Gateway to Great Barrier Reef and Rainforest
Cairns is a city in Queensland, on the North East Coast of Australia and is home to around 150,000 people.The city features dozens of hotels, tour agencies, souvenir shops, bars and tour boats to take care of all the tourists who visit the city from all kind of countries. They use the city as gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, Daintree Rainforest or Cape Tribulation. Besides tourism, the city is focused on agricultural products such as sugar cane, bananas, coffee
After a great 3.5 weeks in New Zealand, I flew to Australia for the second time. I took a flight from Auckland via Brisbane to Cairns. For strategic reasons I flew this time all the way to Cairns in the northeast of the country. From there I had the advantage of being able to take the route further south along the east coast without having to travel one way up and back.
Hostel organizes bbq with crocodile or kangaroo meet
When I arrived at the airport in Cairns, I spotted several tourist signposts in Japanese and Chinese language, as the area is teeming with tourists from these countries. There are no public buses from the airport to the center. Only by shuttle I reached my hostel, which got "the best hostel in Australia" award for some years. The award surprised me a little, as at first sight, the hostel was rather ordinary. It had a nice pool, a quiet location and was clean, but nothing that I would not have seen better in other countries. What most deserves an award is the outstanding social atmosphere, through which you quickly got in contact with the other guests of the hostel. In today's society, where everybody is just staring at their mobile phones and minding their own business, this is a rarity.
Every Monday there is a barbecue at the sister hostel where even crocodile, kangaroo or emu meat is thrown on the grill. Here, I had to pass as a vegetarian, but instead, I took part in the weekly pizza evening where dozens of domino pizzas are ordered. The pizzas taste terrible, but anyway, it is more about having dinner together. And so I unexpectedly met a former teacher from my school! Right on the other side of the world. What are the odds? In all the years I've traveled, I've never even met anyone from my city.
Swarms of bats in the city center
Something unusual can be observed when you walk through the city at dusk, as there are large swarms of bats flying over the city. I have never seen so many of these creatures in the center of a city. During the day you can see them sleeping on the treetops and signs warn of possible faecal discharge from above.
Gorgeous nature surrounding a rather boring city
Cairns itself is a rather small city, it lives mainly from tourism. The city itself is not very beautiful, it is the nature in its surroundings that marks it out. The Great Barrier Reef and the rain forest are right at the front door. I spent most of my time in Cairns going to the Esplanade, which is a great public swimming pool with an artificial beach and sunbathing lawn where you can relax and read your book. Disappointingly, there are no beaches near the city itself.
Apart from that, almost everything that you can do as a tourist in Cairns costs money. And the touristical attractions, the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest or the visit of Kuranda cost several 100AU$. The only thing that was free is the visit of the botanical garden, where I saw some beautiful butterflies and carnivorous plants.
A lot of rain and heat in tropical Cairns
The city is also known for wild parties at Gilligans or Woolshed, where women sometimes like to expose their bosoms. However, I could never visit these two clubs. The wet weather usually spoiled my mood for going out. It was the beginning of April and that just marked the end of the rainy season. A few weeks earlier there had been heavy flooding in this state, which even led to roadblocks. So in my first week in Cairns I practically only experienced rain, once it rained 3 days in a row! And also in the second week it rained regularly almost every evening. And how it rained: it poured like from buckets. Cairns has a tropical climate, which in its hot and humid extremes reminds me most of Bangkok. I literally sweated the whole time. In my hostel they provided at least an air conditioner that could be used for 3 hours if you pay 1$. Electricity is quite expensive in Australia.
Looking for a job
I stayed longer than usual in Cairns, because I wanted to digest my impressions of my stay in New Zealand and above all because I wanted to find a job in the area. But also here it was not an easy task and so I met many people in my hostel who got stuck here and received free overnight stay in the hostel in return for 2 hours of mopping each day. Cleaning toilets for a lousy bed was out of question for me, so I searched for something else.
Often it made it easier to find a job if you had a car, because then you could get jobs in harder to reach places, but I didn't want to rent a car either.Restaurants or cafés were hardly looking for any. The owner of the hostel told me that only in a few weeks it would "get better". But maybe he just said that to get me to stay. Farm jobs in Australia are also much more in demand than I had imagined, as many backpackers fight for these jobs to complete their 88 days of regional work, which entitles them to a second visa year. In the past they used to get African slaves for this, today they get naive western backpackers.
Getting a volunteer job
Volunteering was also fine for me. I actually wanted to save a little money in Australia, but I still had plenty of money. At last I found an advertisement at workaway, where a small hotel near Cairns needed an "allrounder". Workaway, a site where you can volunteer, was something I wanted to try for a long time. You pay almost 44$ per year and get access to volunteering opportunities in almost every country in the world. The communication with the hotel owner went on completely straightforward and I got the promise to work there for 2 weeks in exchange for a free overnight stay. So, after almost 2 weeks in Cairns I started my first volunteering job in Yorkeys Knob, a suburb of Cairns.
