Melbourne in the summer is like Edinburgh, the clouds come in from the sea, so it was sunny and clear at 6am when we got up, but by the time the aircraft took off this morning the clouds has come in. (The clouds would usually have gone by the afternoon). Our flight was to take us North to Cairns a distance of about 1450 miles and about a 3h flight. Fairly soon the clouds disappeared and for most of the journey we had clear views of the ground below. On our flight from Singapore days ago, we only had a brief view of the desert in Western Australia. Today we passed from the agricultural green vegetation of Victoria through progressively drier areas passing over New South Wales and arriving in Cairns (in Queensland) which is surrounded by Cloud forest. During the flight we were served a snack meal (two meat pies or vegetarian bites) which was a vast improvement over the packets of nuts that we are used to! We were monitoring our progress during the flight and at one point passed over a town where the temperature was 40C, it was 31C and very humid when we arrived in Cairns. Apart from planning to go out to the Great Barrier Reef at some point we have not planned our time here. A few weeks ago there were severe weather conditions here and flooding and a lot of the major roads impassible because of mudslides etc and we were not sure what would be possible to do now. We had a short taxi ride to the hotel and have a nice room with a sea view. We also now have been able to plan for the next few days.
