Cairns

We got into Cairns late (around 11pm) so we hopped in a taxi to our hotel – thankfully only a 15 min ride – and crashed.

We stayed at The Abbott Boutique Hotel (https://theabbott.com.au) and it was very convenient for walking around Cairns (including to the boat pier) and also for pick up for our Daintree Rainforest Tour. They have someone on site 24/7 but there’s only someone at the desk from 8am to 6pm. So if you arrive after that, they give you a door code and they have your key cards sitting on the desk (we were definitely not the last to arrive judging by the envelopes still on the desk). It was definitely an interesting way to do it but worked out well for us. The hotel had a nice shared lounge area with a coffee machine so that was handy in the mornings. It ended up being a great hotel (clean, convenient, relatively spacious with some nice amenities) for what amounted to approximately $120 (US dollars) a night! The exchange rate definitely helped us out some there.

We spent 3 days (4 nights) there total. Because we were arriving so late, I didn’t plan anything specific for the first day there – we slept in and then wandered around Cairns to check it out (I case you are wondering, the “r” is silent – it’s pronounced “cans”). So our first day we woke up, had some coffee, and ventured out.

We were a short walk from the esplanade area – it’s a nice area to walk along the water that stretches for 2.5 km and has some mud flats along it, which made for some pretty cool wildlife watching (more on that in a bit). It also has a really neat “lagoon” (public pool right on the esplanade) – it is almost an infinity pool but the pathway goes between it and the mudflats.

We saw quite a few birds – I can’t identify most birds but Chris usually can. But we saw some new ones – and apparently the Merlin app Chris uses to identify the bird sounds only has about 30% of the birds in Australia on it. Some very nice locals helped us figure out this particular one, called a Bush Stone-curlew (https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/bush-stone-curlew). We saw them on the promenade during the day (and this one was missing a foot but seemed to get along just fine!) and then again at night in a park. They have a pretty distinct sound. They are more active at night – and that’s when we heard them making a log of noise! They have a pretty distinct sound.

As we walked around, it was still so strange to me to be walking around in shorts and a t-shirt with Christmas decorations out around town. Temperatures were in the high-80s during our time there – still hard for me to think of Christmas as a summertime holiday.

One of my favorite birds we saw while we were there was the pelicans. If you’re thinking those don’t look like the pelicans we know – that’s because these are Australian Pelicans (https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/australian-pelican), versus the Brown Pelican we know. I took a ton of pictures of them but the really cool one with their gullet full was taken by Chris.

My other favorite animal on the mud flats was the Fiddler Crab – so they’re pretty cool to watch and seem so lopsided with their one big claw. Incidentally, I learned that there is an entire page dedicated to Fiddler Crabs! https://www.fiddlercrab.info/field_guides/field_guide_e_australia.html

They were pretty fun to watch. I think my favorite part of the videos I captures is when one crab goes down a hole, and the other follows. He must have been telling the first one to get out of his house, because they both come back out and the first one leaves.

Another bird we saw was the Whimbrel (https://australian.museum/learn/animals/birds/whimbrel/)– you can see guy hunting crabs. They feed on mudflats and crustaceans are part of their diet.

This guy is the Masked Lapwing (https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/masked-lapwing). I thought his yellow mask was pretty neat. I pretty much know nothing about birds but had fun reading about all of these birds while writing this post.

I learned a bit about the mudflats. Interestingly this apparently used to be a sandy beach and the mud comes from silt that washed up after dredging a shipping canal (https://www.cairnsesplanade.com/story.html). Pretty amazing to see the ecosystem that has developed in the area from that. I think my favorite quote from the link I just shared is “This infusion of mud has been great for the mangrove ecosystem, but not great for tourists who would rather see a sandy beach than a muddy tidal swamp” – which I find funny because I think this is much cooler to see than a sandy beach. This seems to be an ongoing point of controversy.

We ventured back out a couple of nights while here because it was also quite beautiful at night.

Cairns in general also had some really great sights at night.

On our 2nd day there, we did a Great Barrier Reef snorkeling trip and on our 3rd day there, we did a Daintree Rainforest tour – I felt both of those deserved their own separate posts so those will be next up.

The morning that we flew back to Sydney we got out for a run along the Esplanade.