Day 32 to 38 - Cairns, Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Rainforest

Port Douglas

Cairns is a lively town full of backpackers, it seems that the city would not exist without backpackers and especially without the Great Barrier Reef - Cairns is the main spot for tours to the reef. Let's start with our trip to the reef. We went with a boat to the Upolu Reef which is part of the Great Barrier Reef, on our first stop we did an intro dive for about half an hour and down to 8m. We saw alot of colourful fishes, turtles and other marine life. We saw three huge, more than 1,5m long fishes, really close.
After we had lunch on the boat we head up for the second stop on another area of the reef where we snorkeled.

Great Barrier Reef

Cairns Marina

On our snorkeling tour we saw clownfishes (Nemo), stingrays and much more. At the afternoon we were lucky and saw a yellow shark from the boat. At all it was an amazing day with experience what we wont miss.

Can you see it?

Rainforest lake

Rainforest

The target for our next day was another world heritage site - The Daintree Rainforest in North Queensland
The day began with rain and we had a long way to go to our first stop, a rivercruise on the Daintree river. We had to drove on a street though mountains and rainforest. Andi (he drove) recognised that it was very slippery, like driving on an icy road in Austria in winter. Only some time later a car in front of us slipped off the road and crashed into the wall beside the road. We stopped to help the woman who drove the car. Andi was not able to walk with his shoes on the street, that was the moment we really recognised how slippery it was. The woman was not injured and the car was just a little bit damaged but she was not able to get out of the ditch. Andi and me pushed the car back and we managed to get it back to the road. After this was done and the woman was happy we all proceed with our drive very carefully.

Crocodile on the Daintree River

Arrived on the Daintree river we started our boat cruise to see some crocodiles, there are many living in this river up to 5m long. Only a short time after leaving the boat station we saw the first one. It was about a year old and 1m long. On our cruise we saw two other the second was about 1,5m and short before we returned we saw on with about 3m, really incredible.

Crocodile warning on the walking track

Cassowary warning

After crossing the river with a ferry we drove along the street to the north where the Daintree rainforest begins. After we saw already a subtropical rainforest in the south of Australia our first impression in the tropical Daintree was "This is a real rainforest!". It was like we expected and like we knew it from pictures and from TV. Hopefully you can get a feeling of it, when you have a look on the pictures. We did some walks through the rainforest, saw some "interesting" insects and enjoyed the sunshine which came at the late morning. We would highly recommend to go to the Daintree rainforest if you are in Cairns, it's for sure worth a visit.

Beautiful scenery on the way to the Daintree

We left Cairns last saturday to go back to Sydney. After a last weekend in Sydney together it was time to say goodbye. Andi went home to Austria on sunday and I went to Tasmania where I will stay for one week.
Andi have a good trip home and enjoy the time back in Austria with real good bread and all the other things which we missed in Australia.