Cairns
Cairns, Australia: Last stop on our coast tour!
We pull up to Cairns Holiday Park and spend the night with a bit of goon. The next day, we take the 30-40 minute walk on the Esplanade into town, and find Calypso Café for breakfast. Their iced mocha is to die for!
After a bit of exploring, we go to Woolies and stock up on a few things. We have goon, as usual, and then we fall asleep.
The next day, the guys go skydiving – we decide to go drink. It is our friend Devon’s birthday, after all. We go to Calypso Café for a great breakfast and coffee first, then we go shopping for a bit, and then we end up at a bar on the Esplanade. The guys eventually join us, and by then we’re beyond tipsy. We’ve made friends with the only male bartender, Dane, since he makes the strongest drinks, and we stuff our faces with $ 18 nachos and equally expensive buffalo wings. Eventually, we go back to the campsite, where we keep the drinks coming.
The next day, we go for breakfast at the same place yet again, and then go next door for day drinking. I really love day drinking. We book a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef the next day with Reef Daytripper, so we head to bed quite early.
We get on a nice boat with a bunch of very boring couples and sail for around 2 hours before we reach Upolu Reef. We jump in, and within minutes, we have found a white tip reef shark! The waves are hitting us hard and knocks us back, so we get quite the workout swimming around, seeing bright blue starfish, clownfish and other colorful species, when we stumble upon the day’s first sea turtle. We follow it for what seems like ages, before we get back on the boat for lunch, and then we sail for a little while to snorkel a different area of the reef. Here, we find even more turtles.
On the way back, we aren’t feeling too great, but we are offered a GLASS of goon, cheeses and fruits. The day can’t possibly get any better, can it?
We have been talking about going to Nandos for ages, since I have never tried it before – and Cairns happens to have one. We go get ourselves some delicious chicken, although I am being a bit moody, since my fries are way spicier than I though. I don’t do spicy food very well, which I like to remind everyone of. We walk home in the rain, and I am too exhausted to even consider goon. I try to read my shitty crime/horror/romance/erotica novel about cowboys and naïve blondes (why do I even bother sometimes?), but I can’t process the words. Craig reads aloud a chapter of the book he’s currently reading, The Rosie Effect, which is the follow-up to The Rosie Project, that I previously read and enjoyed immensely. I’ve said this before, I’ve swallowed books over the past weeks. I think I am up to 5 books since we left Brisbane. While I appreciate Craig’s fatherly gesture, I quickly fall asleep, unable to make sense of the English language anymore.
The next day, we have our last iced coffee at Calypso, and we decide to pick up a few things at Target. It quickly turns into a full-on shopping spree. Several hours and dollars later, Sharon, Craig and I jump into Rosie and drive back to the camp site, waiting for the onsite mechanic to fix her up before her big trip to Uluru. He hasn’t received all the parts he ordered, so we wait until the day after, which is our check-out day. He is late, as expected, so we go to Woolies to pick up 30 litres of water, 3 kilos of pasta and several cans of soup. We’re ready to go.