Meng's Travels: Cairns

I flew from Sydney to Cairns on Virgin Australia Airlines in about 3 hours. The fare costs about A$200 one-way. Cairns is in the northeastern part of Australia, in the state of Queensland. It's about a two-hour flight north of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. Most people come to Cairns to experience the Great Barrier Reef, although there are a lot of other activities that you can do in the area. I signed up for 2 tours when I was still in Sydney: a cruise to the Great Barrier Reef and a trip to the rainforest. I already talked about my trip to the Reef in the previous post. It has to be the highlight of my Australian trip. Early the next morning I was picked up by a van to go see the Daintree Rainforest, which is about an hour north of Cairns. The van also picked up many other tourists from the other hotels in the Cairns area. There were about 20 of us in the van. Unfortunately, it was raining that day. The forest is named after Richard Daintree, a geologist.
Our first stop was the Habitat Village, where you can see birds and animals of the rainforest and outbacks. Since it was raining, part of it was closed and we didn't see some of the animals. We also visited the famous Mossman Gorge, where we see a lot of water rushing down the gorge. The most amazing thing is that the rainforest here is very thick, just like you would see in any rainforest in the tropics. Later we cruise down the river looking for live crocodiles. We saw one.
When I visited the markets in Melbourne and Sydney, I found many tropical fruits like bananas, papayas, pineapples, guavas, etc, that were grown in this area. Along the road you also see a lot of sugarcane being grown. This area has been growing sugarcanes since the late 1800s'. In one of the information boards along the Esplanade in the city, they explained that many Chinese were in the area in the late 1800s' working in the sugarcane plantations. Later, Japanese and South Islanders also came to work in the plantations. This explains why Cairns has such a diverse population.
At the Rusty Farmer's Market in town, I saw mostly Asians running the produce stands. I found out that they were from different parts of Asia: Thais, Laotians, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Chinese, etc. You can also get Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese food from the food stands. It's an amazing market. The fruits and vegetables were very inexpensive, compared to the stores. Not only that, they were very good. I tried a Custard Apple for the first time and was surprised that it is so sweet. It looks like a small soursop fruit but the soursop is more sour than sweet. Soursops are common in Southeast Asia. I also tasted the pears and persimmons. The pears are bigger and sweeter than any that I have tasted in the US. The persimmons, one of my favorite fruits, are also very sweet. Red or green bell peppers are called capsicums here.