to Oz!

The Nadi airport is tiny, and the flight to Sydney was about three and something hours. My first sight of Australia was of a wet, chilly Sydney, and my first encounter with Australians on their home soil was with with a customs officer who saw fit to take away all 5 of my juggling balls because they 'contain millet seeds'. That was 50 quids worth of juggling balls going to the furnace (or, perhaps, to the customs officer's children's toybox, who knows?)! Needless to say, I wasn't left with a great first impression of the Australians as The Stealers of All Fun.

Then there was another four hour something flight to Cairns, which was, being a lot more k/ms further towards the equator than Sydney, really, really hot and sunny. May is late Autumn verging on Winter here, which is something that I can't quite get used to - 28C isn't winter! It's just NOT.

I met Nik at the hostel, Dreamtime Travellers Rest ('dreamtime' is something to do with the Aborigines, I haven't quite worked out exactly what yet), a great, chilled out, tropical hostel with an enthusiastic Irish owner. Nik had mostly heard that Cairns wasn't a place to linger, but the view I' d got of it from the shuttle bus window was ok enough - a slightly sprawling small city with wide streets, backing onto the (closed) man-made lagoon and the sea, which was preceeded by mudflats teeming with thousands of slightly sinister-looking crabs. We would be in town for a few days at least while we sorted out a working hostel to go to.

Almost immeadiatly as soon as I arrived I was drawn into the Hmm, Now What Do We Do?! panic that Nik had been embroiled in for day he'd already been in town. All the working hostels he'd called were either full or had no work, and work was a definite priority, so we could have a bed to sleep in and food etc. We ended up in Cairns for four days in the end, most of them spent on the internet or phone, contacting hostels, and WWOOFing hosts as a back-up, with occasional forays out to the waterfront and the cute but slightly tacky Night Market. We also went to the BBQ and fireshow that the Dreamtime held every Wedneday. I passed on the BBQ but Nik got to try kangaroo and crocodile. Apparently kanagaroo was nicer. So, the first kangaroo I got to see in Australia was on a plate, cut into small pieces and barbequed...
The fireshow itself was fantastic. It was put on by 3 performers from the area, with their individual routines co-ordinated to music.

Finally, after 3 days of slightly panicked looking, we found a working hostel in Tully, centre of banana-growing in Australia, which had two dorm beds free, with the owner also giving us the positive news that we'd be numbers two and three on the hostel work list (jobs are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis).
With that sorted we figured we could hit the beach or at least chill out in the waterfront park for our final full day in Cairns....

But there remained the rather disgusting issue of Nik's Knee. What had started out as Fiji-origin mosquito bite had over the past week morphed in something altogether more gross and infected. So our last day in Cairns turned into a merry exploration of all the different medical offerings in the Cairns Central Mall - the chemist, the doctor's, the chemist again, and, finally, when Nik was hit with the doctor's bill and penicillin prescription charges, the Medicare offices to sort out getting a rebate. Still, it was definitely worth it to ensure that his leg didn't fall off, which would have really mucked up the next day's trip to Tully to jobhunt...

written by  LizIsHere on May 20, 2010 from Cairns, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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