The tour of nothing...

Well hello there!

Many of you may be wondering how I got to Thailand from the east cost of Australia - did I magically transport myself there or have I accidentally missed an entire month-long chunk from my blog? Well, as you'd probably guessed with me at the keyboard - it's the latter! Honestly, I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on!! ;)

So here's a quick summary of what happened down the Red Centre of Oz. Cape Tribulation was a beautiful place - very remote and perfect for a honeymoon or such like as there was hardly anyone there. I'd already booked my transportation up there through the Oz Experience office and I decided to stay a couple of nights - just to chill and catch up on my 'paper' journal - which I did. En-route to Cape Trib we drove through Port Douglas which was a lovely little town - and I'd just missed my Hollywood break as days before they'd been filming a new film with Kate Hudson and Matthew Mconnaughey called 'Fool's Gold'. Damn it, I'm always too late! I met one lady at the hostel who'd seen filming and said they'd taken over the town for a few days and placed the cars on the other side of the road to make it look like Florida. Hmmm. Would have been interesting to see though. Sadly we didn't stop there and I learned later that other bus drivers do - for ice cream - as it has an excellent shop! Grrrr. :(

We stopped at the Rainforest Habitat and saw all kinds of creatures such as kangaroos (which I fed - at the behest of some young Americans on my bus who gave me food and took photos!), wallabees, tree kangaroos (very bizarre), koalas, snakes and mostly birds like cassowaries and other tropical species. Sadly no wombats. It was nowhere near as good as the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary outside Brisbane. They only had 4 koalas here and they were quite old by the looks of them.

We also visited ? Falls - very picturesque with lots of rock pools - before having lunch (an impromptu picnic which the driver made with our help) and then venturing onto the river for a cruise to see crocodiles and snakes in the wild. I was amazed to see snakes sleeping on tree branches - for some reason I always thought they lived in the ground... We also saw a tree frog, which was seated under the boat driver's seat. He just whipped him out and plonked him on the top of a chair!! Isn't he the cutest! I'm going to zoom in and blow that photo up. :)

I stayed at Cape Tribulation Beach House which was lovely (they organised this for me en-route as they had it down on their itineraries that I was just a day tripper - d'oh!). MDF cabins with 6 bunks - tables and chairs outside and even a pool. Although I refrained from swimming in it as it was a lovely mossy green colour!

The two-day break was just what I needed. I met a a lovely German girl called Christina and we hung around for a day together. We walked for 45 mins along the practically deserted beach (probably because of the crocodiles - although thankfully we didn't see any) to the Dragonfly Cafe (which did actually have dragonflies in the beautifully landscaped garden) and Gallery. We had a drink there and then walked back. There and a small supermarket and pharmacy is all Cape Trib has. Heaven!

After that I returned to Cairns and stayed at the very nice Cairns Bohemia Resort hostel. It had a lovely pool and I swam every day. There were 2 very young Canadian girls in the 4-bed (who seemed to have dragged the largest trolley bags and collection of shoes with them ever) - yes BEDS, NOT bunks! - and a really lovely Hawaian lady called Christine, who had now convinced me to visit there because they seem like the most laid-back people on the planet! Sadly that was where the luxury ended as something insect-like took a fancy to me and latched onto me for the next week or so. I was covered in bites. It wasn't bedbugs either (thankfully cos that's one of my worst nightmares) as I got several pharmacists to look at the bites and all of them said it wasn't. They were little pin pricks but itched when irritated. I looked like I had chicken pox all over again - NOT nice. :( I declared war on them in Alice Springs and just covered myself head to toe in insect repellant - it seemed to do the trick. Nearly asphixiated me too but hey - casualty of war! ;)

Then it was on to the Tour of Nothing from Cairns to Alice Springs. That was what Shane our tour guide called it bacause there is literally nothing between Cairns and Alice Springs apart from the very odd town (sometimes with a population of 2 or 3 - ie cattle stations mostly). Shane was good fun and very informative and the group on this coach was a much better mix of age groups (ie not all young pissheads) and consisted two-thirds of Germans! The coach was much better too - it was a PROPER coach (ie like the large 46-seater Kiwi Experience buses) with proper air-con and everything. We were spoiled. But only for 3 days..

Well, I lied when I said there was nothing - there were huge termite mounds (see bottom photo). It was rather large. Thankfully unoccupied. We stayed at a Comfort Inn for one night and a cattle station on the second night - thankfully 100 times better than Kroombit!! The food was nice too. They even had a pet kangaroo called Mary!! I sat next to a lovely French girl from Paris called Fanny who was en-route to see her cousin who was moving to Alice Springs. Further highlights included a game of bus skittles (the aisle was the bowling alley) and a 20 minute walk along the Outback highway - ie lots of desert. Exhilerating.

The middle pic is of Ayer's Rock (or Uluru, as the Aborigines know it) at sunrise. But more about that in my nexy entry...

Ciao for now. x