Cairns is an extremely small city that put me in mind of a southern California beach town. It's kinda flat, filled with stuff for tourists like bars and restaurants and surf shops and cheap motels, with lots of palm trees and stucco, but not much to do. It's really more of a jumping-off point for excursions to the rainforest or the reef, rather than a destination in itself. I'm sure that our perspective would have changed a bit if we'd be able to get out of the downtown area and explore some of the residential neighborhoods, but we were happy to just spend the day wandering around and having some down time after our three days of swimming.
Breakfast was at Fusion, a funky-crunchy-hippie-veggie place with a little too much of an alt-medicine vibe for its own good, but with lots of food options and freshly squeezed juice. Unfortunately, a somewhat inept waitress managed to spill the entirety of Michael's coffee and a good bit of my carrot-orange-ginger juice onto our table and all over my (white, of course) purse. Great start to the day. Well, at least the food was good, and we got to eat outside on the sunny patio.
After breakfast, we took a walk around the downtown area and along the Esplanade to the Lagoon, which is a very impressive bit of civic architecture. The beach immediately off of Cairns is not very nice, consisting mostly of muddy flats and a sad lack of sand. So the city of Cairns built an artificial beach/pool area, the Lagoon, elevated a few meters off the natural beach and cutting along the side of the harbor and into the downtown area. There are sandy, beachy parts to sit on, and clear water for swimming, and lots of grass and trees around it for relaxing.
There are also several dozen grills surrounding the Lagoon and stretching down the Esplanade, with attached picnic tables, which you can cook on at basically at any time of the day. I'm not sure if you have to reserve the grill areas in advance, but they did seem to be very popular with the locals. One of them even had a bouncy castle set up nearby for a kid's birthday.
At the far end of the Esplanade, near the ferry terminal, are a number of large hotels that we headed towards in a bid to catch a taxi. We didn't manage to (maybe taxis frequenting hotels is an American thing?), but our eye was caught by a sign advertising a farmers' market inside the mall attached to one of the particularly posh hotels. So we took a peek. It was great. Unfortunately, we couldn't buy any of the local produce, tempting though it was, but there was certainly plenty of it, including fresh fruit and veg from the surrounding area, fresh eggs, homemade sausages, etc. Similar to the market in Sydney, there was a stand selling condiments made from bush ingredients, and we were tempted by a spicy bush plum chili paste until reading the ingredients and discovering that there was fish sauce in it. Ain't that always the way. But a little further on there was a booth selling handmade snack bars and handing out samples. We stopped to try a few, and ended up buying two variety packs of 5 bars each. The brand is called Yummy, and they're made mostly with dates and milk powder, plus various nuts and dried fruit pieces for flavoring. I'm particularly fond of the mocha and macadamia one, and Michael likes the coconut and crunchies. Not sure what makes up the "crunchies" part, but it is, as advertised, yummy.
There was also a crocodile-hunter-type guy at the center of the market, doing a demo of some native birds and animals for the kiddies (and interested adults). We weren't able to hear most of what he was saying, since we were too far away, but we did hear a bit about this guy:
It's an eastern quoll, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Unfortunately, they're being out-competed for their natural niche by feral cats and foxes, both introduced by us stupid white people.
After some wandering, we did manage to hail a taxi and went out to the Cairns Botanic Gardens for a walk through the jungle rainforest and the mangrove forest on the banks of a saltwater lake.
There have been known to be crocodiles hanging out here, but we didn't see any. We did see quite a few of these funky-looking Australian brush turkeys, though:
We walked from the Gardens to the hotel along the edge of the harbor. The plan for the afternoon was to check email and do a little maintenance and some blog posting, but wouldn't you know it --- the DSL was down for the entire hotel and they couldn't get anyone out to fix it until Monday. Really, people, don't you know we're addicted? Well, that's the Queensland laid-back attitude for you. So we found a nearby Internet cafe instead and took care of the most pressing issues (for $6 an hour), and decided to leave the rest of it for Brisbane. Yet another reason why the blog posting has been severely delayed, but I'm sure you've all been coping with the withdrawal just fine.
In the evening, we walked along the Esplanade to watch the sunset, and then went down to Ochre, a restaurant serving upscale bush tucker and other dishes made with native ingredients. They didn't have a table for us right away, so we put our name down and went to the pub a few doors over for a pint of James Squire while we were waiting. When we got back to the restaurant, our table still wasn't ready (we'd kinda forgotten it was Saturday), so we sat at their bar and made a good start on a bottle of Shiraz/Viognier blend from Innocent Bystander while we were waiting. It was fairly light for an Aussie Shiraz (presumably from the addition of the Viognier) and a little bit spicy, which worked very well with the food despite being an entirely introduced plant. Maybe there's something to that whole terroir thing after all.
Dinner was fantastic, and completely unlike anything I've ever had before. We started with the wattle seed damper loaf, which was served with peanut oil and a blend of native seeds called dukka for dipping. I'm not sure if I could recognize a wattle seed if I saw it, but luckily there was a guide to the native foods at the back of the menu. Wattle seeds are ground into a flour which tastes a bit like the grains that we're used to but also a bit like coffee. For our mains, we both had their veggie tasting plate: a papaya salad with sprouted seeds and chili; wild yam and wild spinach gratin; quinoa (not native, obviously, but grown locally) with mango relish; and a mixed veg stir-fr with green beans, bok choi, and shiitake mushrooms in a light soy broth. I was almost totally full from dinner but had saved a little pocket for dessert. We had the house speciality, the wattle seed pavlova with meringue topping in a sauce made from native citrus, with bush plum sorbet on the side. Yummy. Some lemon-myrtle tea helped with the digestion.
Unfortunately, that marked the end of our north Queensland vacation. When we got back to the room (slowly), we packed everything up in preparation for our flight out to Brisbane.
Flora of the day: Nymphaea violacea, an Australian water lily:
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