Up north

It's still weird to me to think of things in a Southern Hemisphere kinda way. For example, birds / old people :) migrate south in the winter. Here, they migrate north. Weird. That sort of thing. It just sounds wrong. Anyway, we're up in the waaaaarm north areas.
Laing and I arrived in Cairns on the 20th, stumbled across some fun markets where I tried my first lychees (yum!) and starapple (super yum!). It also was apparently Peace Week and they had some bands playing as well as some cultural performances which were pretty interesting. We were planning on scuba diving, but alas, we got Paul, our van, in the shop for his yearly inspection and he'll cost about $500. Mind you, that's pretty good considering he's a 1998 and driven around soooo much. But it's all good, we've been entertaining ourselves with other natural wonders.
We drove up to Daintree National Park and Cape Tribulation. The Daintree is the oldest surviving rainforest on the planet! It has some trees (such as the 'idiot fruit tree', lol) that haven't changed in years - like they were the same when dinosaurs lived! We went to the Daintree Discovery Centre that takes you on an aerial walkway so you can view the rainforest from different levels, the floor, midway up the canopy and from the very top. It was pretty cool. Sadly, it had just finished raining so the mozzies were quite thick and attacked me. I was quite itchy after all 30 million of my bites. :(
The Daintree area is separated a bit by a river and all the flooding in the area during the wet season makes it a bit hard for electrical stuff, so many of the residents up there use other sources of power - solar, wind, etc. So they all turn into hippies a bit. :) They have heaps of things like this one ice creamery we stopped at - it was Biodynamic Organic Ice Cream (I don't even know what that means!). They had heaps of funky flavors as well - Laing tried Sweet Potato and Ginger, I tried Black Sapote and Chocolate Liqueur. They had other tempting ones like Goji Berry and Yoghurt, Macadamia with Lime, Dragon fruit, etc.
Oh! So scary story! One night, we were camping at this rest area. Mind you, no one else is around. Just Laing, me, woods. Usually at a rest area, there's one or two other campers at least. So, I get woken up at 1:24am by a really loud noise that I think is a gunshot. But I'm foggy from just waking up so I think maybe I'm dreaming. I wait a bit to see what it was, and BANG! Another gunshot! Now, it's fairly close and before I left Coolum, everyone was making fun of me for traveling and this Aussie horror film, Wolf Creek (an evil killer man preys on travelers and kills them....great way to send me off, guys!) so it's dark. We're alone in the woods. There's gunshots and I'm just like, "AH! WOLF CREEK!" I therefore hurry to wake up Laing and he's all, "Oh it's fine , it's fine" even though 2 more shots happen. Anyway, those were the last of it, hopefully it was just someone hunting (at 1:24am!?!?!) or something, but let's just say, I had a whole plan of action of how to jump into the van and drive away quickly if needed. :)
We next headed to Mareeba because they have a reallllly good coffee place - so good! As well as Kuranda for their Rainforest Markets. It's pretty cool to walk around all the funky market stalls in the rainforest. It was a fun town as well - they had a saltwater taffy shop where you could watch them make it which was pretty interesting.
Yesterday, we drove out to Atherton and Yungaburra to see the Curtain Fig as well as the Cathedral Fig. They are huge trees, about 700-1000 years old in a Mabi Rainforest - again one of the older rainforests in the world. I have some really cool photos of those. We also drove out to Lake Tinaroo for a wee picnic - we were going to swim, but it was cloudy and not warm enough. :(
Today, our plans are to drive to the Millaa Millaa Waterfall Circuit and Laing wants to visit a biodynamic dairy around the area as well...we get to sample cheese, lol!
Hope everyone's good!