Learning from our previous misadventures trying to find somewhere to stay in Surfers Paradise, Eloise and I had phoned ahead and booked a motel room for our short stopover in Cairns. I had already booked what I hoped would be a romantic retreat in the rainforest at Cape Tribulation for the next few days, but we were a day early arriving in northern Queensland and the courtesy bus from the rainforest resort wouldn't be arriving to collect us until the next day - so we had twenty-four hours to spare and, having stayed in Cairns on my previous trip, I thought I'd take the opportunity to show Eloise around. Being a simple roadside motel rather than a backpacker resort (as they like to call them in Oz), we had to make our own way from the coach station, and flagged down a taxi on arrival. This was to give us another insight into the difference between British and Australian culture.

As we drove through the streets of the city, our driver began by asking all the usual questions about where we came from and what we liked about his country, before embarking on that thing which taxi drivers do where they explain in detail how they would run the country much better if they were in charge. Eventually, he realised that we were just ignorant pommies who didn't really care about how much the cost of living had risen in Australia over the last year, fell silent and turned the radio up - and this was the first time either of us had really had a chance to sample the delights of Australian broadcasting. Boy, was it an eye-opener. The DJ seemed to believe that he was stuck in the fifties, and was speaking as though he was a living cliché of everything associated with corny old style radio. Now, I realise that Australians are very outgoing and emotive people, and can come across as pretty excitable at the best of times, but this guy was really taking things to extremes: "Hey there, party people. Don't touch that dial, this is Stev-o the music meister coming to you on your twenty-four seven music station. Get down with the groove and live the sound, right here..."

Before you point out that Australian radio is pretty diverse and that our driver may simply have had a strange taste in DJs, I should mention that I have recently bought myself an internet radio at home - a device which stands by my bed, plugs into my broadband internet connection and allows me to wake up to the sounds of any one of twenty-thousand radio stations from around the world. Needless to say, the first thing I did on getting it home was to look up some Australian stations and was pretty excited to find that many of the rural ones were pretty much as we had experienced in Cairns. It seems as though the country is so large and people spaced so far apart that the sort of national music culture we have in Britain doesn't exist - it's all local DJs doing their own thing, playing their own style and being ever so slightly mad. For a country which recently had a referendum on whether or not they should keep the Queen as their national monarch, they also seem to be fixated on the more bizarre stories from Britain which don't even make it into the papers back home.

This must give Australians a really warped view of how we live. Just this morning, for example, I was listening to a station from Sydney on my internet radio and the DJ was telling me how a woman in Birmingham, England had shot her cat out of a tree. No explanation was given - this woman, clearly, had simply gone out into the yard and shot her cat out of a tree for no other reason than that she was a stupid pommie and that's what stupid pommies do!

The music was just as bizarre as the DJ playing it. I swear to god, I'm not making this up: after playing probably the strangest piece of rock music I've ever heard in my life, the presenter on the radio in our taxi came back on in his best eccentric DJ voice and said: "Hey, wasn't that awesome guys. They're really going places. That was the latest smash hit, 'I've just had a chunder, and I might need a poo too'!"

The Pier shopping centre hadn't changed much since my previous visit, except for most of the shops and the fact that the food court had almost totally vanished from the upper floor. Actually, there wasn't much that was the same, to be honest - but it was full of touristy places selling souvenirs and stalls positioned around the ground floor covered in the sort of things you find in the gadget shops back home, so we were able to spend the evening browsing. At the top of the escalator, we found a large odds-and-ends store selling just about anything gimmicky that the owner could fit through the door, and a large display by the entrance was full of cuddly looking stuffed koalas (stuffed toys, obviously - I'm not suggesting the owner was some sort of sicko or anything) which I was drawn to in my quest for gifts for my friend's kids back home. On further inspection, we were strangely delighted to find that pressing a small switch on the bottom of the koalas sent them into a mad song and dance. In a quest to annoy anyone within listening distance, we soon had several of them going, waving their little arms around wildly, turning their heads this way and that and filling the shop with verse:

I love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, very much,

Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, very much,

Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, very much,

I really really really really hope you love me too!

Obviously, after the first play we were thinking how cute these little things were, singing and dancing along with them as their little legs swung back and forth. By the tenth play, we were starting to get a little irritated and holding our koala upside down looking for the battery compartment while it continued to swing its legs determinedly in the air. By the fifteenth play, the thing was in serious danger of being torn into several pieces, batteries scattering all over the floor as it's legs swung from a nearby ceiling fan! However, children have more patience with these things and the koala song was actually kinda sweet when taken in moderation, so I bought one for my friend's child anyway. I later discovered that the batteries had mysteriously gone missing the moment I left their house...

A shop selling fudge and incense and other great but totally unconnected giftware in the Cairns Central Mall, a place which I had somehow totally failed to discover the first time I visited the city, goes by the utterly mad name of Zonky Plonky. Totally inspired, that - if you want to draw people into your shop, what better way than to give it the stupidest name you can possibly think of. I can't even imagine how many people must go through their doors every day just to ask exactly what set of circumstances resulted in them thinking that Zonky Plonky was just the right name for their new gift and homeware business. The explanation I was given smelled ever so slightly of "make something up for the pommie", but is possibly the best example of the laid back Australian approach to things I've come across so far. It would seem, according to the assistant I spoke to, that, for whatever reason, there was a cut-off point of midnight to register for a new company name. Perhaps there was a special offer ending that night, or something. Anyway, it was approaching zero hour and the owner either hadn't got the faintest idea what to call the shop or had simply been too laid back to bother about it until the last minute. So at the very last second, he just says "Oh... Zonky Plonky. That'll do." and fills in the form. Sound like an urban myth? Maybe, but can you imagine the fantastic shop names we'd have scattered throughout the world's malls if we all thought like that? I can see the television adverts now: "Come to Crinkle Crankle for all your clothing needs, only two doors down from Flippy Floppy". The mind boggles.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.