So, Port Douglas, and don't I have a lot of exciting things to tell you? ... Yes, yes I do.

ps. this post will be quite text heavy, as although H kindly didn't point the finger about the missing camera cable, it was, believe it or not, me who packed it in the wrong bag.

The plane got in as the sun was setting, and it felt damp. I knew Cairns was in the tropics but I hadn't really put much thought to the humidity levels, at least we had a few steps up from a tent in the desert to look forward to, complete with air-con, mmm air-con, love it, I would choose air-con over the environment any day.

Port Douglas is about a 45 minute drive north of Cairns which we did by bus, it is meant to be a spectacular drive up the coast but as it was pitch darkness we couldn't tell. On arrival at TreeTop Resort, a kind of open air hotel based around a small landscaped rainforest, we headed straight for our room. Loveley, nice big room with all the mod cons, and we could watch some of the tennis. Come on Murray!

Sleep time.

24th Jan

Now I will be jumping through the next couple of days pretty swiftly, firslty because my brain does not seem to be connected to my fingers correctly today, and also because we did sweet F' all. We had our reasons though, cyclone Olga was on its way. We had seen warnings on the news at Ayres rock of the possibility of it hitting Port Douglas. This meant that most things in town were closed, and if they were not closed they were closing at 3pm, bugger. We had intented on visiting the sunday markets but ended up just wandering around. It is a lovely little place though, with a beautifull, small wooden church overlooking the sea that looks like it belongs in the Caribean. Back at our room we had the warning letter pushed under our door saying to stay inside, exiciting stuff, I wondered if it would be like Twister. It rained a bit, then it rained some more, and that was cyclone Olga. It passed right by. Ah well, we will get more stuff done tommorow we thought.

25th Jan

Wrong. We remained in the resort for pretty much the whole of the day, and it was great. I love doing nothing, and I especially love leaving your room to do nothing and coming back and it is all clean and the bed is made. I read, gymed a bit, had a swim and read some more. In the evening we thought we should eat somewhere other than the TreeTops restaurant so got the shuttle bus to another hotel which was meant to have a good fish eatery. The good fish restaurant was closed so we ate at the one handily opposite and opted to eat outside, but under cover in case it rained. And boy did it rain, bloody hell, I havn't seen that much rain before, we could hardly hear ourselves speak over the sound of it hitting the tent cover thingy. At least we didn't have to walk back in it, ah shit, yes we did.

We waited about an hour in the lobby watching some tennis until the rain had eased off a bit and then walked back along the road. H had an unbrella because she is a girl and more organised about these types of things. I got soaked, but it was like having a warm shower with your clothes on.

Oh yea, happy burns night. Me getting soaked was my shout out to it.

26th Jan

Australia day!  A bus driver from one of the days past recommended we head for a place called The Combi Club on the sea front. The place looked like it had evolved over a long period of time; the main building was made out of corregated iron, but then the massive veranda bit over the waterfront looking pretty modern. It was kitted out like a village fate, and events like tug of war and "hit the tinny" were going on. Came second in the tug of war, how many teams competed you say? Well that doesn't really matter does it, its the taking part that counts. The tug of war took place out on some tarmac, and it is pretty hard in flip-flops (which are amusingly called thongs here, it is strange hearing mums entering their kids into the "throw the thong" competition) and I mashed my foot up when my sandal thing came off, but I'm hard so I shrugged the excessive pain off easily. So what is Hit the Tinny? Basically you go down to the pontoon with a golf club and a ball and have to try and get the ball in or near  a little dingy that is moored about 150m out. I skimmed mine like a stone, which I thought was pretty impressive. Other people showed off by getting their balls in the boat. After some lunch we had a change of venue and we witnessed a pie eating competition which I had to drag H away from entering kicking and screaming. That was Australia day, everyone said it was a bit dead because of the cyclone warning causing some people to leave town, but fun none the less.

Oh somewhere in there we had a wander down the four mile beach, my first beach lined with palm trees and covered in fallen coconuts. The weather always looked like a storm was brewing  but it didn't rain today until the evening when the heavens opened. 

27th Jan

Congratulations if you are still reading. To intise you; today in my opinion was the best day of the trip so far. We had booked a tour called Daintree Dreaming. It was royally pissing it down when we woke up (if you havn't guessed already it is the wet season here). We fuelled up on bacon,eggs, sausages, beans and all that healthy stuff and went outside to wait for our pick up. Oh, I forgot to mention before that there is a tame Cockatoo by the reception called, mm can't remember its name, lets call it Norbet the Wonder Parrot for the sake of argument. I have been trying to give Norbet a stroke since we came but he/she just trys to bite me, but this morning she bowed her head like a Hippogriff and I scratched him/her behind the neck. This was truly a sign that things were looking up for today.

A four-by-four pulled up and our guide for the day Emma came bouncing up. Already in the car, were an Australian AFL player called Hayden and a German called, Roybert, or Royer or Rayman or something. If I refer to him again he will be "R". They had already driven up from Cairns but we just had a 15 minute drive to our first port of call; a Daintree River boat trip. I jammed a couple of those all in one, attractive rain sacks into my pocket and we headed on to the boat. After about 5 minutes we spied a 3m long tree snake, closely followed by the worlds largest tree frog, and then a crocodile! Although I could not tell which bit I was looking at as it was only little and hidden away through the bushes, but I aimed the camera and pressed the button. The photo wasn't half bad.

