Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
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29
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Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Cairns,
Australia
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Early in the morning we check into the Koala Beach Resort in Cairns city center. Not an arbitrary choice but the third place we tried to get find a vacancy, each time going up the price scale. Still not a bad place, but cost $70/nite Australian, and has a nice pool in the court yard. [GPS 16 55.197S 145 46.439E from the street in front] There is no beach near here though. We cleared out the van and take it to the Wicked depot to turn in and got our deposit back with no problem. We have driven 3346 kilometers or about 2091 miles of Australia, from Sydney to Cairns including side trips. We couldn't have seen as much of Australia as we did without the van, but it will be nice having someone else do the driving from here on.
As soon as we could, we got on the train up into the mountains to Kuranda, which is something Irina has been talking about for 13 years, when she had visited Cairns. Arvid wants to see what she's been talking about. It's a steep and picturesque railroad trip winding up through rainforests and numerous tunnels to Kuranda on the Atherton Tablelands. We spent a couple hours walking about this cute little tourist town and then took the Skyrail back down to Cairns. The Skyrail was not here 13 years ago, so Irina couldn't say she'd already done that.
Jan. 5
Another thing Arvid wanted to do was his first scuba dive ever; and he wanted his first dive to be on the Great Barrier Reef. So we did the reef. Our boat left Cairn harbor early morning and went to three reefs, two of which we snorkeled and the third we were able to scuba dive.
01-04a
We did have one strange encounter which reminded us that our friend Rev. Jim had bet us that we'd end up causing international incident before the trip was over. Remember those Oysters Kilpatrick? We went to a very fancy restaurant in Cairns called the Court House, because it was in the old court house building. Their motto was "You be the Judge". We ordered a meal and a dozen Kilpatricks, but when they arrived at our table they were swimming in a barbeque sauce. We each tried one and you could hardly taste the oysters. Irina insisted on sending them back claiming they were not Kilpatricks with directions on how to prepare them as Ben and Jeff had. The manager refused and said he had tasted them and they were fine; that since we weren't Australians we didn'tknow from Kilpatricks and that we had to pay for them even if we did not eat them. Course this meant we had to pay for the one he'd eaten too. The menu had two kilpatricks listed: one with special sauce and one just straight Kilpatriks. He said these were the ones with the special sauce. But we'd ordered the regular ones. He said it didn't make any difference and they were the same. This got Arvid involved since he thought we had a verbal contract with the waitress for regular Kilpatricks. Irina was not going to give up either and so the manager called the cops. He was hopping mad. While we were waiting for the cops to show up the cook came out of the kitchen and told us he understood but had only been working there for two days and couldn't say anything. When the police arrived we explained our position and that we had been given the wrong order. The manager was sputtering and sputtering. He told the cops they could make their Kilpatricks anyway they wanted, which is true of course. But he made a mistake when he told the cops that it didn't matter that they could "piss in the food if they wanted." This apparently did not sit well with the officers and we ended up just paying for the meal we'd eaten and not the barbeque sauce covered Kilpatricks. Arvid was a little disappointed he wasn't going to be appearing for the first time in an Australian court to argue the case. On the way back to our hotel we stopped at another restaurant and their Kilpatricks were even worse. Homemade is always better.
