Back to Reality

I sleep in on my final day, eventually waking up around 10:30 in the morning when the sun’s light shining through the window is too bright to ignore. Originally, my plan for the final day had been to catch an early morning shuttle up to Port Douglas and spend as many hours as possible wandering the streets and finding adventures, mostly enjoying the view on the way up, but there are several reasons why I had decided against it on the previous day. First, it would have required me to wake up at around 5:30, and between two weeks of being late to bed and early to rise, and the experiences and walking of the last few days, I feel I am too physically and emotionally drained to manage it. Second, from my brief drive through on the way to the Daintree, I had noticed that although the town looks like an excellent place to stay, it does not appear to be the best place to visit; it appears to be the kind of place where one would spend several days getting a feel for the atmosphere while cruising the markets and beaches. More important than any of that, though, is that I don’t want to waste the petrol necessary to get up there. After witnessing firsthand the damage that is caused by pollutants carelessly wasted, I can’t even imagine myself stepping in a van with only one or two other people and driving several hours to a location so I can aimlessly wander around for the day, and then drive back. Port Douglas is out.

I rise, collect my belongings, rinse my face, and leave the hostel, not entirely sure what I am going to do, but not content to sit for the day. I walk down the boardwalk a short way before running into a weekend market that has been set up in the city, and spend half an hour or so perusing the highly overpriced, handmade artifacts that are hung or laid out under tents. I finally purchase a few souvenirs for myself and people back home from the crappy, cheap pile of objects in the back of one of the tents, and make my way to the bus station. What I need, I’m fairly certain, is to just spend the day on a beach resting and collecting my thoughts; to read my book and to write down what I am feeling. I purchase a ticket to a beach that I have not visited, and which is closer than Palm Cove, and then board an overcrowded bus and settle in for the half-hour ride. It is around noon and the sun is directly overhead, shining bright and warm, as I spread my towel out on Trinity Beach, lie down, close my eyes, and reflect.

Yesterday, after rejoining the cruise ship we had headed back into Cairns. For the hour and a half that it took to get there, I sat out on the bow and wrote. I needed to share my feelings with someone, and for the first time the entire trip, felt sad that I had not come with a mate. Journal in hand, though, I spilled my thoughts and feelings onto the page in order to keep myself from bursting. After arriving at the dock, we were told to find our buses for the ride home, and this thought made me sick. I was disgusted with cars, disgusted with humanity and all its waste, and was determined to just walk the distance back to my hostel. Turns out they had changed all of our bus drivers, so no one knew where to go and the dock was just a chaotic mess. After consulting a list of passengers held by one of the drivers and not finding my name, I mentioned that I was just checking because I actually just wanted to walk, and the bus driver responded that he wouldn’t mind if I were on his bus, so I took this as permission and walked home.

After another dinner consisting of noodles and sauce, it was back out onto the boardwalk. I wanted the pelicans, the moon, anything to take my mind off of pollution and windblown sand. I had to wait a few hours, but sure enough the pelicans came, the moon rose, and I was able to relax a little. Being a Friday, the city was alive behind me and every few minutes a drunken group of hooligans would wander past, screaming at the top of their lungs and disrupting my peace, and this only deepened my resentment of humanity. At one point a man walked by talking on a cell phone and smoking a cigarette. He stopped about two benches down from me, took one final long puff, and flicked his butt off the boardwalk and into the bay. All I could see was toxic chemicals leaking from the butt and falling directly on the coral I had seen earlier, causing it shutter, shrivel, and die. The man turned to face me and we made eye contact for a few seconds, and I saw nothing in his eyes. No remorse, no hesitation, not the slightest indication that he had done anything wrong.

I turned back to the pelicans and put my head in my hands and tried to block out the world. I couldn’t understand myself. It had been such an amazing day and I had seen so many beautiful things, but no matter how hard I tried I could only focus on the dead, grey coral, on the birds who will lose their home, and on the propeller, blasting the coral over and over and over again. I sat out for several more hours, watching the pelicans sleeping on a small section of dirt that had been exposed as the tide went out, but the city would not quiet down and I could not escape from it like I had done so easily the previous few days. Eventually, tired and feeling a little less hatred, I walked back to the hostel and gazed up at the ceiling for a half-hour or so before finally falling asleep. It had been an interesting day.

Now, lying on the beach and letting the sun wash over me, I am finally able to relax enough to focus on the beauty of the reef, on all the wonderful things I had experienced on the coral. I lie on the beach for a few hours, step in the water a couple of times just for the experience, and take several naps, before purchasing some fish and chips for lunch and reading a little in my book. I start to write a little more, but suddenly the wind picks up and it is difficult for me to hold the page down so I give up and decide to catch a bus home. I get back to Cairns, walk up along the boardwalk, and notice the movement of several dozen mudskippers searching for a meal in the mud left in the wake of the tide. Around them are several shore birds trying to catch a meal as well, and I sit for a while to watch.

A short time later I am eating my final “dinner” at the hostel, and then it is back out to the boardwalk for one last night of watching the pelicans. They are there, as always, but the tide is not high enough for them to float in the water so they are gathered on land and sleeping. As well, the moon is hidden behind clouds, and only peeks out intermittently to shine its pale yellow light across the water. I spend only about an hour watching them and thinking about the week that I have spent up in Cairns before thanking them for all of the support, tipping my imaginary hat, and heading back in for an early bedtime. I have to be on a shuttle at 4:10 the next morning to catch a 6:00 am flight.

I wake up at 3:30 and take my time getting dressed in my traveling outfit (black batman shirt, black jacket, and generally pajama pants, but for this particular trip I wear my shorts instead… it’s sort of a superstition thing…), packing all my things, and then grabbing my sheets to return them to the reception desk. I have been told to leave my sheets by the desk and toss my key under the protective barrier across the reception desk (it being closed at four in the morning, obviously), and after setting my sheets beside the desk I take aim at the bin for keys and fire off my best shot. The keys hit the barrier and skid to a stop well short of where they are supposed to be. Self conscious about my aim and key throwing ability, I decide that I should reach under, grab my keys, and give it a second shot. I slide my hand under the barrier, and immediately after I do, a rather loud beeping sound greets my ears from the other side of the desk. I have set off an alarm… Oops…

I decide to leave the area, and walk out of the hostel at around 3:55. I have a few chips left over from my fish and chips the previous day, and I figure I can eat them for breakfast out on the boardwalk for the next few minutes before the shuttle arrives, and so I take a step to cross the street, and suddenly a car comes barreling around the corner at top speed. Weight already forward, I can’t stop myself and step into the road, then break into a sprint to avoid being hit. I reach the other side of the road and turn back, only to see the car come to a screeching halt outside the hostel, and I see “security” printed in big white letters across its black body. Oops… Now not only have I set off an alarm in the building, but as the security company arrived, the first thing they would have seen was a kid dressed mostly in black running for his life away from the hostel. This is not looking so good…

I wait for a minute, prepared to put on my best innocent face and explain everything, but no one gets out of the car, and I finally decide that I might actually look guiltier if I stand around waiting for the cop to approach, so I surreptitiously back my way into some bushes, and then jump to the other side and proceed to the boardwalk to eat my breakfast. The chips are stale, cold, and soggy, but I figure this will be the best meal I will have for a while once the cops jump through the bushes and throw me in prison for breaking and entering and then running from the scene of the crime. No cops show up, though, and so at 4:05 I make my way back to the hostel to wait for my shuttle. The car is still there and there is a man inside scribbling away furiously, but he does not even look up and notice me as I walk past and then wait in front of him for five minutes, before boarding my shuttle. I feel pretty bad for causing all the trouble, but I need to catch my flight.

The shuttle drives me to the international terminal check-in point, and we arrive at around 4:30 with plenty of time to spare. I might just make my flight home. As I enter the terminal, however, I see that the Jet Star check-in station is totally dark, and as I stand there confused, a man walks up and asks if I am here for the Jet Star flight to Sydney. I reply that I am, and he says that unfortunately it has been cancelled, and points me to a group of people looking irritated and waiting for their turn on a phone to an airport representative. I walk to the back of the queue and listen to all of the irritated conversations of the passengers ahead of me before being handed the phone and greeted by an exhausted sounding man who immediately apologizes three times for the inconvenience. It strikes me that maybe I should be more annoyed about my flight being cancelled, everyone around me seems to have felt that way, but I am really not that perturbed by the whole thing, and patiently wait through his explanation of what happened and then try to be as nice as possible when receiving my new flight information. I have been moved to a Qantas flight leaving from the domestic terminal at eleven, and I thank him for the time and then say “Good news: I’m the last one in the queue so you can have a break until the last second, frantic, and angry rush of late passengers.”

He gives me a tired chuckle and I feel better for brightening his day a little. I also feel good that I had done the international to domestic terminal walk earlier, because there is no way I could have done it in the dark. I am walking the path when I notice I have a stupid grin on my face and am skipping slightly when I walk, which doesn’t make any sense since I have just been told that I will have to wait six hours before boarding my flight, and it suddenly dawns on me just how amazing this vacation has been. My experiences on the reef and in the forest have allowed me to shed all my cares, and I am genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. It is a great feeling. I reach the domestic terminal, and having nothing better to do, decide to check in for my flight. This turns out to be the best decision I make all day. I wait in line for about half an hour, and then make my to the nearest agent who tells me that there is no record of me on a Qantas flight, and that I need to go talk to customer service. I walk over to the customer service lady and after punching through the computer for a few minutes she discovers the problem: there is no flight departing from Cairns to Sydney at eleven, and rather I have been booked onto a flight from Brisbane to Sydney, a city 1,750 kilometers south of Cairns. Still unperturbed by the news that I no longer have a ride home, I decide to make another stupid joke: “Brisbane huh? I can walk there from here, right? Um… You may have to point me south…”

The woman tries to hide a smile and I feel even better about myself, then she tells me that I need to go talk to the Jet Star people again because they were the ones who made the booking and there is nothing she can do. Five minutes and a hasty walk around the terminal later, I find myself in front of another woman who tells me that I am actually booked on another Jet Star flight which is departing at six, forty minutes from now.

“Ah… So I should probably get in that really long check-in line that will take me forty minutes to get through, right?”

“Um… Yeah… Sorry, mate.”

Stupid smile still plastered across my face I get into the line which will surely keep me grounded until long after my flight leaves, and luckily enough it moves quickly, so that half an hour later I am standing in front of another lady who is hurriedly trying to check me in. Inspired by my previous success with stupid jokes, I decide to try one on her and when she asks me if there is anything dangerous in my bag I reply “Only for the environment.” She stares back at me, head tilted at an odd angle, and slightly put off I say “Um… No… No, nothing dangerous,” and then pick up my pack and run to the security checkpoint. No sooner do I think I am through, then I feel a tug on my shoulder and a security woman is standing behind me telling me I have been chosen for a random bomb-check. My plane is taking off in three minutes.

I sigh, and she says “Sorry, mate, but I have to. Oh, you are over sixteen, aren’t you?”

“Yeah… I know I have youthful good looks but it is all just a façade.” She takes my bag and pours out the contents; I see my plane taxiing out to the runway.

“Ahh, don’t knock ‘em mate, you’ll lose ‘em! Where you headed?”

“Sydney”

“Home?”

