Hiking the Rainforest in Daintree

This glitch where I can only upload three photos before crashing the system may make things a bit overwhelming here...today was a day of a lot of photos!

After our beautiful beachside breakfast we headed up to Mossman Gorge, a hike in the Daintree Rainforest National Park. We enjoyed a long, humid hike with some lovely views before moving on.

Next was a crocodile river tour - no photos as I wasn't fast enough on my phone, but we glimpsed a few!

Finally, we hopped a car ferry and drove up to a few more hikes in the rainforest and on the beach before our long drive back to Cairns.

Tomorrow we board our liveaboard, so we'll be off for a few days, but hope to have some great photos for you this weekend!

A quick stay in Palm Cove

At least, I think it was Palm Cove...there are a million little beach cities here and we stayed in the city for less than 12 hours!

The good news - we survived our first drive on the left side of the road with minimal drama (thanks to Patrick) in spite of arriving at 11 pm in pouring rain and with me feeling sick due to I think the most turbulent flight I've ever flown on! And we had a lovely little beach hotel waiting for us, with  beautiful sheltered patio to sit on and listen to the rain for a little bit before sleeping.

And then in the morning, there was our view for breakfast....

Last Day in Sydney

Today is our last day in Sydney, so we're knocking out all our last to-dos! We started bright and early again (good thing they are good at coffee here!) with an opera house tour. It was quick, but a fun way to see a bit of the opera house even though we weren't interested in any of the shows here for these three days.

We then wandered around and explored the Rocks district, full of cute restaurants, and Observatory Park (previously a working observatory and now a museum). 

Finally, we swung through the aquarium (not terribly impressive although they are one of only a few aquariums to house dugongs, a saltwater manatee). We actually finished all our planned events early today, so wound up just having coffee and snacks in the Queen Victoria Building, a lovely old building that is now a shopping center but has some great architecture and Christmas decorations!

As I write this we're sitting waiting for our flight to Cairns, where we will be visiting the rainforest and great barrier reef. Our access to WiFi is less than guaranteed, but we'll fill you in next when we can!

A Few More Photos from Sydney

Well, all - Blogger seems to have set itself a limit of 3 photos per post before it crashes, so here's a second post for our Monday in Sydney, with a few more photos!

Sydney by Boat and Foot

We had an easy day planned for today - a leisurely breakfast, the ferry over to the zoo and then dinner at the Sydney Eye, an observation tower overlooking the city. We woke up early after falling asleep at 9, and were off...and promptly boarded the wrong ferry.

I can't say I regret the mistake, although it would have been nicer with sunshine - we ended up at the beautiful Manly Beach, which it turns out is not where the zoo was.

The ferry ride itself was beautiful, with some fantastic views in spite of the fog and rain. We arrived at the zoo to more rain and regrets that our ponchos were one of the items that didn't make the cut for bringing when I was trying to make our weight limit! We had a nice, lazy day wandering around the zoo anyway, and it cleared up partway through our day. The zoo itself was not bad - I'd never seen an echidna, wallaby or platypus before - but the view was spectacular.

We then took a slow wander through the botanical gardens (more views) before heading up to the observation tower (noticing a theme here with the views?). While the observation tower itself was a little too crowded to be fun, the revolving restaurant and bar on the next level down was much more relaxed and offered the same view as long as we ordered the equivalent of one drink each and an appetizer to share. Not a bad place to watch the daylight disappear and the city lights come out!

I had this goal of not walking quite as much today as my feet were already tired, but we definitely didn't meet that one. We'll see about tomorrow!

Good morning, Sydney!

We arrived in Sydney bright and early at 8 am, after about 24 hours of travelling - thankfully we were both able to get some sleep on the plane! We decided to take the adventurous route and walked from the airport to our hotel. While it wasn't a quick walk, it was a sidewalk the entire way and we ran into a whole lot of gardens, breweries and other places we otherwise never would have seen. Including a chocolate bar - and yes, I did use jet lag as an excuse to eat a chocolate soufflé at 10 am!


We made it into town just in time for our walking tour, which I had thought was an hour and a half but turnedt out to be a 3 hour tour of Sydney! A few highlights:

St. Andrews Cathedral

Queen Victoria Building (fancy shopping center with great architecture)

An alleyway decorated with birdcages, always playing the songs of the native birds that live in the bush nearby

We hit the opera house and the harbor bridge just as the drizzle started, so those photos will come on a nicer day! Mostly, though, the weather has been beautiful and warm - just a slight sunburn for both of us.

And now, we've finally reached a late enough hour to get some sleep - so good night!

And We're Off!

Well - almost. After a few hours of switching things in and out, we're at least finally packed. Once we get into Australia, our baggage limits are 7kg a person (about 15 lbs), and we finally clocked in at 6.8 kg each! It took a bit of creativity and we'll both be wearing our jeans, jackets and sweatshirts to check in for each flight whether it's 50 or 115 degrees, but we made it!

First stop after a very, very long flight is Sydney. Keeping our fingers crossed that it isn't pouring rain, as the ponchos were one of the items that didn't make the weight cut.

And now, off to the next task - packing up Gadget's things for his vacation with both sets of grandparents and his best friend.