Hey everyone

Today we went to Cairns!

Since we spent lots of our time in Cairns just job hunting (and then reading when we realised we weren't going to get jobs), each day doesn't need its own blog entry. However, two days definitely do: our trip to Kuranda, and our day out on the Great Barrier Reef. But this entry is just to explain what else we got up to while in Cairns.

There wasn't a lot to do in Cairns aside from wander around the nice lagoon (built because the sea is unfit to swim in), though there seemed to be a lot of travellers hanging around and partying every night. We stayed in a cheap hostel which in some respects was pretty rubbish - it had a tiny kitchen, hardly any toilets, strangely low bunk beds that you couldn't sit up in, and was opposite the biggest noisiest hostel in town - but the rooms were clean enough, there were only 4 people to a room, and we got a free meal every night at the popular Woolshed bar.

It seemed that most hostels in Cairns gave out free meal vouchers for the Woolshed, as from 6pm it filled up every night, with a big queue going out the door. You may remember the free 'meal' we got every night when staying in Sydney... By meal they meant 'a small mound of rice with a spoonful of sauce' or 'a few chips and a frankfurter'. Thankfully, the Woolshed's free meal was better - we chose from dishes like chili con carne and spaghetti bolognese every night. This saved us even more pennies and meant we didn't have to use the scummy hostel kitchen as much so we couldn't complain. Also, on our walk over to the Woolshed we often saw huge numbers of birds flying around the trees and streets, narrowly missing people as they raced by just above our heads. Equally strange were the trees, in the city centre, that were filled with bats every night.

We had spent our first few days in Cairns asking in all the job agencies and doing all we could to try and get jobs, or just find out whether there were actually any jobs going. But things didn't look good. So after a few days we did some careful calculations and figured out our options, and finally decided on our plan of action. We decided it was time to leave Australia. Job hunting had been much harder than we imagined, mainly due to our time constraints - unlike many other travellers, we couldn't spare 3 months for a job. Also, the harvest had been delayed and damaged by the bushfires in the South, and floods and cyclones that had hit the East coast.

So, we decided to move all our flights forward by about the length of time we would have spent working (6 weeks), and after a few phone calls to STA, it was all sorted. Our new flight dates are as follows:

22nd April: Cairns to Auckland, NZ
31st May: Christchurch, NZ to Nadi, Fiji
14th June: Nadi to Honolulu, Hawaii
23rd June: Honolulu to Los Angeles
26th June: LA to London!

So now we'll be arriving into Heathrow at 11:50am on 26th June - see you there! Well hopefully someone anyway.

But that's it for this entry - expect the next couple to be much more exciting! Xxx