The first day!

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We got here!
Arrived very early in the morning into Cairns international airport today. Got in around 5.30 after the 3650 mile journey from Tokyo which in turn was 6220 miles from London. Kate found suspicion with the quarantine people after the cutest dog in the world put its little paw on her luggage. Clearly she had some kind of illicit fruit!! Seemingly the little dog was in for a bit of a kicking after it turned out she had nothing on her at all (though later we did discover an empty KitKat wrapper so maybe it was on to something!) and we walked out into a very dark Friday morning in Cairns.
In due time, we arrived at the Calypso Inn, to be our home for the next few days. In their own words they are, 'A tropical Australian paradise with a little twist of Jamaica' and to be fair they didn't really dissapoint. The hostel was set in the midst of palm trees and other exotic tropical plants. Most of the hostel was open to the air - an outdoor bar, swimming pool and eating area. We had to wait for our room to become available and so we sat down to a second breakfast surrounded by somewhat optimistic-looking young people in shorts and flip-flops.
To fill some time we decided to walk down the Esplanade before properly checking in. This consisted of a long stretch of boardwalk in front of a fairly muddy sea-front. The whole front was palm tree lined and very tropical in general. We stumbled along nice little picnic areas with FREE electric BBQs, amazing little water play areas for kids and stunning views accross the marina. We had to stop! It dawned on us that we'd been wearing the same clothes for 40+ hours and it was starting to get hot!
Needless to say - we went back and checked in, had the obligitory traveller's nap and went off exploring.
Cairns is suprisingly small for such a big dot on the map. The whole atmosphere is very relaxed but so friendly. Kate & I ended up jumping more than once when people in shops asked us how we were! More later..

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Comments

[ben]

yep
thats right chris... the cute little dog was looking for fruit!?!