Cairns & Darwin

We're now on the second of 5 segments of our  cruise and there are 587 passengers.  16 different nationalities are aboard with 413 US and 74 Canadians.

We are now dining with a friend we met a couple of years ago on our cruise to the South Pacific.  She is on her 5th World Cruise and is booked for next year.

3 sea days from Sydney including Valentines day.  Princess celebrated by having an extensive brunch and formal dinner.  The highlight of the day was the Captain performing renewal of wedding vows for any interested passengers.  We were one of maybe 100 couples who participated.  The passenger choir first sang and then the Captain took over.  Many passengers obviously anticipated this as they had red apparel to wear.  One couple was dressed all in white and she even had the head wreath popular in the South Pacific islands.

CAIRNS -  Day 27  Home of The Great Barrier Reef - the world largest -stretches  some 1250 miles along the Queensland coast and is made up of more than 2000 islands and 3000 reefs - 90 minutes by high speed catamaran.  Cairns also serves as the gateway to one of the world's ancient rainforests with vegetation as impressive as the Amazon - has the largest concentration of ancient flowering plants in the world.  Pop - 144.  Temps at this time of year 90 to over 100 and very humid.  Cairns is also home of the Kuranda railway and many white sand beaches.

A hot and humid day in Cairns (95 with close to 100% humidity).  We did none of the tourist things as we've done the reef, tram and Kuranda railway when we were here before.  It was a day to get a haircut and buy wine.

DARWIN - day 31 -another 3 days at sea from Cairns.  Situated on the Timor Sea.  Located 2100 miles from Singapore and serves as a gateway to countries  like Indonesia in Southeast  Asia.  Pop about 135k.   Climate tropical which means it has  a wet and dry season.  Temps around 98 with high humidity this time of year and frequent showers.  Darwins - known as Top E nders drink over 60 gallons of beer per person per year.  Even more interesting is  the fact that they compete in the annual beer can regatta, a race featuring boats, rafts and other vessels made out of beer cans.

Darwin town center is cleaner and nicer than Cairns.  Len and a fellow he met in the gym did their version of a pub crawl - pubs are plentiful and he says the  beer was good, especially with the high temps.  More Aussie wine was on the shopping list.

1- some of the Whit Sunday islands on the way to  Cairns
2 -skyline of Darwin from the ship
3- sunset leaving Darwin