A visit to a Cairns market with some amazing influences.

IN A SCENE being played out in hundreds of Asian cities, brown faces beam from behind piles of bananas, melons and dragonfruit amid the cacophony of an early-morning market.

Rather than Bangkok or Phnom Penh, however, I'm standing in Rusty's Market in central Cairns on a clear spring morning surrounded by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Chinese stallholders selling everything from limes to lemongrass.

It's 8am and I've risen early and come to Grafton St at the urging of Mark Carrette, new executive chef at the Novotel Cairns Oasis Resort.

"I shop for the hotel there. It's the new Cairns,'' he says.

"The Asian influence on the food scene is very strong. Cairns has one of the largest Cambodian communities in the country."

The Cairns market is bustling when I arrive. Bearded, tattooed locals in singlets mingle with camera-toting tourists and shy Vietnamese children.

The aroma of freshly roasted coffee blends with the scent of fresh flowers, handmade soap, leather and massage oils to produce a pleasant perfume that drifts over the market.

Cairns, the northernmost bastion of the tourism market, is changing. Once synonymous with platoons of Japanese tourists marching obediently behind flag-carrying guides, it's being forced to seek new markets.

The Japanese are still coming but there are fewer of them, and visits by Australians are down as they take advantage of cheap airfares to Asia and a stronger Australian dollar to holiday overseas. The emerging middle classes of China and India are starting to appear, and Nordic backpackers still crowd the pubs and cafes.

Novotel Oasis general manager Greg Erwin has spent $7 million refurbishing the resort's rooms and public areas and believes Cairns will adjust to the changing tides of tourism.

"It remains a unique part of the world,'' he says.

"We just have to adapt to new markets.''

As I swayed gently in a glass gondola above the rainforest the previous day, the mood was definitively and uniquely Far North - warm, green and lush.

The Skyrail gondolas carry passengers from Cairns to Kuranda, gliding over towering trees clinging to the slopes and gorges of the range that guards the city as it rises to become the Atherton Tableland.

Once a hippie haven, Kuranda has become a tourism haven with the pub one of the few buildings to retain its original character.

The publican, a barrel-chested moustached man named Barry, a one-time boxer, stopped for lunch at the pub six years ago and decided to buy it.

"I had a steak and it was so bad I figured that anything I did would be an improvement," he says.

Kuranda may have succumbed to commercialism, but the journey itself is the essence of the experience.

Take the Skyrail up and the scenic railway down or drive the loop, continuing out of Kuranda and across the Atherton Tableland before descending to the coast and taking the Bruce Highway back to Cairns.

Leaving the markets next morning, I walk to the foreshore, rejuvenated by a Cairns lagoon and boardwalks. Already the lawns are crowded with sun-seekers taking advantage of the cloudless day.

Any trip to Cairns brings an awareness that you are nearing the end of the line.

To the north lies Cooktown and beyond the wilderness of the Cape York and the Gulf.

Next time I visit I'm going to fulfil a lifelong ambition and travel overland to Karumba. It's that Cairns thing, the feeling there's country stretching beyond the bitumen that you must see.

Click here for information about Cairns accommodation and Cairns tourist attractions.

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