No blog for a week? It’s been interesting but not necessarily worth writing about especially when it’s unclear how one feels about the experience. We’ve moved some 70+ km up the coast from Cairns to an upmarket resort called Port Douglas.

Beginning with our arrival in Australia last Monday, we spent the first three nights in a large apartment at Trinity Beach. Trinity beach is a quiet, peaceful sort of place, lots of apartments and hotel style buildings calling themselves resorts clustered along a relatively short beach front. A couple of coffee / restaurants dot the promenade

and it seems that they have the occasional run in with local saltwater crocs.

A sleepy place there’s nothing to do there apart from walk up and down the esplanade or drink coffee, eat lunch etc. All the action takes place in Cairns.

So, after getting through a somewhat unpleasant Monday night we caught a local bus into Cairns, wandered around, booked a trip to Michaelmas Cay, a 10km long reef some 40km out from Cairns on the edge of the continental shelf and hired a Suzuki sewing machine engined car to get around.

Cairns is a low rise town, frayed on the edges but has character. It’s entirely dedicated to tourists, has shops touting reef visits on every street corner with the gaps filled with coffee shops, restaurants of all description and offers of accommodation. We made our reef trip booking in a shop run by a guy from Wrexham aided by a guy from Cambridge. Most boats take up to 360 tourists out to the reef at a time. Ours was ostensibly one of the smaller boats and would take a maximum of 60. As it later turned out we had a little over 100 on board. We booked snorkelling gear and a guided trip by a marine biologist.

We turned up to the boat on Wednesday morning

but jet lag had kicked in big time and I found it difficult to stop coughing for more than 30s at a time. Coughing into a snorkelling mask might prove tricky so we postponed until Saturday.

So what to do? Queensland is home to two international heritage sites, the Great Barrier Reef and a tropical rain forest. The first had been postponed so we took the opportunity to see the second via Skyrail, a 7.5km gondola ride over the rainforest to an ethnic village called Kuranda and back via a small gauge railway. I coughed and spluttered there and back, surrounded by hundreds of a mixed medley of characters out of popular Australian soaps. The rainforest itself was interesting but with no real context one tree looks much like another especially when there are thousands packed tightly together.

Australia has clearly recognised the economic potential of both reef and rainforest and is exploiting both as ruthlessly as it can. Having replaced large areas of the forest in earlier years with huge sugar cane plantations it’s now investing money in billboards, gondolas and park rangers to look after what is left.

There is an impressively huge gouge in the earth halfway to Kuranda called the Barron falls where the Barron river suddenly drops some 400m onto the valley floor. It’s apparently an incredible sight during the rainy season but is a small trickle at this time of year.

Kuranda is a major tourist attraction, full of trinkets, dodgy looking shopkeepers and aboriginal art. Far too much new age nonsense for my liking but it draws in the tourists.

The train ride back to the departure point took an hour and a half of rickety track noises, stops and starts. I slept – badly.

On Thursday we moved to an apartment on the 11th floor of a 13 floor tower block. Small but pleasant we enjoyed ill health together.

On Friday we decided to visit the tablelands, an area west and south of Cairns that had lakes, hills and gently undulating fields full of sugar cane. Formerly rainforest, the area is bland, boring, tedious but with one redeeming characteristic – platypuses.

I’ve no doubt that it’s a pretty naive view but I had sort of hoped to see kangaroos bounding joyously through the grass, parakeets circling and venomous snakes sliding sinuously in the middle distance. No luck. So far the only marsupial we’ve seen was one non bounding wallaby watching us warily one evening as we passed in the car a few miles west of Oxford. Ironic.

But, having stopped the car next to what purported to be a platypus hide, we decided to take a walk along the bank of the nearby stream and were rewarded by the sight of this cheerful little platypus cavorting in the middle of the stream.

Definitely a real highlight. But one joyful platypus a great holiday does not make. So, on to the Great Barrier Reef.

We arrived at the boat in plenty of time, got issued with our snorkelling gear and lots of warnings about what we could and shouldn’t do. As fully paid up members of a additional snorkelling group activity (five of us), we got the benefit of a wet suit in addition to the full body covering of a black wrap intended to keep the sun off us as we snorkelled. Dorothy’s was skin tight, and as someone unused to a wet suit this would prove to be a problem.

It took the best part of two hours to reach the reef.

A transfer boat took us in groups of 30 to the reef. Once on the reef I donned clippers and mask and headed out leaving Dorothy with instructions to take her time and I’d rejoin her shortly.

In fairness, it was pretty cool poodling along on the surface gazing down on the coral and brightly coloured reef fish and it was some fifteen minutes before I made my way back to Dorothy. Unfortunately the combination of tight wet suit, mask and general water unease had caused her to have a nasty panic attack. She’d completely freaked out and was unceremoniously hauled into a small boat. Nothing would persuade her to have another go.

I spent another 30 minutes or so on the outer edges of the reef before we both returned for lunch followed by a trip in a boat specifically designed to see the reef out of glass side panels so Dorothy pretty much got to see what I had.

I returned to the beach with the marine biologist and three others before snorkelling back to the boat having fondled a sea cucumber and traversed a much larger section of the reef.

So all in all, from my perspective at least, a decent experience with only half a dozen or so coughs marring the actual snorkelling.

It took a further couple of hours to return to Cairns where we disembarked along with a few hundred other brave snorkelling souls.

On Sunday we headed north to Port Douglas. Port Douglas is much smaller than Cairns, clearly far more select and twee. It’s essentially one large resort, again lots of shops offering reef trips but others extolling the virtues of trips up the Daintree river, deep into the heart of the rainforest. As intrepid explorers we’re not daunted by tails (sic) of vicious cassowaries attacking unsuspecting tourists so yesterday we drove up to the Daintree, took the ferry across and headed as far up as our car insurance would take us (only on tarmac roads).

We saw a solitary croc on the river and had high hopes for spotting the elusive but dangerous cassowary. The local authorities encourage the more adventurous tourists to venture off the beaten track so after an ice cream and a walk around a small banana plantation

we headed into the bush along a small but just visible track.

Over the course of the next 5 km or so and hour away from human company we saw lots and lots of amazing trees,

a solitary brush turkey,

some fish

and crabs but no cassowary. But we did spot its poo.

The drive up to and back from the Daintree is reminiscent of the route down highway 1 in California. The sea however is quite a different colour, the coral sea is much more turquoise than the Pacific, quite dramatic.

It’s clear that this part of Australia is one very large Mecca for tourists. Dorothy and I have trouble with tourism as it necessarily includes large numbers of people all herding in the same direction. This is tricky to cope with. The overt commercialism is also pretty heavy handed. Given Australia’s recent approach to the problems of climate change – deny all, it’s nonsense, give me more coal etc, it’s historical track record re aboriginal peoples etc, the whole ‘visit the Great Barrier Reef’ and our pristine rainforest where both have been pretty much exploited to death – it’s been a somewhat chastening experience.

We’ll spend this evening reading and generally relaxing in the warm tropical sunshine before flying out to Sydney tomorrow where we’ll stay until Friday. We’ve attempted to book a return flight out of Sydney on Friday afternoon which should get us into the UK via Singapore early on Saturday morning. We think it’s time to make our way home.

Bon voyage