Bikeetching

Bikeetching

Monday, February 29, 2016

Day 94-95: LONG Train to Cairns

Not a whole lot of photos from this section of our trip.  After catching the ferry to the mainland again, Molly found that someone had used her Debit Card number to rack up $3,000 in charges to Habbo Google (whatever that is) in $4-$9 increments before the Bank of America stopped it.  Good times.  That took some sorting out, but should be good.  (PS.  Bank of America, your customer service sucks.  It's not fun to get hung up on 4 times when you are calling from overseas.)

In any case, we were supposed to catch a late evening train to Cairns from Rockhampton.  Our bus dropped us in Rockhampton at 5, which left us 6 hours to bum around and wait for the train.  Except everything seems to close in Rockhampton at 5, so there wasn't a lot to do.  We managed to find some Thai food, but no grocery store to buy provisions for the train ride.  Oh yeah, and some locally made rum.  I prefer whiskey (bourbon, really), but we had been travelling through sugar cane on the train for so long, I went with the local thing.

Our train was scheduled for 11:40, but by 12:30AM, there was no sign of it.  Eventually, we boarded, exhausted from a long day already, at 2 AM.  This was not a good sign.

Somehow we managed to get some sleep on the train, and around 10 AM, awoke.  It was a lovely day, but somehow the train had managed to lose another hour along the way, and by 3 PM of our scheduled 16 hour ride, had lost another half hour to wait for the southbound train to pass.  

In any case, instead of arriving in Cairns at 4PM, with plenty of time to find a place to stay for the evening, we pulled into the station at 7:30, in the dark, and had to scramble to find a hostel for the evening.  We got lucky, and found one not too far from the station, and passed out for the evening.  

The fun stuff starts the next day, when Mary and Monroe arrive, and we get ready to head out to the reef.




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