Whilst out with Alan & Marta in St Kilda last week, we spotted a distinctly miffed looking Captain Cook (discoverer of the east coast of Australia in 1770) as this seagul takes revenge, for his part in the influx of Europeans to this part of the world…

Just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take this photo :-D

An ex colleague Alan, and his wife Marta, are in Australia on holiday this month, and this week they’ve been in Melbourne. We met up Friday in St Kilda and had a pleasant afternoon and evening drinking, eating and catching up. This weekend thay are visiting the Dandenong Ranges and the Great Ocean Road, before heading off to Brissie tomorrow. We found a nice terrace to take a beer on Friday afternoon. It’s a cafe situated close to the end of the pier, with views across the bay to the CBD…

I also had a surprise on Friday evening. Was approached by a girl in the Elephant & Wheelbarrow in St Kilda, who I have to admit looked vaguely familiar, but I’d thought nothing of it until later. Anyway, Nikki said she recognised me from the Nag’s Head in Mumbles, where she was working in June. Indeed, I would have been there beginning of June - it was one of the places we went during the football world cup when I was back home in Wales. Bizarre!

Amzaing show last night. Didn’t take camera. U2 should have been here on 24th March, but due to illness of one of the band member’s immediate family it was postponed until last night. Well worth the wait. Best concert I’ve been to. The playlist here looks accurate to me - http://www.u2tours.com/ - Just wish I had a couple of photos to accompany this entry, but I couldn’t do it justice in any case.

Last day in Cairns. Flight was due to leave at 8pm, so had the whole day to check out the city, the new shopping centre called Cairns Central, and the bars and cafe on the Esplanade.

Cairns is arranged in blocks, with lots of shade as can be imagined. Every building has aircon pumping at full belt, making the temperature difference between outside and inside about 20 degrees. Luckily at this tie of year the humidity is bearable, and the shade is comfortable. We spent most of the day killing time, on terraces drinking and trying to stay cool.

Soon it was time to go. Luckil we flew back on a direct flight to Melbourne, meaning the flight was just 3.5 hours and we arrived at 00:30 at Tullamarine - to a very cold Melbourne. It seems a cool change has been predicted for southern Australia this week, with winds coming off the south pole. That’s bad timing for us!

Michaelmas is a sand cay formed over the last few hundred years, and winds and tides have moved sand and dead coral and formed a this small island on Michaelmas reef. Deposits from birds have created a fertile ground enabling flora to sustain itself on this essentially sand and coral island. We nicknamed it Bird Shit Island, partly due to the overbearing smell.

Fringing coral reefs are slowly receding, and being eaten up by the island as it grows over time. However, this also creates an amazing sight of marine life extremely close to shore. In fact, we found a giant clam just a couple of metres from the shoreline. This clam is destined to die in the near future, as it has no protection from the dying coral around it. Apparently these clams, once dead, are cleaned out to just a shell within hours by other marine life.

At about 2 hours and 70km from the mainland, Michaelmas Cay is almost on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. That means this part of the reef is more exposed to tides and cyclones, hence the formation of Cays such as this one.

We went with Ocean Spirit Cruises, who offered complimentary champagne whist we were sailing back to the Reef Fleet Terminal in Cairns. We also had the chance to chill on the forward deck of this large catamaran, warming up in the sun and getting some much needed r & r. Our last trip to the Reef has ended

Marine World is a diving platform moored at a spot on the eastern edge of Moore Reef, part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The visibility here was excellent today, about 25 - 30 metres. According to the staff and dive crew, this is about as good as it gets here.

One of the dive crew was also a photographer, and took this photo of me below with a Napoleon Maori Wrasse called Wally. Wally lives in and around this dive platform, and judging by the photos on the walls is perhaps the most photographed Maori Wrasse ever. It’s quite impressive to see such a large colourful fish on the reef, and one that is obviously used to human interaction.

There is also a semi submersible available free of charge for those who don’t want to get their feet wet, but the best option is to either snorkel or dive and get righ up close to the coral and fish.

The highlight for us was a snorkel safari on the edge of the outer reef (we were taken by boat), where the warm waters of the shelf on which the GBR sits meets the cold deeper waters of the pacific ocean. This attracts a lot of marine life and when the visibility is as good as it was today you miss nothing. We snorkeled with white tipped reef sharks, turtles, parrot fish, clown fish, unicorn fish, barramundi cod, chevron barracudas, and many other colourful reef fish I couldn’t even hope to identify.

All in all we spent 5 hours at the reef today. All but half an hour of that time we were in the ocean, so we returned very tired, but it was an impressive experience.

Green Island is 27km from Cairns, and located with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. It is surrounded by coral gardens and abundant marine life, and is the only cay on the Great Barrier Reef with a rainforest growing on it. It is also home to the largest crocodile in captivity, a saltwater croc around 7 metres long.

The island was first charted by Captain James Cook in 1770, and is named not because of its lushrainforest, but after the astronomer on board Cook’s ship Endeavour, Charles Green.

Green Island is home to a resort, but the some of the facilities such as the swimming pool and the bar areas are open to day trippers from Cairns. The nice sandy beaches have little shade, but by hiring snorkeling equipment from the resort you can immerse yourself in the warm tropical waters to check out the fringing coral reef.

