Oh, Happy Day

Made it to Cairns safely from Airlie Beach. Ten hours on a bus is... a lot of time on a bus.

Without making things too out-of-chronological order here, I wish to state my great excitement that I will be away on an overnight sail-snorkel-scuba-dive deal on the Great Barrier Reef (!) on Tuesday/Wednesday. Also, tomorrow is Australia Day (commemorating the day the first fleet from England arrived in Sydney, like Independence Day in the US), and I will be spending it on the Cairns Esplanade with my host and about 10 of her friends. No, we will not be throwing any shrimp on the barbie (especially because there aren't "shrimp" here, only "prawns") but there will be sausages. Australians love sausages.

In case you were wondering, Cairns is INCREDIBLY humid. Like, I thought Brisbane and Bundaberg were humid. I thought Boston in August was humid. I thought the Costa Rican rainforest was humid. But this is humid on an entirely new level. I was soaked to the skin by the time I arrived, so I went for a swim with my host in a lovely little pool in her apartment complex. The reason this is important is to explain to you that we had to creep through some dark gardeny parts to get to the pool, and all I could think about was that one picture I saw on the internet, basically one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen, which was a spider eating a bird--Yes, you read that right--right here in lovely Cairns. I'm betting you could google "spider eating a bird" and find the photo in question if you felt the need.

So hopefully I won't step on one of those?

Happy Australia Day!

A Wild Life

Made it to the Gold Coast. Long, long day-- one of the German girls who gave me a ride was bitten by a spider just as we were preparing to leave. All you hear when you come to Australia is how the top 20 most venomous creatures in the world live here, so she was understandably terrified even though our host, Chris, insisted it was just a black ant bite. It was, but she went to the emergency room anyway to get it checked out. I walked down to the (gorgeous, incredible) beach via a beautiful cliff walk while I waited for the girls to return from the hospital. We got underway several hours late and I had to get my host for tonight to give me a ride from Byron Bay, which he luckily was willing to do. (I am his first surfer and he is cutely eager to do right by me.) Anyway, the point of this post is to tell you how awesome today was, despite the dely, because I saw the following Iconic Australian Animals:

Koala in the wild: Check
Koala up close in a hospital: Check
Kookaburra: Check
Wild kangaroo: Check check (yes!)

For the record, I also saw:
Wild parrot
Wild turkey
Gecko

Still waiting on the platypus and dingo, but you can't have everything. Especially not within a 24 hour period.