Queensland Day 5

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Last day at Cairns. This last day at Cairns was a break for the two of us. After about 10 hours of sleep and a late breakfast, we shopped around the city for a little bit, went to the hotel’s pool for sun-tanning in the afternoon. The sun was really strong, we were dehydrating badly after being under the sun directly for more than 30 minutes and the freckles on my face were growing at light speed. One of our missions for the day was to book the accommodation for Melbourne, our last trip before we return to Hong Kong. To do this, we had to go to our favorite restaurant in town - McD, where free WiFi is available. This is the only place in Cairns that offers free public WiFi, and so it gets quite crowded with travelers trying to make reservations for their travel and connect with oversea friends or relatives. Free internet is rare here, it could be due to the expensive data plans here. It costs average of $2 for 15 minutes at internet café. Hence, McD becomes one of the places we always locate first wherever we travel to. Trying to make a booking with such a slow connection was quite frustrating, but because we will be going during Christmas time, we figured we better book our hotel before we return to Sydney on the 20th. As one can easily imagine, hotel is expensive during that time of the year. After about an hour of research, we found a mystery deal online, where we won’t find out the name of the hotel until we confirmed and paid for our booking. Desperate to leave McD, we decided to try our luck with the mystery deal. It was our first time ever doing this, and it was pretty exciting!! We ended up with Novetel at $99 per night, for Dec 25th and 26th, what a deal!

Overall, there is really not much in Cairns. It is basically a base to travelers visiting Great Barrier Reefs and the nearby islands. I think it has been developed quite successfully with a full range of services available to travelers with various backgrounds and budgets. I think 5 days at Cairns are about right. If we packed things a little tighter, we could’ve fit in 2 days sailing at Whitsundays. Two girls we met in a tour couple days ago went there and they said the beaches are gorgeous with sands white as snow. Well, next time! We did not do skydiving at last. Everybody is asking me to do it, saying it’s once in a lifetime thing and that it will be memorable. I have no doubt about that, but I could not justify paying $300 for half a minute of free fall that I might not enjoy. Carlos wants to give it a try, but he will only go if both of us are doing it together. Not this time!

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