Oh yes, back to the blog. So on the Friday morning before Easter, Lisa and I started our escape. Lisa awoke early so she did some additional checking on our destination hotel, the Thala Beach Lodge and found a review from someone complaining that they had to walk eight minutes to get to the main reception/restaurant complex. This was not a good sign, as when we last wrote about escaping from Sydney, we covered Lisa’s damaged hamstring. Nonetheless, we caught a taxi to the Sydney domestic airport, checked in, learned that we were on a pair of corporate tickets and could have taken the much speedier grey carpet line instead on ‘E’ ticket line, and started a very long hike to the gate. I thought several times that Lisa might give in to the pain, I even offered to have us turn around and head back home, but she insisted that she wasn’t going to spend this weekend, Easter Weekend, in bed in Sydney. We boarded our Virgin Blue airline with Lisa propping her leg across my thigh to keep it elevated and away we went. The flight took about 3 hours to arrive at the Cairns airport (CNS). It was here that we realized that the Cairns airport was a lot like most airports in tropical zones such as Mexico beaches, Hawaiian Islands, etc. I think Lisa was really wishing she had popped an Ibuprofen pill or two about 30 minutes before we landed.
Taxis in Cairns seem to have a bad reputation and it would be an expensive cab ride from the airport to Thala Beach Lodge, so we had the lodge book us on the very popular bus line operated by Sun Palm. Their desk is in baggage claim.
About 45 minutes after we finally had a full bus and left the airport, we arrived at our lodge. from our place to Port Douglas is about another 15 minutes. As you get closer to Port Douglas, the more resort hotels, apartment, etc start appearing, On the bright side, even though Port Douglas is mainly supported by the tourist and vacation trades, there aren’t a ton of 20 story resort towers that you would find in a Miami, a Cancun etc. Of course, eventually the hotel conglomerates will succeed in buying enough sway in local politics to get the zoning laws changed—It just hasn’t happened yet. As a matter of fiction or fact, one of our bus drivers told us that was a swath of land that the developers really wanted to concrete, but local government has been refusing to allow a bridge to be built to it. So Port Douglas, although very commercial, still has a small town feel and I didn’t see a McDonalds, a Subway, or a Starbucks. I’m not saying they aren’t there, just that I didn’t see any.