“Sort of, I’m spending the semester abroad.” She begins to search through my pockets. My plane is taking off and leaving me behind. I still have a stupid grin on my face.

“Ahh, whatcha studying?”

“Neuroscience”

“Complicated! What do you get when you’re all done with that?”

“Well, hopefully a job and the small, shattered pieces of my dignity to keep as souvenirs.” She begins to pack everything up again. They are serving beverages on my plane by now.

“Ahh, good onya’ mate! Enjoy your flight!”

I rush to my gate, still reflecting on what must have been the best bomb-check I have ever been through, and am greeted with a very welcome sight: a queue working their way through the ticket stand. I have forgotten that nothing in this country runs on time. I board my plane, sleep through the flight, board my second plane, read through the flight, and before I know it I am walking in Sydney’s domestic terminal, making my way to the subway station. I feel like a million dollars. I can’t say that my vacation was necessarily spectacular, considering that I spent a fair amount of it crying and hating humanity, but it has left me feeling fulfilled and content. I am sad for the things I have seen, but determined to do something about it and devote myself to serving causes meant to preserve the sights. I think it is the first time in my life that I have had a well-defined goal for my future. It is a wonderful feeling.

I take a train into the city, become uncontrollably excited when I see the Opera House and Harbour Bridge again because it suddenly reminds me that my home is Sydney, Australia, the amazing place that I could only dream about visiting as a child, and then catch a bus back to Macquarie. I get off a stop early, happy to walk the extra distance and watch a few familiar birds. Spring has come, and in the last week the trees have exploded with flowers and green leaves. It is a warm, calm day and the campus is still very quiet since many of its residents will not be returning for another day. I have to break away from the path at one point because a male and female duck are crossing with seven young chicks that I imagine can’t be more than a week old; they are nothing more than brown and yellow balls of fluff waddling across the sidewalk in their mother’s footsteps. My stupid grin turns into a full on smile.

I walk into my house, and there are all my roommates, gathered around the T.V., where they spend all their time and exactly where I would expect to find them. One turns her head, notices me, and says “Oh hey, GI Jo (My nickname, not sure why), T.V.’s fucked up,” and turns her head back to watch. Indeed, the TV is pretty awful looking, nothing more than a hazy picture behind some static lines, and the dialogue is only barely comprehensible, but my roommates are captivated.

“Oh, okay guys… Thanks.” I walk upstairs to my room. It’s good to be back.

Quote of the Day: “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” Thomas Jefferson

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: Australia appears to have one the fittest and most unhealthy populations in the world. In urban areas, 60 percent of adults either belong to a gym and/or compete in a competitive sport, but in rural areas, Australia leads the world with nearly 66 percent of the adult population being obese.

Photos of the week's events can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/10298685@N02/

The Sand Bar

I am up before the sun. To be honest, I never really went to sleep, tossing and turning in anticipation of what is to come. I finally decide to give up trying at six in the morning, stuff my scattered belongings into my pack, arrange them into the areas of most convenience, and finally leave my room around 6:50. The cruise I am going on is a one-day trip out to Michaelmas Cay, a small sand bar 40km outside of Cairns that serves as one of the most important seabird breeding sites in all of Australia. During the summer, nearly thirty-thousand birds call the small, kilometer long patch of sand and small fresh water plants home, but unfortunately I am more likely to see only a few hundred. The Cay serves as the only known point in the world where the sooty and crested terns both nest together (one existing primarily north of the site, and the other south), and so this trip will allow me to get a unique glance at both terrestrial and aquatic life.

Surrounding the cay are several kilometers of Great Barrier Reef, and the cruise I am on offers a chance to snorkel, SCUBA dive, and even take a semi-submersible boat tour. A few summers ago my mom and brother decided that they were going to become SCUBA certified and I, being the pessimist that I am, turned the offer down because I figured it was a skill I would never use. I have been kicking myself ever since arriving in Australia for not getting certified when I had the chance, but my cruise offers introductory dives to uncertified swimmers. Doing the dive will not give me the opportunity to snorkel because of the instruction I need to receive, but I figure a medium amount of time swimming through the reef would be better than a long time floating above it, and am excited for the opportunity to get in the water.

The previous day I had called the Ocean Spirit administration office (the company offering the cruise) to confirm my spot and also to arrange a pickup from my hostel, but it is not supposed to arrive until 7:30, so with a little free time I go wandering down the road to pick up a cheap breakfast. After a brief stroll down the boardwalk I find a Turkish kebab stand serving toast and jam for 3 dollars (questionable but good), and am back in front of my hostel by 7:12, leg shaking in anticipation as I wait for my pick-up to arrive. There is a large group of people, all waiting for their respective vans, and one by one the hostel reception area begins to clear out until finally, at 7:25, the only people left are a young couple across the room and me, both anxiously awaiting a pick-up.

7:30 comes and goes. Nothing in this country runs on time, and by now I am trained to expect it, but as the minutes tick by and no one shows I begin to get anxious. I look over at the couple, and they appear to be in a similar situation. At 7:42 the man walks to a pay phone and calls someone, gets supposedly good news and walks back to the woman where they both sit a little more relaxed. I decide to do the same. Like hell I’m missing this trip because some driver can’t find me! I can walk to the wharf if I need to, and I know from my itinerary that the boat is scheduled to depart in three minutes so clearly something has gone horribly wrong. I call and no one answers, the office is closed. I sit there feeling dismayed, phone to my ear, and see a giant bus pull up to the curb several meters away. The couple is very happy and run up to the front door, tickets out expectantly. I am desperate! I am going to miss my cruise, the only thing I really came up here for, and God only knows when I will get another chance.

Turns out the bus is not for the couple and they walk away confused and disappointed. A large man gets out and yells a name I can’t quite hear, but it ends in “…anning.” I am confused: I was expecting a van, not a giant bus; after all I am just going a few hundred meters down the road, but think, “whatever,” and yell out “that’s me!” imagining that the driver will be able to sort things out if necessary. He seems relieved, beckons me over, and begins to speak in a thick Scottish accent. After several days of trying to interpret Queensland English, I am not prepared for the switch and so I can’t understand a word he is saying. He doesn’t check to make sure I am who he says I am, says something else I don’t understand, slaps a sticker on my chest, and shoves me on the bus before climbing in himself and pulling away from the curb. I begin to have my doubts… Obediently though, and with a rising sense of panic, I begin to walk to the end of the bus. It is filled with old people, and for the second time this trip I appear to be the only one under fifty. As I go by one of the passengers, I see a sticker on his chest and I finally think to check what was slapped onto mine: it says “Ocean Spirit” and I feel a little more comfortable.

The driver takes us around to a fancy hotel, runs in and picks up two more people, visits a second hotel, then backtracks and picks up two more from the first, and I begin to understand why he was late. We eventually make our way down to the docks, where we are ushered off the bus and told to stand in front of another fit-looking Scottish man standing at attention. He barks out our marching orders, and we weave our way through the hundreds of other tourists getting on cruise ships, eventually making it all the way to the back of the wharf. On our boat are the crew, all standing at attention and waiting for us. Amazing. Out of all the boats leaving here I have managed to book myself onto the old person’s Scottish military cruise.

My identity is finally confirmed as I hand over my egg stained travel voucher, and I am herded on board and then immediately stopped by a far-too-excited Aussie crew member with a camera. She reminds me of a camp counselor on steroids, and she shoves a large life-saver into my hand and snaps my picture, then throws it over my head and snaps another. I am not amused, but she happily cheers and encourages me to explore the boat before moving on to the next baffled customer. I enter the ship’s saloon and am greeted with a very welcome sight: young people. It is a 150 person cruise, and apparently my bus was the only one filled with elderly. It does not take me long to scope out the place and identify where I can get my complimentary cup of coffee, served to me by an over the top stereotypical Greek chef, and as I am finding a seat I here him ask the girl behind me where she is from. Texas. I hate Americans. They are the only people I know who, when asked where they are from, will either respond with a continent (America), or a state, as if every person around the world should be born with an encyclopedic knowledge of all the names and locations of U.S. states (something which, hypocritically, many studies have shown the very same Americans do not possess).

After my cup of coffee I make my way around the ship trying to find any papers I might have to sign to go SCUBA diving later. I am trying to be proactive, and find it a little suspect that no one has addressed this yet… I find a desk with papers, and ask the woman next to them if I need to fill any out. She hands me a sheet, I sign away my life at least eight times, claim not to be pregnant or have a chest cavity which is currently exposed (omit the fact that I have an upper respiratory infection), put my address and such and return it to her. She takes a look at it and says “You live in Marsfield, eh? I grew up there!” I tell her I actually live in the States but am spending a semester abroad, she does not listen, just goes on about how she used to walk down such and such a place and eat at somewhere or other, asks me if I know where she is talking about and I enthusiastically say yes just to be agreeable, she isn’t listening to my responses anyway. I get the information about where I need to be and when for training and head up to the bow of the boat. It is full of sunbathers and appears to have no more available seating, but I am cleverly and agilely able to maneuver myself into a spot with plenty of sun and a great view of the ocean.

No sooner do I sit down, however, than I hear my name called over the intercom, and I am asked to make my way back to the administration table. I begrudgingly do so, weaving my way back through the throngs of people and into the saloon, where I am met by the exact same women who talked to me not two minutes earlier, holding a blank copy of the exact same paper I filled out not three minutes earlier. I look at her confused, she stares back indifferently, I say “Um… I think I already filled one of those out…” She looks at me confused and we have an awkward moment.

“You have?”

“Yeah… Just… Like… A minute ago…” I want to say “When we had the fascinating conversation about Marsfield,” but am afraid this will embarrass her, so instead I agree to help sort through the pile of signed papers. I can’t find mine. The woman begins to doubt me, and I feel like saying “Seriously? We talked literally a minute ago,” but fortunately am able to find my paper the third time through, just before I am forced to fill out another. She looks over it, and I swear she is about to mention Marsfield again, before she gives me the same instructions she had a few minutes prior, and then sends me on my way. This, apparently, is my SCUBA instructor. When I return to the bow, my seat is taken, and it is standing room only as we ship out to sea.

Forty minutes in, and the coastline is nothing but a distant blur. It is the perfect day again: only one or two clouds in the sky, no wind, and a hot but not uncomfortable 30 degrees (C). All around the boat is the calm, blue ocean surface; unlike the Daintree, the sea is not so quick to reveal its treasures. I am finally able to find some sitting room, but after twenty or so minutes of gazing out over flat, blue water, I get up and walk back to the saloon to hear a talk about the wildlife we can expect to find when we reach our destination.

A crew member begins the talk, aided by a DVD which he explains can be purchased for a low, low price while on board, and works his way through the long list of organisms seen around the cay at some point in the past. I think half the things he shows are just trying to make the passengers purchase another cruise, because they are out of season and there is no way we will see them. Half way through he notices me taking notes in my journal, and he pauses to point me out and make fun. Ha ha, I’m a geek, get over it. Despite the commercial plugs in the talk, and the obvious disinterest of the teacher, the lesson is still quite interesting and very informative, and the next time I check my watch I realize I am several minutes late to my SCUBA instruction. Oops.

It’s okay, I have only missed part of a physics lesson on why it is important to equalize pressure. It goes a little something like “Water weighs a lot, as you go deeper there is more weight on top of you so the air particles in, and around you, grow smaller. As you rise they grow larger. You equalize the air to keep the right number of particles in you at all times.” This lesson makes me confident that I will never see the surface again.

