The end ?

We made it back after an extra day in Sydney, courtesy of Qantas, and are now trying to pay the overdue bills that backed up while we were away and get back onto the correct time zone. To all of you who followed our trip, I hope you enjoyed seeing Fiji New Zealand and Australia through our adventures, and we look forward to sharing our next trip with you. No sooner does one chapter close than the next one opens.............

Atherton Tablelands

After Jean went up to Cape Tribulation and I got back from my dive trip, we went off for a couple of days to the Atherton Tablelands. We went to see the rain forest at Mamu where the state parks people had built a sky walk over the rain forest canopy after an area had been knocked down by a huge Cat 5 Cyclone in 2006.






Then we went through rolling farm land on the top of the Great Dividing Range mountains. There are several huge strangler fig trees in the National Park areas. This one was called the Cathedral fig, as you can see, it's absolutely massive. Supposedly, 500 years old.








The town of Milla Milla was just as I'd always imagined the Australian outback. A store that sold everything from food to hardware and gasoline, a pub and a church.





After touring the waterfalls that dot the area, we stopped in a B&B in a picturesque town called Yungerburra - home of the duckbilled platypus. Despite extensive searching, they remained un-photographed ( at least by me!). Then it was back to Cairns for our last night before heading back. I'm hoping that our flight from Sydney to LA will be on the new Airbus that we saw on it's first roll out when we were in Toulouse a few years ago. Like all good things this too has to come to an end, but as this trip finishes up, it's not too early to start dreaming of the next one..........

Great Barrier Reef

Off on the big dive trip. The boat is fairly basic but comfortable. The first day we did two dives on the famous cod hole. It's a bit like Slates Friday dives on the city of Washington. Potato Cod appear to be a type of Goliath grouper. Visibility has been a bit disappointing, but adequate. Not quite what I was expecting, lots of particulates. The unbelievable thing to me is that I can post this blog from the middle of the Coral Sea! We went back to Cairns after 4 days, and Jean came to meet me!


She rented a little red thing to go around in. My dive boat is in the background. Diving has been good, but like anywhere you've read and heard about since childhood, it's a little bit of an anticlimax when you actually come and see it.





The highlight for me was being able to photograph cuttlefish – they're awesome

Cairns

Like Brighton in the sun, Cairns is quiet and relatively laid back. The temperature is a bit like Florida, although the landscape is much different.



Here, the cloud covered mountains of the rain forest reach down to the banks of the river. Very scenic.

Ayers Rock

G'day mates! We flew from Sydney to Ayers Rock. The plane was full. Apparently some 400,000 people a year fly 31/2 hours to see a rock in the middle of nowhere.





Even the plane is specially painted. The whole town is owned by one company. It has 4 hotels and a campground as well as it's own “town center”. It caters to all price ranges – from exorbitant to outrageous – but if you stop to think that everything has come by truck nearly 1000 miles to get here, I suppose it's not too bad. About 1200 people live here to support the tourist business.


All this because people want to see one rock. Actually there's more than one rock. This one, a mere 50 miles away, is Kata Tjuta, the old men. We went there for sunset.





The next morning, we got up at 4:00am to be at Ulurhu for sun rise.







We then walked all around the rock. About 6 miles, but well worth the effort. This morning it rained! It's a semi arid environment but sometimes it doesn't rain for up to 7 years at a time.

Bondi

We took a bus tour to Bondi beach. On the way we visited the Sydney Cricket Ground. SCG is not as famous as it's Melbourne equivalent – the MCG. Unfortunately Australia are in the process of being demolished by India, in India, at the moment, so there's not much activity in the SCG. Like most places that you've grown up hearing about, Bondi is less in reality than expectation. It seemed very much like Newquay in the sun.

When we got back to town., we had a beer at Darling Harbor followed by a boat trip to “Watson's Bay”.

For some reason Jean insisting on visiting that one!

The Blue Mountains

We wanted to get some idea of the vastness of this country, so we took a trip to the Blue Mountains. Apparently it took many years from founding the colony in Sydney, for Europeans to find a route through this mountain range.


Since the mountains are only some 3000 ft high. This seems strange, at least until you see the depth and steepness of the valleys that form the range. The Blue Mountains are of course yet another World Heritage site, and contain 52 different species of unique mammals and 1/3 of all the birds in Australia.



The size of the park is vast. It is equal in area to half the size of Belgium. When you look out from an overlook, the far side of the park is well beyond the horizon.

One road exists along one of the main ridgelines, and towns and houses have been built on the narrow ridge. These towns have shops.





The aboriginal people have been around for 60,000 years. This rock carving of a kangaroo, which sits just behind somebodies house, is supposed to be 7000 years old. That's older than Stonehenge! We were lucky to have a clear day, so the views were fantastic.




In the foothills we saw grey kangaroos, cockatoos and various other birds. We returned to Sydney from the Olympic park which is quite a long way outside town by one of the regular ferries.