So you may have guessed that I am in cairns. Right this moment I am sitting in an air conditioned suite with some sun dried tomato cheese, a giant glass of red and a swaggle of expensive cuban cigars... to me this is heaven.

Let me tell you a little about cairns, it's much like japan except ... well it's much like japan. Apparently it's one of the closest places for Japanese people to visit in Australia for a memorable holiday, so I am a foot and a half taller than 80% of the people here. It's an instant ego boost.

The most striking thing about cairns is the weather. It's not so much hot, but as sticky a Honeymoon suites bed linnen. The sweat is constant and relentless, and you even sweat in the shower. I swear if I got up right now I could climb on the ceiling like a freaking gecko.

This article is intended to be a diary of my time here in cairns, the moment it sounds like a blog I'll smash my laptop with an overpriced digereridoo that every 2nd shop here seems to sell.

Tomorrow I'm spending the entire day underwater diving so it's almost certain that I'll be bitten or stung by something deadly... so I know you'll enjoy reading that. It's almost like I want a jellyfish to pick a fight with me so I can write about it for you guys from the emergency ward. I promise if I come across a shark, I'll call it's bluff. I need to turn my laptop off so I can mop the sweat out between the keys. Until tomorrow, it's cigar time.

 

The morning started getting all my shit together frantically in time for the bus that was picking me up from out the front of the motel. I stunk of cigars, and had sporadic facial hair that gave me the distinct appearance of an arabic spice merchant.

We arrived at the marina with a small bus full of people from Australia, Scotland and Japan. As we walked towards the boats the Japanese people were ushered off to the side in a scene which felt like Shindlers List. The Japanese people were put on a boat Dedicated to Japanese people, everyone on that boat was japanese and everyone on our boat were fluent english speakers. For a moment I considered that the Japanese boat was hijacked by Pauline Hanson or some other homicidal racist Xenophobe.. I was certain that a bomb would go off out to sea sending the Japanese to a watery grave.

We arrived at the Great Barrier Reef, which is the whole point of cairns... look it up if you are ignorant. The water was as warm as a bath of urine and as clear as the air between Monica Lewinski's ears. It came the time to fill in a medical questionnaire, I was dishonest on everything mostly but told them I was on medication. So the fuckers rang up a Dr and told me that I couldn't dive. As you can imagine I was as impressed as a guy catching his wife fucking the room service guy on their honeymoon.
I managed to regroup and jumped into my snorkeling gear and hopped in. We were supposed to follow the guide or at least stick in pairs, so of course I took off by myself and went looking for interesting and dangerous shit. I've been accused of being a cynical bastard more than once, but I did enjoy the reef... it is a freaking paradise. I found a sea turtle and chased the bastard till he let me take a photo and pat him.

I was swimming along and felt this horrid sting on my face, and it was indeed a Jelly Fish.. I thought my face would blow up to make me look like John Candy. You'll be saddened to learn that nothing of the sort happened.

I swam along further and spotted a shark in the distance, remembering that I promised you that I'd call it's bluff so I confronted it with my A game to see if it would match it with me. It totally folded at the first hand. It had a pair of two's and I had a royal flush. It pissed off at the speed of light and the only photo I could get of it was this:

So we went to another place on the boat that was equally cool and eventually returned home. I was so knackered that I passed up on the bottle of wine on the bar and hit the sack... of course with full intentions to completely commit fraud on my medical test the next day as we were to be on a different boat owned by a different company.

The next day started bullshit early, like 7am or something. The boat was slightly cooler than the day before and I was keen for some scuba. The medical form presented itself and I looked upon it with glee and a certain look of mischief on my face. I didn't read more than two words and ticked no to everything. I handed it to the guy and I was in business.... I was going diving. If I was to die underwater then I hoped my rotting corpse would thrown in the trunk of the guy who turned me down the day before.

Diving was awesome, I had done it before so the dive guide let me do my own thing, I saw a giant sting ray that was sleeping but was still distinctly hinting "Mess with me and I will screw you up" so I left it alone.

There was this other chick diving at the same time and she was hopeless and kicked me in the head a few times, but I resisted the temptation to bite through her air hose and deflate her buoyancy vest and swam on.

Needless to say, the reef kicked royal ass and I was buzzed when I got home. I couldn't contain my enthusiasm so I went across the road to this pub/bar/nightclub thing. They had a live band that was ordinary, but I needed to use the ashtray so I sat there anyway.

I ordered a beer to complement my cigar from the netherlands and they gave me this poor excuse for a glass which I finished in 30 seconds. I went back and asked for two this time. The music was so loud the guy couldn't hear me so he made hand gestures for big and small. I responded to his sign language with a "giant". It ended up costing me $12 for two beers but they were the most amazing thing I had ever seen. At first I thought they were pints, but they made a pint look like a computer programmer in a body building competition.

I downed them and some other strange few nasty cocktails and was decidedly inebriated. I went to get another drink and found my seat was taken... so I asked this guy if I could share his table.
The guy introduced himself and I completely forgot his name 1 second later, then his friend came and joined us too. The friend was like "Who the hell's this guy," so I was prepared for things to get ugly. It turns out the guy was just talking crap because his girlfriend just dumped him or something. We started chatting and they revealed themselves as "A" grade stoners, so I had a few stories to share with them as they weren't satisfied with me being an ex stoner.

From here on things got ugly. Ugly to the tune of their 40-50 year old hippy neighbour who came over. She was smashed out of her skull and clearly had been, or was on heroine. She made Oprah Winfrey look like Jessica Alba... she was actually that disturbing. I was wearing a shirt that said "hung like a" then had a picture of a horse under it. She looked at it puzzled for what seemed like 10 minutes trying to decipher what it meant, one of the guys had to explain it to her. I said I tried to find one that said "I'm Chinese in the pants" but they were all out. Only one of the guys got it and to his stoner credit came back two minutes later with "Well at least the girls wouldn't be disappointed."

The hippy asked for a puff of my cigar claiming that she loved them and was a veteran. I reluctantly agreed, hey I was drunk. She handed it back and to my horror it looked like I'd handed it to a Tasmanian Devil with an overactive salivitory gland. I tried my best to pull the end off it but eventually had to go the the bar for a pair of scissors.

I chatted some more to the stoners and one of them invited me to their next destination, but I decided I'd stay. The hippie came back and asked for another draw. My mind said "fuck no" but I politely suggested that I'll smoke a bit more and let her finish it (finish it she would have.) I went home and cleaned my teeth vigorously in case I had contracted some strange disease.

The next day I buggarised around shopping and then jumped on the plane home leaving a lighter and deodorant can in my luggage just to see if the warnings were accurate, clearly they weren't.

That concludes my trip to Cairns, ... the trip home was less than memorable the only funny thing was that I had to sit behind these two krauts that insisted on leaning back into my 10cms of allocated leg room. When one of them got up to leave he smashed his head on the overhead compartment... I was the only person who laughed.
Cairns = 10/10

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