FNQ - Part 2 of 2

Our first full day in Port Douglas was spent walking through the serene (at this time of year...it is a raging and violent river during the rainy seaon) Mossman Gorge, with it's lovely waterfalls and pathway through the rainforest.  Then came the first highlight of our trip: a cruise on the Daintree River.  The Daintree River is an estuary, full of snakes, crocodiles and sometimes even sharks!  Where could you find more danger!

Mossman Gorge

The crocodiles are really quite sneaky.  They can stay very still for hours at a time, and you really wouldn't know they are there.

We were lucky to pull up right beside one that was resting on a sandbar (her name is Gump, she is about 10 years old, and is approx 3 metres long), then we chugged around and tried to spot some lurking in the water.  They are VERY hard to spot, even when the guide points them out.  They look very much like semi-submerged logs, and have a tendency to hang out amongst the logs, so it takes a well trained eye to see them right away.  We saw a number of sizes of crocodiles, lots of birds and even a pretty cute tree snake.  It might sound like a creepy trip, but we both enjoyed it immensely and would strongly recommend it to anyone.

Gump the croc on her sandbar, log-looking sneaky croc...just waiting for one of us to fall in the water!

Tree snake, her head is in the middle of the photo

The following day we drove out to Cape Tribulation, where Captain Cook and his crew were stranded for three months, doing repairs to their ship after the Endeavour hit the reef.  There are much worse places to be stranded than this!

Cape Tribulation

On Thursday we took a catamaran trip out to the Low Isles on the inner Great Barrier Reef.  It was a fantastic trip and an easily the second highlight of our trip (although it ties for first place!)  We were really lucky to be on a boat that can take up to 23 passengers, but only 7 were booked that day.  It felt like we were on a private charter.  The water was lovely and we saw all kinds of beautiful soft corals, turtles, brilliantly coloured fish (we found Nemo!) and even some rather cute black-tipped reef sharks.  The sharks hung around the boat after lunch, waiting for the free prawns, left over from lunch.  They know how to get a free meal!  This was a wonderful way to see the reef...it was a brilliant sunny day, JB learned how to snorkel and JT got to steer the boat...the $2.5 million dollar boat! 

Green Turtle out for a swim

Low Isles, where we went snorkelling

Finally we had one last day to see Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas and go for a swim in the sea and then again back at the hotel pool.  We loved this trip so much that we realize we could easily spend all of our vacations travelling around to see Australia.  Our only problem is trying to decide where to go next!

Four Mile Beach, Port Douglas

FNQ (Far North Queensland) (Part 1 of 2)

We are now back from our fabulous week in Far North Queensland.  We spent two days in Cairns and 5 days in Port Douglas, about 45 minutes north of Cairns.  We saw Paronella Park, took the skyrail tram up to Kurunda, walked through the Mossman Gorge, took a Daintree River Cruise, drove up to Cape Tribulation and snorkelled off the inner Great Barrier Reef.  We travelled by just about every means imaginable and really need a weekend of R and R to get ready for the work week.

Cairns Lagoon

We started our trip in Cairns, where we spent one day looking around and one day driving to and from Paronella Park.  Cairns is a city of about 150,000 people.  It is a city that is right on the coast, but that section of the coast is all mudflats, no beach, so they have built up a great park area and lagoon for swimming.  It looked like it was very well used and enjoyed by everyone.

We went to Paronella Park to see the ruins of a modern castle that was started in the 1930s.  It is a pretty neat place to wander around and it really has a "tropical ruin" feel about it (in a good way).  The main castle building looks out over a water fall that was the source of the first water-powered generator in the area.  The Park actually had power before the nearest town of Innisfail!

Main Castle at Paronella Park

There is a guided tour to one end of the park, then the guide leaves you on your own to find your own way back to the entrance.  There a plenty of places to poke around and they also give everyone a bag of fish food the feed the fishes.  We somehow managed to attract a very scary looking eel to our feeding spot!

Scary looking but harmless eel



On Monday we drove to the "skyrail" station to take us to the town of Kurunda.  The skyrail offers some really beautiful vistas of the area and of the rainforest canopy.  There are two stops within the rainforest, so the whole ride up takes about an hour.

Rainforest from the skyrail

We had about 4 hours in Kurunda, which is a pretty small town.  We went for a jungle walk, had a long lunch and looked in every possible shop and gallery the town had to offer.  There is an old train that takes about 90 minutes to get you from Kurunda back to a little transfer point that is about 5 minutes from the skyrail station.

