North To Cairns

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  Cairns, Queensland, Australia
Sunday, February 22, 2009

Saturday was a travel day for us- we were off to Cairns, on the far northeast coast of Australia.  Cairns, whose year-round population is approximately 10,000, is primarily a tourist town- the weather there is tropical, and it is best known for being the best place from which to access the Great Barrier Reef, one of the great natural wonders of the world.  There are a lot of backpackers in town, but also a fair number of older tourists as well. Our flight left Sydney at 3:30 and we arrived at our hotel in Cairns around 6:00.  We stayed at the Holiday Inn, which had a pretty good location right by the water.  However, the sign in our room gave us a bit of pause, which said that ants were a fact of life in Cairns and that we were likely to see some in our room.  It also said we may see some geckos in our room. Sweet.  We never did see a gecko, but saw plenty of these tiny little ants, including some that climbed on Courtney's toothbrush one night, which as you can imagine, she was pretty pleased about. 
The Holiday Inn had one thing really going for it- they had a well-versed travel agent at the front desk that gave us a lot of advice on what to do while there.  Since it was Saturday night, we wanted to go out fairly late, but also wanted to do something on Sunday, preferably not very early. We knew we wanted to visit the rainforest and the Barrier Reed while in Cairns, so she hooked us up with a trip to the rainforest that didn't take off until 11:30 am.  Perfect. 
My initial impression of Cairns was very positive.  This was a good thing, since we debated whether to stay in Cairns, Port Douglas, or Palm Cove.  We had heard that Cairns wasn't that great, but had better nightlife.  This was a pretty accurate description, although I thought it was much nicer than advertised.  The main drag along the ocean, known as the Esplanade, has dozens of restaurants and shops with outdoor seating available.  The downtown area is probably about 10 blocks by 5 blocks in size, and there are tons of bars and restaurants and is pretty nice, all in all.  There is definitely no shortage of stuff to do. 
We grabbed dinner at an Italian place with incredibly slow service, but pretty good food, and then went to go out at the place suggested by nearly everyone we talked to, which included the girl at the front desk, the travel lady and our cabbie (who rattled off about 20 bars in ten seconds when asked, but who could not tell us a single good thing we should do while in town).  This place was Gilligan's, a very nice, and very massive hostel that had a very large nightclub/beer garden.  We had drinks in the beer garden while it poured outside(a common evening theme in Cairns, as we found out) and listened to a pretty good band.  The place filled up a fair amount (even when seemingly empty, there could still be hundreds of people at this gargantuan bar), but Courtney decided to call it quits early this night, so we sent her home in a cab.  Andy and I stayed out a while but also headed home probably around 2 or 3 after stopping by a place called the Woolshed, which had a cover, so we decided against going in, since we had to get up at a reasonable hour the next day.

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