The arrival of a twin

My brother Jonathan is here for 5 weeks on a medical rotation. On the morning he arrived in Sydney, he had completed 18 hours of flying. So, being a considerate sister, I decided we'd fly an additional 3 hours that night, to visit Port Douglas in the northern state of Queensland. He wasn't too happy with me.

Still, we had 11 hours to spend in Sydney before our flight, so I walked him to his limits. We went to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay, The Rocks, and over the Harbour Bridge. By the time I got him on the plane that evening he was out cold, even through a rough landing. 

We emerged from the plane near midnight, and were greeted by the heat, humidity, and odd noises of the tropics - boy had I missed it. Cairns is the main town for trips to the Great Barrier Reef. While this means it has a lot of adventure trips to offer, it also means things are expensive, and the town is a tad overrun with tacky shops. 

My favorite place around there is Port Douglas, a quiet town an hour's drive north of Cairns. Jonathan and I had a week to spend in this humid tropical paradise, and the best part was we got to stay with my friends Linda and John, whom Bob and I had worked for and lived with 3 years ago. Linda and John are fantastic and have the craziest stories from living in the wet tropics. It was their stories of diving on the reef that transformed Bob from a clean-cut engineer, to an ocean hunting, shark loving eco-boy. I was curious to see what would happen to Jonathan.