Just chilling in Cairns

Saturday, November 22nd

The sun rises pretty early in Cairns, it was bright and shiny before 6am.  As we didn't sleep till after 2am the previous night, I forced myself to sleep longer.  The bed was comfy.  At 8:30pm, Connie woke up and started to check if the pool was sunny.  It was unfortunately shaded by the tall buildings, which gave us no incentive to do our laps for exercise. To be honest, Connie just wanted to watch me do it while she sunbathed.  Natasha was also too excited to be on holiday to stay sleeping.  So at roughly 9am, we started to chat about the day's plan.  I'm so lucky to have the girls in Cairns with me.

Since we had a full ensuite kitchen with dishwasher and all, we decided cooking a few meals might be a good idea.  We also discovered a bbq by the pool, so we will do that one night too.  Naturally the first stop was the supermarket (woolworths) so we could make breakfast.  We were in there for a bit deciding what we wanted for breakfast and lunch.  We decided to do beef stir fry noodles for dinner.  Nice and simple.

We headed back to our hotel and made our breakfast.  Connie and I had toast with ham and cheese, and Natasha and Mel had cereal.  Connie also tried her first real vegemite with butter on toast.  I think she was a fan too.  Tasted a bit like soy sauce paste.  I also took the morning to figure out our tours and car.  Steph and Bernice went to check out the actual tour agent, while I called Tribal for price quotes.  It worked out Tribal was a bit cheaper, so we just booked our rafting and Great Barrier Reef trip with them.  We also went to Avis to book a car to drive to Port Douglas.  Easy enough.

Although the pool looked tempting, we wanted to check out the lagoon down the block.  Clarification, lagoon does not necessary equate to "lagoon.". It could be, like the one in Cairns, a big public swimming pool with a gazillion kids.  So we laid out for a few hours.  Connie, Natasha, and Mel were desperate to get some color, meanwhile I'm all about not getting any more color.

At around 2pm, we went back to our hotel to make some lunch.  We made a chopped salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, olives and feta.  Yum.  We also had ham sandwiches, humus and spinach dips with pita chips and rice crackers.  A nice, healthy, and satisfying meal.

Mel broke her sunglasses while laying out at the lagoon, so we had to get her new ones at the shopping center.  This also gave Connie and I a chance to do some shopping, and shopping we did do.  We both bought a few good items.  The hours pass by quickly when you shop, and before we knew it, it was 5pm.

Connie and I signed up for reef chat at 6:30pm to learn more about the Great Barrier Reef.  We had to quickly go back to our hotel to change and shower, that's when I discovered Natasha and Mel's room had a washer AND a DRYER.  We will be doing some washing this week.  We left the hotel in good time, but were retarded and couldn't find the place.  It was on the second floor of mainstreet arcade.  The whole time Connie and I were looking for a gaming place, but later we realized it was an arcade of shops and food.  We showed up 5mins late.  Steph and Bernice were already there.

The reef chat was interesting, well worth the AUD15 ($9).  Here are some fun facts:

- most fish are born female and can change to male if there needs to be more males.

- Nemo was a damsel fish and Disney had it wrong.  In real life, after Nemo's mom died, Nemo's dad (Marlin) would of pumped himself with hormones to become mom and Nemo would be the new dad...and new mom (Marlin) and Nemo would of kicked it off.  Try to explain that to a five year old.

- Dora on Finding Nemo is a surgeon fish

- blue green damsel will change their color based on their mood.

- Elvis was a wrasse and can grow to be really big.  A smart little sucker fish called remora sucks on him (clings) for protection.

- the difference between butterfly fish and angel fish:  butterfly fish have a dark stripe across their eyes and no spines on their gills, meanwhile angel fish don't have stripes across their eyes but have spines on their gills.

- parrot fish are the cattle out on the reef.  They chew on coral to eat the algae.  Females are dark red while male are colored.  They also can change their sex if they need to.

- romantic fish of the reef are rabbit fish.  They are with their mate for life, so swim in pairs.  If one is missing, either they didn't find their mate yet or they lost their mate.

- puffer and porcupine fish are cute when they blow up to protect themselves, but you shouldn't do that.  They can only do this 2-3 times in a life time.

- the most venomous fish are stone and lion fish.

- Green turtles can hold their breath for 5 hours.

- nudies are sea slugs.  Very pretty and colorful.

- flat worms looks like a nudie that got ran over by a bike.  Also hermaphrodites.  When they mate two "males" would fight each other with their penis (aka penis fencing) until one loses and becomes the mom.

- octopus are really smart with great memory.  Only their eyes and beaks are hard, so they can basically get into anything.  One time a researcher put an octopus in one tank and a bunch of fish in another.  Every night a fish was mysteriously missing, so he decided to place an infrared camera to see what's going on.  The octopus would crawl out of his tank and into the fish tank, eat one and go back.  To prevent it from happening the next day, they put lids on top of the octopus tank and fish tank.  That was still useless because in the course of a night the octopus figured out how to open his tank and the fish tank and close it when he was done with his journey so that is seemed like nothing had happened.  The researcher finally solved the problem by putting rocks on top of the lids because it would be heavy for him to lift up.  Sneaky sneaky, but brilliant at the same time.

At around 8:30pm the class ended and we all (including Steph and Bernice) made our way back to our hotel.  Mel and Natasha already started the cooking process.  It smelled so yummy and was so tasty.  We made two big bowls of beef stir fry instant noodles.  Connie and I also enjoyed my 007 concoction and mimosas.  Mel and Natasha had beer and mimosas, while Bernice and Steph had wine.  It was good chatting around the dinner and afterwards.  So good that we didn't have to go out.  It was midnight before we knew it and it was totally time for bed.  Our rafting trip is going to pick us up at 6:40am.