We flew to Cairns from Darwin on 29th Jan and I am never sleeping at an airport ever again! Our flight wasnt until 5am so we had a snooze until check in about 3am.....its horrible! I was like a zombie for the rest of the day!!!!!
We arrived in Carins to good weather, hot and humid! The airport is literally minutes from the town so we were at our hostel in no time!!!
Good hostel with a great pool.....yey!!!! We both slept till lunchtime and then after lunchtime we chilled at the pool, recovering from our 9 day tour as it definately took it out of us!!!!
In the late afternoon we decided to take a walk around Cairns. Well its not a very big place, mostly filled with tourism shops and is the gate way to the great barrier reef. Some people adivsied us to do the reef from Port Douglas or Mission Beach so we didnt really look at into it very closely while in Cairns.
The Esplande is nice, lots of restuarants and theres a lagoon pool open to the public as you cant swim in the ocean because of the boxed jellyfish. We jad a leisurely stroll and then went back to the hostel for our free dinner!!
Its ChineaseNew Year coming up so there are lots of people celebrating with flags, dragons, dance and music....entertaining stuff!

The next day is when the weather started to change and in effect changed our plans for the next few weeks!!!!!!

We just wanted to chill out in Cairns and not do much as we were so tired from our tour and the recent sleepless nights, so we headed back to the Esplanade and took a dip in the Lagoon. It started to cloud over and get a bit windy so we didnt last long down there!!
The Botanic Gardens were close to the hostel so we decided to go for a walk in the afternoon....we didnt take any insect repellent (which turned out to be a bad error). We walked through the Centenry Lakes where there are fresh and salt water lakes and then headed into the boardwalk rain forest. At this point it started to rain and the mosquitoes arrived!!! We were only in the trees for 5 mins and I got bitten loads.....Darren didnt get any, so frustrating!!!! We got absolutely soaked walking home but it was all good fun!

So our first two days in Cairns were relatively boring!!! It rained for the rest of the evening and Daz and I just enjoyed watching some of the Oz Open Tennis.

We headed to Port Douglas the following day for a few nights, which turned out to be quite interesting!!!

Short blog update for once but there is a Cairns Part 2!!!