Australia- Cairns

Cairns

It was an early touch down to Cairns and we managed to sort ourselves out with a cheap hostel for our five days there. ‘Sunray’ was managed by a Korean couple so they put us in a private room due to our ‘annyeong haseyo’ for the price of the cheap dorms. Unfortunately there was a good reason it was cheap. We found one or two bed bugs, the place was only surface cleaned and instead of backpackers staying there it was full of semi-permanent residents who seemed to have run away from home or jail. The Koreans took off after our first day on their vacation and left the inmates in charge, along with a timid Korean girl on reception. There was an attack when one of the inmates high on crystal meth wielded a knife at another and he was carted away by the police- thankfully we weren’t there at the time. Another day the inmates pooled their limited money and bought a load or meat and shopping, they forgot the lock the doors that night and someone had stolen all the meat by the morning, in response to this one of the girls put her fist thought the glass fridge door and had to get five stitches- thankfully we were also out of the house for this incident- needless to say we didn’t spend much time inside.


The hostel aside we did have a good time in Cairns. There are great out door facilities with a gorgeous walk/runway along the peer leading to a huge outdoor swimming pool with park side bathing area and intermitted exercise equipment. Also great for those with camper vans as there are great public showers and free gas BBQ areas! The rest of the city is tiny and a bit bland, kind of lacks soul. It completely geared up for tourism, great dining and drinking offers in the bars and restaurants and agents everywhere for any type of sport or outdoor activity you can think of. Our highlight of course was diving on the Great Barrier Reef. We booked a day tour with two dives which were awesome. It was over an hours drive out to the reef where we did our first dive unaccompanied by a dive master, but that was ok as we were briefed on the site and just had to navigated around a headland of coral. It was beautiful, the water was clear and warm and just a lovely relaxed dive. We returned to the boat for lunch and headed on to the next diving point. Here we were lucky as a few of the staff were doing a dive and took us along to ‘Shelly’s Other Hole’ (only in Australia eh?) where we did some cave diving- spectacular- and spent some more time exploring the reef. It was fantastic.


The other event in Cairns was when our friend Ollie Connelly drove up with some mates from Townsville - a six hour drive- to see us and spend the weekend.

The three of us went out for a great dinner (thanks Ollie) where the boys ate shark and we started on the Australian wine. We discussed a quiet night having a few drinks around the pool of Ollie’s hotel but those plans were soon dispelled when we met up with his mates. We hit a lot of the bars, with the Irish one being the most fun and ended in Gilligan’s nightclub. Great fun, but why is it that now that we’re older the hangovers are so much worse? Ollie dropped us to the airport the next afternoon and it was on to Brisbane.