September 7 - spring break trip

This morning Eyal left to continue his travels around Australia. Upon his recommendation I went down to the local PeterPan’s Travel agency and booked my introductory scuba dive and trip out to the Great Barrier Reef. I’m going bright and early tomorrow. :) After I booked my trip I was allowed to use the internet services that they provided for free, so I took advantage and spent some time on the ‘net catching up with e-mail and what not.

I washed my laundry today for $2 and hung it out on the clotheslines in the hostel’s yard to dry. I figure I should be able to just squeeze by the rest of the trip without doing laundry again until I get back to Canberra.

This afternoon I took a walk up the Esplanade and used my handy Cairns map to find Centenary Lakes, a place where one of the bird watchers I met the other night said I should go. I walked around for a while at the lakes and saw some cool new birds there, like forest kingfishers and black butcherbirds. There was a boardwalk that went through a patch of wet rainforest, so I went on that. It was amazingly jungle-like along that boardwalk, and so lush – I actually felt like I was in a rainforest (and I was! :-D). At one point along the boardwalk I saw an orange-footed scrubfowl scraping up dirt by a fallen tree, which, for some reason, made it seem even more like a tropical forest. I didn’t see too many birds in the rainforest, but the atmosphere and vegetation were pretty amazing. After I was done exploring the Centenary Lakes area I walked back to the Esplanade and all the way back along the boardwalk and then back to my hostel in Cairns. In all I probably walked around 6-7 miles today.