Magnetic Island
I almost forgot, after The Whitsundays we spent a couple nights at Magnetic Island which was fun. We got upgraded to our own private room with our own bathroom, fridge, and tv. So that was nice after our previous night at Magnums Airlie Beach (yuck!). We spent a day on mountain bikes, we figured out why they were relatively cheap, hills! So we got a workout. But what goes up must come down right? So that was awesome, flying down the dirt paths with their runoff mounds that made nice jumps. The view was great at the top at The Forts where we left our bikes and did a bit of hiking. There was a lot of evergreen type trees and boulders here, very interesting...

Cape Tribulation!
We were at Cairns for a night and then headed out early morning for Cape Tribulation. We stopped at a river crossing and took a short river cruise looking for crocs. While sipping Daintree tea we spotted a big guy half on the bank. He was to be the only one, but it was cool to see one in the wild. After the short ride were were back on the bus on the other side (it took a ferry). Cape Tribulation is a rare spot because it is where two world heritage areas touch, the rainforest and the reef. At high tide the ocean comes right up to the roots of the dense forest. This forest was special apparently because it had a lot of ancient plants, some prehistoric, like the King Fern. It also apparently is dangerous, blah blah blah, wait-awhile vines with spines that grab you and blah blah, plants that poison you to the point of cardiac arrest blah blah, cassawaries with disembowling claws and a headbutting horn blah blah, crocodiles that can detect you from 200 meters, have gotten as big as 8 meters long, 2 tons, jaw strength of 3000 pounds per square inch, bite you, drown you, and leave you to rot, perfect hunter blah blah...boring! Haha, the rainforest also lived up to its name, and it poured! Apparently they get rain 300 days of the year here, 4 meters on average. Wherever the land touches the clouds it can get up to 8 meters because of cloudstripping. So this place is wet. Lots of cool stuff. We were here for 2 nights and mostly read but did a bit of exporing in between downpours. Yay!

Mission Beach
This place was nice, it had seen a bit of damage from the recent cyclone. So it was interesting to see all the broken vegetation and trees, the houses were not damaged much or were repaired already in this area. We checked out the beach which was across the road from our accomadation and looked around. It was cool gray weather so it wasn't busy there at all. We fooled around with coconuts for a bit that were everywhere (probably blown out of the trees). After climbing one I tried knocking down some that looked to be the right color for eating (the expert that I am from watching "lost on a deserted island" type movies). We opened one that was orange and it was not ripe yet, green was the color I remembered from the movies but the only green ones I could see were small, also unripe. I had given up because all the good ones were probably blown out of the trees, and then I saw them! There was a bunch of green ones splotched with brown that I was eyeballing. After I knocked them out with some grounded coconuts we set to work on them. They are a lot of work with no tools and no knowledge of how to open them. We figued it out finally and enjoyed the fruit of our labors. We were only here for a night and the beginning half of the day because we were moving on to Cairns...

The Whitsundays!
This area was gorgeous...our boat was not, haha! It was still fun. We found ourselves on a booze cruise, with no booze, everyone else brought enough to satisfy a large frat house for a week. So we tried to avoid most of the unsavory characteres we met onboard, hahaha. Though we made a couple good friends, Derek from Dublin for one and Eric from Holland. So we hung out with them. The Whitsundays are a group of over 70 islands at the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. Azure waters and green islands with white beaches. We went snorkeling a few times and even got to do a intro scuba dive. SCUBA is awesome! I deffinately will look forward to doing it again sometime. We saw all kinds of fish and it was all amoungst beautiful coral also teeming with all manner of anemone and the like. We made a trip to Whitehaven beach which is the most beautiful spot on the National Heritage protected bunch of islands they will take us to. The sand was a lot like the sand at a few of the lakes on Fraser Island, the stuff that looked like flour. We spent 2 nights on the boat, which were also interesting, being full of drunks. As it was the engine was running all the time, so that made it harder to sleep as well. The ipod was my only hope, and it served me well the second night. The food was better than I expected, I was full at every meal, which can be hard to do. All in all it was a great trip.

Airlie Beach
This place was interesting. The place we were staying was by far the worst. It was a party hostel "resort." We were in a 10 share room, and the two nights spent here, before and after The Whitsundays, was not much fun. The town had some cool stuff, like a man made lagoon. We spent most of our time at a book exchange and hung out there reading. The real reson we came to Airlie Beach was The Whitsundays...