AUSTRALIA (OZ) - Cairns

Australia, the largest island in the world, a continent in its own right has a population which is roughly a third of Great Britain!

We arrived in a rather wet Cairns after a flight from Singapore via Darwin. We had arrived during cyclone season. It would have been brilliant to get to every place we visited at the optimum moment but with the nature of a route is that you have to take it as it comes. This did however have a little bit of a negative impact on our Cairns visit.

We stayed in a hostel just outside the centre. Cairns is quite a laid back kind of place focused on the tourism genereated by something called the Great Barrier Reef. I would love to tell you how beautiful it is and what a fantastic experience it was but unfortunately the weather did not allow us to visit it. Boredom did come over us and the other visitors to the hostel and we therefore had a night out. Everyone had a good time although some people seemed not to remember much of it.

Now it was raining a lot there but it was in some ways very welcome to counteract the heat and humidity. Luckily we were not in Melbourne at that moment. It was 47 degrees there and so dry that the now infamous forest fires began. We just made do with high 30s. Here is a photo of Cairns in the 2 hours while it didn't rain.

We booked our Greyhound Bus ticket which would take us all the way down the East Coast to Sydney and across to Melbourne with as many stops as we wanted. We felt relieved that we would be able to take in the sites of somewhere else hopefully less wet. We had another night with one or two beers in the hostel bar and met a lot of other travellers including a girl who had just finished university at Portsmouth as well, what a small world we thought.

That night Karl and I entered a Killer Pool competition in the hostel. The other competitors were mostly local guys who came to the bar every night as well as the landlord, a big guy with big red handle bar facial hair, what struck me as potentially stereotypical for a remote area of OZ. Gradually each players three lives for potting balls got lost untill there were just a few of us left. Eventually after the other 16 were out, there was just me on 3 lives and the landlord on 2, it was obvious that he practiced on his pool tables a lot and i think they were expecting him to walk all over us. Unfortunately for him i ended up winning which bagged me the 20 something dollars and a lot of free games of pool, challenges from all the locals, including the landlord. It was a fun evening, the last one in Cairns, or so we thought!

Next day we arrived at the bus stop. We had heard many rumours about the busses. Several people had returned to the hostel because the bus was unable to start its journey. It turned out the situation was the same for us. Some towns further south had been flood to roof height, 9ft. It was unlikely that any busses would be leaving within a week, and we made the decision to look for a flight out as an alternative as we didn't want to spend another week, maybe more, in a cyclone hit Cairns.

The next day we got a on a flight to Brisbane.