Well Brisbane greeted us back from our 7 day cruise through the Whitsundays and Tropical North Qld with a 41 degrees day! Sooo amazingly hot. Stevie played at the Soundwave festival (another big notch festival for them: this one was a 30,000 festival at Brisbane's riverside stage at the Botanical Gardens in the city). They had only been told of this on the Tuesday/Wednesday when we were away (and we had only one day of phone reception in the middle of the big ocean) so there was some panic organising things. We docked in Brisbane at around 5am, and got off the ship at around 8, Mum picked us up and at 8am it was already 33 degrees. We drove home and stevie picked up his guitar and we took him into the city, Mum and I decided to escape the heat by spending money and we firstly went grocery shopping, and then to Dolphins leagues club for lunch, mum put $20 in the pokies and came away $1200 richer! She gave me $20 and I won $100. Not bad! We had a lovely lunch and was home at 3pm where had reached 40 degrees! Soooo Sooo hot. You can't explain how hot it was, it was both humid and the air was boiling aswell. The beaches were packed.
Back to our holiday.
We went on a 7 night cruise with P&0 on the Pacific Sun, with nearly 2000 other passengers. We pretty much ate, slept and relaxed our way through the week basking in air conditioning. The first two days the weather wasn't the best, we haven't updated here for ages, but pretty much the drought in QLD has been broken with EL NINO which has brought huge amounts of flooding through 60% of QLD. It was gloomy and rained the first day but that didnt matter, The whitsundays and Airlie Beach was pretty rough and they had to cancel all the shore trips. We had shore trips booked for Cairns which we spent Tues and Wed there, Cairns is Australias 16th biggest city, had about 150,000 and is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, it also has a backdrop of amazingly lush rainforest mountains and volcanoes and mangroves. It also is super dooper hot and pretty much all day sits on 90% humidity. You are drenched in sweat within 5 minutes.
We had a day trip up in Kuranda which is in the mountains where we went on the Skyrail (why I booked this when I am petrified of heights!) which is pretty much a group of 3 cable rides about rainforests, Barron Gorge and Waterfalls and the Kuranda rail track. It takes 45 minutes and is mind boggingly scarey (also quite beautiful: I wouldnt know as I spent 90% of the trip looking at my feet praying that the cables wouldn't break, especially over the Waterfall) It goes from Cairns to Kuranda which is a mountain top town, and then we linked up with the famous Kuranda rail back to Cairns. The train goes through mountains and is very scenic and was built in the 1890's. Whilst on the train you can see the cable car's going over the waterfall! I couldn't believe I went up on them!
That night we had a great dinner at an Indian restaraunt called Marinades which we followed up with Lunch the next day, it got stevies vote for best Indian food he's had in Australia.
I'll update some piccies and will write another blog tommorow.
p.s the 4th picture of Cairns isn't one we took! It was too hot to carry anything around!
...more can be found about the Railway here http://www.kurandascenicrailway.com.au/
