everything else...

Our homestay was great! The house was right in the middle of a beautiful field with countless rolling hills. We spent Monday relaxing and exploring the property and went to the neighbors’ platypus farm that evening and watched a group of platypus splash and play in their pond. We had spaghetti for dinner and played cards for hours that night. Sadly, we returned to the group the next morning and parted ways with our beloved family  The rest of that day we toured the nearby rainforest with a biologist and learned how detrimental tourism and pollution can be to environments such as that. We were taken to a reforestation project site and pulled weeds around deciduous plants to reduce the plant competition and ultimately increase the size of the Maby Rainforest. Surprisingly, it was a lot of fun, and with thirty people, we cleared a lot of land in little time. That night, we visited the home of a few Aboriginal people and had dinner. While there, we were taught how to properly throw a boomerang, (I still can’t get it to come back to me) and we all learned how to play the didgeridoo while sitting around the campfire. We spent the night in Yungaburra once again but Paul sadly wasn’t there to provide for us a good meal and some entertainment.
On Wednesday morning, we left Yungaburra around 11:30 and headed to Port Douglas! The drive was about two hours and we reached Ti Tree Apartments in the early afternoon. After a short discussion of class modules, we were assigned to our apartments which were used as vacation homes. They were really nice 2 bedroom apartments with a full kitchen, washer and dryer, and I even got the master bedroom (a whole bedroom to myself!! ) Brittany and I caught the bus into downtown Port Douglas that night and ate dinner at a nice restaurant and I had an amazing barramundi dish. We window shopped and bought ice cream before heading back to our apartment. Port Douglas is so incredibly pretty, a vacation spot with many nice resorts and countless unique restaurants. It has a great beach right along the rainforest, which is what makes it so unique.
The second day there, our bus didn’t pick us up for our Aboriginal dreamtime walk which was the very first time thus far that something hasn’t gone completely as planned. It was no big deal though and the group instead walked to the Rainforest Habitat Park which had koalas, kangaroos, crocodiles, cassowaries, and other animals unique to Australia. A lot of the students in our group got a picture taken holding an adorable koala but I wasn’t too keen on paying 16 bucks for it! We did get to feed the kangaroos and wallabees and enjoyed playing around with them. Our last day in Port Douglas, we had no class lectures or meeting and were free to spend it however we pleased. I started the day off with a run down the beach and later walked there with many other girls to spend the day in the sun. The ozone layer is so thin in Australia that after only about 3 hours, I had gotten way more sun than I needed and ended up being borderline sunburnt. I must admit that I am proud of myself for this only being the first time I have gotten too much sun and I have been here for almost three weeks, spending a majority of the days outdoors, and I’m really not that burnt at all! We took showers after the beach and headed back into town to meet up with a few other people for dinner. I had fish and chips…I feel so Aussie! We left the next morning and moved to our second to last destination of the course, Cape Tribulation. Because we were used to limited civilization and outside communication, after a ferry ride and a long bus ride through the Daintree Rainforest, we were not fazed by the small 5-person bedrooms we shared in a remote cabin. It was misleadingly called The Beach House, but yet had only 2 sets of bunk beds and a separate twin mattress. We had to trek to the bathrooms or community kitchen, and it was a good hike to the café and restaurant. It was however, right on a beautiful patch of beach, but we only had good weather on the first afternoon we arrived. Yes, believe it or not, it rains A LOT in the rainforest. Our first night there, we came across a 6-ft python laying across the sidewalk and fortunately the last one we saw. We were in Cape Tribulation for four nights and while there, we hiked, visited the Daintree Discovery Center, went on a gondola ride over the rainforest, planted trees as part of a reforestation project, and did a research project on leaf litter in the mangroves that we observed during our guided night walk. Hiking during the night is completely different than during the day, and we saw all kinds of insects, lizards, birds, and even an eel sliding by in a small creek. Because of the high prices of food in Australia, much less the even higher prices as we traveled farther away from civilization, I survived off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I bought at a grocery store. We enjoyed our stay, but with bad weather, we ran out of things to do and were happy to move on this morning.
We have reached our final destination of our Australian study abroad course. Cairns is a populated city right on the coast of the Pacific. It’s so hard to believe that the long anticipated study abroad session is almost complete! After our final afternoon, those that are continuing on to Fiji will have a free weekend in Sydney and then fly to Fiji on Sunday for another “class”. I have finally started catching on to the Australian way and I hardly even notice an Australian accent anymore. I can now safely cross the street but still sometimes run into people on the sidewalks, forgetting to stay on the left side rather than the right. Tonight we are heading into the city to eat dinner, buy some souvenirs at the famous night markets, and make the most of the last few days we have in Australia.