Australia Day 5: Easter in Cairns

Our morning began with our grocery store breakfast consisting of cereal, fruit and yogurt. I have to tell you about the cereal though, because it was quite interesting. We had golden honey shredded wheat, which sounds relatively normal. It was actually pretty strange though because it was not honey-flavored shredded wheat. Instead, it was regular shredded wheat with a honey filling in the center. It didn't have a bad taste, but the consistency was really weird because the wheat part would get soggy in the milk, but the honey center stayed really gummy. Neither of us were big fans of it.

Ok...enough about cereal! This was Easter for us, so we wanted to go to church. We had looked one up and walked there. We had on skirts and dresses and were all set for a nice Easter mass. However, as it turned out, it wasn't really the most enjoyable experience for us. First of all, it didn't feel at all like Easter...there were no flowers and the church was not decorated in any special way. The microphone and sound system was terrible and we could not hear a word of what the priest was saying. But on top of that, it was so unbearly hot in the church. Everyone was dripping with sweat and fanning themselves with the missalette. (Some people even brought their own Chinese fans with them!) The heat and humidity were just so intense that unfortunately I could not concentrate on anything other than how incredibly uncomfortable I was.

After mass, we walked our sweaty selves to the nearest nice hotel, where we hung out in the lobby to benefit from some of the A/C. I realize that we have done a good amount of mooching on this trip! When we were finally cooled off and rehydrated, we walked along the Esplanade, which is the street that runs along the water.

Now, there is not actually a beach in Cairns. There's a boardwalk (not the kind with rides...just a promendade) and that ends at a really cool looking saltwater lagoon which is open to the public for swimming. By this point, both of us were getting a little cranky from being so hungry, hot and tired. So we decided to remedy one of those issues by stopping for lunch at a little cafe. Next came the relief for complaint #2: we stopped at an internet cafe which happened to be air conditioned. Then finally, we walked back to the hostel for naps to deal with the third issue.

After our naps, we were both in better spirits and headed back into town to find a place to have our Easter dinner. We decided to walk out by the marina, where there were a bunch of restaurants looking out over the water. We decided on a Thai fish restaurant which was delicious! We shared an appetizer of crab and caper bruschetta and then had salmon as our main meal. We then walked around town a bit more and stopped to get dessert! It was a very enjoyable Easter dinner.