Australia

We left fiji in the rain, which was sort of nice because it meant wed had the best of the weather over on all of the islands! The journey looming ahead of us however did not look fun... A five hour or so flight to Brisbane, then a twelve hour overnight wait in the airport and another three hours up to Cairns. We were thinking what on earth kind of backpacker nightmare had we got ourselves involved in, booking a next day connecting flight felt like such a good idea back in the warmth of our canary wharf office!!

It wasn't all too bad though, the flight to Brisbane was one of those old aeroplanes, with the drop down shared TV screens and only one film shown at a time... I slept through almost all of it though, thinking that i wouldn't be sleeping in the airport later so i should really catch some winks when i could! I did pretty well because i slept all the way through and electric storm and its turbulence!!

We were delayed getting off the plane once wed landed, because of the storm. It did make me laugh, Australia grinding to a halt in the rain! Its like us with snow! Although to be fair it wasn't any old rain, I've never seen an electric storm like that in my life!! Proper big lightning bolts lighting up the whole sky and thunder that sounded like the biggest stomach grumble ever!

It took us ages to get our bags as well because Brisbane airport kept issuing storm warnings which prevented all of the workers from unloading the plane. We had taken our blankets plus a couple extra and pillows from the plane so bedded down in the baggage hall for an hour watching all of the commotion! They actually made an announcement saying for those who didn't want to wait for the storm to pass, the airport would arrange to have all bags delivered to home addresses the following day!! Madness!

We got through the airport to arrivals and were looking for ages for where the domestic departure check in desks were but about a good hour after standing waiting for a bus (tell you more about that in a min) (i had managed to fall asleep on a luggage trolly - sort of becoming a skill of mine!! We managed to find out that actually we needed a whole different airport terminal and so we traipsed with all our bags to the bus stop and checked out the timetable which clearly stated the bus times every quart hour through the night and small hours. We waited and we waited (and i fell asleep) to finally be told by some cleaner that oh no the bus doesn't run through the night and actually the domestic terminal closes at 10pm. It was 1am!! f***ity f***!

Back to the main airport then! With all our bags to find somewhere to curl up for the night... Surprisingly we found some relatively comfy sofas without the annoying arm rests and away from all the announcements and shops. Brisbane airport had free wifi so we all managed to call home and then set up make shift beds with our blankets as sheets and looped all our bags and stuff together so we could sleep properly. I had my duty free gin right by my head...priorities!! We slept almost the whole night and managed to get to the other terminal and jump in our next plane to Cairns - result, free accommodation and hello Australia!