There has been a little gap in posting because I haven’t bother to write anything for a while.

So this is what I have been up to for the last few days it will probably form some sort of out of order summary, which I hope covers the main parts of what I have been up to.

We arrived in Cairns on 18th monday in the early morning after a pleasant flight without enough sleep.

Bikes arrived fine in Australia and we cleared customs but they wanted to have a quick look at my bike tyres, to make sure they were not to dirty they were fine.

We had pre arranged using warmshowers.com a resource for touring cyclists to get a warm shower, to meet up with somebody at the airport and get a lift to their house. This was very kind and meant that we could build the bikes in the garage, he also had a Joe Blow (a track pump) which meant that we could inflate the tyres very easily, which was great.

We were both feeling very tired after very little sleep so we had fish and chips for tea which were good and seemed cleaner than english fish and chips, the shop also sold a lot of fresh fish. We had an early night heading to bed at around 8pm.

Tuesday, we got up at a fairly, leisurely time cannot remember exactly when and then headed for a tour of a coffee plantation. Before now I didn’t know they grow coffee here but I guess it makes sense. Our host kindly drove us to the coffee tour. On the way we stop at Barron Falls just out side a small town/village I have forgotten the name of.

We relaxed at the coffee places cafe before we started the tour. I had a chicken pie it was good. The coffee farm was called Skybury coffee.

The tour started with looking at the coffee plants, these can get quite tall but they cut them short to allow the harvester to go over them. There were different types of coffee bean plants. I tried a raw bean from the plant it tasted sugary at first then like wood.

We were then shown some of the other plants they grow on the farm like the bananas. After this we headed to the workshop this was impressive with lots of tools and the Harvester which was massive and had a Perkins Engine which I guessed was made in Peterborough. Around the workshop area there was some of the equipment used for processing the coffee. Things to wash the beans dry them etc. As they have to have a certain moisture content to wet rot to dry not good coffee.

Then we headed back to the cafe area and saw the roasting machine from Turkey it was fairly big and red.

We learnt a bit more about the coffee process and some interesting coffee facts before heading back to Cairns.

We then had our first BBQ of the trip which was tasted good and were joined by a guy who has done a lot of mountain biking tours. It was good to chat and was a good evening.

Before the BBQ we headed to the supermarket and were surprised at just how much food costs here.

So I have written a fair amount so think I will post this then create another post what happen today.