Cairns and Port Douglas

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After the bad weather delay I ended up booking myself a flight for the relatively short journey from Townsville to Cairns to make sure arrived there before my sister! Got there on the saturday and stayed the first night at Gilligan's Backpackers-without a doubt one of nicest hostels in Oz! The following day I checked into the hotel Samantha had booked for us and then went to the Airport to meet her. We stayed a few nights at the Pacific International Hotel which was nice, enjoyed being in a hotel again after several months of backpacking it! While we were in Cairns we did a day trip to Kuranda and did the skyrail which we both enjoyed and we also tried doing a hot air ballon but after getting out to the site at the crack of dawn it was cancelled because the wind was too strong! We did end up doing the trip as had another attempt at doing it while we were staying in Port Douglas and was worth doing as was good experience and very peaceful!

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In Port Douglas we stayed at the Port Douglas Retreat where we had a studio apartment and was in v handy location. Probably the highlight of the stay in Port Douglas was doing the Quicksilver trip to the Outer Reef which was fantastic. We forked out extra money and did a short helicopter ride over the reef first of all, which was brilliant and gave a great sense of the sheer scale of it! The Quicksilver trip uses a Platoon so the activities are based from there and after the helicopter we did the guided tour in a semi-submersible before doing some snorkelling-we were very lucky as had absolutely beautiful weather and water was lovely and clear so was great for seeing all the different colours of the coral. Another enjoyable day trip we did was to the Cape Tribulation and Daintree to see the Rain forest and learn about all the deadly things in it-thankfully had a knowledgeable guide to point them out! We did a small group tour there so was just us and 2 others which made nice change from being in a big tour group. Overall we had a lovely stay in the Port Douglas and Cairns area, very lucky as got good spell of weather up there too, which were very grateful for as had been so much rain of late!