After a 3.5-hour flight to Cairns we checked into the fabulous Shangri-La Hotel overlooking the harbour. Hotel wise, you get more for your money in Queensland. Fantastic room and additionally we got ‘club level’ status, in simple layman’s terms this means breakfast incl. in a special lounge and as much as you can drink and eat between 6-8pm every night. So although over the next 6 days we would be getting up around 6am to go out for day trips, we would always ensure that we were back before 7pm each night to get the full benefit of beers, wines, cava and canapés.
The Shangri-La from the harbour boardwalk
The view from our room
Our room
Once unpacked we went to see the travel desk in the hotel foyer and booked our next 5 days:-
Day 1 Green Island by the Great Barrier Reef - day trip by boat
Day 2 Hire car - drive to Port Douglas and Daintree rainforest
Day 3 Hire car - drive to waterfalls, rainforests and Atherton Tableland
Day 4 Scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef, there will be sharks!
Day 5 Visit Kuranda National Park and village on the cable car travelling over the rainforests
Once booked up, we went to dinner at the 'Raw Prawn' restaurant – great seafood whilst watching the tropical rains come down.
The next day we caught our boat to Green Island from the Reef Terminal opposite the hotel. As we got nearer to the island the rains subsided and we even spotted some blue.
First we visited the underwater observatory for our first views of the reef and the locals in the cloudy waters.
An English woman runs the Underwater observatory
Well we had to go didn't we?
Our boat at the end of the pier.
We took a tour around the reef in a glass-bottomed boat
Hard to get any decent pictures with the glare from the glass
After the reef tour we ran to the crocodile feeding
The Croc handler looked like Louis Theroux
The crocs just looked plain dangerous
They starve them for days to keep them as wild as possible
No other spectators offered to handle it...so what did we do??!!!
It was soft and warm, I was thinking shoes, Stef was thinking bag..
The number of this photo is 666
Cassius - I could only get his head in the photo - really needed a kitten by it to gauge size ;o)
We picked up our certificate and realised Louis was missing...hmmm.
I said at the start of the Oz blogs that it was a daring trip and there doesn’t seem to be anything like feeding the ducks with bread (in a 6” deep man-made boating lake) in Australia. It's more like:- 'dive with sharks with an open wound' or 'jump off a tower using thin knicker elastic' or 'suck eucalyptus sweets whilst you put your head in a koala’s mouth'. So to top the baby crocodile holding, next we took a 10-minute helicopter flight over the Great Barrier Reef, now I’d never piloted a helicopter before but they seemed to trust my intuition..
They gave us raincoats instead of lifebelts in case we ditched..
I checked the tank was full of petrol
And as we ascended I realised my toenails needed clipping
Green Island is the only cay globally that contains a tropical rainforest
The Great Barrier Reef - that's what we came for!!
We were told that The Great Barrier Reef is the only living thing on earth that can be seen from outer space.
- 600 continental islands and 350 coral cays are spread throughout the reef.
- There are approximately 3400 individual reefs that make up the Barrier Reef.
- The Great Barrier Reef was declared World Heritage on 26th October 1981.
- The reef stretches for more than 2,300 km. From near Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland Australia to the Papua New Guinean coastline.
- Not all coral is hard. In fact some are soft and spongy.
- The main industry on the reef is tourism. Reported to generate more than 1 billion Australian dollars annually.
The reef contains:-
- 2800 species of fish
- 400 different types of coral
- 4,00 molluscs
- 500 species of seaweed
- 215 species of birds
- 15 species of sea snake
- 6 species of sea turtle
It took your breath away
Green Island is known as a coral cay and was declared a National Park in 1936
We had lunch and took a walk around the island. Then completed our trip by snorkelling and viewing some great colourful fish and giant clams.
Update 24 - Cairns - The Countryside next..
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