It's so cold here at the moment! During the day it's OK, it's like 24 C. But during the evening and night it can be 10 C..brrr! We sleep under two blankets!
It feels really weird, it's the dry season here, so pretty much always sunshine and the sun is still strong, but they call it winter. At the moment it's tourist season here and we see a lot of campervans and caravans on the road. People from Southern Australia come here for the sun and the warmth (in the winter...). The wind is cold and we wear sweaters when we go to the beach, but also our sunhats and sunglasses. The sun goes down early, around 17.30 o'clock, so that feels like wintertime in Europe. At the same time it is our summerholiday, but here the kids are still in school, no long summerholiday, only a two weeks winterholiday and their school year contunues again.
Right...'hoezo verwarring' would we say in Dutch :-)

That's enought about that, I wanted to share with you a bit of the amazing day we had today. We drove a little bit in the direction of the Outback (only 180 km) to Charters Towers. I don't think they even call it the Outback yet, I think that that oficially starts like 50 km further on the road.. But anyway for us it was already pretty impressive. Especially Charters Towers is like a whole different world. It was like walking through a Wild Western town. Charters Towers is actually known for it's gold rush in the 19th century, but we were more interested in the nature, architecture and the indigenous people who were taken from their land and families when the white people claimed the land because of its gold.
During our stay here in Australia we have learned a bit about the indigenous people of Australia and on every interesting place we visited we have been looking for information about the indigenous people of that particulair place. We have also talked to some aboriginals and Torres Straite Islanders and their stories are all very impressive. I can tell you more about that in another post. For now some pictures of today:

Cairns

We had an amazing time in Cairns! It was a real holiday with the whole family and a nice break from our stay here in Townsville. You can find our pictures here.

We drove to Cairns (it's about 450 km) and on the way we saw the landscape changing from brown and dry to green and wet and with more abundant plant species.
We came across sugar cane areas, we passed fields with banana trees and had a break in Tully, a village that got an eight meter high boot representing the highest ever annual rainfall in Australia. Just for comparison: in Rotterdam the average annual rainfall is 0,86 meter, in Malmö it's 0,55 meter.
When we were in Tully it was, ofcourse, raining ;-)

The highlights in Cairns were a scenic railway tour through the tropical rainforest to Kuranda, a very touristic village but with a nice butterfly aviary and a great boat tour on the river.
Nils was extremely happy that he finally got to take this special train, he had been looking forward to it since we found information about it back in Sweden. I thought it was a nice relaxing way of travelling and seeing the rainforest.
The boat tour was really amazing, mostly because the guide could tell so passionate about the rainforest. We saw turtles, crocodiles, rainbow bee eters (birds) and some other birds and fish I forgot the name of, but because of the guide's way of telling we saw the whole rainforest through our imagination.

The other highlight was a visit to Tjapukai; a cultural center of and about the indigenous people of the area. We learned about their dances, face paintings, art, hunting, didgeridoo making and playing and the way they used to use animals and plants for food and other useful things. We even got a didgeridoo lesson and we got to throw a spear and boomerang, that was really cool!

On the way back to Townsville we had a long lunchbreak at Mission Beach. What a wonderful
beach! The rainforest ends on the white sandy beach and gives it an amazing tropical paradise feeling. The kids had a great time drawing and playing in the sand and we made some beautiful pictures.

Back from Cairns every day life at AIMS continued again.
At the moment it doesn't feel like a holiday anymore, but it's not home either. We are tourists and still do some some tourists stuff, like going to alligator creek and Billabong, be we also go to the library and playgrounds like the other Australians. The people here a very kind and it's easy to get contact, but it's harder to go further and make true friends. It's like when you move to a new place and haven't settled in yet.

We have two more weeks to go and we will make sure to do some things that are still on our wishlist, but it will also be nice going home again!
You can find our pictures of Cairns here.