It was a VERY early start to the day today. The alarm was set for 4:30am cause we had to catch a 5:05am bus. I was not impressed when the alarm went off that's for sure. I keep reminding myself that I'm on vacation.
I quickly got dressed and gathered up my things and met the others in the lobby. The bus was on time and luckily it was almost empty so we had lots of space to settle in. We made a few more stops and picked up a bunch of backpackers at one point. I actually met up with Matt, a guy from the UK who was on my NZ trip. What are the odds?
We arrived at the Procerpine train station at about 6am. The train was delayed so we ended up waiting about 45 min. At about 6:45 am we boarded the train and we were off shortly after. It was a long ride...about 10 hrs schedled trip. It was a nice train with TV screens on each seat and plugs and USB outlets. I was lucky and scored two seats to myself for most of the trip. I watched a few movies and dozed a bit too. We were able to deboard briefly at some of the stops so I did that a couple of times. It was HOT outside. They actually made an announcement that we had to travel at half speed due to the effects of the temperature on the rails.
The scenery along the way consisted mostly of farmlands (corn, bananas). There were also small mountains in the distance. They served hot food on the train but I had lots of food in my daypack so I just ate that. We were given $10 to spend on the train for bfast/lunch so ill just use that for something else.
We arrived in Cairns at around 4:40pm. It was stinking hot...muggy and HOT. We took taxi vans to our hotel which was only about a 5 min drive away. We checked in at the Mantra Trilogy. It was one of the nicer looking buildings from the outside but the rooms were pretty small...decent just the same.
Mary and I dropped our bags in the room and changed into some cooler clothes and then we went for a walk around town. We had had enough sitting for one day. Cairns is a really nice waterfront town...as were all the towns along this trip. We walked down the main strip called the Esplanade and along the boardwalk which was just parallel. The Esplanade was lined with restaurants and shops and it was bustling with activity. This was not surprising given it was Sat. night. We saw some neat marine birds near shore (resembling pelicans) as well as a ton of really big bats (flying squirrel) flying into a tree. There was a sign at the waterfront warning not to swim due to the presence of crocodiles!
Near the center of the Esplanade there was a park like area that was neatly decorated with multi-coloured lights and lanterns hanging from the trees. There was also a huge, lit Christmas tree in the middle of it all. This was nice to see as there haven't really been many decorations to be seen over the past few days of the trip. After walking around and visiting a few souvenir shops we stopped at a restaurant on the Esplanade around 7pm for dinner. It was so hot we both ordered salads. It was good tho...made with greens and pine nuts and beets and pumpkin with a garlic aioli. Yum.
At about 8:30 we left the restaurant and went to the Night Market nearby. This didn't turn out to be as exciting as I had hoped. It was basically filled with a bunch of mass-produced, made-in-China stuff. There were a few things of quality but not much. Mostly souvenirs. I bought a towel and Mary bought some Uggs (knock-offs likely).
At about 10:30 we headed back toward the hotel. I was feeling the 4:30am wake-up call majorly by this point. We made one final stop at the gelato shop before heading home. This time, I got Ferrero Rochee flavour. It didn't really taste like the chocolates, but it still hit the spot.
We returned to the hotel for showers and bed. I did my blogging that I had started on the train and went to bed around 11:30pm feeling exited that I didn't have to wake up till 6:30am :s
T
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