Mission to Cairns on a Hot Day

The average temperature here has been about 34 degrees here lately and with the humidity it feels even worse. We have discovered that the best way to beat the heat is a lot of water, a body of water to swim in nearby and fifty cent mcdonalds ice creams.

We had our massive breakfast and hopped into the car for a short drive to cairns. Because we knew it would be a short drive we decided to take a couple of detours along the way.

The first was to paronella park which is a homestead and massive grounds built by a Spanish settler in the 1930's. It is a beautiful area and he chose to build there because of an amazing waterfall on the grounds. We took an hour long guided tour and then explored the park by ourselves for an hour, taking the time to feed the hundreds of fish and turtles on the grounds.

Our second stop was one of our favourite places in Australia. We stopped at a place called Josephine falls and did the kilometer walk to the bottom pool. We were well rewarded by one of the most beautiful fresh water swimming holes I have ever seen. The fall ran down in three steps and the bottom pool is calm with only one section of the rock containing a waterfall. We swan across the pool to the smooth rocks and after some effort to get up onto the rocks (they were very smooth and covered in algae) we were able to run around and explore. We walked up to the second pool and after watching somebody use the bottom section of waterfall as a slide, we were next in line! It was awesome! We were in the middle of the Australian rainforest watersliding on a waterfall! After a great hour of enjoying the water we got into the car to go the last little bit to cairns.

We drove through Edmonton! It was strange to drive through a city with the same name as our home town on the other side of the world. We drove into cairns and we were immediatly thrown off by how large it was. We haven't been in a large city in so long that it was strange to see so many people and tall buildings! We checked into our hostel and now we are planning to go for a walk.

Talk soon!

D&S