Cairns

Our flight arrived in Cairns early in the day on October 29^th. We got picked up from the airport and taken to our hostel to check-in. Since we had no Australian money Ali headed out in search of an ATM. Unfortunately, this ended badly because as soon as the ATM ejected the money the wind carried the bills down the street and it resulted in Ali running down the road after the money. She ended up only finding some of it and she lost $100 Australian (about $110CAD). Thus, it was a very upsetting start to our time in Australia.

We checked in at Asylum, Cairns. A very basic cheap dorm in Cairns. We only paid $12 a night and it included breakfast and dinner! This was less than half the price of all other hostels in Australia and we LOVED it there! It perhaps wasn’t the nicest hostel, but the staff were nice, the rooms were clean, and it was a great place to meet people J We were only planning on spending about 3 days in Cairns, but we ended up staying there about 6 days because we loved it so much! We met a lot of great people and really enjoyed how cheap the accommodations were.

For the most part we did very little while in Cairns besides relax, go running, go biking, and go diving. We spent a lot of time meeting people in the hostel and getting used to a new country. While in Cairns we took full advantage of the beach boardwalk and started running on it quite often to get back into shape after Asia. We also loved how there were farmer’s markets on the weekends and beaches nearby. One day we decided to rent bicycles and we spent the day biking first to the botanical gardens and then biking an hour to the closest beach. It was nice to get out of the city a bit and see the surrounding area. Another day we went diving on the Great Barrier Reef. We did two dives and saw a cuttlefish J (see additional post)

Overall we really enjoyed Cairns and were sad leave. We only had one month in Australia though to make our way down the coast, so we had to move on. We bought our Greyhound hop-on-hop-off ticket at the hostel and jumped on a night bus from Cairns to Airlie Beach.