The rest of the “training” is pretty much the same. “Here is your indicator, it tells you how much air you have in your tank. Don’t ever touch or look at it, you will mess it up. Here is a red button and here is a grey button. They do things to your suit. Don’t ever touch them.” I look around the room and notice that everyone else is looking just as lost and confused and this makes me feel a little more comfortable. “Don’t touch the coral, don’t breath in your nose, don’t breath in when your inhaler-thingy is pulled out of your mouth, don’t let go of your partner (we are traveling in groups of five, instructor in the middle), everyone ready? Okay let’s go! Group one leaving in five minutes includes Jonathan Fanning…” I go and rent a wet suit because I don’t want to catch hypothermia when I get separated from my partner and am stuck underwater for several hours wondering if I should press the red or grey button.

Afterwards, I make my way to the back of the boat. We have arrived at the island, and there are three or four other cruise ships around the area enjoying it with us. Little boats are zooming back and forth to take people to the shore or around the reef. My boat is chaotic. Everyone is rushing around, trying on snorkel masks or flippers, trying to catch rides to the cay, and it is only by shear luck that I end up in the right place. A bronze-skinned Aussie approaches me and says “Feelin’ confident, mate?”

“Um… Sure?”

“Good onya’!” He straps several rocks to my midsection and walks away, leaving me standing in the spot awkward and confused. I wait five or so minutes before my instructor arrives.

“Alright then! Feelin’ confident, mate?”

“I gue…”

“Good onya’!” She hoists a large air-tank complete with all my equipment on it and walks off. I have no idea what is going on. The tube leading to the buttons I’m never, ever supposed to touch is leaking air, making a small squeaking noise. I am not sure if this is a good thing. My instructor walks by again, hears the leak, gives my tube a concerned look, touches it with her finger, and the leak stops. Satisfied, she rushes off again, and the second she removes pressure, the leak begins again.

“Um…” Crew members are rushing past me in all directions and I am meekly trying to grab their attention by pointing to my tube and giving a helpless, lost look. No one stops. Again my instructor passes by and hears the noise, which is becoming louder at this point, and gives the tube a little twist.

“Feelin’ confident?”

“Of course”

“Good onya’!” She rushes off. The leak returns. My confidence is becoming strained. I take a risk and twist the tube myself, harder than my instructor. The leak stops. I sit back to watch the chaos around me, and not a minute later the leak comes back, seeping out with more and more force. I twist it again. It gets worse. I sound like a deflating balloon.

“Um…” No one stops. I don’t want to be the one tourist who doesn’t know what he is doing, so I start to ease my shoulder near the ears of passing crew members, hoping that one will notice and volunteer to help me without me asking. Finally, one notices, twists some tubes, adjusts my equipment a little, and the leak goes away for good.

“Feelin’ confident, mate?”

WHAT THE HELL AM I LEAKING!!!??? “Always”

“Good onya’!”

My instructor returns with a petite, brunette girl probably my age but about half my size. “Right! You feeling confident?”

“Never felt better! (thumbs up)”

“Good onya’! You’ll be Sam’s buddy. You hold on to her arm and Sam, you hold on to mine. Right? Good!” She rushes off again. I look at Sam, she looks at me, we both look away and stand awkwardly next to each other. Several minutes pass. “Hi, I’m Jonathan. Can I… Be your buddy?” Sam laughs nervously. I have broken the ice: I rock.

Sam is from Connecticut and goes to CU. She knows some people I went to high school with. Small world. We’re finally ushered down onto the lower deck of the boat, next to the water. My instructor is down in the water and she waits patiently as I get my goggles, spit into each eye piece, rub the lugy in good and strong, rinse, and repeat. Nature’s defogger.

“Alright! Feelin’ confident?”

I am sick of being asked this question. “Not at all. Am I doing a good job pretending?”

“Aww come on now, mate! It’s easy! Now you see this red button here?”

“The one I’m never, ever supposed to touch?”

“That’s it, now why don’t you give it a nice, big press.”

“Um…” I press the button and the indicator I am never, ever supposed to look at drops a few notches.

“Right, now take your respirator mouth piece (Respirator mouth piece? What the hell is that? Oh, she’s holding it.) run it over your shoulder like this, give me a nice big ‘ooh’ and then gently clamp, but don’t bite down on it!”

I give an “ooh” face, but as my mouth closes around the mouth piece I realize there is nothing to clamp! Sure, there is a thin piece of plastic that feels like it should be what I am clamping onto, but it is too small for my mouth, and I feel as though I am going to tear it out if I clasp with any force. Also, the respirator is falling out of my mouth and the grip I have on the little piece of plastic can’t support it. I try to find another place to clasp, but end up with my whole mouth over the respirator. My instructor begins to frantically gesture for me to get in the water so I think “screw it” and bite down on the little plastic piece as hard as possible, then belly-flop my way into the water.

Our first task is to put our heads down in the water and get used to the feel of breathing through the respirator. I inhale easily enough, but on my exhale I feel an enormous amount of pressure build up in my mask, which lifts off my face and ejects the excess air. I was partially breathing out my nose. Oops. I focus on breathing only through my mouth, but the same thing happens the second time around as well, and I remember back to my days as the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland when I had a large prosthetic nose and my director had me do breathing exercises because apparently I struggle breathing exclusively out of my mouth, and it was making my voice sound nasally. Why didn’t I pay more attention to her?

At this point, the three other inexperienced members of my group and I are lined up along a bar hanging in the water below the boat. Luckily, my instructor begins testing us at the other side of the bar, moving each member of the group to another bar several meters deep in the water, so I have a few moments to figure out my breathing problem. The key is shallow breaths; I remember that. Unfortunately, when I was acting this was significantly easier because I would take shallow breaths while speaking and then I would have long periods where I could breathe however I wanted, but this is not the case in the water. I work out a system of breathing in and out shallowly until I feel that my lungs are going to explode, and then I release all of my air in one giant breath so that my mask opens, but the force of the air keeps the water out.

It is my turn to descend. I grab hold of the instructor for dear life as she begins to fiddle with my suit and drop me down to the lower pole. Shallow breath, shallow breath, shallow breath, shallow breath, big breath. Shallow breath, shallow breath, shallow breath, shallow breath, big breath. It is a slow process. I am not quite at neutral buoyancy, and I have no idea how to adjust this on my own, so I have to wait for my instructor to clamber over the top of me to fiddle with things, and this is not easy because everything appears bigger and closer than it really is, and I am also struggling with my new flipper and air tank extremities, so I have no idea what the position of my body is, or where I am in space, and I keep knocking into her. We struggle about half way down before I look out ahead and freeze. There are fish everywhere! Hundreds of fusilier and butterfly fish are swirling around the bottom of the boat in a twisting vortex of reflecting color and life. Still not used to the size and distance differences created by my goggles, they appear to be inches from my face, and I am blown away by their beauty. I have seen these fish in aquariums many times before, but that is nothing like being in among them as they seethe back and forth in perfectly coordinated masses. They are joined by banner fish, brilliant stripes and spots of black and yellow and white navigating the florescent blue and green of fusiliers.

Something tugs at my sleeve, tearing me from the majestic image in front of me. It is my instructor and she is asking if I am okay. I have stopped breathing, I have stopped kicking, and I am not making any attempt to grasp onto the pole directly in front of me. I give her the okay sign and try to get back to reality. It is difficult. I keep being drawn away by the fish, watching as they swoop and dive and climb with perfect coordination, and my diverted attention means that I can’t focus on my breathing and it becomes very erratic. I breathe in my nose, leaving myself gasping for air and with a painful air pressure differential in my mask; I exhale forcefully and then only take a very shallow breath afterwards, leaving my lungs screaming for oxygen; I always breathe out my nose, never my mouth. It is not pretty or graceful at all, but I am getting oxygen occasionally, so I give up trying to monitor it. My instructor is running us through breathing drills, we practice losing our mouthpiece and getting water out of our mask. One quick test and we are off. If I wasn’t so lost in the fish I might feel worried, but it is impossible to be worried among these creatures.

We start to move forward, ducking under the pole. I narrowly avoid it, swim forward a little ways, and am stopped by something. I can’t move. I try kicking harder but nothing happens. I am totally stuck. Please don’t ask me if I am feeling confident… My instructor reaches over and pushes me down a meter or two in the water: Oh yeah, I forgot I have an air tank on my back… We begin to descend as we move forward, and the pressure starts to build on my face and ears. I blow out my nose to equalize the pressure, but my ears still hurt. We keep descending and the pain keeps growing. I blow out my nose several more times, but it is not helping! Here I am just inside the water and already I am going to have to hold up the group because I can go no further because of the pain. They said breathing to equalize was easy! So easy, in fact, that they skipped it because the said we were doing it already or we wouldn’t be here! Damn it Fanning! You can point out just how wrong every bit of that physics lesson was, and visualize exactly what is happening inside your body right now from a physics perspective, but you can’t just breathe!? What the hell is wrong with you!? Just as I begin to slow down and signal the instructor that something is wrong, I finally discover the problem: turns out my ears are not located directly beside my nose. During the training, they talked about the air space around your head as if a single space encompassed both the ears and nose, but my ears are not in my mask, they are out feeling the water move past. I pop them and the pain goes away. Good job, Fanning.

We are swimming towards a patch of coral in the distance, nothing more than a vague outline at this point, but Sam gets excited beside me and points to the ocean floor. A blue-spurred sting ray is flapping its way along the seabed, kicking up clouds of dust as it passes. I watch it for as long as possible, looking nearly backwards as we kick by overhead, and when I turn around again I realize I am smashing Sam. I try to adjust and swim further out to the side, but am unfamiliar with how to maneuver myself in the water. I try to turn, but my long flippers end up running into Sam’s body and I inadvertently draw myself closer towards her. I begin to helplessly flap my free arm, trying to pull myself away from her, and this does some good but I still feel that I am obstructing her view. Whose bright idea was it to put the smallest person in the middle of the group?

We reach the coral: long, branching sticks of blue, green, and orange staghorn, at the edge of which protrude brilliantly red or blue sea fans. Behind that, pale yellow and blue boulder coral, rolling down the side of the hill, as well as outcroppings of maroon and yellow tabletop coral speckling the hillside. Those are only the hard corals, though. Swinging with the tide are various types of spaghetti and velvet coral, large colonies of polyps, so poisonous to any potential predator, that they have no hesitation about exposing their wavy, finger-like extensions into the surrounding water. We float through, around, and beside the various types, all brilliant and distinctive in their own special way. The Reef is not as colorful as it appears on T.V., only blue and green light waves penetrate the water at this depth, and television shows generally flood the area with spotlights to bring out the full color, but shades of red, yellow, purple, and orange are still clearly visible. For the same reason, though, blue or green organisms stand out as a brilliantly florescent explosion of color, contrasting spectacularly with the dark maroons and oranges surrounding them.

I am disappointed in myself. I am not familiar with the many different species of polyp that make up these fantastic coral, and I can only use the broad category names to identify them. Gazing down in wonder, I can only speculate about how many hundreds or thousands of species I am looking at. I am better with fish. Parrotfish dart in an out between the different coral branches, somehow immune to the blue and green light rule and displaying fantastically fluorescent pinks and reds, some with purple and orange to compliment their reflective green scales. Schools of razorfish, silver and black and perpendicular to the ground quiver in the safety of the camouflaging branches of staghorn. Small, black bodied and yellow tailed fusiliers quickly dart from the safety of one cave to the next. Burrowing clams, having released an acid which allows them to sink into the hard exoskeleton of the boulder coral, float out their blue and green feathery extensions.

