Mission Beach

Hey all,

After my stay in Cairns John and I decided to go down to Mission Beach and stay with yet another extremely interesting host. For the balance of our stay Mike would “inform” us about the different UFO sightings he has had and the various conspiracy theories of the government. He would then go on to say how young people don’t know how to think because of the widespread use of the Internet and all that goes along with it. Needless to say, he was quite the character. Mike was born in Virginia and worked in a restaurant until he was 25 then moved to Vietnam, and eventually Australia. He lives on a 30-acre property in which he hopes he can one day turn into a cooking school for the physically handicapped… or a campground. While there most of our work consisted of clearing debris from around his property which were left over from cyclone Yasi. The Cyclone had done a good amount of damage to the area so we were pretty busy for most of the time; although we did have some time for fishing and a bond fire down by the creek. After a week at Mike’s house we were definitely ready to move on so we headed out to the town of mission to stay in a hostel and plan a skydiving trip for the following day. The skydiving was incredible! We planned a jump from 14,000 feet to land right on the beach. As we were flying up we had some great views of Mission and the surrounding area and the few amount of clouds gave us a great perspective of how high we actually were. As the plain got ready for the drop and the hatch opened my instructor had me leaning outside of the plain, and without any notice I realized at one point that I was not sitting on edge anymore. As I fell I reached speeds over 120 mph and which made the 60-second freefall feel like no time at all. Once the shoot was pulled the instructor let me take the controls to try my hand at flying which was really fun. We came back down to earth with a clean and smooth landing and all I wanted was to do it again. But alas, we were already scheduled to make our way back up to Cairns for a weeklong Scuba dive course out on the reef. This trip is so great.

Hope all is well back home I miss you guys,

John

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

Treehouse in the Daintree

Hey all,

I am currently staying with an incredible older couple, Mike and Sigang. They live in a beautiful house on a hill that overlooks the coast and is surrounded by the amazing Daintree National Park Rainforest, and their only access in and out is by boat! Mike was born in the States and joined the peace core where he met Sigang in Malaysia, they are really great people and are totally into living sustainably and off the land. They drink rainwater, which pools from their roof and streams, solar panels to for power with reserve batteries, and a wide variety of exotic fruits and veggies that they grow in their garden. They also eat plenty of seafood and even the occasional wild boar that they can hunt right from the borders of their property. John and I are staying in a side shed/house that they used to live in when they were building their current one. It has now walls and the only thing keeping the creepy crawlies off us at night is the mosquito netting around our beds. The place is equipped with all the essentials for modern living, we have a hose for when we want to shower, our flashlights and battery lamps for night, and whenever we need to use the restroom there is a great hole in the ground tank made from an old truck that we can squat over. The place is paradise. So far we have removed a bunch of “rubbish” out to the beach, taken down a large tree overhanging our house, carried a bunch of wood up the hill, harvested bamboo to make scaffolding, and collected and shucked some delicious oysters. We have also gone on a rainforest hike lead by Mike who guided us up a river across a dry precipice, through thick underbrush filled with the annoying wait-a-while thorny palm vines, up and down different ridges all the while barefoot wielding a pair of scissors and a machete, he is totally hardcore. Even though we got a little lost and didn’t arrive at the viewpoint we were searching for, we did come across a giant fig tree, which was pretty amazing. During our stay I don’t think I have ever eaten so well and so healthily in my life. For my typical breakfast I would have oats with apples, oranges, coconuts, star fruit, ladyfinger bananas, raisins, all topped with some whole milk. We also eat a variety of other fruits including the delicious passion fruit, sour sop, abius, papaya, mango/paw paw, limes, and a variety of unusual apples. Soon mike is going to take us boar hunting and, if the water clears up, snorkeling too. I am really enjoying my stay here and am looking forward to the places I have yet to go.

Hope all is well in the States,

John

 

My exact gps coordinates are 15 56 27. 72 south 145 degrees 23 mins 37 sec 22

Discovery Festival

Hey Guys, sorry for the delay the interweb was down,

So I have just finished my two-week stay at Brads place and it was amazing. I don’t think I have ever gotten to eat so much seafood in so short a span, we had Mud Crabs and fresh fish throughout the week, along with Kangaroo one night too (tasted like steak with the consistency of venison).  While at Brads John and I had some really cool adventures. One weekend we went up to Cooktown for the Discovery Festival and stayed with Doreen, a nice Aboriginal woman who is friends with Brad. The festival marked the discovery/crash landing of Capt James Cook to Australia and his interactions with the Aboriginal people. There were some pretty cool activities for tourists to check out including an Aboriginal dance that I took part in. While at Brads we also got to go on an overnight hike to a extremely secluded beach at Cedar Bay. To get there we hiked for 3 hours through thick rainforest jungle, up and over a saddle that required ropes to help the decent, and over a mile of jagged rocks along the coast, but once we finally arrived it made it all worth it. The beach was incredible with its fresh water streams, total privacy, and all the coconuts you could eat. The next day we ate breakfast, went for a swim and then headed back to through the jungle to get to a point near the mouth of the Bloomfield River where brad would pick us up in his dingy. We hiked back over the rocks and saddle and then that’s where it got a little tricky. The trail that we were supposed to follow had been severely overgrown and terribly marked, later we found out that there really wasn’t a trail to be followed, we were just supposed to keep walking East until we hit the ocean whatever way we could. So needless to say we got a little lost, even though it was just over a kilometer to get out to the beach it took us over 2.5 hours. At one point we were walking in a swamp along Fitz Creek and I saw the largest Crocodile I had spotted yet, it must have been at least 17 feet long, at that point John and I decided that we need to get on some higher ground and out of the swamp. Shortly thereafter we made it to the beach and had a relaxing 2 hour long walk until Brad picked us up.

Over the course of our stay at Brads we took on a bunch of different jobs including cementing posts for a trailer, making stairs, weeding plants, fixing crab pots, digging holes, planting, getting loads of rocks, dirt and gravel, and creating wire frames to protect his fruit trees from wild horses. The entire process was great and Brad said that we were excellent workers getting done twice the work in half the time compared to other helpers. On Wednesday we said goodbye to Brad and were picked up at his dock to stay with Mike and Sigang who live just a little south of Brad in the Daintree Rainforest in a beautiful house only accessible by boat. Mike says he is going to take us snorkeling and spear fishing for fish and lobsters. I can’t wait to try it out. I hope all is going well for everyone back home.

Love you guys,

John

Our First Host

So after a couple days staying at a backpackers hostel John and I booked a bus ride up to Degarra to stay with Brad Gould, our first host. The bus we took was totally off road capable which was great because on the road north through the rain forest we drove through three large streams and some really rocky terrain, nothing like Septa in Philly. Within the first couple of hours Brad took us out on one of his boats where we saw a six foot female Croc and also picked up a couple of crabs from some pots he had set out earlier. We then came back and did a couple of light chores around his house, which reminds me of my Aunt Martha and Uncle Robert’s place in San Diego. He lives on a ten-acre plot that runs right up to the shore of the Bloomfield River right near the mouth of the Pacific Ocean. On his property he has a variety of exotic fruit trees, three rope swings, an outside compostable toilet, ping-pong table, Xbox Kinect, and a above ground pool (unfilled though). Right now Brad just got back from some other work he does and were about to go collect some gravel in his truck. So far this looks like it is going to be a great time here and I can’t wait to see what happens next.