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Blog : Cairns
When we got to Cairns airport we were literally exhausted and i doubt many of you will have heard me say this, but being hit by that wall of heat the second we got off the plane, made me want to get back on and go some place freezing! Tierdness, hot and stickiness, two heavy backpacks and a bottle of gin do not mix so good! But we asked around in the arrivals hall for the shuttle bus that would drop us to our hostel and it was all easy enough...
We stayed in a hostel in Cairns called Asylum, it was once one yes (reminded me a bit of one of the student digs buildings in Coventry!) and at first it was a bit daunting! Having come from beautiful, zen Fiji to bustling Cairns and lots of people, actually a lot of Asians and very hippy dressed people (never seen so much dreadlock action!) was a little shock and the hostel looked proper run down and not clean :/ But someone reccomended it to us so i didnt want to judge the book by its cover! We had a room for just the three of us because they cocked up the booking which was great for us because we could hang up our washing lines and dry our knickers and stuff easily - bit weird in a dorm to do this!
We went for a walk and to explore for a little while before Anita's flight arrived and the three LOCOG babes became four for a couple of days... Our first visitor, all very exciting! So Cairns wasnt how i had remembered it from all those years ago i came in hockey tour here, it had a much more bo-ho vibe and a lot less surfer-y and millions of Asian people and uber hippies, i mean full armpit hair, the lot! But we soon found out they're not the usual crowd, a big music festival had happened further North from Cairns to celebrate the Solar Eclipse and as it had just finished everyone was flicking back to Cairns, the nearest town. And Cairns has no beach which i also didnt remember? Only a man made lagoon... Which was full of school kids because its their summer holidays now - strange to think that christmas is slap bang in the middle of their summer!
We had a late lunch and i was reminiscing on being in Cairns last, it was my birthday and wed all gone out for dinner... And no word of a lie as i was thinking about it we walked past the restaurant and i have no idea how but i recognised it and even remembered where we had sat so we had our lunch here, a tasty avacardo toasty, expensive though which we didn't realise!
With Anita we went for some drinks in the evening and met some of the others staying in the hostel, definitely a lot of people who were actually living there and a huge mix of nationalities and languages flying about...plying ring of fire was funny as well, trying to agree on who's set if rules to use! The hostel is BYOB which is great but blimey oh reilley the bars are expensive! We all had to drink stubbies, which i find absolutely disgusting because they were the cheapest thing and they were still £5 each! Madness!!
We went to a couple of travel agents the next day to start talking about all of the activities we were keen on doing and must have been in their about three hours discussing everything we wanted to do, we all had a bit of a shock when the price came out at the end though! We haggled and haggled and finally decided on booking the girls skydives (not for me, far to wussy!) a boat trip out to the barrier reef and a a self drive adventure in Fraser Island which is slightly further down the east coast. I am sure the guy we were speaking to was glad to see the back of us, although we liked him because he was so bad at maths and so his adding up was always wrong and we said we only wanted that total!
In the evening wed signed up to the Mad Monday bar crawl, where everyone is given inmate tshirts and the majority of the hostel go out together and we got free drinks in lots of places and stupid games were played along the way. There was one, which nationality is the loudest and there was most English and German people and there was a roaring battle they called world war three... I cant say it was my thing anymore, i thought id left Carnage and the like back at Uni but heyho it was funny! Hilarious in fact to see some people getting really drunk and others writing rude s*** all over them! We had a couple of drinks and a funny night!! It was good because all of the bars are walking distance to the hostel so we don't have to pay cab fares but the police are very hot over here with you drinking on the street and they probably know about the Asylum Mad Mondays so they prowl the surrounding streets to catch people, they pulled Al over, she was drinking run and coke from a water bottle and have her a right talking to but for some reason let her off the immediate $150 fine, much to everyones amazement! Go girl! The night ended a little abruptly though with some stupid man getting all up in my face and frustrating me asking me questions and then not listening to the answers over the music! Grr! In the end i had to tell him to go stick it in perhaps not the politest of ways but hey!
On Tuesday after the bar crawl we had to get up really early because we rented a car and were going to drive up to the Daintree forest which is the oldest rainforest in the world apparently! Obviously we never made the estimated 8am collection time, i think we left in the end at 10am. Anita was the designated driver of our bright green 'inbetweeners' style car because insurances isnt mandatory in Oz so it is ridiculously expensive to get cover for younger drivers!
We drove to Daintree village an stopped for a pee and found a tourist information place where the lovely lady, very Ozzie(!) told us about a beautiful walk we could so through part of the rainforest that would lead us to a really secluded waterfall so we were sold and off we started walking/hiking in the middle of the day and peak sunshine - clever girls yeah!