Again, another tug on my arm tears me from this beautiful world. My instructor is asking if I am okay. I have forgotten to breathe again, and by the sudden white hot pain rushing from my lungs I think it has been some time. I can’t help myself, the multi-colored and explosively alive environment just inches from my face pushing even my most primal neuronal functions out of my mind as I concentrate all my brain power on admiration and awe. We cruise low over the surface of the coral, and I notice a colony of feather-duster worms sticking their pink and green and blue silky gills out of a nearby boulder coral. I run my hand closely by, and the worms quickly retract the gills, leaving dark caves on the surface of the coral, which moments later bloom like a garden in spring time as the gills reemerge. The instructor points down below, and I notice a giant clam, jaws open and waiting just an arms-length away. Through my magnified goggles, it looks over a meter long with a gaping purple, feathery mouth and neon-green, photosensitive eyes speckled across its surface. There are sea cucumbers, some dull shades of grey and brown, others brilliant reds and purples, slowly making their way across the floor.

We are so close I have to stop kicking. I have no idea where my body is in space still, and I cannot fathom the thought of damaging any of this precious landscape with a wayward kick. The instructor looks at me, asks if I am okay, and then tells me to speed up because I am pulling the group in the wrong direction. I am barely conscious of the others beside me. The fusiliers and bannerfish are still swirling around, joined now by angel and pairs of rabbit fish. My instructor points again to a giant sea anemone with a number of clownfish playfully flopping their way through it. (Find Nemo-check). Suddenly the instructor begins to pull us away from the coral, and I worry that we are through swimming, but no, it is the damn camera lady again. She is just as artificially enthusiastic underwater as she is above it, waving and gyrating excitedly as she tries to line us up for the perfect photo. I can’t see the reef and I am unhappy. The woman coerces me into giving the okay sign before snapping a photo, and just as I think we are headed back down she holds up a giant sea cucumber and offers it to each of us in turn for a second photo. Stupid lady. I wish I could tell her that I would pay her the price of a damn photograph just for her to leave me alone and put the cucumber back where she found it. Instead I reluctantly take the worm, give the okay sign again, and thrust it back in her arms so she can get on her way.

We dive back down to a section of reef. I am greeted again by the brilliant colors of coral and fish, and I drift past in wonder. Within a meter you can find several different types of coral, a sea cucumber, and six different kinds of fish, most of which I can’t identify and wouldn’t want to even if I could. I have fallen in love with the mystery of this place; it is so rich with life that I could spend a lifetime on a single kilometer and still have more to discover. Just like the Daintree, I can clearly see that below me is a chaotic and desperate struggle for survival in an ecosystem so full of biodiversity that only the most clever and unique adaptations are allowed to survive.

We drift through the hills and troughs, surrounded by fish of all different shapes and sizes and colors for a short time more before finally beginning to rise towards the boat again. As we begin to climb, I start to panic. I have not seen what I came here to see! I frantically begin to look around through the last section of coral we are passing over. I have been keeping an eye out for it the entire time and have come up empty, and so now the instructor surely must think I am having a seizure as I frantically search out the remaining few sections of colorful landscape. And then I find it. Australia would never leave me hanging like that. My favorite piece of coral, even though I have never seen it: A giant yellow mushroom of brain coral. I drift up, a feeling of utter bliss passing through me as I watch the brain fade away in the murky distance. We have been in the water for nearly half an hour and it has passed in an instant.

We break the surface, and the first thing I hear is my instructor saying “Well Mr. Nervous, how was that?”

“It…Was…Awesome!” I reply in between waves hitting my face and filling my now exposed mouth with sea water. For the first time since jumping in, I realize that I am floating in salt water. We are directed to a place on the boat where we can climb up out of the water, Sam goes first and is immediately assisted by the bronzed Aussie, who then leaves me to climb out of the water and follow him unassisted, carrying my large and heavy suit with me. After sorting Sam out, he turns to me and asks “Well, Mr. Nervous, how was it?”

Come on. Live on the same street as someone and they forget you instantly. Make one joke about how you’re a tad nervous to jump in the water for the first time, and they make you regret it forever.

I am still overwhelmed. Still swimming among the fish and coral. I decide that now is a good time for lunch while I process what I have just seen. Afterwards, I jump on a boat and head for the key to take some pictures of birds. I am the only one who is taking pictures of the island. Everyone else is on the beach sunning themselves, facing out onto the reef, or snorkeling. Whatever, I’m weird, I know it. There is a rather large colony of sooty tern on the island right now. Along with the adults, several large chicks are sitting under the shade provided by the posts for the rope separating the beach from the bird sanctuary. Large brown footed boobies wattle around on the ground along with ruddy turnstones, and I spot a least frigatebird resting on a nearby rock. Silver gulls circle in the air, ever watchful for unprotected eggs or chicks, and on the sandy beach opposite me, there are a large collection of black-naped terns. I snap a few pictures, check my watch and realize that it is almost my time to go on the semi-submersible boat, turn, see a beach buggy nearly loaded, and run to jump in on time.

Unlike the beach buggy I came over on, this one has a glass bottom which allows viewing of the reef as we skip across the waves. This kind of worries me. What worries me more, though, is that the driver of this boat has an Aussie accent, and all the crew members I have seen on my cruise so far (aside from the camera women, cook, and divers) have been Scottish. I know before the buggy turns away and heads in the opposite direction that I am on the wrong boat. I wait until we are at a different cruise ship before revealing this to the driver. She laughs, the boat laughs, I stare down at the glass bottom. Mostly I am worried I will miss my chance to get on the semi-submersible. The driver is nice enough and agrees to take me back to the island, even though it interferes with her schedule, and we make it back just in time for me to jump off her boat and jump onto mine. I tell her that I will write to her company and tell them that I found the service on their cruise wonderful. She laughs. I feel as though I have redeemed myself. As I am walking away and she is reloading her boat I here her say “he got on the wrong boat” and more laughing. A lesser man would be embarrassed, but after all the wrong airplanes, trains, and buses I have gotten on in the past, this doesn’t really bother me. A few laughs at my expense in return for a free glass bottom boat ride around the Great Barrier Reef is sort of like having to make cookies for Santa instead of myself at Christmas. I jump back on the main vessel, make my way to the semi-submersible, present my ticket, and am admitted.

I ease my down the slippery metal stairs that lead to the pit of the boat. It is a long corridor with sitting benches stretched out along the bottom, and windows slanting out and away on either side so as to form a cramped “V.” As I am the first one on, I quickly scurry to the front of the vehicle, directly behind the crew operator- who is sitting below waiting for us- so I can get the benefit of the viewing windows at the front of the submersible as well. I am quickly joined by a group of American girls who are chatting loudly.

Outside, fusillierfish dart back and forth, feeding on the algae that have accumulated on the underside of the boat. Joining them are the large angelfish, just as eager for a free meal, and finally the brilliantly yellow and silver surgeon fish, so named because on either side of its tail protrudes a black bone spur so sharp and fine, it can be used as a scalpel. I am lost with these fish. Their beauty is in no way diminished now that I am viewing them behind a glass barrier as opposed to swimming among them. A large and blinding white damsel rises up from below, and just as I begin to admire it, I hear the American beside me say “Eww! I don’t like that one, it’s ugly!” This trip will clearly be a test in self control. I grab my left arm tightly with my right to prevent it from rising up and smacking the girl.

We are underway. The boat operator announces that it will be about a five minute ride to the section of reef we are exploring, and begins to go through the safety instructions. I am still captivated by the empty water outside the boat, and fifteen seconds later I understand exactly why the boat takes five minutes to find suitable coral, and all of the wonderful feelings I have been experiencing cease immediately. We are drifting over a large field of grey, lifeless coral. Every now and again a small patch of blue or orange indicates the presence of life, but for the most part we are floating over a graveyard, and I can’t shake the feeling that it is this exact activity, driving past in a noxious fume producing boat full of “ooh” ing and “ahh” ing tourists that has caused it. I imagine the reef we are drifting over was once an easy, go-to location for the submersible, but constant boat tours overhead have destroyed it, and now it is an ugly annoyance that must be passed on the way to greener pastures.

I become acutely aware of the smell of petrol in the cabin. A dark cloud has moved in over me, and I suddenly feel incredibly uncomfortable sitting in this artificial glass tube. We come to our target destination, a large patch of coral that rises and falls over several hundred meters of ocean floor, and provides a plethora of different sight-seeing habitat. We approach it at an extreme angle, and in the last second before we crash into it, the propeller at the front of the boat kicks in, discharging a concentrated wall of water back into the coral inches away, and turning us to safety. All I can see is the jet of water blasting the fragile coral and crumbling it to pieces.

Beside us are an assortment of table and brain coral, small silver dart and angel fish. It is striking. I try to raise my camera and take a picture, but can’t. I feel sick. All I can think of is the gallons of petrol burning up in the engine and choking the reef beside me. I don’t want to remember anything associated with this ship.

The brilliant purple, green, and red of a male parrotfish flashes by us as we proceed around our section of the reef. This is closely followed by a pair of rabbit fish, bright yellow and always found in pairs. The guide is excited, looking from side to side, pointing out the various species to everyone, but as we turn a corner we hit another dead patch. The guide becomes bored, the people become bored, this is not colorful enough for their liking. We are floating over a section of dead coral, and suddenly the guide launches into a speech about how tough the coral is, how it is used to replace bone, how it is used as sunscreen, how they are using it to find a cure for HIV. From somewhere in the back a man shouts “This is the boring stuff! Where are the sharks!?” I want to puke.

This dead section of coral is perhaps the most important part of the reef. It is a perfect example of the effects of pollution, of abuse, and of negligent behavior concerning the reef. It is beautiful in its ugliness, I cannot take my eyes off of it, but to these people it is nothing more than a nuisance. To the tourists, it is a shocking affront to their picture perfect holiday and to the guide, who has the perfect opportunity to spread awareness of reef fragility, it is an irritating break in sight-seeing where she has to come up with lame filler-facts to pass the time. And still, as we navigate through the narrow corridors around the shelf, the front propeller periodically blasts the fragile extensions of staghorn and sea fan.

Does it seriously take a degree in biology to be aware that the reef is dying? I always thought that this was a major issue, and whenever I talked about the reef it was followed by a conversation of rising ocean temperatures and runoff, but as I look around the cabin of the submersible, all I can see is irritation on the faces of the people around me. Anger that the reef is not exactly what they thought it would be, that it has gaps, that it is not as colorful as in the movies, that some of the fish are ugly. I try asking leading questions regarding the future of the reef to the guide. I practically will the crew member to talk about how the reef is dying and how something drastic needs to be done to fix it. She will not talk about it. No matter how leading my questions, she always manages to avoid the obvious answer and talk about the strength and the large, unimaginable size of the reef. For the tourists, it is clear that the reef it is purely about the tan and seeing a shark. No one in the submersible with me cares about the dead reef, no one is effected, the conversation as we exit is about the shark and turtles.

