FNQ

Friday July 6th

We booked our flights to Cairns on the flying kangaroo but then they bumped us onto Jetstar, you know, their subsidary company, so we had to suffer the orange and black scousejet uniforms and the cheap foundation all over again.

The thing about flying across Australia is that you really get a perspective of how vast a continent this really is, and not just how vast but how desolate and unpopulated as well. If you fly over to Perth you cross deserts and multi-coloured salt pans as far as the eye can see and if you fly to the middle of Australia then the earth becomes the richest red colour imaginable. Flying up to Cairns takes you over enormous stretches of land where there's just nothingness and in particular there's no water, hardly any at all, not even in the rivers, which have dried up or salted up or just given up and buggered off elsewhere. It's a stunning landscape; the towns and cities clinging to the very edges of the continent as though they're scared to venture any further inland.

Anyway, as if the bump onto Jetstar wasn't enough, the only flight we could get was at 2.35pm which meant Ella didn't get an afternoon sleep and spent the entire flight unable to sit still. By the time we began our descent into Cairns she had to be strapped to me with one of those lap belts, and cried loudly as we swooped down over the mountains and round over the turquoise of the Coral sea - not the start to the holiday I'd been hoping for.

And here's what all the fuss is about - Cairns, a small town which lies above the tropic of capricorn but below the equator. It's a low-rise town of badly-constructed motels and plots of wasteland and a startlingly ugly statue of Captain Cook, yet still it's my favorite place in Australia, and one of the country's top tourist destinations, with direct flights to Asia every day of the week. In the summer it's wet and hot, especially between February and April, but in the winter it's much cooler and drier and altogether more bearable.

The town sits at the foothills of rainforest-clad mountains on Trinity Bay, as you can see from the first picture. It doesn't have a beach as such, just an expanse of mudflats that become exposed when the tide goes out and provide fertile ground for wading birds, huge great mudskippers and little crabs.

They've tarted Cairns up since we last came and now they've built this artificial lagoon on the esplanade. They've even shipped in some fine white sand in the same way they have in Brisbane and in the same way they're currently busy pumping false snowflakes over the ski resorts of the snowy mountains down at the bottom end of the country.