The Queensland area -- gateway to the Great Barrier Reef

Cairns (say Canns) tropical and beautiful

I found the flower children.  They’re on the beaches in their see-through gause dresses, holding naked toddlers and trekking about with their guy in shorts and barefoot.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, has a cell phone.  Some shoeless, bummy looking person will drag a cell phone out of a plastic bag and start talking!

A nice lady I met at Arie, made me have a renewed appreciation of my life.  She is a widow, her husband did not have a Pension, so she is on their form of Social Security.  She receives approx $600 Aust per money and if she works and earns anything, she has to forfeit 50 cents for every dollar she earns.  If you do have a pension, you can only take out part of the money, under an extremely complicated system.  I get the impression you can’t take out enough for a house or anything costly.  She lives in an old “cane cutter’s shack” on the Cane Farm her daughter and husband own/manage.  She does not have enough money to travel and I met her on a trip she won as a prize.  Oh, they do have a form of Medicare, but I didn’t get the impression it covered as much as in the US.



Went to a restaurant last night that was typical Australian.  You place and pay for your food order, then go to the adjacent bar and hang about drinking until they call you to pick up your order.  I started talking to some football coaches who were in town for some games.  We had some good conversations until they brought up Clinton.  They had big laughs about Clinton’s follies, and sometimes I would say I was from Canada to escape the teasing.  I had to endure questions about the KKK too.



There are some wonderful places to see in this area.




Another piece of Australia map showing the area I am
writing about.  There is more than I can ever cover or
show pictures of.

Tourist buses are everywhere.  There were more people than I expected in this jungle.  They were from all over the world.

The Skyrail was very exciting.  There were many Chinese couples treated to this trip after one of those weddings of hundreds -- they had never met each other until the marriage.  Got this from a person acting as interpreter.  They were having a wonderful time.

The Great Barrier Reef is next (I can hardly wait to show you this)