We are crossing a garden of giant clam now, resting among them is a small and well hidden epaulette shark. Off to the left of the boat, away from the coral and fading off in the murky distance is a green sea turtle. Several schools of fish, species I don’t know or can’t recall flutter past in various directions. Black and yellow tails; perfectly reflective so the color spectrum explodes as they pass; large and blue; uncountable numbers of organisms of all shapes and sizes. There are more angel fish, more pairs of rabbit fish, I spot a sea anemone teaming with clownfish, as well as other stinger-resistant life. They all jet away as we blast them with a fierce stream of water from the front propeller.

I hate myself for getting on this boat. The really important part of this trip was the dive. To establish a personal connection with the reef. I can get all of what I am now experiencing in an aquarium, and all I am doing here is encouraging more habitat destruction and spilling of petrol directly into a natural area. The Americans beside me are bored with the small fish, they start talking about how they are going to woo the hot crew member in the tight white shorts. I sink simultaneously into deeper wonder and depression. A second green sea turtle is resting on the coral; we pass within maybe seven meters. Beside it is a brown, clumsy-looking toad fish. It marks the boarder to another dead patch of coral. I am staring intently now, across the Americans. There are two or three bold fish picking through the remains of this once rich hillside. They are cautious, clearly uncomfortable. Similarly, the occupants of the submersible are becoming restless. The American girl beside me notices me staring, assumes it is directed at her because who in their right mind would want to look at grey, dead plants, and self-consciously covers herself. I’m glad that she considers herself worth that sort of attention because personally I am disgusted with everyone on this boat, myself included.

The propeller blasts another section of coral.

We are headed back now, through the “boring” no man’s land. There is a blue-spurred sting ray stirring on the floor, perhaps the same one I saw earlier. We slowly dock with the larger vessel, and are rejoined by the fusiliers, bannerfish, and surgeons, still eager to clean our underside. I climb out into the warm, sun-drenched air and quickly catch a transport into shore. I can’t deal with looking at the reef any longer, I want birds.

I clamber on shore just as someone makes an announcement that a bird lecture will be taking place by the big sign. A large group of people clear away from the sign. Does no one care? I am one of three people who attend the talk; the others are a French couple who do not speak English very well and need every sentence repeated, and often, rephrased. I don’t mind, it helps to drill the facts and figures into my head, and how sad would it be if out of 150 people, the only person attending a bird lecture was a twenty year-old American male? The lecturer is not very enthusiastic. He clearly has been forced to do this, and I don’t help the matter by asking him to recall difficult facts and anecdotes. Eventually, the French leave and I stop asking questions and just longingly stare out at the birds. This makes the instructor feel awkward. I think he believes that as the teacher, he should be the last to leave, so he self-consciously stands beside me occasionally asking me the odd question like “So… You here with a group?”

I watch the birds. The sun has begun its long decent from the top of the sky, and the shadows on the beach are beginning to lengthen as the temperature cools significantly. On the beach, people have begun to pack their things in preparation for the final boat picking us up, and a momentary quiet hangs over the cay. A small breeze flows across the island, picking up and tossing some grains of sand over my feet and disturbing the sleeping chicks in front of me. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, taking in the moment as best I can.

Eventually the teacher says “Well, the final boat looks like it is coming,” and wanders off. The boat is not coming, but I meander down to the shore anyway and stare out over the reef, watching the last of the snorkelers come in. I have spent a little over six hours out on the reef today, and those six hours have been some of the most enlightening of my life. They have passed so quickly, but in that short amount of time I have been able to experience nature at its most beautiful. I am not a marine biologist, do not have the slightest idea how many species I have just observed, or how many rare finds I have passed over unknowingly, but it is not necessary, I have seen enough to know that I am standing next to an ecosystem which is spectacularly unique and is a stunning example of the grace of mother nature. And yet, I do not feel happy, I am no longer excited beyond words like I was when I first left the water from my SCUBA adventure. The fragility of this ecosystem has struck me in a profound way, and even more than that, how little it appears everyone around me cares about it. Their focus is on getting an even tan, and sneaking off with a piece of coral that no one notices they are stuffing into their pocket as they make their way back to the shore for the final boat home.

In ten years, none of the reef they are swimming over will exist. In the seventies, business men came to Michaelmas Cay and shipped off the thick layer of bird guano covering the island for fertilizer. The guano was the only thing weighing the island down, and now the near constant winds push the island north up to two meters a year, covering and destroying the coral as it moves. A similar thing happened to a nearby island: Green Island is a heavily wooded cay just a few kilometers south of Michaelmas, and it used to have a twin lying beside it. Lumber companies took over the island, logged every tree, and within a few years the cay had literally blown away, unable to support itself without the tree root systems. There is no hope for this coral. Unlike the cassowary, or the other Daintree species that one can still imagine saving if drastic measures are taken immediately, there is no way to stop the sand. Planting trees to stabilize the island will disrupt the nesting site of 30,000 birds, and short of dropping a literal shit-ton of guano, or developing a wind resistant grain of sand, Michaelmas will continue to blow north at its current rate, slowly smothering the polyps, and clams that cannot motor themselves out of its way.

The coral never recovers. Once the island slides past, the newly exposed southern side is too elevated and rocky (caused by compressed sand) to be hospitable to any of the species that currently make up the reef. Assuming that the coral is not bleached by rising sea temperatures and pollution beforehand, which is not a safe assumption, in ten years the snorkeling reef will have been smothered, the coral polyps caught in the islands wake dying as the sand slowly blocks out any available oxygen source. In twenty years, everything I have just swam and boated through will be dead. Ocean Spirit Cruises will have to find a new location, and Michaelmas Cay will begin to chart new territory beyond the surrounding reef. The island will probably slip into the deeper water beyond the shelf and disappear entirely, taking with it one of the most critical rookeries in the world. It is only one of thousands of islands like it in this area, and how many of those have a story similar to Michaelmas or Green Island’s sister?

I stand on the shore of Michaelmas Cay, waves splashing against my shins and a school of tiny fish darting in and out between my feet, and I cry for a second time this trip; tears hidden behind my sunglasses.

Quote of the Day: “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: In Australian political debates as a candidate answers a question, instant polls are taken and the public’s approval of what the candidate is saying is displayed in the lower portion of the screen.

The Dark Underside of the Van Business

I wake up at six, fall back asleep, wake up at six fifteen, fall back asleep, wake up at six thirty, fall back asleep, finally really wake up at six forty-five and have to rush down to the central city bus station at top speed. I am trying to catch a seven o’clock bus up to Kuranda, a small town nestled in the Daintree somewhere up a nearby mountain. I remember from the sign I read on Tuesday that the official bus runs up to the town only three times, all before or at seven in the morning, and if I miss that, the only alternative is a ninety-five dollar scenic sky rail up the mountain. I know that it takes me about fifteen minutes to get from my hostel to the bus station, and my inability to wake has left me with no other alternative than an early morning jog.

I reach the bus station at around six fifty-five, only to find a sloppily, hand-written sign posted over the normal bus schedule which says that bus services are suspended until further notice. Below that is another hastily-written sign saying that “Dan’s Van” service will be available “around” ten o’clock for anyone interested in making it to Kuranda. Despite the time delay this will cause, it still seems like a pretty good deal; the bus would have cost me fifteen dollars, but Dan’s Van appears to be only four. I wander around the central city for a while, purchase a fresh-made fruit smoothie for breakfast, and write down a few thoughts from the previous day’s adventure. With a growing sense of unease I notice that there is a rather large crowd growing around me. Unless Dan’s Van is very much bus-like, it is shaping up to be quite a battle for seats.

I surreptitiously make my way to the front of the group “around” ten, pack my things into my bag so I am ready for a dash, and yank out four dollars worth of coins so I will not be slowed by a need for change. This turns out to be a good idea, because as Dan’s Van pulls up in a belch of black smoke and a rattling shutter, it is clear to me that there will be about a third the number of seats necessary. Dan brings the vehicle to a shuttering and banging stop and then pops out, beaming, clearly pleased at the change in fortune which has left him as the sole means of transport up the mountain. I rush forward, push over a few small school children innocently attempting to beat me to seats so they can make their precious classes for the day, and present my coins to Dan. He graciously accepts them and allows me entry. I climb in and grab the first seat available, next to a toothless old man smoking a cigarette, who arrived with Dan. The van is an old fourteen-seater that has been retrofitted with a few extra seats facing the wrong direction for extra passengers, and Dan packs the van to the point of bursting, so that there are at least twenty of us in the back plus the old man, another man sitting in the passenger seat talking to him, and Dan.

The toothless man strikes up a conversation with the man in the passenger seat and having nothing better to do, I listen in. At this point, I have been exposed to enough of the Queensland accent that I can understand it without too much difficulty, but the toothless man is entirely incomprehensible, and the roar of the engine is making the man in the front’s words hard to make out as well. It sounds a little bit like “Jibber-jabber ding dong somethin’ somethin’ rattatat, mate” “Ah, ribble rabble mish mash tonka tonka, mate.”

I am amused.

Dan presses the gas, and with a sound like a box of nails falling down a mountainside, the van pulls forward. We move along for a while, the old man continuing to smoke and talk beside me, and then suddenly Dan veers off the road and comes to a stop next to a man walking down the street and shouts out the window “Oh hey Paul! How’s it, mate?” Paul looks surprised, but turns, smiles, and begins animatedly talking back. We sit there for four or five minutes, Dan and Paul talking about everything from the weather to how Paul’s son is doing off at uni, and it strikes me that “Dan’s Van” is not a professional service at all, it is just a man with a van who is spending the day shipping tourists back and forth between towns to make a quick buck or two. Judging from the similarity of facial features, I am fairly certain that the man sitting next to Dan is probably his brother, and I imagine the old man beside me is his father. Well, whatever, it only cost me four dollars.

Dan and Paul finish up their conversation, and Paul continues on his way, leaving Dan to continue to the mountainside. We break from the highway, and begin to head uphill, sugarcane fields giving way to bush: hard-barked eucalypts, wattles, and she-oaks; soft paper-bark peeling off in sheets from paper trees. I have grown a new respect for trees after spending the day with Bob, Bruce, and Clayton, and admire my ability to recognize trees that I only learned about the previous day. Wild grasses are springing up all around, and as we rise up the mountainside the ocean becomes visible on the horizon, a vast blue expanse bordered by deep greens and brown; white crests of the far off waves rolling toward sandy beaches. I could spend an entire lifetime here and I am not sure I would ever get tired of these views, they are so beautiful.

We turn a corner and suddenly we are surrounded by the Daintree. Eucalypts and paperbacks giving way to ferns and fig trees; foxtail palms, fire trees, and king ferns. In the sun-drenched roadway, the underbrush has a rare chance for survival and the ground is densely packed with frantic plant life. Every now and again, wait-a-while vines hang down over the road, desperately reaching for any means of catching a free ride to the canopy. We reach the peak of the mountain and begin to descend, my nostrils becoming overwhelmed with the scent of the old man’s cigarette, and Dan going on and on to his brother about the results of a recent horse match. Eventually we drive into the town of Kuranda, it consists of a single large road, surrounded on either side by small markets selling all manner of cheap and useless trinkets, and several smaller streets branching in either direction. It is very clearly a tourist town, but I do not care much, I am not planning on spending a lot of time here anyway. Having learned from my previous public transportation debacle, before departing the van I ask Dan when he will be making return trips. He gives me a list of times and I exit, feeling much more confident about myself.

