Travelling and arriving - Cairns / 24th and 25th Oct 18

14-hour flight? After the 5-hour flight to Doha, I was already fed up. Now, after the flight to Sydney, I was even less positive, and we were relieved when we arrived at Sydney airport in the morning. After endless food supplies, unfortunately also stomach cramps, and an extremely complicated immigration form that we had to fill out before arriving in Australia, we had about 6 hours to kill. 

First, we had to show the mentioned immigration questionnaires and passports. We both ticked that we wanted to bring wheat because we received two large gingerbread hearts from Linni's mom as a goodbye gift, which caused us to be identified as Germans several times on this trip. Now we were afraid that we would have to give them up, but the lady at the counter was very nice and let our big 'cookies', which she would have liked to keep for herself, pass through. Then we picked up our backpacks, which we had already wrapped in multiple layers of garbage bags in Berlin, making them look like garbage piles. We hoped that they were not already thrown overboard as garbage on the way, but we were able to load them onto a luggage cart safely and alive.

After a few conversations with nice people, we finally arrived in Cairns, which is 30 degrees warm. We got on our flight transfer bus to the Calypso hostel and were first called cute, as this was surely our first trip with heavy backpacks, which we [poutingly] had to confirm.

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We had a four-bed room in the hostel - we don't know our roommates yet - and after checking in and inspecting, we first went to the city, especially to the shopping center, where we wanted to get SIM cards and other things. 

After realizing that there is free Wi-Fi everywhere in Cairns, we decided to only get advice from different providers for now and to buy a SIM card when we would leave Cairns. 

Overall, we were approached by about 4 people on the streets in the evening who just wanted to know about our backpacker plans out of curiosity and had some good tips, including one who tempted us with the best sunset and sunrise spots. That's why we have been invited to 3 parties by different backpacker meetups in the next days, one of them is tonight, but we are just too tired. 

We also found out that Cairns has a huge swimming pool right on the seafront, which was a bit grayer today because a few clouds had moved in. Generally, Cairns doesn't have a dream beach like other cities on the coast, but it does have access to the Great Barrier Reef. 

We also listened to a few really talented street musicians, which was really nice.

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Right now, we are sitting on some benches at our hostel, eating the kiwis and apples we bought. I'm already looking forward to breakfast tomorrow, which is included here.

Song of the day(s): Streets of London, because one of the street musicians performed it and I was really happy after I recognized it and could sing along.