Kurunda Train

View from the train

The train has cars are from the early 1900's to 1930's and run pretty slowly along a winding track.  There is narration that highlights some of the difficulties in building the railway and the hardships that early settlers encountered.  There is plenty to see and, at the end of the train, plenty to be thankful for, since neither one of us can imagine living in that hot of an area without air conditioning or running water!

Cairns

After a very hectic week at work, rushing to get everything done so that we could have a relaxing holiday, we are now in Cairns.  This is our first time in Northern Queensland and it has a very different feel from Brisbane.  This is a very hot and tropic place, and has a resorty-ness to it that gives it a much slower pace. 
Today we drove from Cairns to Paronella Park, about 90 minutes south.  We actually drove through both Edmonton and Innisfail to get there and, like in Alberta, Edmonton is north of Innisfail.  It was a little bit of Canada!
Paronella Park (pictures to be posted once we have a better internet connection) is a really beautiful park in a rainforest setting.  It started in the 1930s when a Spaniard, Jose Paronella, fulfilled his dream of building a Spanish castle in the tropics.  The grounds were set up with a ballroom/movie theatre, swimming hole, boce green, tennis court and walking path.  It was a very early theme park.  After Jose died and his family were no longer able to run it, the park was sold to a third party.  In 1979 a fire went through the castle grounds.  The entire place fell into ruin until the 1990s, when the new owners took over.  They haven't refurbished anything, but they have opened up the park to the public and we can now all walk through castle ruins in the midst of the jungle!  It is a fascinating place!

Another anniversary

This week, on September 6th, marked one year for both of us in our jobs with Santos.  Since we first started, JT has gone from a full team to a one-man team, and has now just started the building process with new team members.  JB has moved from working for the GLNG partnership to a different part of Santos, although still within the world of CSG.  The one thing that we have noticed is that no matter where a person lives, one creates one's own life.  We initially thought that working here would be so different from working in Canada.  It really isn't.  We have different jobs, but they are still within the energy sector, we still look at budgets and wells and do all the stuff we did in Canada.  The weekends are different but the weekdays are the same.  It's nice to have that combination of the familiar during the work week and the new/different on the weekends.  We try to hit the beach and the surrounding areas at least one weekend a month, but even exploring Brisbane is still so new to us.

Eagle St Pier from Kangaroo Point

Another, much sadder, anniversary is the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.  We remember clearly seeing footage, some live, on television and watching the horror unfold.  It is a different kind of feeling here, where people would have woken up the next day and heard about the attacks hours after they occured.  The timing of the attacks is 7 am in Calgary, 9 am in New York, 11pm in Brisbane.  People here would have been asleep when the rest of us in North America were glued to TV screens and computers.  It is as hard for us to explain watching the situation unfold as it is for Aussies to express the horror of waking up to the full news story on the following day.  There was no buffer time, just a full-on terrible story.

We are getting ready for a trip to Cairns and Port Douglas.  On the agenda is the Great Barrier Reef, Cape Tribulation and every tourist trap/hotspot the area has to offer.  We are looking forward to exploring and experiencing an entirely new region of Australia to us!

Riverfire!

Start of Riverfire, above Story Bridge

We really know that we have been here for a year, because we have started having our second time doing things.  Last night we had our second Riverfire. 

Last year we were staying in a Santos sponsored apartment, with beautiful views over the river.  So many people that we met told us that we needed to make sure that we saw Riverfire.  Until we saw the fireworks, we had no idea what people were talking about.  Now we know that it is a spectacular fireworks display and the start of the Brisbane Festival.

Since we saw the fireworks from the western edge of the CBD last year, we decided to go to the eastern side of the CBD, to a restaurant in the old Customs House on Eagle St Pier.  We bought tickets to a viewing platform/patio on the river side of the restaurant, that included cocktails, canapes and three course dinner and wine.  The cocktails and canapes happened before the fireworks, with dinner afterwards.

We were a little worried when we were walking up to the entry way.  There were ladies im beautiful evening gowns and men in tuxes ahead of us in the line.  We were dressed slightly less formally, in casual slacks and jumpers.  Luckily we were on the "schlub" side of the restaurant, with all of the other people who were dressed like us.  There was a very formal affair there on the same evening, so we were not as out of place as we first thought.

Story Bridge Fireworks

The fireworks were amazing; 30 minutes of fabulous, colourful fireworks being set off from the bridge.  We were close enough that we could actually smell the smoke!   The setting was perfect and we will definitely go back.  Too bad that Riverfire happens only once a year!