Australia (Port Douglas/Great Barrier Reef)

(05/15)
Waking up relatively early, we hop in the car and drive up to the Daintree Rainforest (purportedly the world's oldest) and witness breathtaking scenery via a walking canopy tour that culminates in a view over the canopy of the entire forest. From there, we make a detour to sample ice cream crafted from local fruits such as black sapote and wattleseed. We then head up to Cape Tribulation and, after some amusing shenanigans in a beachside mangrove forest, we pop back in the car to head down to Porto (Port Douglas). We have an early flight to Ayers Rock the next morning and are all desperate for a good nights sleep. That means, of course, we stay out until 1 am in town try to soak in all the nightlife we can before heading to the middle of nowhere. Sadly, there is little to 'soak in' in town.

(05/13)
Another early morning wake up call, but today it's most definitely worth it. We stuff down some breakfast and stealth out to our awaiting Quicksilver scuba tour. We arrive 1.5 hours later at the Great Barrier Reef for scuba diving and snorkeling. The discovery dive Amanda, Lee, and I take is amazing. We know the colors we see and the diversity in the fish is just scratching the surface of what there is to see. The three of us resolve that we must become certified so we can do better dives in the future. After our dive, we snorkel for an hour and are able to swim within a foot of a phenomenal selection of coral and fish. The scenery above the water reveals shades of blue I've only seen out of paint tubes.

A hard act to follow, we head back into the actual town of Port Douglas and witness Cane Toad Racing. Lee even participates as a jockey. The basics of the event are as follows: (1) get a bucket of cane toads marked in some fashion (these had colored hair ties on them) (2) take one of those noisemakers that unfurl into a shiny plastic tube when you blow into them (used as cane toad 'whips' for the 'jockeys') (3) put bucket with cane toads on table (4) put empty bucket on floor (5) let cane toads out of bucket (6) blow noisemakers at cane toads so they jump off the table as quickly as possible (7) the jockey then picks up their respective cane toad and drops them in the empty bucket. Winner takes all. As this is Australia, all is a cold bottle of beer.

(05/12)
After a quick pit stop in Sydney on May 11th, Cam, Amanda, Lee, Guri and I roll out early May 12th to catch a Qantas flight to Cairns. Three and a half hours later, we are in a rental car on our way to Port Douglas.

We make a quick stop at Hartley's crocodile farm to check out crocodiles, kangaroos, and koalas before we arrive at our swank villa just outside the town of Port Douglas, chow down, and collapse.