The burn time in this part of the world is about 20 minutes, so high factor sun screen is a must - and when snorkeling a rash vest can give you that extra protection from the sun. The number of fish we saw this day was a little disappointing, but fish tend to feed on different coral gardens at different stages, which allows the coral to recover and provide a feeding area for the fish at a later date. We did however see a fairly large stingray. Hard to imagine Steve Irwin was felled by one of these normally placid creatures.

Kuranda is a town in the mountains inland from Cairns, surrounded by lush rainforest. We went there using the Kuranda Scenic railway, which takes around 1.5 hours, and returned via the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, one of the world longest gondola cableways.

The real treat were the journeys there and back, throught the rainforest on the way there with the scenic railway, and skmming the tree tops on our returnvia the Skyrail.

Kuranda itself is teeming with tourists on days trips from Cairns. Apparently, after the last train and gondola have left for Cairns at around 4pm, you can see the real Kuranda. Unfortunately we were only on a day trip, so didn’t get to see this.

Today is a holiday in Melbourne. The first Tuesday in November is a holiday every year in Melbourne. It’s all to do with a horse race the Melbourne Cup. This must be the only place in the world which desgnates a public holiday just because of a horse race.

Anyway, it’s a good time to escape, so we’ve decided to go to Cairns for a week - a last minute decision, booked late yesterday afternoon. The flight was at 6am this morning. Due to availability we had to fly via Brisbane. In any case, we took off from Tullamarine at 6am. Both Brisbane and Cairns are in Queensland, which being close to the equator does not observe daylight savings, so is therefore an hour behind Melbourne. with a 45 minute stopover in Brissie, got to Cairns at 10am local time.

Cairns is in the tropics, just 16 degrees south of the equator, with a fixed population of around one hundred thousand, and it pretty much relies on tourism. It is well know as a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, the end of the Bruce highway and the railway line which both run from Brisbane.

It is also the ideal starting point for trips to the the Daintree rainforest and Cape Tribulation, where the Great Barrier Reef meets the rainforest. Cape Tribulation was named by Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery, after his ship Endeavour was holed on the the reef in June 1770. They managed to free themselves after a couple of high tides, but the damage was significant. They found shelter several kilometres up the coast where Cooktown now is, and sheltered in the crocodile infested Endeavour River. At times it was touch and go whether they could continue their voyage and return home, but in August they were finally able to set sail again. Incidentally, this is when then first European set eyes on a Kangaroo. The ship’s botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, describes “an animal as large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour, and very swift”. However transient, this was the first European settlement in what is now Australia.

Cairns is in fact crocodile country itself. Estuarine crocodiles (saltwater crocodiles) are regularly sighted in the local river systems and even on the local beach. For this reason, and also because of the deadly box jellyfish, swimming off the coast here is not advisable.

The box jellyfish, also known locally as a sea wasp, has caused numerour fatalities over the  years. Their tentacles can be up to 3m long, and as they breed in the mangrove swamps in the local rivers, they generally appear after the first rains of the wet season when they get washed out to sea. Since my last visit to Cairns in 2000, a saltwater lagoon has been built in the town as a safe environment for people to cool off in.

The temperature here remains fairly constant all year round. The variable in the climate is generally the humidity, which during the wet season (Nov - April) is pretty much close to 100%.

As opposed to the last time I was here, when it was the middle of the wet season, we are fortunate. The wet season is late this year, so we are blessed with 33 degress every day, clear skies, and a cool 22 degrees at night. That also means that the stinger (a stinger is the generic term here for jellyfish) season is not yet here, meaning less chance of being stung by jellyfish.

This is a must see movie. It’s done in a mockumentary style, and follows a guy called Kenny, who is a plumber. No ordinary plumber though. He’s the guy who goes to all the festivals and big sporting events to plumb in the portacabin toilets for his company, Splashdown. It’s set in Melbourne and is possibly the funniest film I’ve seen. Lots of great one liners, a small selection of which are below. Kenny is all the rage here, and will hopefully get released in Europe at some stage.

Quotes:

Kenny: It takes a certain kind of person to do what I do. No-one’s ever impressed. no-one’s ever fascinated. If you’re a fireman, all the kids will want to jump on the back of the truck and follow you to a fire. There’s going to be no kids willing to do that with me. So, I don’t do it to impress people - it’s a job, it’s my trade, and I actually think I’m pretty good at it.

Kenny: There’s a smell in here that’s gonna outlast religion 

Kenny: I’d love to be able to say “I plumb toilets” and have someone say “Now that is something I’ve always wanted to do”.

Kenny: See, here’s another classic example. Someone having a 2 inch arsehole, and us having only installed 1 inch piping.

Kenny: This is the busiest time of year, this is a crazy time, it just goes bonkers. It’s as silly as a bum full of smarties.

Kenny: Today there’s gonna be over a hundred and fifty odd thousand people crammed in here, so today I’m gonna have to ask for 273% out of you. You’re gonna be as busy as a one armed bricklayer in Baghdad.

http://www.kennythemovie.com/