Earlie Beah on the Coral Sea

This is BEACH CULTURE!

We had a nice low key day so far. It's now around 5 in the afternoon and I have made sure Nina and I have done as little as possible. We are here for a week and that will be good.
We walked down by the shore of the Coral sea this morning and saw...Dolphins! A school that was touring the bay and the boats, shopping I guess.

We saw tons of Sulphur Crested Cockatoos. A whole mob of crows. These crows caw sort of like the ones at home, except they draw out the last few caws into one long gurgled noise. Tons of lorikeets and herons, small grey birds with blue bills (have to look up the name) and a weird bird that looked like it was not well, because it had no feathers on its head, but that's the way he's supposed to be! We had Oz turkeys walking on the front lawn of the hostel this morning!

I ran into an interesting problem today in thet the Oz bsnk in this little tourist town would not change Traveller cheques! I had to go to an exchange place to do this.

Laying around in the shade and reading and resting was the order of the day till later when we went shopping for what we would get for our dinner. Chicken breasts today, with a light thai sauce with corn, peas on cous cous. Oh yes, and salad too. We really enjoy cooking up these little feasts in the evening. There is always a rush on the kitchen between 5 and 7 for all the kids to go eat then rush out to party. I've never seen so much pasta being cooked in one place in my life. It is the lifeblood of the young and broke.
The kids are all pretty serious partiers here though I think it is a school holiday right now, sort of like March break.

There is a Saturday market tomorrow morning that we will go to after breakfast. The coffe culture is good here too, but not to the same degree as in NZ.

We are going to go watch the sunset tonight on the beach. Sunset in the tropics happens about 6:30, so then we will have dinner after that. I am feeling a nice dopey feeling. Getting into the relax thing I guess. I get so addicted to doing things that it's hard to give up and really do nothing.

The train trip from Cairns to Earlie Beach was really interesting. It was a long day, starting at 9:15 in the morning and getting off at 9pm. The bus into Earlie Beach took 25 minutes and when we had settled our stuff in our room, we went for a walk. This means we went to bed after ten, fairly unusual for us. But we both slept well, so that was good.

On the train, I got to see the landscape of Australia change, ever so slightly. We went from Tropical rainforest to a Sub-Tropical type of climate. It's stil warm but not as blistering. The woods are very different too. The trees are more separated from each other. The mountains of the Great Divide are lower still and we see more flat land with estuarial floodplain stuff going on. It looks a lot drier too, when it comes to looking inland. I saw a whole bunch of kangaroos in a field with the Brahma type cattle they run here.

There is so much sugar cane here. I think it is the third largest export in Oz, but don't quote me.
We've seen tea plantations and I've even seen coffee being grown. Lots of fruit farms and banana plantations and this is only what I could see from the train.
The next leg of the journey, which will be from Earlie Beach (Proserpine train station) down to Hervey bay. We will do that leg on the night train, with a sleeper! How exciting is that? I haven't done that since...I can't remember when!

Before all that though, I'm hoping to do a tall ship day trip. I think.