My first stop is the butterfly sanctuary, where I am intent on capturing a decent photo of a Ulysses butterfly, and maybe seeing a giant Hercules moth. Upon entering, I find myself at the back of a guided tour which has just started, and follow this for half an hour or so learning about the various butterflies of the forest, before breaking off and trying to snap a few pictures. The Ulysses butterfly is the most difficult creature in the world to photograph. Not being poisonous, its brilliant blue colors attract every predator in the vicinity, and so it has evolved wings which allow it to move in any direction it pleases in an instant. As well, immediately after it lands, it closes its wings leaving only its black under-wing visible. I try desperately to snap a picture of one flying for about ten minutes with no success; by the time the camera is able to focus the creature is long gone. I then decide to hunker down in a bush next to their feeding area, patiently waiting for one to drop by. I get some odd looks, but it is worth it for the half-decent photo I manage to take fifteen minutes and forty or so unsuccessful tries later. There are no Hercules moths flying around, but a pinned up collection of moths and butterflies displayed after the sanctuary has several specimens, and I spend a few more minutes admiring their gargantuan size.

After the butterflies, it is off to the bird sanctuary, where again I take about thirty photos of empty tree branches where birds used to be, and admire many of the birds that I only saw at a distance the previous day up. I spend several minutes at the cassowary pen, observing the two birds they have isolated from the main pen where every other bird is free to fly and walk among the visitors. It is not nearly as poignant or exciting watching the birds in captivity, but I am still drawn to them, and my devotion is rewarded when I notice a bright green spot near one of the birds. The two are a breeding pair, and just two weeks earlier the female laid her first egg, a lime green oval about eight inches long and four inches wide. It is comforting to know that one more cassowary is on the way. I spend about an hour in the sanctuary, making laps around the pen and admiring the many colorful and graceful birds, then head back out and wander the markets for a short time, before setting my sights on a new destination.

Clayton has recommended that I try and get to Barron Falls, a giant waterfall 2.8 kilometers outside of Kuranda. He suggested that I hitchhike out, but I am anxious for an opportunity to go for a long walk in the forest. I can see on my map that there are several jungle trails that will take me through to the falls, and so I make my way to the edge of the town, spirits high and sun beating down on me. As I enter the forest, though, the sun is blocked out by the canopy of ferns and palms, and once again I am surrounded by the flora and fauna I have come to admire.

Ten years ago, a major cyclone came through and destroyed this entire section of rainforest, leaving it fallen and broken. Now, the path I am taking leads me through a life-cycle in the forest that I have not yet seen. As the forest returns to what it once was, the signs of frenzy and drama are everywhere. There is still enough sun breaking through the canopy to support a large amount of underbrush, so the forest floor is littered with large-leafed plants shoving each other around for available soil. Hanging all over above the path and on the surrounding trees are wait-a-while vine, and several times I have to step gingerly to avoid being caught. Every now and again I run across a large tree trunk left over from the cyclone, whose root system was not entirely destroyed, and so it has begun to twist and turn in a irremediable attempt to reorient itself and grow upwards again. Without a stable root-system these trees will eventually die, it is only a matter of time, and already they are being overcrowded and overtaken by strangle-fig and ferns happy to feed off of the trees’ decay. As I watch them, I can’t help but think of once proud soldiers, now mortally wounded and desperately reaching up for help, but only receiving cold stares from above before being smothered. This place is so full of life, death, and drama; I had no idea.

Although I am hoping to stumble across another cassowary, I know it is not possible. The underbrush is so thick that only the smallest of creatures can make their way through, but the lack of a cassowary does not stop the forest from presenting me with even more of its treasures. The path is abandoned, and I am isolated and surrounded by the wonder of nature; it is breathtaking. Sunbirds flit by overhead, their yellow bellies flashing brilliantly as they catch the streams of sunlight breaking the canopy. A buff-banded rail charges across the path in front of me, and rummaging in the undergrowth to the right of me a short while later is a pair of Australian brush-turkeys. Bush-hens, tree creepers, and wrens, every time I turn I am looking at a new species of bird and I am overwhelmed. I have my bird book, am trying to find the birds to give them names, but can’t sift through the pages fast enough. Eventually I reach in for my journal and begin making quick sketches of the birds, they are poor resemblances to the living things but they are enough to allow me to remember what I am looking at for later classification.

Looking up for more birds, I accidentally stumble on a family of large lizards sunbathing on the path, and they dart off before I am able to get a decent look at them. I am so happy. I’ve never been anywhere so magnificent, this is exactly what I would wish for as an ideal place to find myself, and I can feel the stress and worries of the past several years of my life lifting off and being absorbed by the forest. I can’t help myself and begin to skip slightly, totally caught up in the moment and without a care in the world. It takes me almost two and a half hours to walk all the way to Barron Falls, I pause so often to observe and butcher a drawing of the local fauna or absorb some view of the forest. Being the dry season, the falls is a trickle compared to what it usually is, but it is still an impressive view. The river follows a gorge carved out back when the mountains themselves were pushed from the depths of the ocean, and the water of Barron Falls drops several hundred meters before crashing into the rocks below.

I admire the view for a short time before I look down at my watch with horror and realize that Dan’s last pick up is only an hour away. I have spent so much time in the butterfly and bird sanctuaries and making my way through the forest that I have lost track of time and am quickly running out. I begin to head back, still admiring the flora and fauna around me but speeding up significantly, and then my energy suddenly disappears. It’s no surprise, I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in over a week and a half, and I have been walking for over three days now. It is getting on towards evening at this point and I have only eaten a fruit smoothie during the entire day, and on top of it all, I am finally beginning to feel the effects of a respiratory infection that has been brewing under the surface for the past few days. I urge myself onward, but it is difficult; my legs feel like lead weights and I am struggling to keep my eyes open. The forest’s majesty continues to unfold around me, and I pause every now and again for a photo or a drink, but my focus now is just getting back to Kuranda.

I arrive back at the pickup point fifteen minutes before Dan is scheduled to show up, and since the village seems to have shut down and closed up for the day, try and keep myself awake by buying a can of coke from a vending machine. I don’t need to wait the whole fifteen minutes, however, because ten minutes before Dan is supposed to arrive another van pulls up, and a man jumps out and starts taking money from people. As I walk up to the van, I notice a very hastily-painted sign tied to the front bumper that says “John’s Van.” John has arrived earlier than Dan, and is offering a ride back to Cairns for three dollars; it doesn’t take me long to realize that this is about as close as you can get to undercutting someone in the business of commercial vanning. John packs us into the van so that we are smashed one on top of the other, nervously checks around, and then takes off quickly, three minutes before Dan arrives, leaving Dan with only one or two wayward passengers to pickup. I am smashed between the window and a girl I assume is American because of her Philadelphia Flyers labeled backpack, and after looking out the window for a short time and noticing that John is highly opposed to the use of breaks as we go careening around the sharp corners of the mountainside, I look inward and strike up a conversation with the girl. It takes me about ten minutes to realize what I am doing: I am talking to a girl. Not only am I talking to a girl, but I even initiated the conversation and am doing a fantastic job of keeping it flowing… maybe this trip has changed me…

Philadelphia and I cover everything from origins, reasons for coming to Australia, and areas of study before John finally pulls up at the Cairns bus station and we go our separate ways. I am still exhausted and so I immediately return to the hostel and take a nap, falling asleep in mid-air as my head approaches the pillow. I wake up for dinner, which is back to rice and chili, and then go for another walk along the boardwalk. I am hoping that the pelicans I saw the previous night have returned, and am not disappointed. The three have returned with all their friends and family members and the kitchen sink; there is a massive flock of fifty-four birds floating around in the shallow waters of the bay. I sit and watch for a while, micro-bats flying in and out beneath me again, before turning my attention to the moon, which has just begun to rise over the hills to my south. It is full tonight, and as it clears the hillside it is shrouded in a yellow haze that reflects off the water and mixes yet again with the light from the far-off boats. The city is slightly more alive tonight, and the shouts and cries of people moving from bar to bar disturb the peace I enjoyed the previous night, but by no means ruin the moment. I had planned to go out at least a few times while I was here and enjoy the nightlife, but I find that I cannot pull myself away from the moon and the pelicans.

Although burned and exhausted, I am as contented as I have ever been in my entire life, and I can’t help but smile as I gaze out over the boardwalk’s edge. This vacation has been just about the most amazing thing I have ever experienced, and it is only going to get better: tomorrow I am going on the Reef.

Quote of the Day: "It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” Abraham Lincoln

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: In Australia, you cannot see Polaris.

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Gindaja

It takes me about half an inch and two seconds to realize that I am burned… everywhere. Turns out my cheap, not-so-much non-greasy sunscreen was also not-so-much sunscreen. The simple act of reaching over to turn of my alarm feels as though it is sending white hot metal rods shooting through my body. I rub my legs against each other: burned. I scrunch my face: burned. I am a giant red ball of future skin cancer.

Luckily though, I was able to sleep in a little later than my previous few mornings, and so despite the inability to move, I feel significantly refreshed and ready for a tour of the Daintree Rainforest, which is set to take off at noon. My primary reason for coming to Cairns was for the Great Barrier Reef, but a friend of my dad highly recommended a tour of the forest, and so I have signed myself up for a small tour consisting of a van that drives into the forest, a short hike through the woods, river boat trek up the Daintree River, and finally a decent meal before driving home. I’m not sure what to expect, but at the very least I figured it would be a great opportunity for some bird watching, as well as a wonderful chance to catch a cane toad.

Despite the pain, I eventually manage to roll my way out of bed, prepare my backpack for the day, and am out of my room at around 11. My burns feel slightly better, now that I am able to move them and warm up my muscles, and I am starting to feel the first pangs of hunger. I make my way over to the hostel bar and order a bacon and egg toastie, and while consuming the hastily prepared meal, read a few pages in Chaos to give my mind a psychological jolt.

It is a hot, muggy sort of day, and I am sweating pretty heavily just reading my book and waiting for my van pickup, which probably wasn’t going to help the smell I more than likely was developing after not taking a shower for three days. At ten to twelve, I close up my book and walk out to the hostel reception area to wait for the driver, but as I enter I hear a man at the front desk asking for a Jonathan Fanning and so I raise my hand, identify myself, and approach my guide.

His name is Clayton and he is a squirrelly looking sort of fellow with reddish-brown curly hair and a mustache-goatee number that rivals old Bill Shakespeare. He is probably in his early thirties, or somewhere thereabouts, and his safari shirt, shorts that were just a little too short and tight, and thick socks that he had pulled up as far as possible, makes me think of an overenthusiastic dad trying to drag his kids out into nature; all that was missing was the fanny pack. I am a little worried that I might not understand a word he says, but he is originally from Tasmania, not Queensland, so his accent is very easy. I hand him my curried-egg stained travel voucher, and he gives it a knowing nod like he gets it all the time, and I feel a little better about myself. He directs me to the Wait a While Van, which offers the glorious comfort of air-conditioning, and we take off down the road, he trying to identify where I am from in the States and me trying to explain why I am in Cairns for the week.

