Back to Cairns

Hello everyone,

Sorry for not updating the last couple of weeks, I have been pretty busy and without free Internet access.

 So I had finished up my stay with Mike and Sigang, and I have to say it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I so thoroughly enjoyed their daily pace of life that it left me aspiring to find a way to achieve such greatness for myself. Mike and Sigang live simple and without excess, they do what they need to, then do what they like with a good amount of traveling. In their secluded house in the Daintree Rainforest, they have little worry of neighbors and spend most of their time in the company of each other. The place is truly a tropical paradise. However, eventually our stay came to an end as we all left the “treehouse” early one morning. Everyone piled into Mike’s dinghy and we were dropped off at Brad’s house (our first host), we said our goodbyes to Mike and Sigang and I can only hope I run into them again in the future. Brad then gave us a ride back down to Cairns which was incredibly considerate, the bus fare would have been 60$ each. However, the feeling of Cairns was such a strong contrast to the tranquility of the Daintree, and within a couple of days I became increasingly more bored of the city lifestyle. However, there was the proposition of picking up work on some of the dive tour boats. Diving the reef is something I need to do and if I work in one of the programs available I can get my Dive Certification along with extra dives for a seriously discounted price, for just being a deckhand! So after a number of nights in a hostel we scheduled an accommodation with a new host Chris Taylor. We are currently staying on Chris’s boat, which is located in the Cairns Marina. Chris is semi-retired from his dive company and hopefully he can hook us up with some good connections to the other skippers in the marina, whom he has breakfast with once a week. Chris needed some help moving furniture from his old house to his new house and warehouse. We worked just about an eight-hour day, then got the next day off which worked great for us. He lives with his wife and two children in a beautiful house that overlooks the city and ocean. On Wednesday we plan to go slightly north to Smithfield to stay with a new host where we will be moving some rubbish and also painting prep most likely.

After that we will be going down to Mission Beach to stay with Mike in the caravan, I will let you know how it goes…

- John