We have arrived in Australia!! First stop is Cairns in the North East after a stinker of a flight. We left Singapore at around 8pm and flew the 5 hours to Darwin for a stopover which lasted 4 ½ hors then another 2 hour flight to Cairns - safe to say by 9:30 in the morning when we arrived we were exhausted and even at this time in the morning it was already an energy draining 30 degrees - a sign of things to come! Luckily our hostel offered a free pick up service from the airport so we called them and they brought us to the front door of our room which was a relief!

The hostel owners were really friendly and nice but the rooms were crap and all we wanted to do was sleep but couldn't with the guy driving the ride on lawnmower right outside our window. We knew this wasn't the hostel's fault but it was still really annoying! We slept most of the day once the lawnmower stopped and for dinner had a BBQ at the hostel which lots of people staying there went to so we got chatting to a few new people and swapped stories so far and picked up some tips of things to do in Cairns. I found out that Australian sausages are amazing and Kangaroo meat isn't that nice once it stopped hopping round the plate long enough for me to eat it……….only sleggin!

Laura still isn't feeling 100% after the food poisoning so we took a trip to the doctor (5th doctor or hospital of the trip). In Australia we get free trips to the doctor through Medicare although we hadn't registered yet so it was another AU$90 once we saw the doc and got medicine to help Laura's stomach! We spent the afternoon swimming in the manmade lagoon (can't swim in the sea because of saltwater crocodiles) and lazing about before heading back to the hostel to book our trip for tomorrow (a private flight over the Great Barrier Reef) and to get an early night and pack our bags.

Thankfully the next morning, even though we were checking out, the hostel let us leave our bags in their luggage room while we went to the airport for our flight! The plane was tiny with barely enough room for the 2 of us and the pilot and even on the runway sitting still the wind was blowing it about - this was going to be a bumpy ride! Once all the passenger jets cleared our runway we took off and headed out towards the reef - to be fair it wasn't that bumpy once we were up and the weather was pretty much perfect for flying and seeing the reef from the air! The reef is amazing and so vast even though we were only seeing a small part of the beginning of it - check out the photo's to get an idea of what we mean although they don't really do it justice! While up there we decided to get a small upgrade which took us further out over the reef and let us see a bit more of it which was well worth it! We came in over Cairns town again which was cool to see the town from the air - it really is much smaller than we thought it was going to be! We got the bus back to the hostel to get our bags and move on to our next hostel, Gilligans, (we were moving just because of the crappy rooms where we were) which was down near the lagoon and right in the centre of the town. This place was a bit more lively and was massive - the biggest in Cairns, so there was no shortage of people about! The room we got in Gilligan's (a 6 bed dorm) seemed good and the Canadian girls already there seemed nice (first impressions can be deceiving as you will find out).

The hostel had a great pool and lagoon area of its own and a massive bar and nightclub which was already pretty busy even in the afternoon with the Ashes cricket on TV. We met up with Laura who was on our trip from Cambodia and Vietnam so it was great to see her again and we hung out by the pool all day and arranged to grab some food later that day! A lot of the Hostel's here give you free meals when you stay there so the 2 of us, Laura and a couple of her friends grabbed some food at the hostel before heading out to a bar near the beach for the cheapest beers we could find, which were still expensive - Australia doesn't do cheap as we were finding out! We got back to the hostel around midnight and headed to bed to be woken up at 2:30 am by the lovely Canadian girls who came back blocked from a pub crawl and proceeded to pretty much have a party in our room for the next 2 hours! Despite us telling them to wrap it up more than once they didn't really quiet down so we didn't get much sleep that night! We left early the next morning making sure we made as much noise as possible in the morning to wake the b****es up and left to book our overnight bus to Airlie Beach. We ran into a slight problem as the overnight bus was fully booked so we had to book a bus for the next morning and spend another night in Cairns (we were both getting pretty sick of it by now!) Due to the lack of sleep from the night before and the fact that we had to get up at 6am the next day we booked a quiet motel room down near the lagoon which turned out to be perfect! Air conditioned private room, swimming pool and a laundry room for those full rucksacks of dirty clothes - lovely jubbly! Spent our last evening in Cairns relaxing by our pool until dark, cooking our own dinner in the kitchen and packing our stuff up ahead of our bus tomorrow morning.

We both were not that keen on Cairn's - unless you were doing day trips to Cape Tribulation in the north or out to the reef there wasn't very much to do in the town and it didn't feel safe at night out walking about which was the first time we had experienced this since going away - we didn't feel like this once in Asia. We think it is maybe down to a lot of the clubs and bars promoting drinks offers every night so because there's a pile of kids knocking about that couldn't handle their drink and causing trouble you can't really relax when walking about - especially when we weren't in group! I (Laura) really missed Asia while we were in Cairns!

Goodbye Cairns and onto Airlie beach for our cruise round the Whitsunday Islands which both of us cannot wait for! Check out Whitehaven Beach (one of our stops) on Google to see why we are excited!!

Craig and Laura = )