Rainforest

We got into Cairns late last night. We are staying in the Cairns Queenslander on Lake Street in Cairns and we told our taxi driver to take us to the Queenslander on Lake Street and, little did we know, there were two of them on the same street. The first place the Taxi brought us was really sketchy and pretty sketchy people running around outside. The girls looked at each other and were ready to switch locations right then. Luckily, we come to find out that it wasn't the place we were staying.

Today we decided we wanted to head to the Rainforest which is about a 2 and a half hour drive. Renting a van was a lot cheaper than any carpool out there. We figured since we had been watching traffic in NZ the past 12 days that driving on the other side of the road would not be that bad. If I was driving, I would have been so scared, but we but a boy in charge of driving the 12 passenger van the whole way there. That was an interesting experience in itself. It was a 'group effort' every time we changed lanes. Addison got the hang of the driving after a while and it wasn't actually all that bad. It did get interesting when it started down pouring here like crazy and the roads started to flood out. When we were driving in the flooded roads, the water would spray up well over the van. We started joking that the cyclone wasn't over for how much it was down pouring. The damage here isn't as significant as I thought it would be. We can definitely tell that there is damage, but I thought it would be worse. They call this time of year the "rainy season" and every other time the "less rainy season" because it doesn't stop raining here.

We couldn't get into the gorge because the road was too flooded, but we put our van on a ferry and went across the river into the rainforest. We drove around there for a bit and then got out and walked around the actual forest. We bought some pretty sweet ponchos and went exploring. We didn't really get to see any cool animals because of the amount of rain, but we did see a few really cool looking spiders. Nothing too exciting. It was just cool to go exploring around the rain forest. The water in the river was like a chocolate brown color, which was disgusting. We were told it was because of the rainy season, and we were guessing the cyclone had a lot to do with the debris in the river.

Even though our trip for tomorrow got cancelled because the big ship got wrecked in the cyclone, we found another night trip for even cheaper that we can go out on. We will be picked out tomorrow at 7am to get shipped out to the boat. We take a smaller boat to get to the big ship and it takes about two hours to get out there. We have about 6 dives tomorrow and I have no expectations. I am excited for the adventures tomorrow will bring. Every day seems to be a new experience and our group gets along really well.