It's Grim Up North

If you're mad do you know that you're mad? And if you don't then how do you know that you're not mad? Yes, you're right, Cairns gave us too much time on our hands.

If you ever come to Australia or have been here, you will know that Aussies think some weird stereotypes about us lot.
1) All English people constantly whinge. Where does that come from? Yes, we all wear bowler hats aswell.
2) We drink warm beer. Apart from the fact we probably invented the cooling systems they use, we don't drink our beer in girly half pint glasses and our beer doesn't warm up after 2 minutes because... (next stereotype) ...
3) In England it's always minus 30 degrees and raining.

They will remind you of each one of these at least five times per day. So if ever they pull out the weather one on you, tell them to go to Cairns in January. It did nothing but slash it down for the whole week we were there. Nice weather for ducks. It's a tiny place anyway and except for a day trip to Cape Tribulation, the Daintree rainforest and Mossman Gorge, there was little else to do. We also had a week to kill until our road trip. I therefore turned into one of those domestic housewives who drink red wine all day to pass the time. I don't have any pictures of Cairns but here's a self portrait I took which managed to pass 25 seconds of the day.

The original plan was to rent a car and take a five day road trip through the desert to Darwin but no car hire company would let this happen. It's wet season and they don't have sealed roads which would apparently mean a ruined car and loads of breakdowns. What, no proper roads between two major cities? Are we in Africa or what? After two days of stressing between Boycie style car dealers we decided to Geoffrey Boycott the idea of Darwin and booked a 3 day coach tour to Alice Springs instead. Carla, whom we'd originally met in 1770 (the town, not the year) came to join us and we were off. Goodbye Cairns, goodbye east coast, goodbye slight red wine addiction, goodbye my lover, goodbye my friend, you have been the one, you have been the one for me.