20 | Cairns

End of the line…

The end of the Loka trip had finally arrived with 7 nights in Cairns left to enjoy before being cast out into the World of uncertainty again. The past few weeks had been memorable and thoroughly enjoyable. I have met many people along the way who I will be staying in touch with for hopefully a long time. All though this is a slightly sad part of the journey, there are still some pretty sweet activities left to do.

Our penultimate trip was to Cape Tribulations. One of the places we would be stopping off at is the iconic waterfall where Peter Andre filmed the ‘Mysterious Girl’ video. Yes there were attempted hair flicks but with a short back and sides haircut, the results are not spectacular but more cringe worthy. We swiftly moved on to platypus watching, yes I repeat platypus watching. I have never seen one before so this experience was a first. The rain was torrential all day so my hopes of one coming out into the river channel were pretty low. However after 15 minutes of straying up the riverbank we spotted this tiny creature rummaging its nose through the riverbed scavenging for food. It was tiny in comparison to what I thought it would look like and they have claws which are toxic. Not so cute after all.

The final part of our tour took us to a fresh water lake where in the center was around 70m deep and had a resident 2m fresh water croc residing in it. No problem, off we went straight into the water which was wonderfully clear and had a real deep blue colouring to it. Admittedly the idea of swimming in a lake with a crocodile in it does not sound very inviting however myself and John felt safe enough to swim out around 40m into the lake side by side. I took the action camera out with me in anticipation that hopefully I might catch a glimpse of it in the footage swimming underneath me but it was not to be. We made it to a platform where we dived into the water for a short time before being recalled to the bus when our time ran out. This was our last activity on the trip but a very memorable one.

Wednesdays at Woolshed is one of the main nights out of the week. We all headed down in numbers for one of the last nights out as a group before splitting off and doing our own things. They run a ‘dance’ competition or should I say strip competition to win prizes. When the DJ said there was a bunji swing prize I thought that’s MINE! Admittedly I had a few drinks for Dutch courage and off I went onto the table to battle for my prize. After a few awkward moments (as you can imagine) I was stood there in my lucky salmon boxers in the last two; no going back from here I thought. After a couple more abysmal dance moves and a few dollar notes shoved down my front (Thanks Loka gang) I was called out as the winner. I sprayed my corona around like I had won the Monaco GP and crowd surfed in celebration. Little did I know my jump had an expiry date on it so when I called I could not do it for the price on the voucher, SHIT! Oh well I guess its good to get out of your comforts zone every so often.

#Nature #Nightlife #City #Tour