Busy Busy Day to Cairns!

My, what an interesting 24 hrs it has been!
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Hospital Trip Numero Uno, and let's hope Numero Only!

As soon as I left the internet last night I went looking for Claire, as I hadn't seen her for about 2 hours when she went to get some help with her hand. Turned out after much anxiety that she was actually behind the bar alternating between putting her hand in a jug of cold water and putting an ice bag on it. The conversation went something like this...

Christina: Bloody Hell Claire I've been looking for you everywhere!

Claire: Well I've been here! And look what they've given me! (shows me a flashing red cross - base backpackers logo - on a necklace) And a free pen! And that guy with the dreads who was on the ferry has been very nice!

Christina: Claire, is that a schooner of wine?

Claire: Yeh, they gave me free wine too!
Christina: Claire...? ....Are you pissed?
Claire: (laughs) .........Yeh!
Barman/Manager: Yeh, we thought it might take the pain away!
Christina: (to Claire, menacingly) And has it???
Claire: Not really!

Anyway, the long and short of it was that the management had offered to phone her an ambulance, but despite it not getting any better or any less painful she had refused. But as soon as she showed it to me I convinced her to take them up of it. It looked really bad! She has blisters on the tips of her fingers and across the top half of the palm of her hand. So the paramedic came out, then drove us in the ambulance over to the medical clinic where the on-call nurse came out to, and she put some industrial-strength pain-relief cream on it and dressed it properly. She gave us the rest of the cream and some more dressings and she says that as long as Claire doesn't break the blisters and allows them to heal naturally, she'll be fine. She'll really have to not break them if she's going to scuba dive on Tuesday, cos the ocean up here is full of nasties. But hey, there's always antibiotics!
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Travelling to Cairns

So what's happened today. Well it's been an incredibly long haul to be honest, but we've had plenty of stops so it's been ok. Got the ferry this morning at 7:10am, but not before managing to snap a picture of the sunrise over the sea from our dorm. Lovely! Once on the Oz Bus we stopped at McDonalds first for breakfast (oh the shame! But dry cheese toasties didn't really cut it!). Our driver was 'Gollum', and he kept doing Gollum impressions over the microphone and it cracked me up. He was really good actually, sounded just like him! Then we drove through Ingham (large Italian population) and Cardwell - home of the Giant Crab, and then we stopped in Tully to observe the Giant Gumboot (or Welly, if you prefer). It was quite impressive. The point of it is that Tully claims to be the wettest town in Australia, and the 7.9m tall golden boot (with a frog on the side) represents the total amount of rainfall in 1950 - a record-breaking amount I would imagine. Anyway, you can walk up the spiral staircase inside it and emerge at the top of the boot, so there was many a touristesque photo opportunity grasped here! After that we dropped a few people off in Mission Beach (where one of the missions to Christianise (word?) Aborigines was set up, but then blown away by a cyclone) and had some lunch.
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Feeding Time at the Crocodile Farm - Keep all Arms and Legs outside the fence!

After lunch we headed on up to Innisfail, to visit Johnstone River Crocodile Farm - the purpose of which is actually to farm crocs for their meat and skin, which is a bit gruesome. The resident pooch came aboard the bus to say hello, then we all piled in feeling rather nervous (or I was anyways!) It was $14 and that was on offer, so a bit pricey, but I guess they don't get much custom. Anyway it was a lot of fun! We saw them wake the crocs up by tapping a garden rake on their heads (rather aggressive, but I guess so are the dear creatures themselves!) and feed them dead chickens. One of them burped as it crunched - it was well minging! They showed us their only 2 freshwater ones which were a lot smaller than the saltwater ones, and then Gregory, the 5m long and extremely heavy crocodile that was so dolice the farmer actually sat on it! There was also a female one which hissed at us and stuff as we walked past, and one of the farmers explained that she was being protective over her nest, but little does she know that there are in fact no eggs in her nest as they've already taken them out. They also had kangaroos there (one of the farmers joked that they were actually selling them for $20 each as crocodile food, which Me and Claire believed with horror at first), and emus (which the dog chased until they started chasing him!) and cassowaries. There are only 1200 of these left in the wild so they said they were desperately looking for a female to breed them. It's a shame really cos they're amazing looking birds it would be a shame if they became extinct. Anyway, next they showed us the 1-2 yr old saltwater crocs (they were about 15 inches long) and they were sat in a water shed listening to 'Video Killed the Radio Star' on the radio, which I thought was hilarious, but it's actually so they can get used to having noise around them cos otherwise it stresses them out - they're not used to it in the wild. We got to hold one later on, and Claire took a picture of me with one. It felt really weird! I was expecting it's skin to feel rock hard but it didn't, it was kinda squishy! We held a small python as well, and then a 2-day-old croc! It fitted it the palm of your hand! If only they weren't so deadly they would be so cute!
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Certified Swinger! Tackling the Minjin Swing at AJ Hackett

After the Crocodile Farm we made our way up to Cairns, stopping in the suburb of Smithfield first to pay a visit to the AJ Hackett Bungy Site. For those few uncultured people who don't know ;o) AJ Hackett is a Kiwi who has bungy-jumped off pretty much every platform going, and has broken loads of records and won awards and stuff for his efforts. He now has loads of bungy sites all over the world, including in Cairns. As much as I'd love to do one, I really don't think I have the balls to do a bungy jump (and after climbing the tower and looking at the drop my suspicions were confirmed!) so I thought I'd tackle the Minjin Swing. This is what I thought was a 40ft but it's actually a 40m drop (so about 120ft!). They hoist yourself and your unwitting buddies (3 persons max) backwards and upwards into the trees, and you are hanging side by side, horizontally in harnesses. Then one of you has to pull a rope which lets you drop 120ft and swing back upwards. I'm rubbish at explaining it! I persuaded Claire to do it with me, but you could tell she was canning it as soon as she realised we were in harnesses and not a solid frame, and she admitted later she nearly backed out. It was absolutely fantastic! As we were being hoisted up I said "God this is high!" and we'd only gone about a third of the way up! By the time we got to the top you could see for miles over Cairns, so by now I was bricking it! Then the guy in the middle of us (we designated the task of pulling the rope to him as neither of us wanted to do it!) pulled the rope and for that first moment it was like nothing else! There was a split second where we were just suspended in mid-air with nothing holding us up and nothing below us. Then we started to drop down and swing forwards at once, and at speed too! It was the greatest rush. When we swung right back up on the other side we could see right over the trees, over Cairns and to the horizon, so we were pretty high up! Then we were swinging for about 5 mins before we slowed down enough for the guy to grab us. He took some photos for us but the sun was right in the way so I don't know how good they'll turn out. It was so good that I didn't feel the need to bungy-jump after that! Though I think I may be turning into a bit of an adrenalin junkie!
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So What Now?

Well now we're in Cairns, and we're staying in a really nice hostel! The room is only similar to what we've stayed in before, but the pool is really cool, with a waterfall and everything! And the rest of the place is very much what you'd expect of a hotel. Very nice! So tonight we're probably just gonna kick back and relax cos we have an early start tomorrow with our Atherton Tablelands waterfall trip. I'm really looking forward to that cos although we saw rainforest on Fraser Island, this has waterfalls. That you can swim in. Very exciting!

So yeah, that's about it! I'll post again tomorrow if I can and let you know how gorgeous the tablelands are!