Cairns to Airlie Beach

After those few days of rain we hit Cairns to lots of sunshine and have now had 18 days of hot sunshine!!:D  We're not as ghastly white as we were when we first arrived now..... After a lazy day in Cairns and a night out with our hostel 'Asylum' (dressed as mad escapees!( for Halloween)) we headed to Townsville. Admittedly there wasn't much to do here (apart from an olympic size swimming pool which Tiff loved!) but it was from here that we went over to Magnetic Island or Maggie as it is affectionately known. Unfortunately its not actually magnetic though, a huge disappointment! Our hostel on Maggie was very cool with an animal sanctuary attached, lots of hammocks and pool with a sign to watch out for falling coconuts! Our highlights of Maggie were doing the forts walk...there was a fort, but the best bit was the search for wild Koalas and we found 9 including a baby (we had a small amount of help from arrows on the floor left by other walkers but still.. Lizzy did spot a few!) and one leaping to another tree, they don't normally move much!! After a champagne breakfast we visited the onsite sanctuary and risked our lives holding a croc, snake, lizard and letting a cockatoo take a seed from our lips (we have survived to tell the tale!). After Maggie we travelled to Airlie Beach to pick up our boat to sail the Whitsundays. The next few days went in a bit of a blur, the first day we headed out to Haymen Island where we did our first introductory dive - it was pretty amazing, at one point we found ourselves surrounded by fish and a huge Maori Wrasse. The next day we headed to Whitehaven Beach (a stunning beach on the Whitsunday Island with swirling sand patterns, the sands so fine can be used as a good exfoliater!). After this we sailed out to the Great Barrier Reef (Bait Reef) where we stopped for a couple of nights and did a few more dives and snorkelled lots! Both were incredible - the coral and the fish/turtles/sharks, made it look like a whole other world under there! We even managed to put on a dance show under the water (all caught on camera...!) On our sail back to Airlie beach we were joined by 5 dolphins swimming by the boat, incredible!  The sailing trip was amazing and thankfully we had a boat full of really friendly people and funny crew who made the trip really memorable. 

Uluru and Kata tjuta

After a couple of lovely nights with Laura in Perth we headed to Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park. Our first evening there consisted of sheltering from a very spectacular lightning storm - pretty impressive!!! Unfortunately the weather didn't get much better than this so we took it in our stride and got up at 4.30 the next morning to see what sunrise looked like - Uluru was covered by dramatic clouds giving it quite an eerie feel. By 6.30 we were beginning our walk around the base of Uluru before joining a ranger guided walk some of the way - he chatted about the Anangu people (the indiginous people) and the laws and traditions surrounding Uluru, was really interesting. From the ranger we discovered that the water which flows off Uluru is sacred to the Anangu people and very few people get to see water cascading off of Uluru so we were actually pretty lucky to see it at this time! After the talk we walked the entire base walk - we came to the conclusion it was humungous from all angles!  The next day we had another early start for sunrise at Kata Tjuta followed by a walk through the valley of the winds. This walk saw us following a very questionable path, across rocks, up and down valleys and at one point climbing through a tree as the path had disappeared under water! The views however were spectacular and in some ways more impressive than Uluru. Kata Tjuta consists of 36 huge rock formations (reaching up to 500m) covering a 34km square area...it's quite incredible to be standing in quite a flat valley and having these towering over you - felt very small!!!!