Day 13 – From Cairns to Darwin

Today we leave Cairns for Darwin, the “Top End” of Australia. Our flight is in the afternoon, so we take the morning to stroll around Cairns. We are up early, but its already getting hot.

The hot climate around Cairns is great for sugar cane; this is a picture of one of the many cane fields that surround Cairns.
Our hotel in Cairns was very nice, set just across from the Esplanade, and with lots of tourists from many countries. But our early morning tour schedule has prevented us from eating breakfast anyplace except at the hotel. The hotel serves a very nice breakfast buffet, with everything from miso soup, to eggs and bacon, to breads and tropical fruits. However, it’s way more than we can eat, and, at $25 each, more than we care to spend.

We find a very nice, hole-in-the-wall type restaurant that has delicious, non-hotel style food and caters to our growing addiction to flat whites.

Then we walk on down to the central area. Cairns is on Trinity Bay; a bay named by Lieutenant Cook. Trinity Bay is a muddy bay and it also has saltwater crocodiles.
But the bayside part of the town is quite pretty. This is a picture of a kid’s free playground with fountains that sits right on the Esplanade.
We wander long enough to justify lunch, and eat facing the bay at the “Rattle and Hum.” It’s a delightful tavern with two emus in its logo and a most unusual urinal.
For lady readers who are not familiar with urinals, a urinal is a fixture in a men’s restroom into which men urinate. In the U.S. they are mostly individual porcelain fixtures that hang on the wall.

In Australia it is fairly common for the urinal to be a multi-person wall and trench affair, in which blokes stand shoulder to shoulder and direct their streams against the wall, so that the liquid runs down the wall, into the trench and away. Most of the ones I have encountered have been stainless steel.

But the Rattle and Hum urinal was unique. Instead of a trench and wall covered with stainless steel, there was a trench and a window. A perfectly transparent window looking out into a restaurant courtyard with tables and… people.

That meant that use of the device requires one to face the window, unzip, aim at the tables and people, and, well you get the picture.

I assume it was one-way glass, but I couldn’t be sure. I hesitated for a moment and then made the obvious decision: p*ss on it.

We walked back to the hotel, caught the shuttle to the airport, and had an uneventful flight to Darwin.