Two Words: SPRING.BREAK – Part I: Cairns

I never thought I would be ending up going on Spring Break in October – in Australia! But yeah, that’s what happened. So basically, the whole trip can be described with four r-words: Reef, rafting, rainforest, red.

Everything started of pretty badly: I got woken up at 6a.m. on Friday, the day we were supposed to leave around late noon. Thankfully, my friend, Katherine, woke up even earlier, checked her email and saw that our flight was canceled – which immediately let her to frantically call me, we then tried to wake up Teresa, we re-booked our flight to an earlier on that was leaving around lunch time, I ran up to Coles to get some last minute stuff and then threw all kinds of clothes in my luggage and thank god, we made it to the airport in time! Already exhausted after this shocked, we landed in Cairns around 7p.m. and went straight to the Hostel, which turned out to be pretty nice – it had a bar, a pool and we got a four-bed room with a nice Belgian guy. Since we had to get up pretty early the next morning, we ended up getting food at Subway and going to bed early.

The first day, we woke up around 5a.m. because we had to be at the Marina around 7:30. All packed for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef, we boarded the ship and I started of by stealing all the free food I could find, which in this case was a bunch of cookies. After the boat started to speed up, half of the passengers started to get sea sick and I made my way to the fresh air and stared at the horizon for the rest of the trip to not experience the same fate. Thankfully, I made it to the reef without feeding the fish. After a short instruction, we put on our snorkeling gear and jumped into the water. We snorkeled for a couple of hours around the reef and saw amazing corrals, fish and other sea creatures. It was simply breathtaking and after a while I decided to try myself at scuba diving. I put on the oxygen tank (which was quite heavy on land) and I dove down through the reef with the instructor for around 20mins. It was an amazing experience, although a little scary breathing through a tank. Afterwards, I was so hungry, I ate two whole plates of food which was prepared on board. We then made our way to a second reef location were we again snorkeled for a while. At around 5p.m. we were back at the Marina and being quite exhausted and having to get up even earlier the next morning, we went to bed early again. We also met our new roommate that night, a German guy that turned out o be from Buchholz, the same city my family is from! The world is small…

On the second day, we got picked up at the hostel in the early morning and drove two hours with a bus to the Tully river to start out whitewater rafting. We were six people in one raft plus our guide Ben, who was pretty funny. It was another great day with us ending up in the water quite often – either because Ben let us swim next to the boat to cool off or he because he pushed us in the water. We had a nice lunch after passing underneath a waterfall and were back at the hostel again in the early evening.

The third day turned out to be a little different then the first two. We again were picked up at the hostel by our tour for the day and drove up to Port Douglas where we visited the Wildlife Park for an hour. We took some more Kangaroo selfies, saw some crocodiles and I touched a Python. The next stop was a short walk through the Rainforest and then we made our way to the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation, a pretty remote place where we got lunch, walked along the amazing beach, took some pictures and waiting for monster sounds to come from the forest since the whole place looked exactly like the island in the TV series “Lost”. Later, we took little boat tour on a river with a bunch of crocodiles casually chilling at the river banks. At night, we joined our hostels pub crawl through the city which started at the Serpent Bar, went on to Giligans, PJ’s and ended in the Woolshed with free Pizza and a lot of half-naked people. All in all, the whole nightlife experience made me think of Mallorca quite a lot since half of the people in Cairns are German teens.

On the next day, we didn’t have a tour planned so we bought a ferry ticket to Fitzroy Island to chill there for the day. We ended up snorkeling with a pretty big turtle in the reef, chilling at the beach which was dead corrals instead of sand and walking through the rainforest again. It felt much like a day in paradise!

On our last day in Cairns, my friends took the ferry to Green Island for the day and I got up at 5a.m. to go to the beach and watch the sunrise. Afterwards, I rented a bike and explored Cairns for a bit, having lunch in the Botanic Gardens and falling asleep at the Lagoon. later I met up with the others and we had a nice last dinner at the Esplanade while watching the sunset.