Cairns

Sunday 6th August

So 2 short hours up the road lies Cairns. At last, I’ve made it! My original idea saw me spending 6-odd weeks here as I thought I’d arrive much earlier than I did – not least because I had loosely arranged to meet Amanda and her buddies here for their holiday in July…but I stuffed that up. On the plus side, I got there in the end!

Actually, Cairns is a bit of shithole. It’s obviously undergone a pretty quick expansion to provide for the tourism and some parts of it look like it – the seafront section is pretty nice for example, but by dredging the harbour and marina here, they’ve created an incredibly unsightly beach which has been turned into a mudflat which at low tide stretches as far as the eye can see.



This ones for you Peel - the car was done out with Ned Kelly memorabilia.

I was still hanging a wee bit from the night at Mission Beach and turned in early only to discover on meeting Angus the next day that he went out that Sunday night and checked out the bars and stuff – he did such a good job he blew a couple of ton, was woken up in the hostel TV room at 7am and wrote himself off so badly, the next three nights he was tucked up in bed by 7pm with a hot toddy. Well, not quite but it was some feat of write off as Angus is a sturdy fellow who I can confidently say would be at the bar with Paul Campbell after I’d done my worst and failed! Heh Heh!

In the event, we did have a few good nights out – it was a bit of an Airlie Beach reunion with Angus, Konrad and Romy making various appearances – and in one of the bars met this great guy from NZ who was a deckhand on the boats. It’s a cool fucking place to go out on the piss – I’ll give you that!

In the end though, my main desire whilst here was to get a dive trip under my belt – ideally an overnighter – wahey!