Hills

This weekend was a lot of fun. On Saturday we went into Cairns and went to Rusty's Market. It's basically a giant fruit and veggie stand with some other booths selling all sorts of things. I bought some basic veggies and more kiwi. Some of my friends decided to buy some tropical fruit to try. We tried paw paws, dragonfruit, and custard apples. I think I liked the paw paw the best, it tastes a lot like mango. Dragonfruit looks super cool but at least the one we got didn't have much flavor. Custard apples are kind of bizarre looking but actually taste pretty good, sort of like a mix of pineapple and apple. On Sunday we went for a hike.

We started our hike at about 11:30 without a clearly defined destination, I should have prepared more for being unprepared. Anyways, we hiked to the top of a hill and still had a good deal of afternoon ahead of us so we decided to continue up the saddleback trail. This turned out to be a longer hike than we had really anticipated. It was quite steep for a while. Also it went through a bunch of sugar cane which kept hitting everyone in the face. Then the track went back into the rainforest, which is beautiful. I loved hiking through the rainforest, but several plants didn't seem to want us there, we kept getting caught in things. Several of us have cuts and scratches from the spines on some of the plants. There were some excellent lookout points on the path. We were above the sky rail that goes up the hill which was pretty cool to see from there. Sometimes the trail was basically invisible and we had to hunt around looking for the next pink marker tied to a branch telling us which way the path supposedly took. Eventually we wandered out onto a highway. I'm not sure if that's actually where the path was supposed to end but we couldn't see where else it would go. Unfortunately, we had no idea where we were. Eventually we flagged a car down and asked. Apparently we were 5 km from Kuranda. This was a bit shocking because if we'd followed the road from where we started this would be an 18 km walk. The path that we took was more direct but a lot more steep. We didn't really want to rehike the trail that had taken us about 5 hours to take to this point so we started walking by the road to Kuranda. After about half an hour we came to Rainforestation, the place where I got to hold a koala in my first week here. It was closed but some employees were still there and we asked them for the number to call a taxi. We had to get a maxi taxi (which is basically a van) because there were 6 of us. It was fairly expensive but seemed better than walking the whole way back with no food. When we got back I was ravenous and ate a whole pizza.

I rested the next day and then had class again on Tuesday. In the afternoon someone talked me into running, luckily I seem to be getting back in shape pretty quickly but still, running up hills is kind of icky.