Live from Cairns Australia
We are now in Cairns and Louise is currently on the pool on a scuba diving course, which is monumental since she only learn't to swim when she was 18. We are going out on the reef tomorrow for 3 days living a board a lovely boat with our own 2 berth Air conditioned room. Lets hope the weather is good. At the moment we are just coming into the rainy season so it sunny about 3 days out of 4. Hot all the time!!!!. Since my last mail from surfers paradise we travelled up the coast to Brisbane, where we had the day looking round the shops going up the old clock tower and the wandering through the botanical gardens. We then headed up to Kenilworth and stayed in a State forest there. Next stop Rockhampton where we had to have the van MOTed. We then set back off up North to the Eugela (probable spelt wrong) National park which is a fantastic sub tropical forest. We camped in the parks campsite which had lovely individual bays with you own wood fire, hot showers and a few greedy Possiums. We also got to see some wild Platipuses (one of the few places in the world this is possible!) which was really great. Next stop was Airlie beach just North of Mackay, which is the jump off point for the Whitsunday Islands. Named by Cook when he passed through them on what he thought was Whitsunday. Infact his log was inaccurate by one day, because he had not allowed for the fact he had crossed the international date line. Anyway we decided to take a 1 day sailing cruise. The morning was really nice with good weather. Louise also did an introductory Scuba diving to 3m with some funny Irish girls and an english instructors and I did a dive with this very weird Swiss girl who kept swimming off (this is really stupid when diving!) so I kept having to come to the surface!! Unfortunately the weather turned rainy for the return trip but it was a fun day. After that we head up to Mission beach 150Km south of Cairns. Mission beach is one of the few places where the rain forest comes right down to a lovely sand beach. The only unfortunately thing is that you can't swim in the sea because of Jelly fish, oh well it was still lovely if not expensive on the sun screen!! Anyway then we came up to Cairns and at present I'm sat in the Library waiting for Louise to come home from School!