A British backpacker has spoken of her surprise at being reunited with the feuding couple who shared a hostel room with her in Cairns last week.

Caroline left the Cairns hostel early yesterday morning and travelled by bus to Port Douglas. “The couple were still asleep when I left,” she said. “So I tiptoed out quietly and assumed I’d never see them again.”

However Caroline returned from another snorkelling trip on the Great Barrier Reef to discover that the couple had travelled to Port Douglas earlier today and had moved into the same hostel as Caroline.

“I had told them where I was going to be staying,” said Caroline “Because that’s the sort of thing you talk about when you’re a backpacker. I hadn’t expected them to follow me to the same hostel, but I suppose it’s a logical thing to do, seeing as they’re speaking to me but not to each other. They’ve presumably had to speak to one another enough to arrange to come to Port Douglas, so that’s progress at least.”

The couple’s feud was well and truly established when Caroline first met them on Wednesday evening, and and neither party appears to have made any attempt to resolve the conflict.

Caroline said “It was particularly awkward on Saturday morning. The guy was having a sleep-in, so the girl decided to talk to me in an extra loud voice just to annoy him. I like the guy and didn’t want to annoy him, so I replied to everything she said with one word answers in a quiet whisper, but that just seemed to encourage her to use an even louder voice.”

Caroline is unsure of what sparked the actual argument, but is aware of several factors that are having a strain on the couple’s relationship. “Somehow they’ve survived a year apart, with her at university whilst he helps out on the family farm in Shropshire. She seems to have spent all her money in the student bar, whilst he’s steadily been saving up to come to Australia. Consequently he can afford to go bungee jumping and scuba diving, whilst she most definitely can’t. In the longer term he wants to take over the farm and she wants to move to London and be a copywriter. It doesn’t sound like the most promising relationship, I’m surprised they even got as far as Australia before it all fell apart.”

Caroline is sharing a six bed female dorm room with the girl, whilst the boy is in a male dorm on the second floor. “Maybe it will help them to have some time apart,” she said.

Caroline added “I finally learnt their names too. Apparently they’re called Olivia and Ethan. Which has completely confused me because in my head I’d christened them Beth and Freddie.”