I had no idea, honestly.   Yes we have traveled a bunch and gone to some tourist sites, but I truthfully didn’t know that we were the stereotypical tourist in a beach town.   I think its because we’ve never actually spent a week in a beach town together.   But wow, we caught up fast.   

The first couple days were lazy.   Sleep in, read and nap on the beach, walk to dinner, repeat.   It was glorious.   And then my husband got itchy to drive.   Fine, we went to explore the rainforest and Wujal Wujal waterfall. But on the way home, after hours of driving and hiking and watching for birds and roos and whatnot, he pulled off on the side of the road in front of this glorious entrance and announce we were going to take a gator tour.  [Ed. note: crocodile tour, thank you very much.]

We paid way too much money to join a large pontoon and spent an hour going up and down the Daintree River.  The captain told us we were here at the wrong time and there probably aren’t any gators…information that would have been nice $56 ago honestly.   But he did his part and hunted the likely “spots”…and then he found one.   I think.   Look, we’ve seen these creatures in Africa where they are 15 feet long and a few feet wide [Ed. note: 5 meters long, 1 meter wide. We haven’t used “feet” in months].   They are hard to miss and they encourage you to stay far, far away. This so called croc sitting up on the river bank as about 15 inches long.   Seriously, here is a totally zoomed in picture, tell me if you actually spot him!

The croc tour was basically a bust.   On the way back into shore, another boat was stopped in the center of the water and we creeped up on them to see the croc they spotted…then scared it and made it go under the water for ages.  So we “saw” a croc, but it wasn’t nearly as menacing or up close and personal as the awesome entrance led me to believe….and I had seen a similar entrance before the Thailand Tigers so my expectations had definitely been set…

Thankfully, we weren’t done caving in to totally touristy things quite yet.    Another morning when we should have been reading on the beach, we decided instead to go visit the Cairns tropical zoo [Ed. note: who doesn’t want to go on a zoo adventure?].  I have no idea when I last went to a zoo.   Okay, lie, we had a half tour a couple years ago when we scoped out the panda pavilion as a possible wedding reception site, but that was research not a trip.   We were totally geeking out.   The Boy got to cuddle a kangaroo.   He claims it didn’t count, as it wasn’t in the wild, but the kangaroo tried to nibble on his ear, twice, so I say they are halfway to a committed relationship.

The real reason we came to the zoo, however, was to have yet another up close animal encounter.   What can I say, we’ve become addicted.  [Ed. note: they let you cuddle a 1 year old koala!!!] So when they offered us the chance to hug a koala (one of the other things in Australia my husband had me convinced could kill me because have you ever seen a picture of a wet koala?!?) in a safe environment and for only $20 we had to jump on it.   I promise, at home we aren’t total suckers…we only cave to people with an accent!