk these next two days- I will need to be clear-headed enough to drive tomorrow :)
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