Cairns – Port Douglas – Cairns – Airlie Beach – Brisbane – Byron Bay – Blue Mountains and finally, Sydney.

My 2 previous tours were with Intrepid and overall I was impressed – will G-Adventures be as good?

Our Tour guide is Derek Murphy! Another guide called in at the last minute this time due to two others having Covid. Will it ever go away?

In this group we have: 3 couples, American, Canadian and English then 10 singles, Robert from Ohio and 9 females, I was going to say girls, however, that might be too generous a description for some including myself haha! Everyone seems lovely and you it turns out everyone gets on well thank goodness because we are together for 12 days.

So, we grab a bite to eat and discuss the plans for tomorrow. Cape Tribulation & The Daintree are out due to water damage, for those who don’t know a Typhoon hit just before Christmas the airport looked more like a Marina, the had 24 inches of rain in The Daintree forest in one day and to put that into context they have 2 metres a year normally as an average! One of the areas we came through had 2.4 metres in a 24 hour period, the damage is clearly on view as we drove up and, so we have a day to do what we want in Cairns, 6 of us decide to take the Skyrail over the forest up to Karunda, it was spectacular, we could hear the birds singing from the cable car, we thought it was piped sounds to start with! You can see how brown the water is from the the rainfall and flow of the water.

This forest is over 200 million years old, wrap your head around that one. There are 3 cable car journeys which span approx 10 km, on the 2nd journey Barron Falls ones into view and it is spectacular especially with the additional rainfall, we get the option to view it properly at the next stop!

On to the third leg, we arrive at Kaunda and much to everyone’s surprise there are shops and craft stalls galore, you also could choose to pay to go to see Butterflies, Koala’s and/or the Aviary. We only had an hour at the top and needed to get lunch so didn’t do any of that. Derek our guide is collecting us at 1.30 pm so off we went again.

When we meet up with Derek there is question over us even travelling up to Port Douglas now tonight as their water has been turned off, the irrigation systems are struggling and there is no drinking water, all the restaurants are closed, a decision will be made at 2pm, if we cant go up this evening we will have to leave at 5am to be in Port Douglas in time to go snorkelling on The Great Barrier Reef tomorrow. 2 o’clock was pushed back to 3 o’clock and no-one was hopeful of getting away a this stage. 3.30 pm and we are good to go and with a collective whoop we are off with a few proviso’s. We need to provide drinking water, wine, food as we will need to bbq tonight and be understanding that showering, in fact washing and flushing toilets might be a bit tricky!

The resort is beautiful we have been upgraded for the next two nights, I think a lot of people had cancelled and it felt like we had the place to ourselves, the bbq was so good and great fun, team bonding time for sure. Quite a few of the girls including me got into the lovely pool after dinner and sure enough there is no water to shower after.

I was lucky as I was up before 6 and got enough cold water to rinse out my hair and get washed and then the water went off so most didn’t get this luxury, early bird gets the worm clearly!

We are about to do something today I have always wanted to do and see, which is Snorkel on THE GREAT BARRIER REEF! We sail off at 8.15 am, it took an hour and a half to get to the reef and we snorkelled on 3 different sites, I just loved it. The fish are so beautiful, the reef was duller than I expected, however, by the third site I felt more confident and it was definitely the best site. It was also good to track the people who went diving, the bubbles are freezing cold when burst and lovely to look at rising from their tanks.

It is stinger season (broadly jellyfish, all different sizes) and so, everyone has to wear a stinger suit, you can still feel the attempts to sting through the suits and on you face, vinegar sprays were available if required. Lunch was provided and was really good, this has been a very memorable day indeed.

We went to a local Irish Bar for dinner and despite the offer to stay in town everyone was back on the bus and ready for an early night. It is New Years Eve tomorrow, we have the market in the morning, an Indigenous tour and then a drive back to Cairns, dinner is booked at Hemmingway’s Brewery at 6.30 then fireworks at 8.30 and again at 12pm for those that want to stay up. I will have to think about that!