The boat trip was about half an hour and we shared it with another larger tour group, but left them early to persue other adventurous activities. Now I'm not really a fan of guided tours usually, but this one was ace. Next on our list we headed into the rainforest and walked through rivers (I have already retired my shoes) and through crazy ferns to reach a spectaular 30m ish high water fall called Neo falls, which was particularly big today because of the heavy rains. We all stripped off to our swimmers (up on the lingo now) and scrambled over the rocks and into the beautiful pool at the base of the fall. The water fall is surrounded by dense foliage, and it really felt as though we had discovered it. There were natural spas formed near the base of the waterfall, and following Hayden's lead four of us (Emma, the guide kindly held back to take a photo) bellyflopped our way like seals up the slippery rocks to get a photo right under the fall. Awesome. We swam back to our clothes, but didn't really bother putting them back on and walked back trough the forest to the car.

Lunch was then put on for us at a small ramshackle type cafe. After we had our fill it was off to meet Brendon the Aboriginal hunter for a spot of spear fishing. Unlike the Aborignals we met in central Australia Brendon spoke fluent english, and obviously had kept in touch with his roots but was to all intensive purposes was a normal guy (I know this sounds racist and patronising but I cant think of a better way to say it. You know, he was westernised although he is not in the west). We were each handed a long thin bamboo spear when on the beach and shown how to throw it. Brendon flung his far into the distance where it stuck perfectly into the ground. I threw mine a couple of metres scaring a fallen coconut. We started off walking along the beach. The water was very shallow and you could walk along the sand planes for miles with the water only being inches deep and very warm. The sand had become grey mud now and in the distance Brendon pointed out a grey mass on the mud slowly moving, on closer inspection the mass turned out to be hundreds of little crabs scuttling across the sand. It was like being in a helicopter looking down on a heard of bison. As soon as you approached the crabs all of them dissapeared into little self-dug holes in a couple of seconds.

We were warned of stinging jelly fish as at this point we were up to our knees spears at the ready but we only saw the harmless ones. A couple of sting ray shaped holes in the mud were where sting rays had once been and slightly bigger blue clawed crabs were scuttling by. All the time we were picking up winkles and shellfish to cook later but the real goal was to catch a big mud crab. Branden led us away from the mudbanks and into the mangroves of the surrounding jungle. The mangroves all stood high on cages of roots and the grey mud under your feet was like a free spa treatment. It transpired that crocodiles don't like coming in hear because they are lazy and sharks don't either because they can't swim backwards so would get stuck and drown when the tide went out. Everyone was bear foot because the mud would suck your shoes off and we were now on the lookout for mussles.

As we got deeping in to the mangroves I kept getting handed big clam looking mussels from H and Hayden and R. I found one mussel, they were just sitting on the mud not attached to anything. you gave them a sharp tap on a root to make sure they were alive and then bucketed them. Occasionally there would be a small pile of opened mussels around a tree root, this is where the mud crab had been feeding.

It started to rain again, now we  were all suitably wet and muddy, and it felt if we didn't find a mud crab we would be going hungry. 20 minutes of mussel gathering later Brendon had his spear in the muddy water jabbing it in and out, after about 5 minutes he  unearthed a big mud crab. Score! It turned out that in the fight the crab had bitten off its two front claws that were huge in attempt to escape, it would usually grow these back in a few days. Brendon dug up the claws aswell and we headed out of the mangroves back on to the mud banks. At this point, determined to spear a fish Brendon waded deep out into the water. We followed to an extent and then contented ourselved with just having a wander and I experimented with my spear throwing technique. Hayden speared a small crab, and after seeing it squirm its last on the end of the spear, I decided not to aim for anything anymore, although from my non-existant catch aiming wasn't my forte anyway.

On the way back Brendon picked up some oval pinkish type fruits from under a tree and we followed him back to his house past the Drunken Parrot tree (parrots eat the seeds, get drunk and then fall out of the tree, all the names of things were really literal, like the Snottlegrobber, which was a small fish covered in snot type stuff and made the noise "grob grob").

I forgot about my "thou should not kill" attitude when Brendon's wife bought out our catch all cooked and looking delcious. We ate the mussels with some lime and Brendon's 8 year old homemade chili sauce ("The Ring Burner" written on the lable) and ate the delicious mud crab as it was. The pinkish fruits turned out to be a type of passion fruit and tasted better than any passion fruit I had ever eaten. 

As if all this lovely sea food wasn't enough his wife had made a big tray of Damper, a kind of bread made with butter and flour. It was like slices of warm scones and I must have had about 7 with more butter spread on top and a healthy portion of syrup.

Brendon showed us some of his turtle shells from the turtles he had caught and eaten, and told us of how you have to remove the gallbladder without bursting it before killing the turtle otherwise the meat will kill you. Then a huge array of shells, sting ray barbs and swordfish parts were shown including a little cone shell that looked like a chocolate cornetto. It turns out that if you pick this cone one up a barb will shoot out the back of it into you and you will have about 20 minutes to say your goodbyes. It is becoming apparent that if a venemous animal can kill you then it will come from Australia.

We packed up and got dropped off back at the resort. All in all an awesome day. If you are ever in this area I can highly recommend "Daintree Dreaming" ran by a group called Adventure North.

Tommorow we have some snorkeling and an introductory scuba dive booked at the Great Barrier Reef. Sounds pretty immense but today will take some beating.