Watering Hole

No breakfast included in our hotel tariff! What a shocker. Instead we took ourselves off for a coffee - and then I had a second while the SK marked a few exam papers on t’internet. Our plan to leg it out northwards first thing had been subverted in any case by the discovery the previous evening of a Tommy Bahama shop, and more particularly by the slight of a slim mannequin in the window sporting a pink shirt. That’s lovely, the SK had cooed, you should get yourself a pink shirt. I’ve never ever had a pink shirt, I replied with a laugh, gawdsakes no. I’ll buy you it, she quickly replied: you should have a pink shirt.
Clearly my lack of a pink shirt said that I was some sort of unreconstructed man. Hmmm, I’ll try it on tomorrow if I must, I reluctantly and foolishly agreed.
And so, that is how we finally came to head north at 11am with my pink shirt, two pairs of stylish shorts suitable for slim boys and a pair of sand coloured deck shoes with white piping. All on my own credit card. How did that happen?
Goodbye Cairns and a gorgeous drive north by the sea - proper palm fringed huge beaches, with hardly a soul on them, till we reached Port Douglas which is very luvverly. The sort of place where pink shirts and white shorts are de rigueur. After noodles and prawns it was onward under a hot sun through sugar cane fields to the Daintree Ferry crossing where I blethered awhile with the wiry tanned guy behind us driving a pickup. As friendly as every Aussie we’d met, he’d actually moved here from Leeds nearly fifty years ago. You know what’s so great here, he said drawing on his roll up, it’s like every nationality under the sun is here. And then he gave us a couple of Mangosteens, after demonstrating how to eat them.
So, to this amazing remote place with a few cabins and a superb secluded swimming hole in the creek. The weather had got more and more oppressive and then, just as we waded into the cool waters, thunder boomed out overhead and the rain started lashing down, brilliant and invigorating. Quite unforgettable.