A three hours flight straight north brings us to Cairns, the biggest city on the north-eastern coast. As the doors of the plane open we can immediately feel the tropical humidity taking over. It’s hot and moist here in Cairns, about all year around: max temperatures range from 32 to 25, min temperatures between 24 and 18. Well, if you like seasons you might want to call this boring! But it does make Cairns the best retreat for short holiday breaks during the cold (or so they call them here) winter days in the south. The great waterfront of the town is a beautiful lighted path for people to walk or run, or even exercise since there are open air gyms free for everybody.

The shallow water makes for an impressive effect of the tides on the bay, where at low tide is almost impossible to see the edge of the water, leaving space for a lot of tropical swamp birds to come around to feed. There should also be crocodiles in the water, but we didn’t see any!

The city is full of tropical birds and trees. Not far from town we spend one day at Trinity beach, a nice long sandy beach, perfect for a sunny day!

After a few days in Cairns we head a couple of hours south on the bus for a great place known as Mission beach. It’s small, friendly and as relaxed as it can be. The small family hostel is just 10 meters from the beach, which stretches for 14 Km, with plenty of space for everybody. Since we arrived early in the morning we thought we had time to do some shopping in the nearby town, walking there on the beach and returning by bus…or something. It’s overcast and reasonably cool while walking on the beach. At the shop we overload the bags with all heavy items, like half a watermelon, a bottle of wine, 1Kg of pasta etc etc…all to find out that there are no shuttle or buses back to Mission beach. So we start walking the whole 7Km back, but of course now it’s 1pm and the sun is shining! We decide to at least eat the watermelon not to have to carry that all the way. It’s really hot! Luckily a few Km before town a nice guy stops and asks if we want a ride because we were “uncomfortable to watch”. Just great timing, so we are back to the hostel in time for a fresh drink and down to the beach under the shade of huge palm trees.