The Daintree forest was incredible, so green and lush and full of noises, creaking and squeaking and hooting and cooing... Very cool! And also weird being surrounded by so many animals but without seeing any of them! We hiked for about twenty or thirty minutes along a little path, me in flip flops, proper hiker me! And we had to cross two little streams and Anita was trying to keep her trainers dry so he hopped on over the rocks to get to the other side... At the end of the path we found a pretty big waterfall with a gorgeous lagoon at the bottom of it. The water wasn't clear as it had a sandy floor but having spoken to some of the locals and the lady in the tourist office back in Daintree village they assured us there was nothing deadly lurking within the water so we popped our toes in and after quite a lot of psyching up i launched myself in... Putting on a brave face to the girls i coaxed them in as well and got them swimming out into the deep water and over to the waterfall which was really cold and water spraying everywhere! I saw out of the corner of my eye a turtle slipping into the water but they really don't look cute in real life so i thought it might actually be better not to tell the girls and so not freak them out!!
On the way back from the waterfall we were all sweating out, super shiney and drenched, walking in our bikinis and what comes roaring past but a big 4x4 truck of boys, naaice!! We must have looked a sight and a half! Back at the inbetweeners car it was about a million degrees inside like a sauna and even with the air con on we were all red faced when we got to Wonga beach... we only stayed here for half an hour or so, just to eat our lunch. Alex's sister used to live there and had said the beach was beautiful and deserted... Neither unfortunately rang true, it was high tide when we were there and lines and lines of dead washed up jellyfish on the sealine and we all know how much i love jellyfish, spiders of the sea...YAGGG and also right next to where we parked our car was a hippy camper van... we assumed noone was in it but wrongggg, there was a huge big fat man eating pie lying almost naked inside of it...disgusting!!
By the time we got to mossman gorge we were all pretty knacked and it was definately coffee time!!A couple of people from work had recommended that we go visit mossman gorge because it was incredible and i didnt really know too much about it, but we went anyway and found out from the visitor information centre that we could get a little bus through an aboriginal community and up to a free tree top walk and the lady marked icon a map the best places to go paddling... At this point i didnt even know there was water in a gorge!!
We got this bus through the abo community and we were all expecting a sort of shanty type town but it just looked like a sophisticated mobile home park, only houses instead of trailers and corrugated tin roofs...but weird! At the gorge it was all im a celeb style raised walkways and bridges over this incredible river bed that had huge rocks and boulders in it, absolutely gino! And people had climbed onto them with all their stuff having obviously waded and swam through the deeper water that almost looked like rapids as in some places rhe tide was going quite fast!! We had a little climb and splashed our feet in the water which was surprisingly freezing compared to the waterfall lagoon earlier! It was very dense and moist walking through the forests bits on either side of the gorge but we only had time for a little wander before the last bus of the day departed to go back to the visitor centre that wed parked at. It was like something out of a movie that happended next, quite a lot of people were walking out of the clearing and towards the bus stop and we could see that the bus was there but for some reason we all thought it would wait for us and all these other people, it being the last bus of the day and all and a good 3km away from the visitor centre, but oh no, just as we came out of the clearing, the bus pulled away...having already done so much walking ech we were all pretty knackered and the thought of walking all the way back with the sweaty weather and our day sacks was not appealing! All the way down the walk we out our thumbs out like hitchhikers as a couple of other tour busses were driving slowly down the road too but none had room for all four of us!! So it was a long shlog back to the car! When we got to the visitor centre theyd got the sprinklers in the flower beds turned on, pumping out really cold water agains so we danced in these to cool ourselves down which was lovely :)
It was about five o'clock but we still wernt finished with our days adventure and back in the car we got and Anita started driving again to Port Douglas... She was the only one that could drive as in Australia insurance isnt mandatory and therefore on a hire care anyone under 25 has an automatic excess of $3,500, regardless of fault, so we weren't having that obviously!
We pulled into Port Douglas as it was beginning to get dark and we were a bit freaked out when we parked that a couple of people that to politely say looked like complete hillbillies came waving at us and telling us not to park there because wed get shat on... What?? We got out the car and had parked underneath the worlds largest oak tree or something with thousands and thousands of thousands of birds, blue t*** maybe whizz ing in and out of the branches, tweaking and skwarking at the tops of their lungs and looking like they could squirt a two out at any point. We swiftly got back in and moved the car. We had a little walk around and peered into all of the shop windows, Port Douglas is quite posh because it has a marina and lots of expensive looking boats moored up, deck shoes and stripey shirts were the order of the day! We walked to have a look at the tiny beach and were terrified to read that it was a high risk area for crocodiles and basically to get the hell away, that we did and stumbled into a scene from twilight, massive bats circling around everywhere,ore screeching and this time low flying and swishing past us, it was really freaky! We had dinner at an alrifht looking place near the marina, the cheapest we could find and still over priced for what it was! Anita and KV had the steak and chips for $15 deal and i the prawn salad. The prawns were fully in their bodies still, gross! And frozen cold, yuck! Unsuccessful dinner! We all pretty much passed out the second we got home of tierdness after our big adventure day!
