Cairns Harbor at Night. View from our room.
I didn’t exactly miss sunrise. I was up and on our balcony several minutes early. In fact, as it turned out there were well over a dozen people walking about on the piers, and one of the cruise boats headed out for what must have been a sunrise excursion. The geographical factor that I hadn’t taken into account was “the Dividing Range”, that we could see from our balcony. The mountains divide Cairns from the Coral Sea and who knows what else and I’m not sure of their elevation, but they are tall enough so that while you get the pretty sunrise colors, the actual sun coming up from behind them takes longer than I wanted to wait. That also explained why the cruise boat went out of the harbor and around the point behind the mountains. Ah well, there will be spectacular sunrises to come.
Due to a slight miscalculation on my part, we did what in the Army is referred to as “duffle bag drag” today because the agent that I used for most of the trip booked us into the Shangri La for two nights and the dive trip package came with one night stay at the Pacific International, about two blocks up on the Esplanade. We relocated and again, the room was ready for early check-in, so we were able to get situated. Ah, a digression to discuss packing. The dive vessel we go on tomorrow is a one-week trip, with a 3 or 4 day option. We are taking the 4-day segment and what that means is that the one-week and 3-day people have already been diving and will arrive early tomorrow at Lizard Island. We 4-dayers will be flown by a tiny airplane to meet up with the boat and swap places with the 3-dayers. It’s the small airplane that causes us to be restricted to only 45 pounds of luggage total for each of us. If you know anything about dive gear, you know that a full set, plus much more than a swimsuit and a toothbrush puts you close to 45 pounds. The dive operation has a place for us to store our extra luggage and that’s why we decided to change our usual approach and use rental gear from the boat and leave most of our equipment at home. However, what was also unknown to us was that Quantas (we’re using them for the intra-Australia movement) has a 16-pound limit for carry-on pieces. Even though we trimmed down incredibly for this trip, we have to re-configure what we pack where depending on which flight we’re taking. A minor irritant and an interesting operation.
Okay, all of that shuffling about today means we really couldn’t take any of the day trips out of Cairns as we had thought we might. We continued to explore downtown Cairns and walked up to mid-town. There’s a nice mall that fronts the railway station and we took a pass through to see that it, too, was decorated for Christmas, complete with a few store clerks wearing headbands with felt reindeer antlers on them. One of the anchor stores was a Target, and no, we didn’t venture inside that.
In actuality, we wandered back to the Esplanade and had lunch at the Bavarian Beirgarten. We had been startled to see it yesterday and a cold Hofbrau beer and currywurst for husband and schnitzel sandwich for me was a meal that we hadn’t had in a long time. We’ll be eating at Barnacle Bill’s tonight though for a final round of Cairns seafood. Oh, last night was Tha Fish on the pier where husband had a whole baby gold band snapper and I did the barramundi in a lemon beurre blanc. The barramundi seems to be the equivalent to our mahi as the most common fish served. It’s also similar in taste and texture.
Okay, the time is finally arriving for me to be off the net for about five days as we lose connectivity. I will faithfully blog every day on the computer and post in sequence after the fact. We go directly to the Northern Territory to the famous Ayers Rock after coming off the dive boat and I’m not entirely sure what our internet access will be out there. I suppose there is the slight chance that I won’t be able to post until we reach Melbourne late on 11 Dec. For all I know, part of the experience with being deep in the Northern Territory is that they want you to feel closer to Mother Earth by not having internet. In any case, you will have a day-to-day description to get caught up with when I can post.