About five minutes down the road we make our first stop at a hotel near the edge of Cairns, and Clayton jumps out to meet the next two tourists, Bob, a British botanist who has lived and taught in Australia for the past eighteen years, and his partner Bruce, an Aussie with similar tastes who teaches at the same university. After some brief introductions the botanists take the two seats up at the front next to Clayton and Bob, being British, dominates the conversation for the most part, while I am largely forgotten sitting in the back. Bob begins by asking a few questions about the area and where they should go, as well as about the local flora, both of which Clayton seems fairly knowledgeable about, but then the conversation shifts into a nasty critique of the government and all that they have done wrong. Apparently Bob and Bruce are a little bit hung up over the liberal party (Australian for “conservative”) and their recent claim to be a “green” party.

In the recent past, the liberal party in Melbourne was apparently able to block the construction of a hillside of wind turbines, all the while maintaining its pro-environment stance. How did they manage this? Well, turns out the field happens to be along the flight path of the highly endangered orange-bellied parrot, and dotting the landscape with turbines would lead to parrots colliding with the blades and killing themselves. Never mind that the probability of such an event happening was actually calculated, and it was guessed that one parrot would hit a turbine every three-thousand years, the liberal party was able to push through their environmental policy and satisfy the high-paying oil and fossil fuel company lobbies funding the politicians. This had Bruce and Bob both very animated, but left me quietly sitting in the back admiring the resourcefulness of the Australian conservative party.

We were at another pickup location now, and Clayton jumps out to greet six very loud and not very friendly Kiwis (Australian for “New Zealanders”), who all sit around me, and once they find out I am American, refuse to talk to me for the most part. I don’t mind, Bruce and Bob are back to asking Clayton about the various flowering trees outside our windows and I find this much more interesting. It is another fifteen minutes before we finally break free of Cairns and the surrounding beach towns, and once we do we turn east to join a coastal road heading north to Port Douglas, where we will meet our final passengers. I begin to get a better idea of Clayton’s personality as well; he likes to click his tongue to emphasize a point, and whenever we cross a speed bump he says “bump, bump” as the wheels roll over. Clayton is a little weird.

The road follows the coastline, serving as a divider between the rainforest on our left and the sandy beaches on our right. It is an amazing view. The dark green of the forest comes rolling over the hills lining the coast and spills down, briefly breaking into bush where there is too much sun and the rain is absorbed back into the ocean to support rainforest trees, and then transitioning again into white sand smoothed down by the royal blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. This place marks the joining point of two World Heritage locations, the Daintree and the Great Barrier Reef, and we are bisecting the two down this coastal road. I am trying to take it all in, trying to get my head around the intersecting bright colors of plants and water and rock, when Bob asks if there are sharks in this water and I turn towards the ocean and see a fin.

It wasn’t sharks. A family of dolphins was happily catching a meal near the beach. Clayton slams on the breaks and pulls over to the side of the road, not quite far enough, though, so just as we begin to crane our necks to the side and observe the dolphins a loud and desperate blare from a horn comes from our rear, and a car goes swerving into the opposite lane to avoid us. Clayton says this is not the first time he has almost been hit pulling over for nature. I am beginning to like Clayton. We watch as the dolphins surface at various intervals as they make their way up the coastline, and then follow them for a time before getting back on the main road and heading north again.

We reach Port Douglas, a small and very modern looking townie-sort of costal village nestled between two hills jutting into the sea, and admire the architecture as we pass through. Clayton says that, yes, it is impressive looking, but only because every two or three years a massive cyclone (Australian for “hurricane”) hits the town, levels it, and it has to be rebuilt from scratch. We stop at a rather rustic looking hotel a little way inland and pick up our final two passengers, an old French couple that hardly speaks a word of English. Out of the eleven tourists on the bus, I am the only one under fifty. I’m okay with this. I think people my age tend to be a little less appreciative of nature, and old people laugh at any joke, regardless of how bad it is, so I am inclined to think of the company as a positive thing.

Just as I begin to become accustomed to the new cramped seating arrangements, we turn a corner and are almost plowed over by a Bradley tank. It is on the back of a large truck, but the tank still sticks out over the edges and Clayton, taking the corner a little tightly, is forced to swing way out to avoid it. Apparently Spielberg is filming a new television series in Port Douglas (I hear that it may be a sequel sort of thing to Band of Brothers…), and we almost become unwitting casualties of the shooting (pun intended!). Bob knows a guy who has a speaking part in it. I feel special by association.

We turn inland now, cross over a ridge, and begin driving through fields of sugar cane, tall organized rows of grass lining the road on either side and giving way to more mountains of rainforest on the horizon. It is breathtaking. Even more than that, though, the fauna in the area add a side of un-believability. A pack of wallabies bounces away off to our right. White and straw-necked ibis, jabiru, cattle egrets, king fishers, osprey chicks resting on a telephone line. A pack of sparrows is drifting near by, and suddenly a screaming blur plunges in from above and narrowly misses the group, a sparrow hawk.

Above, a grey goshawk is engaged in an aerial dog fight with a pair of sparrows. In a nearby tree, a single sea eagle chick gazes out over the countryside, all the while Bob and Clayton are discussing the various flora we are passing: African tulips with their beautiful spread of red flowers, actually declared a noxious weed because they poison the ground around themselves to block out competition. Rain trees, gigantic twisting structures that hang long strands of green vine off their enormous branches, which resemble a hand, palm facing towards the sky and fingers reaching up into the blue. Foxtail palms dot the landscape, six or seven green and yellow, fury, palms reaching up and then curving down from the top.

I sit forward in my chair and rip through my backpack looking for my journal. The names of species we are passing are flying out of Clayton’s mouth so fast I cannot process or remember any of them. I open to a page and begin furiously scribbling down the names of trees and birds. The conversation has turned to the sugar industry, the deforestation that is necessary to support it because of the insatiable thirst of a sugar crop. The world’s dependence on sugar. How the crop is unsustainable in Australia, but companies continue to dig further into the rainforest, leeching the soil of every utilizable nutrient.

By now the forest is all around us again, we are surrounded by the hills and mountains that make up the northern Australian range, perhaps the oldest mountain range in the world. The mountains are composed of granite created by the tectonic forces the pushed and shoved this mountain range out of the base of the ocean some 360 million years ago. Now, the mountains are crumbling, slowly eroding away through the years and large slabs of deep maroon granite are visible near the peaks. Directly in front of us is Thornton’s Peak, the second largest peak in Australia, and resting on either side are the two women of Thornton’s Peak. According to the aboriginals who populated the area, the women killed their husband when they became jealous of the attention he was providing the other. They were banished to the mountain, and now lay there ashamed for all eternity.

I look into the hills around us and notice the fire trees. It is not difficult. In the vast sea of deep green, the fire tree is like an explosion of brilliant red and orange and yellow leaves and flowers that break the impenetrable canopy. I am on the verge of tears, this country is so beautiful and I am totally unprepared. We have not even reached the forest yet, and already I have seen enough to make my entire trip worth while. No one is talking to me. The French have discovered that I am American and have stopped talking to me. To everyone in the car I am the dumb American teenager and no one wants to make eye contact with me. I do not try and help the situation. I prefer the solitude as I look out over the rolling hills and sugarcane.

We make a pit stop in a small, one-road town built around a sugar plant, and climb out of the van for a few minutes. I walk into a nearby field and look out over the hills beyond, I am still in awe. Clayton runs to some nearby fox tail palms and comes back with some seeds for Bob to eat. Bob is obsessed with eating the local wildlife, and is disappointed that these seeds are not a coconut, his greatest life goal. The day has cooled down considerably, there is only a single cloud in the sky, and the air around us is perfectly still in the absence of any breeze. Perfect weather. We climb back into the van and travel a short way down the road, only to be stopped by a sugarcane train as it approaches the plant: a large steeple smoking in the distance; An excellent way to end our tour of sugarcane country, before we plunge into the shadow of the forest.

Our first major delay occurs as we wait for a ferry to take us across the Daintree River. The river serves as the major dividing point between the sugarcane and the rainforest, the land on the opposite side being too rough and hilly to cultivate… for now. The lack of a bridge is significant. It limits the traffic that can travel into the Daintree, and prevents it from being overrun by tourists and land-hungry farmers. According to Clayton, a bridge has been proposed several times but the local aboriginal population has warned that any such structure will be destroyed by any means necessary. The aboriginals prefer their isolation, care for the forest, have watched it disappear over the past few decades, and are fiercely committed to preserving what remains. Also, in the wet season the Daintree can rise close to five meters, which would lift and take away any bridge that wasn’t heavily anchored into the soil. It takes twenty minutes, but we finally make our way onto a cable drawn boat and begin to cross the water. Spur-wing plover walk along the shore and circle overhead, and as we cross the welcome swallows on a nearby island take flight and guide us onto the opposite shore.

We start up the engine again and drive up into the mountains along a road that winds its way up the nearby mountainside. The forest is exploding. Green leafed plants of all different shapes and sizes reach for any available sunlight in a desperate struggle to stay alive. I have never liked plants, but listening to Bob, Bruce, and Clayton and watching outside my window at the surrounding unique variations of flora which have developed such unique and complex means of survival in this competitive and hostile environment inspires me. Fan palms reach out their enormous lily-pad like leaves into the sky, the leaves allow for the maximum amount of surface area to gather sun, while also maintaining enough structural integrity to funnel any rain water that hits them directly down onto the roots. Strangle fig cling to various large canopy trees; the plant begins life high up in a tree with plenty of access to sunlight and then grows downwards, quickly wrapping its root system around a host tree and using it to guide the growth downward. When it finally reaches the surface of the ground, the tree then wraps itself entirely around the host, killing it so that it no longer competes for the same resources.

A Ulysses butterfly crosses the road in front of us, a brilliant flash of blue and black as it catches a patch of sunlight breaking through the canopy overhead. Emerald and diamond doves can be seen lining the road or flapping overhead. The Kiwis are talking loudly all around me about something unrelated, I do not think I like them very much, but their chatter does not stop me from hearing Clayton mention the cluster of plants off to our right. The king fern: a plant which has remained unchanged and evolutionarily superior to other rainforest flora for over 300 million years. Present on several continents, it was this plant which first made scientists question the idea that the earth’s crust remained fixed in its place.

The forest is so alive! In a single acre of the Daintree you can find more biological diversity than on the entire North American continent. Palms, figs, ginger, cycads, ferns, all these compete for space, and all are intricately linked to the fauna which live among them, one of which we are looking for now. We are on a single lane bridge crossing a freshwater creek, traffic on either side, and oblivious to all of this, Clayton has slowed our van down to a crawl. He is searching for a cassowary. The cassowary, or Gindaja (pronounced “gin-duh-ja”) as it is known by the local aboriginal tribes, is largely considered the symbol of the Daintree. It is a highly endangered bird that lives in only a small corridor of land stretching along the northeastern Australian coast. It is the largest vertebrate in the forest, and its declining population poses a danger for the entire ecosystem. 150 forest trees depend on the bird for seed distribution, of those, 70 are carried exclusively by the cassowary. From those 70, 20 will not even germinate if not first passed through the digestive system of a cassowary. There are less than a thousand birds left in the wild, and the population continues to decline thanks to the constant threat of cars, dogs, and deforestation. Because of the floral dependence on the cassowary, it is thought that as goes the cassowary, so goes the Daintree, but many years of only moderately successful conservation projects have not significantly improved the bird’s situation.

