Since of earlier today I’m the owner of a 1996 Mitsubishi Magna station wagon. It’s done 285.000km and the engine has been reconditioned at 200.000km. This menace to public road safety cost me $500 and I’ll have to invest about $600 to get it fixed for a roadworthy certificate (RWC). It was a bit of a risky buy but if everything goes well I’ll have paid $1100 for a car that usually goes for $2000.

Day two of our tours around Cairns program started a bit rough due to problems with the rental car. It was stalling all the time at traffic lights which is a bit unusual for an automatic. We got a replacement car and left the city to pick up Hiroko in Palm Cove. After another short stop at Coles for some supplies we drove up the mountain range towards Kuranda. Kuranda is a small village in the tablelands that fell victim to its popularity among tourists.

On Monday last week my friend flew in from Adelaide. After some strenuous months at the office he was eager to get out and see some of nature’s wonders. On our schedule were the rainforest, waterfalls and of course the Great Barrier Reef. We got a car Tuesday afternoon and went to see Crystal Cascades, a small gorge just 20 minutes outside of Cairns. With its rainforest vegetation and boulder filled creek it reminded me of Mossman Gorge.

Like in Germany, TV ads in Oz are frequent and annoying. Fortunately, some of them are quite funny. Be it groceries or beer or other topics that you won’t see on German TV

North of Cairns are, the name suggests it, the Northern Beaches. Besides touristic places like Palm Cove there are the more quiet corners where mostly locals live and no or few hotels can be found. On Monday I took a bus out to Machans Beach which is the first beach outside Cairns, close to the airport. The small village is situated close to where Barron River meets the ocean. Between the village and the river lies a small but beautiful beach.

Cairns Post writes today “First it was one of our wettest winters on record. Then it was the warmest September in years. Now, weather forecasters warn the cyclone season could be just weeks away.” (full article). Besides cyclones the wet season holds further unpleasantness. Yearly precipitation for Cairns is 2000mm, 1200mm alone in January to March (Karlsruhe: 770mm for the year) and heavy rainfalls can cause rivers to grow and cut of the roads north of Cairns.

While still in Germany I bought a small key chain camera on ebay (shipped from Hong Kong), mainly to strap it to my motorcycle and record some memories for the time in Oz. Yesterday I taped it to my bicycle helmet and went for a little ride through Cairns CBD. After all, writing about the city is one thing but this should give you an idea of how it actually looks.

That is the hunt for a used car. Over the last weeks I thought a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of buying a car. On the pro side is the increased flexibility when it comes to travel as well as the possibility to save money by being able to avoid planes and buses but also by carrying a tent and thus cheaper accommodation. The big con is the cost of the investment as well as maintenance and possibly repairs.

It is warm, it is wet, it is the tropics! Temperatures are now usually at 30° here in Cairns and in addition to that heavy rainfalls in the last days brought the humidity up to 90%. Now that’s just a number. To give you an idea of what that means a couple of examples. A cold bottle from the fridge creates a puddle of water within minutes. Eggs from the fridge soak the box they’re in just from the water that condenses on them.

Over the last couple of weeks I worked for the car rental every now and then, covering for other workers either at where I worked before or at the shop my room-mate works for. One day I drove four really old people to the airport. As it turned out they were German mormons who moved to Australia a couple of years ago. When they found out that I was German as well, the guy in the passenger seat started questioning me about how it is in Germany at the moment.