The Legend that is Benny Oakley

Another nap later and we headed down to the bar to redeem our backpacker bargain special - pork chops and chips for $7! We unretired Adam from the game of darts – then Amy beat him so he quickly retired again! He made his come back on the pool table until James – random buyer of drinks/pool club promoter took over and wiped the floor with him. Adam was on the verge of retiring from pool as well but was too polite to say no to the guy when he asked for another game.

The next randoms to invade our personal space was Little Miss ‘Oi Oi Oi’ herself, Brooke - when we finally caught on that she was trying to get our attention we went over and sat with her, her brother, Claire, the legendary Benny Oakley and too many others to realistically remember all their names. The pitchers of beer and the sav blank was flowing and all was going well until the leader of the ‘stupid boys we need large rocks thrown at us’ club reared his drunken head and started causing a scene…we left shortly after that!

Tuesday morning arrived along with more mosquito bite, the beginnings of a hangover, the joys of packing, trying to get to the airport on time (we were up against the clock, a particularly nonchalant mini-bus driver who took forever to round everyone up, forever to get into the bus and then had to drive to the harbour to drop the boat/passengers off before we even set off for the airport), screaming children, the rest of a hangover, turbulence and finally we arrived in Cairns.

To make up for our bad taxi driver experience in Sydney, karma did its job and we managed to discover the friendliest taxi driver/tour guide in all of Australia. Then we met Betty and Evan who became our new best friends and didn’t turn us away even though their motel didn’t really cater for mixed groups…thanks guys! Task #1…to plan the next ten days of our trip - what an ordeal. It was tough enough organising the three of us, our wants and needs without Evan's 'helpful' contribution of only giving us the expensive Whitsundays trip leaflets..."Oh, I'm sorry dude, do my worn down flip flops and holey skirt scream out to you that I have money to spare?!"

We put together something resembling a plan - 2 days Cape Tribulation, 1 day reef, overnight bus to Airlie beach, 3 days Whitsundays then back to Brisbane. Four days later our plan looked a lot more like...2 days Cape Tribulation, 1 day reef, 3 days in Cairns waiting for the rain to stop, 1 day Brisbane, 2 days Byron Bay. Despite all the setbacks we managed to have a good time.