Humphreys presence / presents
Trip Start
Nov 07, 2005
1
18
75
Trip End
Nov 04, 2006
Cairns / Port Douglas,
Australia
Sunday, January 29, 2006
We left Cairns not quite knowing why people had such a downer on it and headed for Port Douglas where we hoped to re-begin our relaxing few days.
We got a free courtesy bus from the hostel to "Dougies" in Port. Yet again the Aussies couldn't resist shortening the name.
The tent site was extra cheap and things seemed to good to be true. They were. Port Douglas had us under false pretences
4 mile beach - Port Douglas
. Not a minute after we'd erected the tent, along came the rain. Although thankfully not as bad as in Magnetic Island.When the rain cleared we decided to head into town. False pretence number 2. As soon as we were about half way there, so that travel in either direction was far enough for us to drown, back came the rain. Poor Simon looked like a drowned giraffe.
We had to do a quick supermarket sweep in record time to avoid getting pneumonia from the air-con.
Remarkably though, the tent stayed mostly dry, and over the next few days the rain cleared up, and on our last day we were rewarded with glorious sunshine. Only it was too hot, so after a quick trip to the beach we spent the rest of the day chasing shade.
One night we played poker with this German couple which was great cos I won. Apparently I have a good poker face. I was under the impression I was looking dumb cos I didn't know what I was doing.
We stayed at Dougies cos someone recommended it to Simon and it was great. But the neglected to mention to resident rat family, the head of which we called Humphrey. We watched in wonder each evening as Humphrey scurried into the kitchen, diving in and out of the bins, taking scraps of food back home. Some people weren't as keen as us but we grew quite fond of Humphrey - he even left some small brown presents on the kitchen work top for us in the mornings.
