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On the road again
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We arrived in Cairns after a flight delay and a time change so we were very tired arriving to our hostel. We woke up at about 3am to find the door of the room wide open and I could see a guy standing outside in the hall....I said "hello", as you do! Thinking he might have been drunk or got the wrong room. As soon as he saw me he bolted back down the hall which I thought was a bit strange. We closed the door and about 2 seconds later I got a bad feeling and I turned on the light only to find Tadghs small bag taken from right beside my bed , literally beside my head as I slept. We went down the hall to find Tadghs bag thrown on the ground wide open with the camera, ipod, mp3 etc all intact but his wallet with his credit cards gone. We rang the cops, as we were really spooked at this stage to think that we had been asleep while he managed to take it. Although it didn't help that we hadn't locked the door of the room. The cops did nothing but apparently it was a common enough occurrence. Welcome to Cairns!
Next day we went on the mission of finding a car. We viewed a few complete rust buckets, one van looked like someone had gone over it with a hammer...a bit like that episode of Father Ted! We met a guy who was selling his mothers car and basically told us we could have it for 800 if we took the number plates off it, and we could always "borrow "ourselves a new set. Dodgy!
In the end by chance we had called into a mechanic to check about getting work done on another car and they just happened to have one for sale themselves. A Mitsubishi magma station wagon with only 160,000km on the clock and in perfect condition, so there and then we decided it was a pretty safe bet.
The rest of the weekend we spent doing a little touristy stuff around Cairns. We did the obligatory boat trip out to the reef which was really disappointing.
The sailing itself was good fun because there were really high winds but the snorkeling was terrible as the water was really cloudy and the coral looked all brown and dead.
We spent an afternoon by the lagoon in the town as well,
a common sight in a lot of the towns on the east coast. It was basically a big salt water swimming pool, but its nice when you can't swim in the sea with all the stinger, sharks, sea lice etc!
We also tried our hand at a bit of knee boarding and wake boarding. Such a good laugh. They have a purpose built lake with cables running overhead that pull you round the lake instead of a boat. I think the lake was a little less full by the time we were finishing with the amount of water we were swallowing.
I kept falling off a the far end of the lakes, at the furthest point from the starting point so I spent half my time walking the length of the lake. Tadgh made a pretty good job of the wake boarding (like snowboarding in the water), supposedly I had a great take off...but that's as far as my talents went, as a split second after every take off I was head first into the water.
We picked up our car that day and spent our first night in the back! No curtains no mattress, lets just say it was slightly uncomfortable!
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