Entry 43: Vacation Part 2 (Cairns and Newcastle)

After a few nights in Sydney, the fearsome foursome (me, my parents, and S) hopped on a flight for Cairns. On the plane, I was sitting in the middle seat with S on one side and a petite, shy Asian woman on the other side -- the perfect setup, it was like I had a seat and a half to myself. But of course, just before takeoff the petite Asian woman switched seats with an overweight, overbearing woman, and just like that my one and a half seats was reduced to about three fourths of a seat.

This woman had the type of body that oozed from her seat under the armrest into my seat. I battled her for a while for a modicum of elbow space, but I gave up when she just started putting her elbow on top of my arm. In her "defense", however, there really was no where else for her elbow to go. She couldn't help but take up my space. That's the problem with sitting next to an obese person on a plane. It's not like you can ask them to stow some of their fat in the overhead bin.

Come to think of it, this actually happened on the flight back from Cairns. Oh well, for the sake of the story it doesn't really matter in which direction we were headed.

Anyway...

The morning after arriving in Cairns, we set out on a tour cruise of the Great Barrier Reef on a beautiful, sunny day. Cairns had been bombarded with rain prior to our arrival, so we got incredibly lucky weather-wise. The cruise was a tad bit touristy, but once we got to the reef it was worth it. We went snorkeling and it was amazing -- clear blue water and all sorts of interesting and colorful marine life. I wanted to spend more time snorkeling than I did, but my mask hurt the bridge of my nose and it became unbearable. I tried switching masks, but that didn't help. I think it's just the shape of my head. I must have a Cro-Magnon brow. My dad was having the same problem, so maybe it's hereditary.

[A picture I pulled off the Internet of the pontoon we visited on The Great Barrier Reef.]

[A not-that-exciting picture of the water and some snorkelers.]

We spent the next day lounging around the pool and walking around town. And by walking around town I mean ducking in and out of shops selling all sorts of t-shirts, souvenirs, and other gewgaw. I'm not a huge fan of going to these places (I'm not a huge fan of any form of shopping), but near little souvenir shops there are often ice cream parlors which makes them bearable.

Our next big excursion was to an old mining-boom village called Kuranda. We arrived by train, which made for some good views.

[A picture of the front of our train, taken from the middle of the train, as it rounds a bend.]

[A beautiful shot of a waterfall somewhere along the way between Cairns and Kuranda.]

The village of Kuranda itself was rather unimpressive. It was basically a lot of tourists and more t-shirts and gewgaw. (This time I placated myself with a beer instead of an ice cream cone.)

[A funny picture of some people I don't know.]

From Kuranda, we took a cable car to an Aboriginal culture experience. It wasn't your typical cable car ride, however. It was about 4.5 miles long and took about 20 minutes. This also provided some spectacular views. It freaked my mom out a bit, as well. I was mostly OK with it. We were quite high, but somehow it felt to me as if the trees would catch our car if it fell, even though I knew that in actuality that was unlikely.

[Scene from our cable card.]

[Another scene from our cable car.]

The culture experience was fun -- nothing spectacular, but parts of it were interesting. We got to throw spears and boomerangs which was cool. We each got two tries with the boomerang and if we caught one of our throws we could keep the boomerang. I really wanted to catch one, and my second throw was decent, but I didn't come all that close to catching it. Nobody really did, except the guide.

[We stepped out of the mesh box and took turns throwing a boomerang.]

[A big spider that was hanging out right by us.]

After Cairns, it was back to Sydney and then straight on the train to Newcastle. (The start of the new year came and went without much celebration by us.) We actually spent more days in Newcastle on this vacation than we did in the other places, but I hardly have any pictures from Newcastle. It's probably because this is where I live, so I'm less inclined to bring a camera out with me.

I'll give a quick rundown of what we did in Newcastle.

Walked around the harbor (nice as always).
Ate fish and chips at to the beach (delicious, but it took forever).
Drove to and walked around Warner's Bay (fine, but a bit of a letdown).
Watched the movie Social Network (okay, not great).
Watched the Seahawks beat the Rams (awesome).
Went on a wine-tasting tour of Hunter Valley (very fun).

The last one I'll talk about a bit more, because I do have a few pics from it. A van picked us up for the tour at about 8:30am, and we started tasting wine at about 10:30am. By the time lunch rolled around at 2pm, we weren't falling down drunk, but I doubt any of us could have passed a Breathalyzer test. At these tours, you're only drinking a few sips of each wine, but if you try ten wines at each winery, and you go to five wineries, well, as my mom put it, "that's a lot of little sips." Sure, you could taste it and spit it out like a fine connoisseur, but that's pretty unsatisfying, and it's also the wuss way to do wine-tasting, if you ask me.

[Grapes.]

[A nice scenic shot at Hunter Valley.]

[Rows of grapevines at a winery in Hunter Valley.]

Well, that pretty much closes the book on our Christmas/New Year's 2010/2011 vacation. The next day my parents flew back to the U.S. and I returned to work. (Both of which were unfortunate, I was really enjoying things as they were.) It might not have been the traditional way to celebrate the holidays, but it was a good one -- a good one indeed.