Full Moon

I climbed out of bed at 8:30 ready to go and get breakfast, but James had other ideas. When the alarm had gone off he rolled over and said something along the lines of, “Nope, that’s not enough for me” to which I assumed he was referring to sleep. So I let him lie in and set myself up on the footstool in the hot-spot to scope out ferries to (and from) the Whitsundays and Fraser Island. It would probably cost a few quid to do so but I had heard great things about them so thought I should investigate. After about half an hour the router went down so I went to see if James was up and about, but before I could do so I ran into Kyle. He was sending an important email apparently and as the router had gone down he had been cursing The Reef (the hostel). I remembered that the Danish girl was due to have a Skype interview possibly that day and hoped for her sake that it hadn’t been during this cut-off time. Me and Kyle shot the breeze for about 15 minutes about Oz, America and the cost of food and the best way to economise (big Dominos pizza for $5, or $5 footlong subway that both easily split into two meals).

The Wi-Fi hot-spot

At 9:15 James was still dead to the world and seemed shocked when I woke him that it could possibly be that late. “What happened to the alarm?!” he exclaimed, suggesting that it hadn’t gone off. He was also surprised when I told him what he said when it DID go off, and that we should hurry up and get down for breakfast before it was all put away. Over breakfast we planned our day; it would be a chilled one (as much of Australia will be) with a trip to the good old Greyhound office to buy our second coach pass. Hopefully the service would be better than across the water in the US.

On our mid-morning stroll round town we hit an electronics shop (for James’s replacement iPod), a shopping mall, and the Greyhound office. It was manned by a guy called Jeff, who had one blue eye and one brown eye. He was also a very pleasant chap who swung us a good deal on the Greyhound pass and had very interesting advice/stories about places to go to along our trip – I don’t know if we will actually make it to the Champagne Bar in Melbourne, but it sounded like we would have a good time there.

Once we were done with the Greyhound ticket purchase we made our way back to the hostel for a bit of R & R. As we were back in the heat and sunshine we were going through our clothes much faster than we had done in New Zealand so we did a spot of hand-washing and hung the stuff out on the balcony. Everyone else seemed to do the same and it meant that things would get dry much quicker than we had done so in the US – waving a tiddly little hairdryer over them or hanging up a washing line in a room with no sun or windows to open, to name but two. In preparation for moving on from Cairns we revisited our old friend Couchsurfing.com and sent out a few requests to people in or near Townsville. I also scoped out a few hostels and hotels to get an idea of the going rate of places.

Gilligan's

We had another meal voucher for Gilligan’s that night so we headed down and joined the queue. Not long after being there a soft Geordie accent asked us if we knew how to use the swipe card for the meal. After advising the owner of said accent that we just had a paper voucher and not a credit-card style one we had no clue, but were sure that it couldn’t be that complicated. The food that night was chilli-con-carne again, so we sat down with Anthony (for that was his name) and chatted about travels and back home. He had only been on the road for three weeks and had already had a moment when he wanted to jack it all in and go back home, but we said that he should stick with it and those times will pass. It felt good to be the seasoned travellers passing on advice to the new kid on the block. He was doing Australia in a year and was already thinking that it was going to be too long and he kinda liked the idea that we had, of going home in time for Christmas. I guess only time will tell whether he sticks it out or not, for we parted company soon after. But not before we had inadvertently joined a group of divers that had gathered and sat around us on the long bench-style table.

We had noted, with envy, that the group at the other end of the table had ordered some pitchers of beer and (presumably) marguerites and were handing out glasses to everyone. One chap was coming round with wristbands and it seemed like you only got a free drink if you had a wristband. When he came down to our end of the table he went through his guff about drinks and diving and wristbands, but I wasn’t listening and ushered him away stating that we were going back to our hostel soon. When the guy asked me if I was sure I didn’t want free drinks, I realised that I hadn’t heard him correctly and quickly changed my mind. We all got a wristband and a pitcher of beer and 3 glasses were sent our way. We were quickly joined by more people with wristbands and it seemed that they had all been on a diving tour and that free beers afterwards was part of the package. When one of the newcomers enquired as to whether we had been on the one-day or three-day dive I replied, “yeah…ummmm…we were definitely on the one-day dive. It was really good diving” but it seemed to confuse them all. Suddenly there were 10 pairs of eyes all looking accusingly at us, possibly trying to work out if we had indeed been diving with the rest of the crew, or whether we were 3 outsiders just trying to sneak a free beer that technically should be theirs. I managed to do the verbal equivalent of “look over there!” by asking about where they were staying or something and the attention was shifted away from us. We finished our beers in relative peace and then realised that all the free beer had been drunk so Anthony-from-Darlington went back to his room “to sort a few things out” and we made our excuses and left Gilligan’s for the last time.

I realise that I haven’t mentioned at this point that the hostel was hosting a Full Moon Party, in honour of the full moon (although Gilligan’s were having theirs on Saturday so we weren’t even sure when the right day was) and were celebrating Thai-style. This means wearing white clothes, dawbing each other with luminous paint, playing ridiculously loud rave music and getting completely legless. Knowing what was coming we popped into the offy again to stock up on supplies in case we joined in the party, but really we were gonna be focussing on finding a place to stay in our next port of call, Townsville. A few painted ravers tried to get us into the party, but we had made u pour minds not to join in as we had seen from the balcony that there were only about 10 people in the “party”. And they were the “mad” people who thought they were the Big I Am around the hostel. We managed to find somewhere and avoid the craziness outside, and were later joined by Doom Guy who continued to play Doom (or some derivative of it) on his iPad. The party carried on into the night, but I managed to drown it out by sticking in my headphones and playing some tunes. I don’t know how James got to sleep without any, as the noise carried on into the night.