On the East side

Say goodbye to Darwin and fly over to the East Coast and Cairns, jumping off point for tropical Northern Queensland. A bit less hot and humid maybe than the northern territories, but no need to break out the woollies just yet. Stay a night heading in and out of Cairns, in between renting another car for the short hop up the coast to Port Douglas.

Rise Saturday morning to the news emerging from Paris - grim echo of ten years earlier travelling in Peru when we woke to first coverage of the London bombings.

From PD we join a tour to Daintree national park - the main attraction on this leg of our travels. Daintree lays claim to being the oldest continuously surviving rainforest in the world - 120 million years old by conservative estimates and home to all kinds of  wonders including, on our trip, a sighting of the rare Casawary bird (imagine a metre high psychedelic turkey) along with its young. The following day we get another view of the rainforest from the air, taking a ride on the skyrail cable car that runs for 7.5 km above the canopy of trees, forest stretching out seemingly forever in every direction. Except that, once again, it may not be forever. The forest takes an amazing 40% of its water not from the ground but through "cloud scraping" - literally, skimming moisture for low-
hanging cloud. With global temperatures forecast to rise, cloud levels are expected to significantly diminish, with the result that...

After two nights in Port Douglas and a second in Cairns we hit the road - or the air - again and fly via Brisbane to Bundaberg, from where we will head out to Lady Elliot Island. Famous mostly for the rum that bears it's name, Bundaberg is a one-horse town consisting on one long, wide street of shops,
bars, food outlets and so forth. Not much to get excited about, but possessing a kind of vaguely old-
fashioned charm slightly reminiscent of small towns across the American mid-west. As a place to
visit, Bundaberg has a few claims to fame including the eponymous rum distillery outside the town, but what drew us was the protected turtle beach at Mon Repos, where we were lucky enough to witness a large and rare Loggerhead turtle laying her eggs. This was one of those very special
moments, particularly as once the old girl had shuffled back info the surf we were able, under the supervision of rangers, to join in moving the eggs - all 143 of them - to a new location further up the beach. Sounds like vandalism but in fact it's conservation - like many of her kin, our turtle had laid her eggs below the high-tide line, meaning that when the tide came in, they would have been waterlogged and destroyed. In moving them the rangers, and us tourists, are hopefully boosting this endangered species chances of survival.

Next day we board a light aircraft for the short flight across the ocean to Lady Elliot Island. By now
we are inescapably in the domain of cliche and hyperbole - remote pacific island on the Great Barrier Reef, clear blue waters,  waking in the morning to gaze out over golden beaches and coral
lagoons...Yes, it was not at all bad....

snorkelling (or doing our best to) in the waters of the reef gave us a chance to see see some amazing sub-marine life at close quarters; sharks (harmless); turtles (a local lad by the name of Buddy); barracuda and a host of flamboyantly coloured reef fish and coral formations. On shore, birds, birds and more birds - thousands of them everywhere, co-existing happily with their human visitors. Our island is so small you can walk right round it in under an hour. With a fully stocked bar and restaurant it wasn't exactly castaway, but it was a temporary flight from the modern world - no internet, no mobile phone coverage. Fittingly, when we found ourselves alone in the resort lounge on our second and final night, picking out something to watch on the VCR, it was an ancient VHS tape of "Groundhog Day" - a movie featuring an improbably young Bill Murray, plucked from a time before the digital world ever existed.