Hi
This is Giddy. We are currently in Darwin, Australia population <175k. My travel partners Jim & Bonnie have been busy doing nothing. We started this adventure to go around the entire island or continent of Australia. We left Sydney on Feb 14th on the cruise ship Brilliance of the Seas and today it is already the 23rd. We have another 25 days before we arrive back in Sydney and several more ports to visit.
Our first port was Brisbane, and I was hoping to see Uncle Kris and Cousin Smit again from West Putford, England. We learned the proper pronouncement of the city Brisbane which is (Bris-been not bris-bane). The interesting thing is the cruise port is approx. an hour away from the city with traffic. The location of the port is in the mud flats of the Brisbane River next door to the sewer plant. Most say the odor is from the mud flats, but I question. I never experienced mud that smells this bad.
However, we experienced liquid sunshine on our port day. As quoted by Karl in Caddyshack, “I don’t think the heavy stuff’s gonna come down for quite a while”, Jim stated there is enough rain falling you can see waves on the deck as the boat slowly rolls left to right and back. So, Jim wasn’t interested in taking me to the City Botanical Park.
I decided to hop off the boat and was immediately swamped with all the rain. I finally made it to the park. Uncle Kris kindly stated I was crazy to be out in all this rain. As I tried to make it back to the boat, I was stopped since I forget my Seapass card, and they would not leave me aboard. Luckly I was able to have security contact Jim & Bonnie and vouch for me. Finally, I was back and was able to be squeezed dried.
We spent several days at sea as the Ship’s captain notified us that he was trying to stay behind the cyclone. I always thought the captain wanted to catch up to it and not follow. We finally cruised into the port of Cairns (pronounced Can-es).
I stayed on board as Bonnie and Jim went into town for visiting the aquarium and had lunch at grill’d – a good burger and beer,
We been sailing a few days (3) and finally passed through the Torres Strait. Captain Cook passed through the strait and landed at Position Island to lay claim of the lands of Australia for Britian. The distance between New Guinea and Australia is only 80 miles wide, but the shipping channel is only 1200 ft wide. The captain made an announcement that people had to move towards the rear of the ship after dinner to ensure the bow did not scrap the bottom of the strait. The movement of people allowed the bow to raise slightly as we started passing through at 7:00. The ship only had six-foot clearance, between the strait bottom and the ship’s bottom. We safety made it through, no scraping sounds were heard. The Torres Strait is the passage from the Pacific Ocean to Indian Ocean. An interesting item is the strait has a current approx. 5-10 knots flowing from the Indian to Pacific Ocean.
After another day at sea, as I stated earlier, today we are in Darwin. It is hot 95 deg and very humid 85% so our walk to the Botanical gardens has been cancelled in the category of too hot. Jim and Bonnie went into the port and bought two shirts at a good price since they were the same price as in US but with the currency change difference +40% they became reasonable.
We are heading to lunch soon, so stay tuned folks for my next post.
Giddy