Day five dawned and we went back to sleep. It was, after all, a bit of a novelty – we weren’t swaying and no one back banged on our door. The downside – no one was making breakfast. So we eventually crawled out of bed, walked into town and had some breakfast. One nicety of Australia – although they’re very backwards about taking VISA, they do have lots of iced tea and chai lattes. We then found an Internet café and did the whole e-mail thing before having a decent look around. It was a bit cloudier and windier so the lagoon wasn’t nearly so full of half naked teenagers, although we did find the HMNZS Te Mana proudly protecting the Cairns docks. We investigated the rainforest dome, but didn’t go in after discovering the exorbitant price, and enjoyed the tackiness of the local shopping centre, locating within a coffee shop with free Internet about 3 hours too late. We also browsed lots of shops while all the time thinking ‘that’ll be cheaper in Hong Kong’. But best of all we found a tea shop, albeit with the appalling name of ‘Specialteas’.
Eventually dinnertime rolled around and we found a nice little pizza place near the waterfront that plastered us with pizza – including a lovely vegetarian option for Polly – and then desert pizzas. Mango on Crème Anglàis turned out to be lovely, although the serving was overly generous. We also discovered that we had picked a good time to end our stay in Cairns – it started raining and only got harder. So we retired once more to our accommodation and the joys of trying to get our washing done.
