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Published: June 21st 2009
Right now I’m up Cairns.
I had to wake up at 5am on Thursday morning so I could check out of my hostel, grab a train and catch my 7am fight up here.
The flight up here wasn’t too bad. It’s about a 3 hour flight, so I just took a nap most of the way, which worked out well since I took a discount airline that didn’t show a movie.
Anyways, landing in Cairns was a completely different experience than I thought it would be. Sydney was a giant city, just like any other city in the world, except people here have Australian accents. Looking out the window as I landed in the Cairns airport though looked more like landing on a tropical island. All you could see was giant hills of lush green in the distance and the airport had this very old school quality about it.
From there I took a cheap shuttle bus over to Gilligan’s, the hostel I’m currently at. I got to the hostel around 11am, but official check in for them isn’t until 2pm. I wound up just wandering around the city for a couple hours while I waited to
get my room key. They held on to my bag for me at reception, but all I wanted to do was change because the weather up here was warm and very humid and I was wearing jeans, full shoes and a hoodie because it was cold in Sydney when I left.
The weather up in Cairns wasn’t so nice when I arrived, but it wasn’t bad. It was warm and humid but the entire sky was covered in clouds (that’s why a bunch of my pics from here look kind of grey). I walked around anyways to kill the 3 hours. First, I walked the wrong direction and wound up at a shopping mall. I grabbed some lunch in there and then found my way out to the Cairns lagoon. It’s a beautiful piece of grassy property that goes along the ocean in the main area of town. I just sort of wandered that area for a bit until I was able to go back to my hostel and get into my room. I changed into shorts and then went back to the lagoon since I had nothing better to do.
Later in the afternoon I came back
to my room and met most of the other people that were living in there. A couple Swedish people, an Irish couple, an English girl, and a guy from Edmonton. The first Canadian I had met on the trip! All of them were nice people and we hung out and went to the club in the hostel that night.
The next day I woke up and it was still cloudy, so I decided it would be a perfect time to go the travel agent and book some things to do and my way back down to Sydney. I spent about 2 hours in the place but now have a full calendar that pretty much takes me all the way until a few days before I have to show up at school for an orientation day. I booked a sailing trip, a camping trip, a canoe trip and some surf lessons all down the east coast with a couple days (but not many) to do some chilling and/or other things. By the time that was done the sun had come out, so I went back to the lagoon to just lie in the sun with some people.
Yesterday I
sister cities
Cairns has like 15 sister citiestook a day trip up into the rainforest, but I’m going to put that in a separate post since I took way too many pictures there.
That pretty much brings me up to now. I just had to check out of my hostel at 10am, but the bus I’m catching to my next destination, Airlie Beach, doesn’t leave until midnight, so I’m going to run a couple of errands soon and then go back to the lagoon for a few hours. Thankfully I made friends with the people in my room so they’re letting me keep my stuff in there so I can go back and change and shower later.
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