How does that scuba thing work again?

Now that it was daylight again, we could really appreciate our accommodations in Cairns. We decided to rent a room in a B&B-type of place. The owners, Terry and Robyn, were extremely nice folks. They manage their own commercial construction company, so obviously their own home was quite comfortable as well.

 

One aspect we particularly enjoyed after our tramps in Uluru and the communal showers:  huge private whirlpool tub!

Ian also loved the fact that they were right in the jungle. We saw a large variety of wildlife just sitting around the house. Here's our outdoor breakfast area (so cute!)

And some of the visitors that would wander nearby as we ate…not naming this first one, but trust me that it was actually more cool than scary/eww-y.

Turkeys in Australia are much cooler than those in the US.

Enough about all the wildlife though. The only item on the agenda today was a scuba refresher course.  Our liveaboard company, the Cairns Dive Center, offered a free refresher the day before the trip -- I needed it. I'd only done that one Majorca/Barcelona trip after getting certified so this was my first big dive trip. Ian, with that week in the Florida Keys under his belt, probably needed it less.  It's not that I actually forgot my skills, but being able to try everything out in the pool just put me so much more at ease.  And it turns out that we'd arrived at a good time -- there are a few divemasters-in-training (Liz, Micha, and Andreas) at the Cairns Dive Center trying to get certified as guides, so we got a TON of personal attention.  All three of them were going to be on our liveaboard trip too; they informed us that they'd be offering their services as guides free-of-charge so that they could get more experience.  So we'll be seeing a lot more of them in the next couple days.

After the refresher, I somehow managed to convince Ian to ride bikes down to Cairns city.  Robyn had her son put together these brand new push-bikes (that's what they call them here, I suppose that makes sense, comparing them to motor-bikes) and opened up some brand new helmets as well. It was a GREAT ride down to the city. Nice breeze, mostly down-hill, good scenery around the Esplanade. We polished it off with a great dinner at the Raw Prawn -- figured out what crocodile was actually supposed to taste like and had some amazing kangaroo too.  The Esplanade also had some cute novelty stores.

As the sun set though, we realized to our dismay that our bikes did not have any lights...and that a lot of those cute bike paths that we'd ridden on did not have lights either. Hmmm...there might be more "pushing" than "biking."  We got home pretty exhausted.  Quick to bed...5:45AM pick-up tomorrow morning!