Cairns

We flew to Cairns after Alice Springs. By the time we got there the day was half over so we had the afternoon to ourselves. We went hunting for Australian SIM cards for our phones and found some for a very reasonable price. Way better than using Bell's roaming service.

So we just wandered around a bit in the afternoon. The population of Cairns is about 150,000 but it seems a lot smaller.  A nice little city though.

In the evening they took us to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Centre.  

This was kind of a corny thing where four people pretended to be aboriginals.  Maybe they were - maybe they weren't. Put a suit on them and they cold be an accountant or a doctor.

Here they are.

A cheery looking gal for sure.

They guy directly above explained how make a didgeridoo.  See below. I had to listen very hard to determine what language he was speaking.

The didgeridoo is a very strange instrument.

Part of the performance was the aborigines came into the audience and oainted our faces.  These are the brits and yanks from our group.

And here's the young Mexican girl admiring her face paint.

After the show people could go on stage and get their picture taken with the cast of the show. We didn't bother.

The weather in Cairns was not great when we arrived and it got worse the second day we were there.  There had been fears of a hurricane but that didn't happen - just  rain and wind.  We were lucky to have been in Alice Springs for the previous few days as the crossing from Darwin to Cairns was wet and nasty.

We were having our breakfast the second day in Cairns and we got to watch our ship arriving. If you listen you can hear the rain coming down.

A shot of the young people in our group at breakfast on the second day. The two on the left end the two two seats to the right of them were the four kids from the Swiss family that had visited Ayers rock back in Alice Springs.  They're sitting with the four young rich Mexican kids.  All eight of them were very nice, polite people and all could speak english very well. I find myself embarrassed that I can only speak one language when just about everyone we meet travelling, whose main language is not english, can speak english so well.

The second day in Cairns we were supposed to go on the Kuranda Scenic Railway through the Barron Gorge.  Unfortunately all the rain in the past few days had washed out a section of the railway so we were out of luck.

So instead we visited a pretty decent aquarium in the morning. After the aquarium we bussed up to Kuranda Village, which would have been the end point of the railway trip if we'd have done it.

Below is a 2-1/2 minute video showing some of the fish we saw at the aquarium.

And remember...click on the button circled below to switch to full screen.

Here's a couple other short videos.  Seahorses and Manta Ray.  Both fascinating creatures.

First the Manta Ray...I felt sorry for this guy as he was in such a small tank. Back and forth, back and forth he would go. It's the main reason that neither Terri nor I are really very fussy about visiting aquariums and zoos.

Here's the Seahorses.  And here's a link to a Wikipedia page that explains how Seahorses breed...very interesting.  Scroll down to "Reproduction".

And a real cool fish - a stone fish I think

Kuranda Village is mostly just a huge tourist trap and as such it was pretty annoying that we missed the train trip and had to spend three hours here before we would go down in the cable cars, that luckily, hadn't been affected by the rain.

The weather was so crappy I didn't get any pictures worth showing but here's a few anyways:

And the reason I love travelling...finding GLF's   Goofy Looking Fuckers!

This guy might get the prize for the whole trip.

We took the tramway back to the bottom and the trip was mostly cloud and gloom but we did get a glimpse of the falls for a few seconds at one point.

That's it for Cairns...better luck next time!