We arrived in Cairns exactly one month ago today. Our month here has been both a delight and a disappointment in different ways. Cairns is a very nice little city providing everything we need without the hassles of a bigger city. It is very tropical here and the welcoming sign on the southern outskirts pretty much says it all....”Cairns – City in a Garden”. It really is as if the city is one large botanical garden with tropical foliage in abundance everywhere. And the hills rising to the west of the city are covered in the most impressive rain forest, thick with an incredible variety of tropical trees, ferns and flowering plants. The only really disappointing feature of the city is the seafront. There is no beach here in the city and dull gray mud flats stretch from the esplanade running along the sea for hundreds of meters out into the bay. It is a shame that Cairns' deep water channel and harbour hadn't formed a few kilometers to the north where the magnificent “northern beaches” begin, as the city may have then had a stunning stretch of sand at its sea border rather than its less than attractive mud flats. But all in all it is a lovely place to “winter” before we head west in September.
We have been happy with our apartment here at Trinity Links as well. The 3 bedroom apartment is in a resort complex about 10 minutes' drive from downtown. We are on the top (3rd) floor and have a view overlooking one of the two pools here, though our view is pretty much obscured by the many palm trees situated in front of us. I think the designers of this place probably didn't consider how thick the vegetation would grow to be when they landscaped the property because, if anything, there is too much vegetation within the resort. Even at the pool you have to keep moving your lounge chair to find patches of light filtering through the tall palms....not that we have spent much time at the pool. And therein lies our primary disappointment with our time in Cairns so far.
As I have mentioned before, when we spent 6 weeks in Cairns in 1978, we had day after day of beautiful sunny weather and naturally we were expecting the same this time round. I ended our last blog entry with the following: “But we are really ready for a few days of lying in the sun. The forecast is for some improvement over the next few days, so hopefully by the next blog entry, we will be able to report sunny skies!” Well....I'm afraid not! We had had some glorious days on our 3000 km drive up from Sydney and assumed the sunshine would continue and temperatures would get even warmer as we drove deeper into the tropics. But alas, it seems we have picked a bad year to spend a winter here. As we heard on one weather forecast, the end of an el niňo year (which this is) usually brings an uncommon amount of rain to eastern Australia. That is certainly what we've had. So, to answer my question in the title of this entry....of course its green because of all the rain that falls here!
Since arriving here May 19, we have had day after day of cloudy, showery weather. We have had the occasional sunny break (when we head straight to the beach or pool for some quick baking as the sun is still very warm when it's out) and did have one day with clear blue skies all day. But most of our days have been dull, with gray skies, showers or heavy rain. Today marks the eighth day in a row that we haven't had a glimpse of the sun. This weather has been very disappointing and depressing. It is still reasonably warm here in Cairns with highs of about 25 degrees (the local tv weatherman talks about the “unusually cool weather”) but temperatures all over eastern Australia have been well below normal. Townsville to the south of Cairns had its coldest daytime high ever recorded yesterday...17 degrees. And in New South Wales and Victoria to the south, vicious winter storms have lashed the southern states bringing flooding to many parts of the area. Another strong gale warning is in effect for the south tomorrow. Yikes....
I can understand why people talk about winters in Vancouver being so depressing with endless cloud and rain....but at least there you know what you're in for whereas here, we should be getting hot, sunny “holiday” weather. Missing days on the beach, with walks along the sand and swims in the ocean is bad enough, but when the rain is pelting down we are pretty much confined to the apartment or to one of the nearby malls where we have been spending way too much time wiling away the hours on the Internet or in Woolworths doing our grocery shopping. As Sue likes to say, we are now considering Plan C for our time here. Plan A was lots of beach time in the wonderful tropical sunshine; Plan B was to wait for the sun to make an appearance. Now thinking about Plan C has caused us to do something I never would have thought we'd be doing....looking for last minute sell off vacations on the net to Bali or Fiji or somewhere with sunshine!! Realistically we won't be doing that, but I admit I must be succumbing to cabin fever when I do things like suggesting to Sue we spend Sunday afternoon shopping at “Cairns Central”, the city's major shopping complex! What's come over me??
And we, of course, aren't the only ones suffering through this bad weather. Thousands of retirees spend their winter months here in trailers, campers and mobile homes. (We are thankful that at least we aren't camping!). And other thousands of Aussies and foreign visitors come here for a winter break. This morning's paper had a front page picture of a young couple on their honeymoon here in Cairns, their umbrella turned inside out in the wind and some text about their disappointment as they had expected a sunny vacation. We just hope that things improve next week when Mike and Cheryl, our friends from the Gold Coast, have their winter break at Palm Cove half an hour to the north of Cairns. And it must be a nightmare for the the many tour operators here, as large swells and rain pound the Barrier Reef pretty much shutting down excursions for diving and snorkeling (something we were hoping to do too). Even the cane farmers are despairing. Yesterday was the traditional first day of cane harvest in Northern Queensland and the farmers have no hope of getting on the land till the fields dry out. It looks as if this weather is set to continue though as the forecast is for wet and unusually cool weather for the next 4-5 days at least. The whole eastern side of Australia has been having horrific weather again the last few days with gales and flooding in the south, snow in the Blue Mountains and record cold temperatures everywhere.
