Cairns is amazing, at least to us having arrived from Vanuatu. It feels plush, colourful, and very cosmopolitan. The infrastructure and landscaping is stylish and looks brand new. We have been nowhere like it for a very long time.

Cairns sits on a massive plateau like a saucer at the bottom of the surrounding hills so walking is easy and a pleasure, the wide boulevards and pavements encourage ambling about. There are restaurants for every taste particularly for the sea food enthusiast, open- air restaurants with couches, chairs and tables spilling onto generous verandahs. I'm not a great fan of ice-cream but golly they are good here. The Friday and Saturday market is exceptional, high quality produce being sold by mainly by Japanese stall holders but many other Asian nationalities too. It is difficult to buy because there is so much choice and all beautifully presented looking as if polished. We indulged and had to arrange the fridges like a jigsaw puzzle.

In the morning the waters in the lagoon had receded and bare sand stretched out into the sea but the swimmers were active in the coast side pool constructed with its own small beaches, child friendly slopes and a long shoal into the deep end like so many of the beaches here. Pavements were clean, everything sparkles – well the sun has been constant since we arrived. In the evening streets were busy.  The market changed into a foodies delight with stalls of every description: pizzas, pies, quiches, sausages and meaty things, sea food, fish, fruits, veggies, smoothies, sodas, juices and ices, coffees and then the alcohol. We went with a Chinese stall. At home we don't eat at Chinese restaurants, the food never appeals, but here the wide variety of fish and sea food dishes is amazing and their traditional sauce based dishes very good. Strolling down the busy streets at night was most enjoyable, many people, many languages and many styles. Tourism in Cairns seems to be booming.

Leaving Cairns we became aware again of the fires in the rainforest on the hillsides spreading out from the harbour. They had been burning for days causing a thin smoke cloud to drift out to sea. There is an Aboriginal settlement adjacent to Cairns and these, we were told, were their fires.

These fires continued along the coast. We believe most of them are started deliberately to burn off scrub and encourage new growth. Certainly one of the islands we had intended to stop at was well alight, but lit by the wardens as part of their annual ecological regime. Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem in much of Australia with many plants requiring fire to germinate. The trick apparently is to light fires frequently so the the heat does not get too intense and burn the mature trees. Some of the eucalyptus trees have a thickened coating of bark for the first 10 feet of the trunk that is not shed as on the rest of the tree, this protects them from these bush fires.

Perhaps the locals also light them to keep warm. Especially at night, the weather has been decidedly chilly requiring long trousers duvets and fleeces ….at 15° South! Something to do with cool air coming straight from the far south due to a particular combination of pressure systems.