Cairns

A 5 hour bus journey up the coast and we were in Cairns. We had the weirdest bus driver ever who kept talking in different voices and perving over all the girls. It was like he had some sort of split personality but I suppose if you spend your days driving backpackers up and down the East coast, your bound to suffer some side affects. The ride was 5 hours too long and we were all very happy to get off the bus!! We did get to see some hurrican damage too, massive trees uprooted and flung over the roads, it all looked really ravaged.

We liked the look of Cairns from the bus, there were people about and shops and restaurants were open, which is always a good sign.

We checked into our hostel and Emma was a bit upset to notice that the All You Can Eat mexican buffet had finished, so we just had to drink beer and cook pasta.

The next day, Saturday, we went out to explore Cairns a little. Again, not a massive city, I think there's about 250,000 people living here and it survives mainly on tourism. But, it had a nice big shopping centre and there were lots of nice bars and restaurants. The weather was a bit cloudy but still tropically hot. We spent the day window shopping and wandering around.

In the evening, much to Emma's insistance of course, we had the All You Can Eat BBQ buffet at out hostel. All You Can Eat is definitely the way forward and for $8 it was a bargain!!! Emma was very pleased and this time had 2nds and 3rds!!!!

We got chatting to some local Ozzie men who told us that we should rent a car and go inland and up to Cape Tribulation - great idea! We ended up going out clubbing with them and they seemed to 'know people' as we never had to queue at the club door and we even got into the VIP area. Yep, we were cool!

The rest of the week was spent organising the rest of the trip, doing a little window shopping, buying jumpers in preparation for our trip to NZ, eating out and just dossing around really. We swapped hostels to the lovely YHA (just to get Emma away from the All You Can Eat buffet really!!).

We did hire a car for a couple of days. A bright yellow Hyundai Getz! We drove up to Port Douglas and had a look around there and then on up to Cape Tribulation, through lots of lovely luscious rain forest. It was a really nice drive and it was nice to get behind a wheel and not be sat in a bus. Good practice for when we hire a campervan in NZ too. We got to the end of the road at Cape Trib (you can only go so far in a normal car, after a certain point the road turns to gravel and you need a 4 wheel drive). We decided that Cape Trib was a bit too jungly for us so drove back to the more respectable Port Douglas and stayed at the YHA.

Next day our plan was to have a massage and facial seen as we weren't doing any white water rafting or sky diving. Unfortunately we realised that we are poor travellers and so had to abandon this idea, and it had seemed such a nice idea over our 2nd bottle of wine the evening before!

Instead, we drove inland to some towns that were not really towns, but just streets with a couple of buildings on them. We stopped off at Coffee Works and did a tasting tour of the little factory there. Not great for me seen as I don't drink coffee but the promise of the chocolate shop at the end sold it!!

We then drove around some more and saw some waterfalls. It was all very nice apart from the fact that it chucked it down, ALL DAY!

We got back into Cairns that evening and dropped the car off and then got absolutely soaked walking back to the hostel. Queensland is meant to get 300 days of sunshine a year, we obviously visited during the 65 days of cloud and rain because we hardly saw the sun at all!

We liked Cairns though, we met some nice people and everyone was very friendly but it's very much geared towards diving and other water sports, which we don't do (yet, maybe in Hawaii, where hopefully it will be warmer!). We met a nice Irish man who did say that the diving tour he went on was amazing, much better than snorkelling but at the moment, snorkelling is enough for me. Especially here where there's so many things in the water that can kill you, even swimming in the ocean is a dangerous sport and you have to be properly kitted out for it.

Anyway, next stop Alice Springs for an Uluru camping adventure, gulp!

My rucksack now weighs 18kg. It was 11kg when I left England in January and I still have more stuff to fit in it that I left in Sydney. Pesky shopping gene.