Day 2 - Cairns to Mission Beach

Spent a lovely morning in Cairns before we caught the Greyhound bus to Mission Beach.

Very yummy muesli breakfast at the hotel...with banana chips. That may be what's causing Tim to concentrate really hard. Or maybe I said something daft

Or maybe my super red hair is making his head hurt... 

Darker and with pout...

After breakfast we walked along the sea front which they've kitted out with an amazing skate park...lots of wee kids on scooters but only one skateboard. Sad...

There's heaps of fitness equipment along the length of the boardwalk, with chin up bars and sit up benches and all sorts of other stuff. There's also a massive outdoor pool that apparently is in the shape of Queensland called the Lagoon. But it's sooooo massive that you can't see it's in the shape of Queensland.

And me, after a swim, looking a bit grim...

I was having an awesome time, really! 

The fish/fountain thing was cool.

In this part of the world you can't swim in the ocean during summer (November to May) as it's filled with lots of nasties (stingy (stingers) and bitey (crocodiles, sharks)).  Which is a terrible shame because it's super duper hot and humid at that time of year. Hence the Lagoon, I suppose.  Cairns beach itself is basically big fat mud flats anyway. There was a guy on a bobcat chucking in a load of sand when we were there, but it just gets washed out again eventually.

That's a picture of a picture of a crocodile. Still scary even when they're cartoons.

So, later on we hopped on the Greyhound to Mission Beach. A couple of hours later and we were met at the bus stop by a lovely German lass who drove us a massive 300 metres to the Absolute Backpackers.

We stayed there two nights before we started the kayak trip. It was a really really nice hostel. They'd been a bit slammed by Cyclone Yasi 6 months before so there was still a bit of construction work going on. They opened the pool on the day we arrived though! Great timing us!

The good folk and palm trees (see below) of Mission Beach were whacked by Cyclone Yasi in February. The town was where Yasi made landfall. Wind gusts were estimated to have reached 290 km/h (180 mph).  Buildings were flattened or took massive damage - roofs gone, windows shattered, power out for a month, water supply cut off for days... The resulting storm surge of 7 metres combined with a super high tide brought the ocean into peoples living rooms. To put it into perspective for those of us not used to things being on such a massive scale: Cyclone Yasi was 650 kilometres wide - Big enough to cover the UK (click the linky for a pic).  It was a bit bigger than Hurricane Katrina that killed around 1800 people.

But, amazingly, there was only one death attributed to the cyclone - a guy barricaded himself into the smallest room of his house with a generator and was asphyxiated by the gas.

Bits of Mission Beach still look a bit ragged

Had some chats with locals who are typically blase about the whole thing. One guy said he ventured out when the eye of the storm was passing over - he had 45 minutes of weird calm where he could see the stars in the sky before all hell started to break loose again.

So, hanging out at Mission Beach pre-kayak trip was nice. I did some modelling. I think this might be my last assignment....

NB: Palm trees are a weed even though they've got proper yummy coconuts on them. Cabbage palms, for those of us who've enjoyed their growth in sunny Torquay, are related but without the juicy nut. Mission Beach council should save itself some dollars and replace the coconuts with cabbages. Apparently it costs the local council $150 per tree to de-nut them each year so they don't conk unsuspecting tourists on the head.