Cairns, in case you didn't know, is the main gateway to the tropical north. It is where tourists can book their day trips to the rainforest, arrange to go snorkeling or hire 4x4s. As a result, it is teeming with visitors - most British or Irish - all year round.
On Saturday night I explored the city's much vaunted pubs and bars, before heading off to Cairns' one and only venue for those who like to bowl from the Pavilion End. I was fairly optimistic about this place - despite it being called 'Nu Trix' - and was hoping for a good night. After all, this is a city with a permanent population of around 100,000, there are thousands more young tourists in town and you'd have to go a bloody long way to find another gay venue - roughly 1,500 kilometres south to Brisbane or 2,000 west to Darwin, to be precise.
When I got into the place at around midnight, it therefore came as something of a surprise to find just four paying customers there and me. The bar staff and bouncers outnumbered the punters. So, I bought myself a drink and sat reading one of the free newspapers available. It's not much fun going to any club on your own, but needs must when you are travelling by yourself. It's quite another thing when the club is next to empty. Sat by myself, I must have looked like some kind of closeted, friendless married man, who was escaping his real life for the evening in order to seek random sexual gratification. Or something like that.
After about 20 minutes during which not one single extra person entered the club, I went to the toilet. When I came out, there was a bouncer waiting for me. "We've been watching you," he said. "You're all over the place. Time to go." And so I was marched to the door and the number of paying customers inside the club instantly dropped by 25 per cent.
I was initially incredulous about this - not least because I was nowhere near as pissed as this prick seemed to think - but I wasn't going to kick up a fuss about being told to leave a place that practically had nobody in it.
Another reason I took my exclusion on the chin was because it didn't come as a surprise. Bouncers in the UK may be scum, and do not tend to operate in a fair or rational way. But generally, on the whole, you do need to have done something wrong in order to be punished. In Australia, they adopt a pre-emptive approach to potential disorder. Bouncers closely monitor people inside clubs, and if it looks even vaguely like you might be getting a bit tipsy, they often throw you out. Even if you've done absolutely nothing wrong or said a word to a soul. I've known people to be plucked from dance floors and removed. My crime was to be "all over the place", which I suppose was accurate in the sense that it took me a little while to locate the Gents in an establishment I had never frequented before.
I wish I'd asked the bouncer what he thought I was going to do. Start a fight with the four other people in the club? Fall onto an empty dance floor? Perhaps bouncers assume an intoxicated person is going to become violent because that's what they do when they've had a drink. Ask yourself this. When is the last time you heard of a fight in a gay bar? Either bouncers don't understand a brawl is not very high up a gay man's agenda on a night out, or they just enjoy persecuting them out of prejudice. I suspect it is both.
Anyway, that was Saturday. Since then I've not been able to do very much because the weather has been, to put it bluntly, shite. It has consistently pissed it down. I said in my last post that this does not matter when the temperature is 30 degrees, and this is true. The problem is it's hovering around 22 here. It's not unpleasant, but it kinda limits what you can do given that all the attractions and activities in this part of the world are actually of the outdoor variety.
Cairns does not have a beach as such, and the sea off the coast is not advisable to swim in because it is home to the lethal box jellyfish. The authorities have made up for this by creating a giant swimming pool by the sea, which is completely free and just blends into a park as if it were a pond. It is very well maintained as well. Impressed as I am, I don't think this is a concept I would like to export. Can you see this working in, say, Southend or Margate?
I'm not due back in Sydney until July 5, so there is plenty of time for the sun to get its hat on. It just bloody well better had.
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