Nomads Serpent Hostel & Bar

It is still good for us!
We return to here for our second visit its still nice from our stay few years ago on our first trip to australia. It is clean rooms and the bar is nice but the communal kitchen is terrible. People were nice and make our stay enjoyable. The staff were better this time except for there was no Nate the chef! We are so dissapointed as he was our highlight of australia -- our partyman and good guy and best chef ever! we could not find him anywhere and we told he left cairns! where are you Nate! So sad, but we made new friends and for second time the shuttle bus to the woolshed became our best friend. We recommend a stay here as the price is good for the facility

Pretty good, great for sociallisng
I found this hostel pretty good. i forked out the cash for a private room and was happy with it. Even tho the air con is turned off during the day, i found my room to always be a comfy temperature. During my stay here i was surprised to see they had changed the free dinner to a free breakfast comprising of toast or cereal and coffee or tea. Was not happy that they didn't inform me but did not complain. This place is just out of the main drag of cairns but does have a shuttle service. Was really good for socialising.

Overpriced hellhole
I stayed at the serpent for six weeks. the place is a joke. the rooms crawl with bugs. they turn the air conditioning off during the hot times of the day (9 a.m. until 5 p.m.) so your rooms are left boiling and stinking to high heaven. when you ask them to sort it out the response was that it was the heat and any other questions were answered by the arrogant staff with "who cares what you think you're only a backpacker." they offer working for accommodation, and put you in a staff room that has food thrown all over the place, bedbugs and if you try to put a light on before 2 p.m. you get slated. don't go to this hostel, you are treated like sh*t.

Ok
We just came back to this hostel from last year and had good times again but we were upset to not find Nate the chef in the kitchen! He was the best cook and most fun person we met on our trip! If the bar is cheaper (backpacker friendly cheap) and nate's food is back on menu we will come back to live!

Mighty hostel with a great pool. The rooms are big and spacious and if you book well in advance there are rooms for 14 bucks a night. The girls on reception are sound and really looked after us during our stay. Great happy hours in the bar. Dont bother with the food- loads of supermarkets and shops in town . Huge kitchen at the hostel with cooking utensils and fridges for storage. Nice bright and clean toilets and showers. Only be quick because they close at a mad hour in the morning for cleaning.

My rating is probably a bit harsh -- the setup they have, with the bar, a pool, volleyball court, and open air lounge is great for socialising and ambience. The rooms themselves are not too bad, typical hostel-fare with barely any space and the lovely smell of feet. As someone on a budget though I was really annoyed to find that the "free dinner" advertised by Serpents is so completely tiny that it is misleading to call it a dinner. Basically it is a ploy to get you to buy an meal upgrade for seven dollars. So yeah, if you're choosing this place to save a bit on money, beware. You will probably end up having to buy dinner somewhere else anyway, which is a bit of a problem as Serpents is not particularly close to any restaurants or stores.

This was a very impressive hostel. The dorm was clean, with a lovely balcany. The kitchen was large enough, with plenty of utensils. The bar was an absolute perk, and the pool was nice. There was a lot of space here also, and to top it off, some really nice people. The only thing that bothered me was this moody girl at reception, who would ignore us when she felt like it. The hostel needs to get rid of her as I've never come across a receptionist quite as rude.

The room we had was clean and spacious — although we did have a double room, as it was our first stop in Australia. The hostel didn't have much of a friendly atmosphere, which is usually the case with larger hostels anyway. Food was good, recommended, and the bar was quite nice. The pool area was also very nice. Overall, it was ok for a few days while we were finding our bearings in Cairns.

I hated this place. It is crawling with bedbugs and fleas!!! The kitchen is disgusting. On my very first day I carried out some bed changing for free food and accommodation. The beds and mattress protectors were soiled with blood and stains. The "new clean sheets" used to change the beds are brown and dirty. The blue blankets were never ever changed between customers. The girl doing the beds before me advised the blue blankets were never ever changed and were a breeding field, and that almost all customers had complained. Also lots of people complained about the sofa's crawling with bugs. The frumpy frizzy-haired receptionist was a muppet who had never done anything to help. And so I left with 21 bites in tow.

Don't think about it...just go!

I stayed at the Serpent when I first arrived in Australia and I didn't want to leave. I ended up going back 3 weeks later and have been back again since! It's by far the best hostel I've been in during 11 months in Oz. It has clean, spacious rooms and excellent facilities. It was really good for socializing and I met friends for life at the Serpent. Some of my best memories from my trip are from this hostel. I have recommended it to heaps of people who tried it and agreed!

I only meant to stay in Cairns a week, and it ended up more like two months. This is a cool place to hang around the pool, with clean rooms and good cheap food in the restaurant. Take your own drink, as the bar is expensive!!