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Bartending and Travel My North Queensland Adventure I like many bartenders before me have been blessed in life, by the joy of adventure. Bartending is the premier profession for any person with any ambition to travel this wonderful planet. 
This is to be the first in a series of articles on bartending & travelling. I was about 25 when I set out on my first adventure, driving from my home in Sydney, to Cairns in Far North Queensland. The journey was long, Australia is so much larger than most people imagine. It had many magic places to admire along the way followed by long periods of vast emptiness.
I arrived in Cairns quickly learning there
is a big difference between a large city like Sydney & a small tourist city. You are 3 hours by
plane from the nearest major city & everything seems a bit backward. 
I spent 4 months working in Cairns suffering from the heat & humidity of a tropical wet season, suffering from homesickness & wondering what have I done, why did I leave my comfortable well payed job. 
I now know from all the additional travelling plus speaking to other travellers that homesickness is normal & when you finally overcome your homesickness the world becomes so much more magnificent. Lesson Homesickness is a period of letting go of the past & welcoming the new. Believe me when I tell you that it does go away. 
In truth I was very luck that I stayed in Cairns with family or I probably would have quickly driven home & missed out on all the joy travelling has brought my life. My first job was working in a casino, I was working in a bar, as a supervisor in the banquets department, room service even concierge any department that I could pick up work I did. Lesson If you work in a hotel & need money, call the hotel every day & ask for the duty manager or in some cases the food & beverage manager, to see if you can cover a shift for anybody who has called in sick. Lesson Find a job any job to give yourself a steady flow of cash. You can be picky when you have money coming in. 
I then found a job working as bar manager on a resort at Cape Tribulation in the Daintree Rainforest, it had a coral reef off the beach that came out above the water at low tide, the bar had an ocean view, the resort was located in world heritage national park & was 300km for the nearest town. In wet season we had no access to even a shot for at times weeks on end as the creeks flooded & blocked the roads. I used to live in a little wooden hut, would walk along the beach every day, go for my daily swim in the local swimming holes, go fishing & work in a bar with a million dollar view, what more can a person ask for. 
On the bartending front an isolated resort is a challenge as it can take long periods to get stock & equipment. As a cocktail bartender however I had so many exotic fruits to mix up wonderful exotic cocktails, with resort style fruit salad garnishes. The guests are relaxed on most occasions but some people fear the forest, its sounds, its density & its wild animals. Others can’t handle life without their mobile phone, which didn’t work so far from civilisation. Lesson Your job is to make your guest feel relaxed & in some cases be company to someone who has there spouse driving them mad in a room with no TV. You are also so much more as a resort bartender you are also an expert on the area, you are an expert tour guide to every one whom drinks at your bar. Lesson 
Go on as many tours as possible & make friends with all the tour operators. It’s amazing how much you can see for free or highly discounted. Earth Bar Magazines Bartending & Travel is a series of articles, which will run over many issues of Earth Bar Magazine. When your dieing to feel like you inside let it be all you see & let it be beautiful  |
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