Your First Day in Cairns: Palm Cove, Rusty's Markets and the Esplanade Lagoon

The first day of a holiday is the one most people waste. You land tired, you have not worked out where anything is, and you either try to do too much or sit in the hotel until dinner. Cairns is a good place to get this right, because the three best things to do on day one are all easy.

This is how we spent ours: a beach up the coast, a market in the middle of town, and a swim on the foreshore.

Our Cairns series: Day 1 · Day 2 — the Daintree, Mossman Gorge & Port Douglas · Day 3 — Green Island & the Great Barrier Reef

Planning the whole trip rather than just this day? Start with the full three-day itinerary.

Start at Palm Cove 🌴

We picked the hire car up at Cairns Airport and drove straight north to Palm Cove, and we would do it again. It is the gentlest possible introduction to the region: a long beach lined with melaleuca and palms, a single road running behind it, and somewhere to eat every hundred metres.

There is nothing you have to do at Palm Cove, which is the point of it on the day you arrive. Walk the length of the beach, get a coffee, sit under a tree. It resets you after a flight far better than trying to tick something off.

One thing to know before you swim anywhere on this coast: marine stingers are a genuine consideration in the warmer months, roughly November to May. Swim between the flags inside the stinger net where one is set up, and take the local signage seriously — it is there for a reason, and conditions change.

Rusty’s Markets in town 🥭

Rusty’s Markets is the opposite kind of stop, and the one we would most want a first-timer to make. It runs Friday through Sunday in the middle of Cairns, and it is the fastest way to understand that you are somewhere tropical: mangosteens, rambutans, custard apples, soursop, half of it fruit you will not recognise and most of it grown within a couple of hours of where you are standing.

Go hungry, buy something you cannot identify and ask the person selling it what to do with it. They will tell you.

Because it only runs three days a week, it is worth checking the days against your arrival before you lock anything else in. If your first day is a Monday, swap this and Palm Cove around with something later in the week.

Finish at the Esplanade Lagoon 🏊

Here is the thing nobody tells you about Cairns: there is no swimming beach in the middle of the city. The foreshore is mudflats at low tide. What the city built instead is the Cairns Esplanade Lagoon — a free saltwater swimming lagoon on the waterfront, patrolled by lifeguards, surrounded by lawn and public barbecues.

It is the single most useful thing in Cairns if you are travelling with small children, and it is a very pleasant way to end the day if you are not. We came back to it more than once during the trip when a plan fell through or the weather turned.

The Cairns Esplanade itself runs for a couple of kilometres alongside it, with a boardwalk out over the mudflats that is unexpectedly good for birdlife.

Worth ten minutes: the Visitor Information Centre

The Cairns Visitor Information Centre is a genuinely useful stop rather than a tourist trap. Reef trips, rainforest tours and river cruises all shift with the season and the weather, and half an hour there on day one is the fastest way to find out what is actually running while you are in town — and to book the reef day before the good boats fill up.

Planning the rest of your Cairns trip

A few things we worked out that would have helped us on day one:

Hire a car. Most of what makes the region special is north of the city, and the coast road is worth driving at your own pace rather than a tour bus’s.

Give each day one big thing. Beach day, rainforest day, reef day. People who try to fit the Daintree and the reef into the same day tend to see neither properly.

Book the reef day first and build around it. It is the one that depends on weather and availability. Everything else can move.

Do not over-plan the first afternoon. You have flown in. The lagoon and a walk will do.

Next up: the drive north to the oldest rainforest in the world — Mossman Gorge, the Daintree and Port Douglas.