Cairns- Hitting the Town

Today we took a slow start to help our bodies adjust to another 2 hour forward time adjustment. We are now 15 hours ahead of the central time zone. Amy was up anyway and saw a beautiful sunrise. We walked into downtown Cairns and visited a few information centers to gather brochures to help us plan the next few days. We walked to the Hemingway brewery for lunch and reviewed the brochures we picked up. Right next to the brewery was a huge cruise ship that was loading. After making decisions about the next two days, we rented Beam scooters and went to book our Great Barrier Reef tour. The tour we booked included an introductory scuba dive. As we discussed the scuba dive, we were told that due to some medications taken, Emily and Amy would need to get a note from a doctor to be able to scuba. Emily and Amy took the scooters to the 24 hour medical clinic, but it was too busy and they weren’t able to see a doctor. They were able to set up a telehealth check with an Australian doctor who concluded that one medicine could make us sleepy so we won’t all be able to scuba.

We put away the scooters and walked to the Cairns museum. It is a small museum, great for visiting in a couple hours. Cairns was founded by white settlers in 1876, but the aboriginals were there loooooong before that. Some of the history, such as the efforts in WWI and WWII were great, some of the history of the exploitation of people of color was rather shameful. All the history here is directly tied to the geography of the city: the water (rivers and ocean) and the climate (hot for raising sugar cane) and now the tourism of the Great Barrier Reef.

We finished the day with dinner at Muddy’s Cafe and a rousing game of Crew.

Tomorrow we go to the tropical rain forest and see koalas!Read more