Cairns

We both picked up colds on our Cape York Trip, so the week we spent in Cairns afterwards was partly spent recuperating. Once we started to feel a bit better we did a few short walks, including one at the Botanic Gardens that climbed up a very steep hill to a lookout over the Cairns airport. We spent quite some time sitting on a bench getting our breath back and watching planes take off and land, Cairns is a much busier airport than you might expect and our high vantage point gave us a perfect view.

On another day we went to Crystal Cascades, a lovely stream that burbles down to a series of water holes, set amongst palms and ferns. We also visited the Barron Gorge power station, which uses the water from the dam on the Barron River and has a fairly interesting exhibition on its history and the science of hydro-electricity generation. We had actually seen the power station from a distance when we had our day trip to Kuranda a couple of days before, it appears very, very faintly in a photo of the gorge in our previous post.

Our other big day out in Cairns was a trip to Green Island, a 15 hectare coral cay in the Great Barrier Reef. The island has been created by a build up of sand on top of the coral reef, seeds were deposited by visiting birds, gradually top soil was built up and a tropical rainforest emerged. Although the entire island is a national park it has a fairly up-market resort, and is a very popular day trip destination. We did a glass bottom boat tour over the reef and saw lots of fish, coral, clams and even a turtle. We also did the quite interesting walk around the island, then had a swim and lunch before catching the ferry back to Cairns.

Of course, sick or not now that we've hit the tourist towns of the east coast we couldn't resist the chance to have several games of golf, we're looking forward to lots of different courses over the next few months.