But despite the weather, we have been able to do some interesting things. As mentioned on the days when the sun has made an appearance, we've spent time on the lovely beaches in the area. And we've had some great walks. Just walking around our part of the city is interesting as there are some lovely homes to see and beautiful gardens. But we have also been to places like the botanical gardens here in the city and on a fabulous 8 km loop cut through the rain forest in the hills overlooking the airport to the north of Cairns. And one day last week, we drove up to the table lands and headed inland where we actually found some periods of sunshine. After a drive down a very rough, unpaved (“unsealed” in Aussie parlance) road where I thought our van would be shaken apart by the washboard surface, we had a wonderful walk to some falls in the Davies Creek National Park. And later in the day, we drove to Kuranda, a small town at the edge of the table lands overlooking Cairns, where we stopped at the Barron Falls Gorge, where water plunges hundreds of feet to the coastal plain through a spectacular chasm cut in the hillside. So, although we haven't done nearly as much exploring as we'd hoped, we have seen something of the area....and hopefully we will be able to do more soon.
One thing we are enjoying here is food. We have been cooking our own meals, though on Sue's birthday, we did have a fabulous meal at a local Balinese restaurant where we had a superb “Rijstafell” the Dutch/Indonesian specialty where a large number of different meat and seafood dishes are served with rice. But we have really enjoyed the local fruit and vegetables which we get at the farmers market held each Friday through Sunday. The luscious local fruit is not only sweet, juicy and delicious, but is also very cheap and we are continually stocked with pineapples, melons, papaya, bananas, tangerines and grapefruit. And the vegetables are plentiful, cheap and really taste like vegetables. We delight in getting red peppers for under $1.50 a pound, avocados – three or four for a dollar, beautiful vine-ripened tomatoes – under a dollar a pound, delicious small green pumpkins, Sue thinks they call squash pumpdins here, so they are really squash, but delicious) and cauliflowers, green beans, broccoli, onions, lettuces, etc., etc., all cheap, fresh and delicious. And we've had some excellent snapper and tuna – fresh at the market daily. And we've really enjoyed the local lamb – chops, legs and minced for “lamb burgers” - very tasty! So all in all, we are eating very well!! Now, if only we could get some decent coffee! We haven't found any good ground coffee for making ourselves, and coffees in shops are all espresso based and, although they taste ok, are expensive and small. Oh for a Starbuck's Grande Dark Blend and a bagel!! (Bagels are another thing the Aussies have not discovered yet...at least here in the far north!)
With our all good eating, we are trying to keep our exercise regime up. As well as our daily walks (whenever we can) we try to get to the gym here at the resort most days. We've been pretty good and have really improved our conditioning in the last month. I have regained a lot of the upper body muscle I'd lost while in Central America and Peru and Sue has kept her svelte figure in tact with lots of hard work on the treadmill and weights. Justification for that glass of good Aussie wine at the end of the day!!
Sue has found a volunteer position and she has her first day “on the job” tomorrow. She is working as a fill-in receptionist at an agency which deals with abused children. She applied through a central volunteer agency and they steered her to this role. She had an interview yesterday and starts tomorrow. She'll work one or perhaps two days as week from 9:00 to 2:00. She's been having cabin fever too, so this will give her something to get into.
Well that's it for this update. I've attached some pictures taken in the area...many of them of local flora encountered on our walks. Hopefully we'll have more beach pictures next time!!
Holloway's Beach 10 mins north of Cairns on a rare sunny day
The following are some pictures I took of some of the plants and foliage we encountered on our walks around the area.
Signs like this appear at beaches and along rivers, but the chances of actually encountering a croc in the wild are very slim.
One of the pools at our apartment complex
Another pool view
The grounds at the Trinity Links where we are living.
Near the Davies Falls on an excursion to the table lands
Cairns in the distance taken from Kuranda
On one of our walks through the rain forest near the airport, we came across several of these spectacular fungi. They are most interesting.
This specimen is about 8 inches in diameter.
These large berries are found on the forest floor (can't remember their name) and are eaten by cassowaries, the large flightless bird that inhabits the norther queensland rainforest. The cassowary is a great spreader of seeds and there are over twenty different plants that won't germinate unless they have been through the cassowary digestive system.
The vines in the rain forest are amazing. Everywhere the trees are covered in clinging vines. Some, like this one, are almost indistinguishable from rope.
Another shot of Cairns from a nearby hill.
Us on our balcony soon after we arrived .... we still had our tans from the good weather coming north.
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