So basically…

I went to Cairns (in Australia) with my family recently and I want to share some of my favourite pictures.

I compressed all of the pictures and videos a bit because there were so many of them. I’ve left higher resolution files here.

Drone shots

I’ll show these first to grab your attention.

So we were walking along the beach at Palm Cove and I saw that the tide was pretty low that afternoon. It was so low that I could see land between the two islands in the ocean, Double Island and Haycock Island.

I was curious what that looked like from above and if it was now possible to walk from one of the islands to the other. Google Earth didn’t have imagery taken during low tide, so I hurried back home and picked up my drone so I could find out myself.

I flew it from the beach towards the island until we could just barely see the drone, then I took some photos, videos, and a panorama.

It seemed like the two islands were still separate, but it was damn cool to see that through my own pictures.

I probably could’ve gotten closer to the islands if I took off from further down the beach, near the jetty.

Below is a screenshot of the flight log, the flight path is in blue and I think the green circle is the distance limit that’s hard-coded into the drone. I didn’t end up going that far from land actually.

Green stuff on the rocks at the beach

When we were up at Port Douglas, the family stopped at a playground as they were fatigued from all our wandering around town. I, however, had no need for rest. I wanted to occupy myself, but I was too mature for the playground there; I am a very serious and grown-up adult now.

In the distance, I saw a bunch of green rocks on the beach.

“Now that doesn’t make any sense”, I thought. That looks like moss, but moss normally grows in moist and shady places, not on sunny shores.

As I cautiously approached the weird moss, I realised that it wasn’t actually moss (gasp).

It was actually seaweed!

Well of course it was seaweed, I was on a beach. I don’t know why that surprised me…

Here’s another picture.

Woah clouds look like that now

My sister wanted to go out for an early morning walk with me once, at 6am or something like that. Her goal was to see the sunrise from the beach.

I don’t normally get out of bed that early, let alone step foot outside the house, but I said sure. Just this once, since we’ve come all the way to Cairns.

As soon as we got to Palm Cove Beach, I noticed that the horizon looked strange.

It was as if the distant mountains that we saw during the day extended to cover the entire horizon.

I blinked twice, then realised those were actually just low clouds in front of the soon-to-rise sun. Because I never go for walks this early on the beach, this was the first time I’ve ever seen something like this. It was beautiful.

For a brief few minutes, there was also a small hole in the clouds right in front of the rising sun. It looked like a magic door thing.

We both sat down next to the jetty and waited for the sun to rise. It didn’t take long, but I enjoyed the little time we spent waiting. Sitting there in front of the waves on a chilly and bright morning had very peaceful vibes.

After the sunrise, the clouds that detailed the horizon faded away and only the mountains remained. I’m super glad to have experienced that view. Thanks, sis.

Bird world

There was a bird world at Kuranda called Birdworld Kuranda and we went there.

I don’t have much to say about this one, but it was very cool. I’ve been to a few of these bird sanctuary places before and this one was definitely up there.

I think the same company that runs this attraction also owns the butterfly sanctuary next-door. That’s also a very cool place. I’d say both of them are worth a visit.

If you were to go here, I’d highly recommend you buy a bag of bird feed for $3 from the counter. Before we did, the birds didn’t care about our presence at all. The Birdworld Kuranda experience is completely different if they notice you have food. They’ll be all over you.

There was also this lone turtle in the water below.

I felt kind of bad for them. They were the slowest animal in the whole sanctuary and probably the only one that couldn’t fly ;(

Assorted pics

I don’t have any cool stories for the rest of these images, but I found them neat.

Beaches

Greenery

Crikey this post is long. I’ll end it here, but there’s more pictures here if you liked the ones above.