Home again

Well we are back all in one piece from our adventures in Nothern Queensland. I know you guys are all probably dying to see pics of our trip, so I will release then to you slowly since there are a lot of them. Despite the horrible weather, we had a great time. It felt like the days were going so slowly coming up to our trip, but then when we were away, the week just whizzed by.

Here is an overhead shot of the coast line from the plane coming down into Cairns.

The Esplande in Cairns runs all along the waterfront into the city. There isn't a beach in Cairns, and the water here is actually quite muddy with lots of dangerous scary creatures in it such as crocidiles and box jelly fish.... not the ideal place for swimming.

This is our first day of adventuring, rafting down the Tully River through the tropical rainforest. The weather was horrible, raining all day, so what better activity to do than go rafting. We had a great time, navigating through the rapids. The river levels were high due to all the recent rainfall which made for a wild and exciting ride.

Here's Todd before making the big leap into the river.

Splash, he's down there somewhere.

This was not the only time that Todd ended up in the river, but the only time he purposely jumped in. Later on in the day after navigating through a tricky part of the rapids, the Maze, going through rapids intertwined between masses and masses of rocks. We made it safely to the bottom of the rapids without flipping over the raft or anyone falling out.... until we reached the bottom when Todd somehow flung himself over my side of the raft head first into the river and under the boat. He was the only one in our group to fall out of the raft that day.

One of the other group of rafters managed to flip their raft over 3 times that day. There were many many swimmers and floating paddles without owners everywhere.

It was so amazing being in the middle of the beautiful rainforest. The pictures just don't do it justice.

Beautiful waterfall that we went underneath. The water sure is strong coming down on top of you, not quite as enjoyable to look at when there's thousands of kilo of water pounding down on you, makes it hard to see much of anything.