Flower Power - our visit to the Cairns Botanic Gardens

Last week Alex & I donned our walking shoes (well Alex did anyway) and headed north of our place to check out Cairns’ Botanic Gardens.  Cairns is a pretty small city so our expectations were low but it was beautiful with tons of tropical flowers.  My Grandma has the greenest thumb of anyone I know and her garden blossoms with an endless number of flowers every summer but none like this, so please bear with me while I post all these pretty flower photos for her to check out (since she’s now reading the blog!). 

This flower looked like it was made out of tissue paper

Not sure what this was but I thought it was pretty

Another one I just thought was cool

Jack in the pulpit

Jade vine - one of only three green flowers in nature

Pitcher plants - so perfect they seemed fake

Venus fly traps!

Even the trees were blooming...

Then there was this weird thing.  Is it even a flower?

After wandering around the Gardens for a while, we continued our jaunt on the nearby hiking trails that Alex had scoped out the week before.  He’d warned me before we left that it was rugged but I shrugged it off and dressed casually in my top siders.  That was a seriously bad decision as my feet were killing me shortly after the hike started and, over an hour later, we were still walking with no end in sight… 

Alex’s work at the car wash has honed his fitness and he’s in peak physical condition.  Sadly my time at the bar has had more of the opposite effect, so I was lagging behind, winded, feet hurting and wishing I had never agreed to hike the harder trail after we’d already walked a few miles that day.  You get the sad picture, right?  Well then you can imagine my excitement when we got to a point where I knew we were almost to the end.  I was ecstatic and caught a sudden second wind and began running down the stairs towards the start of the trail with Alex casually meandering behind me.  At the last stair, right before I was about to put my foot down, I noticed the long brown snake slithering on the path.  I screamed bloody murder, turned on my heel and high stepped it all the way back to the top where Alex was standing, half looking at me in horror wondering what was wrong, half laughing hysterically because I’m pretty sure my eyes were as big as saucers and I don’t think he’d ever seen me move so fast.  I want to share, as an aside, that Alex & I took a First Aid course here and we spent a long time on pressure immobilization techniques for snake bites (and something I’ve never even heard of in any previous FA course back home), because, as the instructor was so kind to point out, Australia has eight of the ten deadliest snakes in the world and all of them can be found where we’re staying – so you know I was imagining the worst as I nearly stepped on the snake.  Alex is still making fun of me for that day but I think my reaction was pretty standard (he’d have screamed like a girl too he just doesn’t want to admit it)!

On our way down the ‘mountain’, we got this nice view of Cairns then headed back home.  Isn't it pretty with the water, green space & mountains in the background?