Cairns 4 nights in a hostel

Until Saturday we booked a double room in the hostel in Cairns. It was our first hostel stay ever. We stayed at MadMonkey Backpackers on the waterfront. Very nice, clean hostel opened in 2017. The location was super central and breakfast was included in the room price.

There is also a public swimming area right on the Esplanade in Cairns, which you don't have to pay for (see entry Brisbane). It was a less than a minute walk for us and we spent most of our time in Cairns there. The area has a tropical climate and we had over 30 degrees Celsius every day.

In total, we only did three sightseeing activities in the city. We strolled through the city center and along the Esplanade every evening.

Once, we rode the free bikes from the hostel to the botanical gardens. The garden is tropical and well maintained, and admission is free. It was nice to walk around, but not necessarily a must-do excursion for us.

We also visited the art gallery in Cairns. It's a small art exhibition spread over three floors, beautifully located in an old building. Admission is free.

On Friday, we booked a sailing trip to the Great Barrier Reef (http://www.fallareeftrips.com) with this boat, meals and two snorkeling trips were included. We decided to scuba dive, but unfortunately Jenny couldn't because she had trouble equalizing the pressure. So she went snorkeling twice and Thomas did two dives. Diving costs extra and there is a certified diving instructor on board. The underwater view is amazing and you can see many corals and animals while snorkeling, including reef sharks, barracudas, and Thomas even met "Nemo". The onboard meals were good and we learned a lot about the reef, the boat, and the crew. The atmosphere was very relaxed 😎. The trip was definitely worth it and worth the money in our opinion!

During our stay in Cairns, we decided to look for accommodation for the next days/weeks where we could work for food and lodging. We had already found something suitable (work on a farm near Maryborough) and could have stayed with a family over the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, you could only get to this place by train or bus, and when we wanted to buy train tickets, it turned out that all seats on the train were fully booked for the days before Christmas. The Greyhound bus option was too expensive for us (about 30-40% more expensive) and it would have taken us 1-2 days longer for the same route. So we had to cancel with the family and luckily, we were able to take advantage of an offer at the Gold Coast from December 20th. The route from Cairns to the Gold Coast can be flown in about 2 hours and we were able to book cheap flights for Saturday at short notice. To bridge the time in between, we booked a room on Airbnb at the Gold Coast from Saturday to Wednesday.

For those who book the right seats (on the left side by the window) on domestic flights heading south and have good weather conditions, a view from above of the Great Barrier Reef is included :). We had great conditions and fortunately booked the right seats, so on Saturday we continued (with a view of the reef) towards the Gold Coast.