Days 33 & 34: A free day in Cairns and nine to five on the train south

So today I had planned to go back to the rainforest, to Kuranda. Fortunately I had not made any bookings, as I realised I had not scheduled any down time in my busy itinerary. Three and a half weeks in New Zealand and the last ten days in Oz; there hadn't been one day during which I was not getting up early to go hiking, swimming or traipsing through museums and parks. So I had a much needed lie-in, a dip in the pool, and then decided to just hang around Cairns.

My knee was still swollen but only painful if it touched anything; I couldn't even kneel on the bed! It still did not hurt when walking, which was a good thing, as I did a hell of a lot of walking that day. My hotel was on the outskirts and I went back and forth to the centre three times.

Always nice to be greeted by a pair of Easter Island dudes...

Nah, I wasn't tempted! Too ticklish for one thing...

I was almost tempted by this dress - love that print! - but not the price; I think it was a hundred bucks!

I visited a small art museum:

This is what the coastline was made up of. These were collected washed up on said coastline. Sad.

For the past month I had been following in the footsteps of Captain Cook. Now finally, here he was on a street corner!

This place was recommended to me. It was a bit of a walk and in the heat I nearly gave up, but it was worth it.

Not that I bought anything, or could have; trekking through Borneo with kitchenware would not be very practical...

How nice this would have looked in my orange kitchen though!

When I was shopping in Woolworths (a supermarket chain in Australia!), some unknown person slipped this post-it note in my basket!

On my third trek into the town centre I spotted a pair of Bush Stone Curlews gallivanting about:

Dig those glowing eyes!

I spend a lot of time watching the flying foxes who have two noisy roosts in the centre of town, but parrots are roosting in an adjacent tree; as the bats fly out the parrots come in for the evening.

So, the following day I had booked a seat on The Spirit of Queensland. This train leaves Cairns at 9:00 am five days a week and arrives in Brisbane 24 hours later. I was only travelling to Proserpine, an eight-hour journey. The train was much more comfortable than I had expected, like a first class airline seat, and each seat, also like an airline, had a video monitor with free films, but the journey was a lot less scenic than I had expected. (We were going down the coast, but rarely seemed to go near enough to the coast to see the ocean.)

Hence I have no photos from the train, nor any at all from that day! In Proserpine a shuttle van took me to my Air BNB place in Airlie Beach, and it was dark when I arrived. I was in a luxury flat that belonged to a couple from Townsville; they were on top of a hill overlooking the harbour and the three of us shared a bottle of wine on their balcony. Tomorrow I would go back out to the Great Barrier Reef.