April 1st, 2025

Happy to be in port after 4 sea days. We did have some rough weather for a couple of the. sea days. Pouring rain and very bumpy. They closed off all the open decks for 2 of the days due to the rough weather.

The grill during one of the downpours.

There is only 1 lady who has showed up for Mah Jongg on the sea days. She says she knows how to play with 2 players but does not like it so that is not an option. I doubt I will try again this cruise. So with no Mah Jongg I have been doing lots of reading.

We docked in Cairns at 10am but immigration took quite awhile. There is a lot of crew leaving from this port since we did not make Sydney and all of their luggage had to be checked. They brought dogs on board to check for drugs and 1 of the dog handlers was telling us that her dog just got taught a new skill and that was being able to smell large sums of money. After the ship inspection was done everyone had to get off floor by floor for a face to face with immigration. Since we knew it would be late morning before we were able to get off we decided to do room service breakfast and then we figured we would skip lunch and do dinner in town.

We remembered some of this port from our visit last year and first stop was to pick up our tickets for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef on the 3rd. Next stop was to find the hotel where our tour will pick us up tomorrow to take us into the rainforest and visit a waterfall by 4×4. While we were walking into town we saw a bunch of really large birds and they almost looked like vultures.

I took a picture of them all on the ground and then later got a close up of one of them and looked it up and it is a black red-tailed cockatoo. You can see the bit of red in the one flying away in the first picture. They were huge.

Our next stop was to a large mall that has 2 department stores and 2 grocery stores attached to it. The appeal of the mall was that it was air conditioned and Cairns is very hot and quite humid and that’s coming from people who live in Florida. We wandered the mall for a couple of hours and then headed back to the ship around 4pm.

This sign was outside one of the grocery stores we went into.

One of the buildings in town. The town sort of reminds you of the wild west.

We cooled off on the ship for an hour and then headed back to the mall. We had found a movie theater and they had a showing of Captain America at 7pm and we decided to go. We had dinner in the food court, McDonalds for Kathy and KFC for me. Since the movie has been out for quite awhile there were not many of us in the theatre. After the movie we walked back to the ship.

Our ship at night.