NE Australia

We're now on the driving part of our Australia stay and we've made our way up to cloudy Cairns. Cairns is 1000 miles north of Brisbane, and we drove up over 3 days--it's a great way to see and appreciate the countryside. Some areas looked almost like northern Michigan, others like cattle ranches out west and others had huge sugar cane and banana plantations. Closer to Cairns, though, we saw the effects of Cyclone Larry, with banana plantations especially devastated. Didn't see a lot of homes damaged fortunately, but there were still some "blue roofs."

We had a good drive, traffic was light, roads are great. We spent 2 nights in the Townsville area for some excellent birding.

Today we took the Skytrain, an aerial cablecar that travels over/through the rainforest canopy for 7 kms--beautiful sights--you're up above the canopy of 150 foot tall gumtrees and pines and other tropical trees, with giant ferns and other epiphytes high up in the branches.

We head further north tomorrow, getting further into the rainforest, and then we hope to swing a little bit west and catch some Outback. We're not doing the Reef out of Cairns because all the rain they've had has spoiled some of the visibility, but hope to catch that when we head further south again.