At Cairns Kenny's journey with us came to an end. He took advantage of having a couple of days there to take a train trip up to Kuranda while we ran around organising last minute bits and pieces for the trip North. Cairns is our last major town stop before we hit Darwin, so we had to purchase a satellite phone and do a big shop to last us about 6 weeks.

Most of our time at Cairns was caught up with running errands but we did get a chance to meet some more people in the rally at a nightly informal barbeque that had started just for this purpose. We stayed in the Marina for a couple of nights and took advantage of being able to leave the boat at our leisure to have a walk around town.

The town was very busy and had changed quite a bit from the last time I was there about 12 years ago. We went to the night markets and wandered around, we felt like we were getting prepared for Bali when we walked down one aisle filled with asian masseuses who followed us lowering their prices and trying to get our business.

With all our business concluded we were looking forward to moving on and were soon on our way to Port Douglas.

For anyone interested the photos for this leg of our trip are now in the gallery.