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  • Day 69

    Rafting

    March 19, 2018 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

    Up early as I had a white water rafting pick up at 6:30. Luckily I checked my email as my tour was cancelled. The plan was a full day tour on Tully River, but the roads to the access point on the river had washed away in the flooding, so it simple was not possible going there.
    Instead I went on a shorter and less intense tour on the Barron River. We were 10 people and 2 guides going, and a guy from the company also came along to have fun in a kayak.
    The rafting was fun, but rather short, the best part was that we got to do a lot of swimming, and what is know as surfing where you on purpose get stuck in a rapid and let it flood your raft.
    At the surfing spot we got to try and swim across the rapid. I managed to swim so close that I got caught in the whirlpool, at first I didn't realise what was going on so I kept swimming futilely in the current. When it dawned on me I just enjoyed it until I first was pulled fully under life vest and all and then spat out again and swam to the raft. Final adventure was our guide flipping the raft on purpose, I ended up under the raft and had to swim out.
    The tour was over really early, so when I got back to NJoy Emily was still in our room. She suggested we could go to the aquarium and I agreed if we could go past the contemporary arts museum, which is right next to the aquarium.
    The museum had two exhibitions, the first one was pictures of Chinese people in Cairns cooking secret recipes. We were a bit puzzled as to how that was considered art.
    On the top floor the exhibition was a lot of large balls with a dim red light inside. A small sign set please interact with artwork, so we did. When kicked, punched, thrown, or in other ways stirred the light inside change to a bright light, so we just had fun with that for a long time.
    We then went to the aquarium, it's brand new only opened 6 months ago, and as aquariums go it was really good. We went to a behind the scenes tour and got to see their unique water purification system, which mimics thunderstorms to help coral growt
    After the aquarium we went to a café to snack a little, on the way we saw some low hanging clouds in the mountains across the bay.
    For dinner we went to a Greek restaurant. There was music, which along with the décor and staff really sent me back to Greece. The food was amazing, and a dinner party suddenly got up and danced traditional Greek chain dance. If our food hadn't just arrived we would probably have joined in. It was a good way to end a great day.
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