Backpacker for the Day

Well I slept until 8am and then got my stuff together and checked out at 8:30. I could have waited until 10 but I didn’t have anything to do anyway. I got a bus ticket to the airport for 12:30 since my flight was for 2:55. So I had 4 hrs to kill around town carrying my backpack and another bag.

            About an hour after I left my hostile, I got a text from JetStar saying my flight had been canceled for the day. Just my luck…I sat down my stuff on a bench and called the number. This call ended up costing me $2.70 too by the time I was done talking with the person. The next flight to Sydney was leaving at 7:10 tonight. I already checked out and booked my bus so I would now have 6 hrs at the airport before my flight and I would arrive in Sydney at 10pm, leaving me with 2 hrs to get back to Macquarie before the trains stop and it took me an hour and a half to get to the airport the other day. The whole reason I had originally booked the earlier flight so that I wouldn’t have to worry about missing the last trains. Well that was not a highlight of my morning…At the end of the call, the guy told me my new itinerary would be sent to my email soon, but I had no internet access either, but luckily I didn’t need it because I had the same booking number.

            After getting that settled, I headed to the lagoon which was a pool with a tiny strip of sand on one side. Since I had time and I was sweating walking around with all my stuff, I decided to change into my swimsuit and take a dip in the pool. I knew I would have plenty of time to dry off before I had to head back to Gilligan’s for my bus. The water felt very nice since it was 30 C (around 86 F) outside. Then I just sat on my towel in the sun for a while. I didn’t want to go too far from my stuff, since I had everything with me.

            After being at the lagoon for a bit over an hour, I changed and walked around taking more pictures of the scenery. Then I stopped in more souvenir shops. Everything is beginning to look similar just like when I went to Costa Rica. There were a couple stores with some good deals but I resisted spending too much money, plus I didn’t really have any room to carry more stuff back with me. 

As I was walking back towards Gilligan’s I passed a place with pancakes on the menu and at a decent price! I stopped there for brunch, getting pancakes and bacon. Their bacon here is like ham basically but for the price of $7.50, I thought it was delicious. I needed something to fill me before dinner at the airport.

            My last stop for the morning was the Cairns historical society museum. The tour guide was a really cool guy and he had me get my camera and hold a sawfish nose and a shark mouth or something and an alligator head and took pics for me.

holding 2 sawfish noses

I'm an alligator

            I’d say my morning was pretty fun compared to my afternoon, where I spent 6 hours at the airport and then my plane was delayed by a half hour, so it was closer to 6.5 hours sitting in the airport with nothing to do really.

On the plane I had the very first seat, seat 1A. I had never sat at the very front of the plane before. It wasn’t too bad as I at least had a window seat, but it was dark outside by 7pm. I’m so used to leaving from cities that once you take off, you see all the lights and in Cairns, there were clusters of lights, but very few lights compared to a city, since the roads are not lit up. When we finally landed in Sydney 3 hrs later, you could see the highway all lit up, but not too many light in the suburbs of the city. The highway looked like a golden road from the sky though, which was pretty neat.

As soon as we were able to get off the plane, I got my bags and was the first one off, which is the best part of being in the first row and I walked as fast as I could to the trains, because we had landed around 10:30, leaving me with exactly an hour and a half before the trains stopped running. I got a ticket and caught the first train just in time. It actually didn’t take as long to get to Wynyard this time because the train didn’t terminate earlier than it was supposed to. I only had to wait 5 minutes at Wynyard to get a train to Macquarie and then I finally felt relaxed as I knew I would make it back just around midnight.

I got off the train and walked up the hill. I guess they are doing some night construction on the road so there was some fresh tar on the road that I was guided around, but I made it. I was so happy to be back at my friend’s place. After a quick shower I headed right to bed. Traveling is tiring especially when you spend over 6 hrs in an airport, then 3 hrs on a plane, 1 hr on a train and walk up the top of a hill…yep that is the sum of my afternoon and evening but I made it back!!