Cairns

3000km and 11 days later we had made it to Cairns from Sydney. What a mission that was and I have to say it was worth everything and has been one of the highlights of my trip so far. Cairns is a beautiful city, it´s hot, popular but unfortunately it´s rammed with Australian´s who have just managed to evolve into humans from one of our primate ancestors. We checked into The Serpent Hostel shortly after saying our goodbyes to Marge and, after dropping our gear into our prisoner cell block H style room, we headed into town for an explore and a few beers. Cairns is lively, but not in a good way. It´s full of dick heads and it´s got a vibe which makes you think it could kick off at any time. It seems to be quitye popular for the young fellas to shave their heads but leave a few inches at the back in proper red neck stylee!

The highlight was chatting to a couple of Christians trying to recruit from the back of a van, with ´Jesus saves´ plastered on the side, by giving out free coffee and cookies. I couldn´t help myself and after about half an hour Kev and I had completely destroyed them, in the best possible way of course. If you know me, you know I´m an atheist but an atheist with a great interest in religion. It´s not that I´m looking for a religion to subscribe to, I´m just interested in it and I´ve being doing a lot of reading on the subject since I´ve been travelling. I believe in evolution, I believe in the big bang too and for those reasons I believe that most popular world religions are flawed to a certain degree. Some religions are less flawed than others, in particular Buddhism, but for me Christianity has to be the most flawed of them all for loads of different reasons.

One example is that Christians believe that god created the universe 6000 years ago and that he created every living creature as they are now. Popular science has gathered evidence to suggest that the universe is about 3.7 billion years old and that humans have existed for about 100,000 years. Now I´m not narrow minded enough to say that I´m 100% sure that there is no god, but I´m pretty sure that the universe wasn´t created 6000 years ago. So when I questioned these two lovely Christians on this I got a typically weak response, something on the lines of ´that´s the leap of faith you need to take´. Bollocks I say, get a grip and stop wasting your time trying to tell fairy stories to people on the side of the road and bribing them with coffee and cookies to try to get them to conform to your ridiculous beliefs. Anyway, loads more was discussed and we parted company with good faith, to pardon the pun!

The next day we flew back to Sydney, stayed one night and took a 12 hour flight to Buenos Aires.