Northern Queensland - The rest of the east coast!

Mossman Gorge
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Townsville

This was our first stop after the boat trip. With sweltering heat 35 degrees and 75% humidity we didn't last long walking around the city. Seemed like a nice enough place. Later on that night we had a few glasses of wine sitting outside the van after dark, big mistake..  we woke up the following morning with about 50 bites between us.

Mission Beach

15 km of sandy beach, although you can only swim in a very small netted section because of all the jelly fish in the water. A local woman told us that they are the size of a small coin but can deliver a killer sting. A lovely place to walk the beach but not much else going on. The campsite site was full of beetles the size of your fist and loads of cane toads.. Lets just say showering was not a pleasurable experience.

Port Douglas rain
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Port Douglas

Port Douglas is the swanky upmarket area of Queensland. When your in a campervan with tropical rain storms there is nothing swanky about it at all. The five star resorts looked lovely but our campsite was in the middle of the jungle. Again most of the day we spent swatting flies and bugs off us. We were supposed to stay here two nights but the heat and bugs got the better of us so we headed south to cairns in search of some air-con.

mission beach
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Mossman

Mossman is only a ten minute drive north of Port Douglas. Here we went to visit the daintree national park, the oldest existing rainforest of the planet. This whole areas is unesco world hertige site. Lots of aboriginal communities living up here. Also up here there is a gorge that you can swim free of crocs.

Cairns

From what we had heard about Carins we were not expecting much, but we were plesantly surprised with this city. Its has nice big boulevards and esplande's to wallk around. It was nice to be able to walk around some air con malls to escape the heat and humdity.

townsville
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Found out a really interesting story about Ugg boots, apparently the one's that we can buy at home for 2 - 3 hundred euros are actually an American brand who make the boots in China! They robbed the brand from the Ozzies back in the 90's and have been marketing them as UGG Australia ever since. Over here there are a few companies who make the genuine Uggs, but they are now have to be called UGH or UGS. The American ones are much clumpier and dont have the genuine sheepskin, so I invested in a pair of the Ozzi ones, for about half the price, including shipping home! An Xmas pressie to myself!

DSC05209
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So that ends our east coast trip, tonight we fly to Perth for two weeks travelling the west coast before we hit Asia...

Its not Xmassay at all over here, all the decorations are up everywhere but it doesnt feel the same at all so makes being away that bit easier......

In total we clocked up 2700km in the campervan so was a relief to hand it back in one piece! It'l be back to public transport for us....