The following day we chilled out by the lagoon and rented bikes for an hour or so and pootled up and down the esplanade. The bikes were free to rent from the travel company we booked all of our tours through which was good but helmets were mandatory, they are throughout the whole of Australia, and not wearing one carries a pretty hefty fine of your caught (and after our run in with the police once already we didnt fancy it again so on they went!) Anita had to leave at lunchtime to get her plane back to sydney and we were all sad to wave her off, our first visitor on the trip! Kate and i mooched round all of the hippy shops in the afternoon in search if hairbraiding, someone to do it or somewhere to it the embroidery thread. We got all excited at the thought of finding the thread and talked about charging people $5 dollars per braid on the greyhound and stuff as we came across lots of other girls wanting them done too! We am didnt find anything of the sort sadly even after about five miles of walking around looking but we did find a really cool shop called shiva moon that sold afghani jewellery and stuff which was absolutely beautiful! But really expensive! We found on the counter these beads though that were called dread clips and theyre sort of cuffs in gold or silver that you can clip into you hair, i put a couple up my braid (that i did at home before we left) and KV used hers as an ear cuff! We all brought cool earrings as well to feel the hippy vibe, peace and love.
It was one dollar drinks in a bar round the corner from our asylum hostel that night so we all went out for a few and ended up in MacDonalds at the end if the night! Shameful!! The alcohol was probably watered down but the drinks were alright and you can't beat $1 drinks when your buying them for yourself!!
We were up early again on the Thursday to go on our boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef, the one thing id been looking forward to fir absolutely ages. I love seeing the whole other world that lives under the water, its so different and colourful! We scored with our boat trip though, so much free food, tex and coffee, buscuits and more and a proper slap up bbq for lunch, yummy!!! I could go on for hours about how glorious it was to sunbathe outside on the boat and how incredibly the coral was and so much of it that i had never seen before, including a stingray the size of about four dinner plates and a giant sea clam that kept opening and clamping shut! We did two different parts of the GBR, i cant remember what they were called but we were the only boats there which was cool and although stinger suits were 'recommended' we didn't see a single jelly fish so were glad wed saved the ten dollars each by not renting them. We did however have a bit of a suncream fail though, Anita very kindly left us the rest of her suncream as she couldn't take it back on the plane but it was ozzy stuff which is just pure disgusting, so thick, a minimum of spf30 and waterproof for two hours at a time... It was that stuff that would rub in properly no matter how long you spent trying and also that made you look all white and streaky the second you came in contact with water, and the only way to get it off was by scratching it with your nails. I found shaving my legs worked quite well as well but didnt fancy shaving my face or arms!!
A little bit gross but on the second trip, which was quite soon after lunch Al was sick in the water, unbeknown to me, i just thought she much have kicked up a bit of the coral with a flipper as it was quite shallow, but i didnt understand why all the fishes all of a sudden wernt scared of me and were swarming round... Yes then i found out that Al had just been sick, id swam through it and the fishes were eating the clumps from my hair and goggles, nice, real nice!
We spent friday by the lagoon once again, watching films and reading our books, which was really lovely. I started peeling though so spent most of the miring surreptitiously trying to peel my boob skin off because i alway think it looks so gross!! We went to Gilligans on Friday night which is a club underneath another hostel in town which was quite busy, although expensive $11 a drink! When people said to us Oz was expensive i didnt realise it was quite as bad as it is! A small bottle of vodka or something here from the supermarket is £30!! Ouch! The Gilliagans night was good, loud and current music but made so much better that so show we managed to dodge the entry queue and the $10 fee!! Yessss!! This night ended at the pizza house! Fatty!! Especially after wed been to the supermarket earlier that day counting our pennies trying to make a meal on a budget and ended up with a beautiful salad and pasta which we stuffed our faces on so a) we should not have needed it and b) it was $5 - more than wed spent on all our supermarket supplies each for dinner!! Ggrrr!!
On Saturday we had to check out if asylum and say goodbye to everyone as we moved on to Mission Beach, our next stop off... It was quite sad saying bye to everyone as we had made same nice friends but the great bit about travelling is that everyone else you meet is to so you bump into them again and again on your trip! We had a quick gander round the Saturday lagoon market but it was mainly selling handmade ornaments and stuff, not really that practice for backpackers!! Cairns has a really cool night market, selling trinkets and bits and bobs which we enjoyed a lot and went to twice over our time in Cairns.
- comments
Debs Lawson Wow... what a great interesting story, dad could not believe I was still reading it 15 mins later! Like hearing about day to day life for you in each continent! Keep it up (please)!!
Nana Nana. Wish I'd known you were going to Cairns as I'd have put you in touch with Shirley's brother who lives there. Loved reading all your doings even if it was hard to disentangle at times! Look forward to your next.............