Joel & Nicola's Travelling Adventure: Chillaxing in Cloudy Cairns, our northernmost stop in QLD

We arrived in Cairns at 06:00 after a 10 hour overnight greyhound, which was less comfortable than the last; partly due to the seats being marginally but noticeably smaller, and second because the bus was full of bogans (chavs) and backpackers. We headed towards our motel, the Cairns City Motel, which was on Lake St. so not far from where we were dropped off. As we arrived we saw a sign saying that reception was closed until 09:30. We should have guessed that at 06:00 reception would have been closed, so we walked back to the Esplanade near to where the bus dropped us off and had a cheeky Mackers (Aussie slang for McDonalds) to kill some time. When 09:30 finally rolled by, we were outside our motel. We were less than pleased to see a clearly hung over backpacker man (or should I say woman) the reception desk. We asked if we could check in and she said, emotionlessly, “Check in is at 3”. We had clearly just got off a bus and we had all our bags with us but she just sat there, with vacant, dead fish like eyes and said nothing. I asked if maybe there was a store room we could put our bags in until check in. She nodded and said yes, I asked her where this store room was and she opened the door behind her. Dealing with such a listless cretin was not a good way to start our stay in Cairns, but we were soon learning that hostels that employ backpackers tend to employ the most simple and inefficient morons under the sun.

Nicola and I walked to the Esplanande, again, and had a sit by the lagoon. Much like most of QLD, well from around Rockhampton up, it was jellyfish season so an alternative to the sea was the lagoon and interestingly, the one in Cairns is saltwater. Anyhow, Cairns doesn’t actually have a beach, so I guess the lagoon is not really an alternative, other than an alternative to the croc infested waters touching upon the rainforest further along the Esplanade. Instead of sand, Cairns has mud banks. At 14:30 we went to the motel and asked for our room, I know they said 15:00, but we had arrived at Cairns nine hours earlier and we wanted to get into our room, shower and change into new clothes. Needless to say we were not in a good mood and were not going to be happy unless we had our room – I had my “I’m in a mood for an argument” face on – but fortunately, the simpleton from the morning was not on shift (probably off drinking or staring vacantly out to sea) and a good humoured chap was on reception. The only problem was he told us our room was open and the key was inside, which was partly true, our key was inside the room but the door was locked. Flabbergasted, we walked back to reception and retrieved the spare key and finally got into our room. Moral of this story, don’t say at Cairns City Motel (also known as Poinsetta Motel) as it is staffed by halfwits.

Nicola and I had a traipse around Cairns and soon discovered that there is a dearth of things to do in Cairns. There is plenty to do outside Cairns, but after walking around the lagoon (unless you are a gambler as there are plenty of tacky little pokies and a casino) you have exhausted all there is to do in Cairns. Unfortunately, we had booked 10 nights here due to arranging to hire a campervan on 21 November. One interesting thing about Cairns was the few trees near the lagoon that were inhabited by flying foxes. If you’ve not seen a flying fox, think of a massive bat and it kinda looks like that. As we were walking around with our bags a fruit bat opened his bowels right on top of my rucksack, mere inches from my face and chest. I had a dairy farm flashback – I guess I must have the scent now, animals just want to poo on me. I know they say if a bird poo’s on you it is good luck…but what about a flying fox pooing on you?? At night they made a hell of a racket and you could see hundreds of them flying around the few trees they lived in, it looked like something out of a Dracula movie, seeing hundreds of these big bat like creatures circling in the skies…spooky.

Cairns also has a high aboriginal population. I believe there is an aboriginal reservation nearby and we saw more in Cairns than we had seen anywhere else in Australia so far. The people in Australia we spoke to didn’t speak of them very highly, apparently in Cairns they like to beat up tourists at night, there is an endemic drinking problem in their communities and they appear to be seen as trouble makers and lazy (a bit like chavs back home) by the non-indigenous Australian population. Whether this is true or not, we do not know that’s just what we’ve heard.

We spent the next few days in Cairns sitting by the lagoon, sitting in our hostel (we moved hostel after one night in Cairns City Motel) reading, applying for jobs and generally relaxing. Unfortunately, the weather, almost from the moment we arrived, was wet. Despite it raining heavily a lot of the time, it was still excruciatingly humid – we both decided not to bother looking into short term farm work: one, because they tend to want male staff only; and two, the weather would probably dry us out and dehydrate us faster than we could pick a crate of mangoes. We also discovered, to our disadvantage, that out here in Australia, they are pretty protectionist about employment. They want the foreign backpackers to do the farm labour which they don’t want to do themselves (Hank and Peggy on the dairy told us that QLD agriculture is dependent upon backpacker labour) and they keep the graduate jobs for the locals. All the graduate scheme or similar jobs we looked at were for ”Permanent Residents or Citizens” only (the Americanisation out here is excruciating – I feel like daubing “u’s” on their signs adding to words like “Labor” and “Color” and swapping “z” for “s”!). We were only considering grad schemes and the like as a break to our work from home, and seeing that we’d have two years (in theory at least) out here, we thought why not. Not completely put off, we still applied for jobs via a recruitment site in our respective fields (paralegal and medical laboratory scientist) as not all the jobs were explicitly for locals only.

We are finding that the cost of living out here is quickly draining our finances, and we need to secure employment if we wish to remain out here. We commenced “belt-tightening” measures, such as making our own food and topping up water bottles instead of buying new ones. Small measures you may think but not when one round of meals (i.e. lunch or dinner) was costing us around $30 - $50 a go. Three rounds of meals a day, and it all adds up pretty quick. We booked ourselves into a “getaway park” camp site, which is around half the price of a hostel for six nights after the eclipse to save money and we also booked a “relocs” campervan to save more cash. Relocs stands for relocations, basically, camper hire company A in town B needs campervan X at hire company Y in town Z. That’s where we come in, for $5 a day (and they provide us with petrol up to $250 upon valid presentation of receipts) we will be driving a four bed campervan over 1000 miles from Cairns to Brisbane in four days. Excited? Very!