Travel: So this is what travel agents do when they want to have a good time

You would have thought that if anyone could arrange to hold their annual convention somewhere different it would be Abta, the Association of British Travel Agents. This convention is an event which tourist destinations (nice ones, at that) seem almost as keen to host as the Olympic Games, and will spend vast sums to attract. British travel agents presumably know a thing or two about good places to go on holiday. And given that the end of November is a time when tickets are cheap and planes are empty, how could Abta fail to produce the perfect jamboree?

It is just bad luck for Cairns in northern Queensland that its rainy season coincides with the British winter. I write these words huddled beside my hotel air-conditioner looking out over a grey sea and a sky of remarkable blackness. The forested hills in the background are submerged in fog. The foyer of the hotel downstairs resembles a hurricane relief shelter, with permanent encampments of dripping Japanese child-couples in sandals and plastic coats. The streets outside are about as welcoming as Bournemouth in, er, late November.

I am not exactly blaming Abta for having failed to deliver sunshine. But Tourism Queensland does seem to have been rather asking for trouble. In front of me I have the invitation to join their welcoming party for Abta '99, written on a box which contains a sarong. "Slip it on and head on down ... for a night of tropical Queensland fun," someone has written, before adding the ill-advised suggestion that the invitee - in his or her sarong - "... dance the night away under our star-studded skies."

Oops. A beach party in the rain. Except that the one thing I do not feel like slipping on at the moment is a sarong. Why didn't anybody foresee it? This morning my taxi driver (shortly after uttering the phrase "no worries mate" for the forty thousandth time in a minute) cheerfully confessed that the suicide rate was bad at this time of year. "Yeah, it gets pretty depressing in December," he said. "Barrels of rain. Drives you crazy. You really need to get away."

At first glance, the thought of Cairns even having a suicide rate struck me as seriously odd - about as odd, say, as koala bears having a murder rate. Or wombats an anorexia rate. This was a city which promoted itself as one great big funfair. It had golden beaches, back-packers' hostels, rainforests, coral reefs, aboriginal art, old train stations, crocodiles, eco-diversity, cheap food, fine wines, international flights, painted didgeridoos, healthy and relaxed people. So relaxed, in fact, were those people that you half expected them to be poor and picturesquely ragged, living 10 to the room in huts. In fact, as we all know, this was a land of plenty. Irritatingly enough, then, I could not imagine a suicidal thought entering the head of a single resident of Cairns, no matter how much it rained.

But then, how could I tell what it felt like to live here? I was only attending the Abta convention. In a few days' time I would be leaving behind the dark, rainy skies of Queensland in summer, and replacing them with something, well, slightly different (ie, the dark, rainy skies of England in winter).