Cairns- Northern Australia (Eastcoast)

We arrived in Cairns very tired and very hangover due to our send off the night before; However we were still very excited as we stepped out of the plane in to warm sunny weather, which was a welcomed change to the cold, wet weather we had just left behind in Sydney.

Whilst in Sydney we booked a week accommodation on the internet for a hostel in Cairns called Gilligan’s as we had heard great reviews about it from fellow travelers. Our advance booking also included an airport pickup which saved us about $20.

Gilligan’s is the biggest hostel in Cairns, with its own nightclub, bar and swimming pool. It is a very clean and modern hostel with large spacious kitchens on each of the 4 floors it has, and it is not overly expensive to stay there. So in saying all the above, I do agree that Gilligan’s lives up to all of the reviews we heard from other travelers whilst in Sydney.

However it is very LOUD!!! Which is all good and well if you don’t need or want much sleep or you can sleep through noise, but if like me you cannot stay up for more than 2 nights in a row and you like to get at least 4/5 hours sleep a night in order to function the next day… well then you are warned, you will not get any sleep whilst staying at this hostel… Therefore after a week of no sleep I was ready to move on…. At the age of 26, Toni and I did start to feel a tad too old for this hostel as the average age of the people that stayed was between 18-23. If I was in this age bracket then I may have enjoyed my stay here a bit more…. That said, and after sounding like an old party pooper… I must say we did have a few good drunken nights and meet some great people whilst we were here….

At first Toni and I decided to stay in Cairns but just change accommodation and find jobs; we found a room above a big pub that was only $100 each a week… However at the end of our initial week in Cairns we were ready to move on… And in all honesty, if you have not got the funds to eat in all the lovely little restaurants, or shop in the shops, or go on all the trips of the rain forest and great barrier reef and you don’t enjoy or can handle getting drunk every night, then there is not a great deal to do in Cairns….

We had heard about a backpacker travel agency called Peterpan’s, so we decided to check it out… We was happy with the prices so we decided to book our Whitsunday and Frasier island trips, as well as our Greyhound coach that would ensure we had travel back to Sydney, this coach ticket meant we had 6 months to get back to Sydney and we could stop off on the coast as many times along the way… For all 3 of these we paid $900 which is 500 pounds, which was really good. Also booking through Peterpan’s gave us additional discount vouchers and free and cheap internet at all their stores over Australia- Bonus….