Cairns Day Two and Three

It's pretty easy to get into the slow walk.  Our real sightseeing starts tomorrow (Saturday) when we do the whole Kuranda thing, then Sunday up to Port Douglas and the Daintree,  Monday over to Fiztroy Island on the reef.  In the meantime we've stepped down quite a few notches the last two days. Compared to our usual frenetic Sydney inner west Enmore life, we're chilled out.  Haven't done too much, walked around, had some drinks and food. A prawn stabbed me in the thumb when I was peeling it to eat and that feels a bit pesky.  But after all, I ate that prawn and it tasted great and it must have been worse for the prawn first up.  The pool yesterday morning looked enticing when we checked it out.


The pool yesterday morning

It looks quite appealing

I love the tropics.  The plants are so huge.




Around the corner from the pool is a tropical garden

Green and red

What an amazing palm



Giants


We had a great breakfast yesterday morning which got us through until about 2:30pm.  Then we had tapas for lunch.  I'm not sure this picture looks so great but the food and the Asahi beer was good.  That was calamari with wasabi-pea infusion, stuffed mushrooms, and prawns with mango salsa.  Too good.

Tapas and Asahi

Last night we went to the Cairns Reef Casino.  I don't think you can take photos in a casino, so I didn't.  However I did take some beer coasters and this morning I discovered I still had $55 worth of $5 chips in my bag.  I must have had too much champagne to forget those chips - now I have to go back and cash them in.



The lost chips

So, this morning (late, like 11:30) we were feeling a bit rough.  Luckily we had some freezing cold Sapporo in the fridge.  Thank God for that.

Icy Cold

It felt like a good idea to go to the pool to clear the head.

Sunburn coming on

But it got a bit hot.  So we needed a mojito.  Looks a bit muddled and blurred, but it was a mojito after all.

Mint, rum, lime juice, sugar, soda water, ice.

After about 2 hours we left the pool.  We did some shopping.  It was quite laid back.  Afterwards we had this.

There's champagne in there

The champagne was chilled on ice right up to the brim of that bucket, and the glasses were frosty.  I think the strawberries don't even need an explanation, so I won't attempt one.

The one thing I forgot to mention was that NSW won the second State of Origin match on Wednesday night 16-12. And because we support NSW (the Blues), and we are actually in Queensland, we were right in the heart of "football enemy territory"!  The front page of the Cairns Post shows how tough these guys are.

And the back page....our Blues Boys are pretty happy. The decider is yet to go, in three weeks.