36
NOVEMBER 2020
By Duncan Bennett, Member #4171
A
trip to Las Vegas is perfect for a 25th silver wedding anniversary, slightly more so than a trip to Cairns. But Cairns was firmly within the present allowable travel perimeter, and Las Vegas wasn’t, so Cairns it was. A Friday afternoon flight successfully boarded giving the appearance we were going to fit the face mask while never quite bothering to do so, in a mere 2½ hours we landed on the narrow strip of available land just north of the city. The romance pack had been provided by the Shangri-La Hotel, in the form of a bottle of bubbly, and around then the actual activity planning for the weekend started to ramp up out on the balcony. A jet-ski tour had been booked for Saturday morning, and a reef cruise for Sunday, but what about the free period on Saturday post-11am? On a third top-up of sparkling, a brilliant idea was conceived. Why don’t we hire motorcycles?!? The Cairns motorcycle hire scene can be a little disappointing unless you are chasing a 50cc scooter, an engine-free motorcycle a.k.a a bicycle, or a Harley with an engine capacity larger than a Panamax tanker. The Harley option was nearly on except they didn’t have anything available, so we called the unpromising sounding Cairns Scooter and Bicycle Hire. How many motorcycles do we need they asked? Two, Cindy answered. What a coincidence, we only have two! OK, we’ll take them! So, off to dinner. The Shangri-La is only two stories high but was apparently built before stairs were invented so the only way to get up or down involved a very long march to the lifts. Hang-on, I can see a short-cut straight outside said someone in the party, and although a later inquiry couldn’t conclusively determine who had said it, next thing we were in the fire escape and heading down. To a door at the bottom which said the fire alarm would go off it were opened. So back up we went, but all the doors were locked, and the only way out was by setting off the fire alarm. Or calling the front desk and waiting to be let out by a bloke who really didn’t appreciate how funny we were trying
SILVER SERVICE to make the situation seem. A learning from that first night in Cairns, besides don’t try to leave the hotel by the fire escape, was that everything along the marina had to be booked in advance. We tried to get into several places without success, before finally convincing someone at ‘All About Tha Fish’ that we could get through three courses with wines in 15 minutes if they convoyed it to the table bumper-to-bumper.
Cindy trapped in the Shangri-La Hotel fire escape using her on-line will app to delete a beneficiary Up quite early and breakfasted, we wandered into town to the K-Mart to buy some motorcycle clothing to complement the thongs and shorts. Nothing by Klim or Touratech or BMW Motorrad was available in K-Mart Cairns, so a $20 outlay was made to get pants and tops with the highest breathability rating but the lowest possible water, abrasion and impact resistance rating, perfect for wearing on a scooter in Bangkok, but at least mine was hi-vis. Kitted out for later on, we hit the marina and the NQ Watersports facility for the jet-ski experience.