Clayton is trying his best to find one for us, but he says that he has not seen one in nearly six weeks and we should not get our hopes up. We wait on the bridge for as long as possible, before the traffic on either side becomes seriously impatient, and then continue down along the road, shaded once again by the ferns. We stop at a few more creeks, create a few more traffic jams, but come up empty-handed. Eventually, we make our way to a scenic overlook, where the mouth of the Daintree River can be scene opening into the ocean. We pile out, observe the view, and Clayton runs off to a nearby fig tree to bring back the seeds and explain the intricate symbiotic relationship between fig tree and wasp. He comes back and holding a seed he has torn in half and holds it up directly in front of my face saying “Hey look! This one looks just like a monster!”

I look at the seed which is now only inches from my face. It looks like a seed that has been torn in half. This does not stop Clayton from squeezing it so that it closes and maybe begins to look like a little mouth. To add to the effect, he lets out a “Rawr! Rawr!” I am a little unsure of how to react, but manage a smile and a small chuckle to make him feel better. Encouraged by this reaction, though, Clayton moves onto the next member of the party and says “Hey look! This one looks just like a monster! Rawr! Rawr!” Similarly, he gets an uncomfortable smile and chuckle, and again he continues to the next person, until he has shown his “monster” to all eleven of the passengers. Clayton is a little weird.

We eventually pile back into the van and drive a few minutes to our next destination: a large boardwalk that weaves its way through the forest for about a kilometer. We all clamber out again and begin to slowly make our way down the boardwalk. This is difficult for the old people, they take several breaks and we make only slow progress. Again, I do not mind, the old people may not be very interested in what is around them, judging from the complaining and discussion of other topics, but the frequent breaks allow me to look deep into the forest and get lost in it, imagining what life might be like for a bird or a tree. There are several vines hanging down over the walkway, and just before Bruce runs into them (he, Bob, and I leading the pack since we are actually interested in the forest), Clayton rushes forward and dives in front of him to pull the vines out of the way. These are Lawyer Cane, or as they are affectionately called by everyone who knows them: the wait-a-while vine. The vine has sharp, grabbing hooks jutting out along its stalk which reach out and grasp other trees as they struggle towards the sunlight. So powerful are the hooks, however, that had Bruce run into them, he would have walked away without a fair amount of his face. The vine is called wait-a-while because if you run into it while on your own, you will be stuck waiting for someone to come rescue you, the force applied to your skin and clothes to powerful to break on your own. In the past, motorcyclists have been killed by the vine as it catches them driving past and hurls them to the ground. I am fascinated.

As we approach a bank of the Daintree river, the rainforest gives way to fields of mangroves. Because it is low tide, the roots of the trees are exposed, revealing huge buttresses, intricate patterns of stilts, and large patches of spikes, the trees’ various methods of collecting oxygen from the nutrient-poor mud. The forest takes on an entirely different persona, more open and bright, more welcoming. We are walking over a bridge looking down at a school of Archer fish laying still in a small puddle, waiting for the tide to come in, and I hear one of the Kiwis say “someone throw a rock in so they move.” I do not like the Kiwis. The call of an orange-footed scrubfowl floats out over the still air, and an eastern whipbird darts through the trees overhead, I think I am the only one who notices.

We walk further and Bob becomes uncontrollably excited, on either side are various orchids in bloom. Bob grows orchids, and to see one in the wild seems to be the best thing to happen to him since birth. They are beautiful, and joining them closer to the path so that it can be easily smelled is the sweet scented Gardenia. Bruce notices me taking notes about all the species, wanders over, and asks me if I am doing this for credit. I tell him no, that I just don’t want to forget any of it, and he gives me a strange sort of look but suddenly seems to think much more highly of me. We start up a conversation about the various unique evolutionary adaptations of plants, and then move on to where Bruce is from in Australia and other places I should visit if I get a chance. At one point one of the Kiwis comes over and makes fun of me for writing everything down, and Bruce defends me claiming that we should all be doing it or we will all forget the place. I begin to like Bruce. Bob also seems to like me more, having noticed me recording some of his long speech about orchids, and as much as I have enjoyed my solitude up to this point, I find it refreshing to talk to people who have similar feelings about the beauty of this place.

We are interrupted, however, by a hoarse, rasping bird call close to our right, and Clayton has found a spotted catbird only seconds later. I look up to where he is pointing, see nothing, and silently pat myself on the back for bringing my binoculars. Peering through them, I find the bird, and despite its ugly call, which sounds more or less like a cat dying, the bird is actually quite spectacular. A bright red eye surrounded by a tan and black head, supported by a speckled yellow body and emerald green wings. Again, I am entranced, and stare up at the bird with admiration as the others get bored and walk past. I yank out my journal, make a quick sketch in my notebook so I don’t forget what the bird looks like, curse myself for not being a better artist, and run after the group, only to find that they are stopped in front of another bird, the orange-footed scrubfowl. It is rummaging away at the forest floor, and after it wanders out of sight, Clayton points out another tree: the Black Palm, a tree with perhaps the hardest bark in the forest, and which served as one of the most useful trees for aboriginals. Difficult to grow and subject to deforestation, it is considered threatened.

We make our way back to the van, climb in, and drive further up the coast to Cape Tribulation, a beach area alongside the Great Barrier Reef, and the location of our afternoon tea. Clayton says the tea will be ready in about ten minutes but we should feel free to make our way down to the beach until then, then wanders off leaving us milling around uncertainly. The old people are tired, unsure of what to do, and after a minute or so of waiting, I decide to ditch them and head down to the beach alone. My timing could not have been more perfect. As I am working my way down along the path, I catch a very large movement off to my right, working its way in front of me. I know what it is without even seeing it. I am overcome with excitement, my heart quickens, and I grab my camera, ready to rush down to meet it, but think better of it, curse myself for having a conscience, and run back towards the old people. As soon as I am in eye-sight I a let out an excited half-whisper, half-yell, “Guys! There’s a cassowary!”

Bob gets very excited, he comes rushing over with Bruce, runs right past me, thinks better of it, and says “Oh, you should probably lead the way.” The French are coming quickly as well, but the Kiwis are taking their sweet time, and after a moments hesitation I decide that they can find their own, slow way, and dash down the path. We rush along for a while, but find nothing. “Are you sure you saw one?” asks Bruce, and I begin to feel a little awkward. I didn’t actually see it, and knowing me it’s more than likely that I just imagined it. I begin to doubt myself, feel guilty for all of the heavy breathing behind me, and am about to apologize, when I see it.

The cassowary is a majestic bird. We are looking at a female, the larger of the two sexes, about 1.8 meters tall, and it is rooting through some nearby shrubbery. Its feet and legs are massive, prehistoric looking extensions, a pale gray color and scaly, as if they had just been stolen off of a brontosaurus, and jutting out from each of the three massive toes was a long, slender claw. Its body is a mass of glossy black feathers, working their way up to its long, slender neck, where they run into a large red wattle, hanging down from the deep blue, scaly neck. A sharp, triangle beak sloped back to a white-blue head, affixed with red eyes, and at the crown of the head is a large, bronze casque, rising another 20 or so centimeters off the top of the head before curling down slightly. It is the most beautiful bird I have ever seen.

Officially, the Cassowary is descended from the same family as emus and ostriches. This does not come close to describing the uniqueness and splendor of the bird. According to the aborigines, Gindaja used to be a beautifully colored, flying bird that roamed far away from where it currently lives. It flew to this area one day, and in that time the land was dominated by a large lake. Unsure of this new place, Gindaja flew into the lake, only to realize that it was filled with mud, and it began to sink deeper and deeper. It struggled, flapped its wings desperately, but it was no use, its feathers began to fall off as it flapped, and when it was finally able to crawl its way out of the lake, it had lost the power of flight, and its remaining feathers were stained back from the mud. To this day it wanders around the land, unsure of itself, and trying to find its way home.

I stand, captivated by the bird. Watching it graze through the trees, I am suddenly touched in a way I cannot describe. I am looking at a wild cassowary. There are less than a thousand of these left on earth, it is more than likely that they will disappear entirely within my lifetime, and here I am, less than three meters from one. It is the closest and most connected I have ever felt with another species in my entire life. A small crowd has gathered at this point, people already at the beach having noticed the commotion, and suddenly the cassowary snaps up and glares at us. cassowary attacks are becoming more and more of a problem as people come in closer contact with the birds, and this particular cassowary has had enough, picks someone out of the crowd, and charges. That someone is me.

The bird rears up, and comes running at me, releasing a low guttural tone as it runs. I run like hell, come within several inches of it and its claws, and make my way to a safe distance. The cassowary calms down. I calm down. The cassowary charges again. I run like hell again, she narrowly misses me again, we both calm down, and she charges a third time. I don’t blame her. I am partially responsible for dragging a large crowd of people over to gawk at her and point cameras, but come on bird! I love and respect and appreciate you more than anyone else in the crowd, why me? The bird does not listen, just keeps charging. After the third charge a tour guide from another group steps in and yells very loudly at the bird and starts clapping in its face. The bird hesitates, takes its eyes off me and glares at the guide, and then slowly walks its way back into the forest.

The crowd disperses, disappointed that I am not missing more limbs I imagine, but I sit on a nearby bench and watch the bird slowly disappear through the underbrush. I can’t help but think this will be the last time I will see a cassowary. All too soon the bird is gone. I sit for a few more minutes thinking and gazing, than make my way out to the beach. Dipping my feet in the water reveals that it is surprisingly warm, and I stand in it for a while, snap a few photos, but then here Clayton say “Chochies” (Australian for “chocolates”) and rush back into the forest for some tea. I spend the time sitting at the end of my table, gazing yearningly out at the forest, willing the Cassowary to return. The Kiwis are talking about how they like to kill possums. I am mad at myself for only taking a few photos; I should have gotten a video of the bird, something to remind me of how it moved, how it interacted with things, an insight into what it might be thinking. We eat and drink and relax for about half an hour, I finally give up hope that it will come back, and we start to pack everything up and move it to the van.

The cassowary returns. Just as I am coming back for one last look at the ocean, Bruce lets out an excited cry and there it is, back to exploring the ground just outside the path. We all stand around watching it again for several minutes, I make sure to get a short video, and then put the camera away to just watch and experience the bird first hand. The old people get bored, start to head up to the van, and then go for one last pit stop before moving on. I take the opportunity to look at the bird; perhaps my last opportunity.

The problem for the cassowary is not that it is being hunted illegally or that it is being out competed by other invasive species. It is not the occasional dog that breaks free of its leash and murders one in the forest, it is not even the fairly large number of cars that leave the Daintree full of tourists with guilty looks and cassowary feathers smeared all across the front bumper. The cassowary has nowhere left to go. The Daintree Rainforest occupies less than one percent of the total land mass of Australia, and eighty to eighty-five percent of the lowland forest has been removed for development and sugarcane. There are a thousand cassowary left, but this is a misleading number. Because of the way the forest has been chopped up and separated, those thousand birds occupy isolated pockets of land, unreachable by other birds from the species. Inbreeding is quickly becoming a serious risk, and even if a reforestation program were put into place tomorrow, eliminating all the sugarcane and restoring the rainforest to its former glory, it would probably not save the cassowary. The bird is fiercely territorial, only occasionally moving during the breeding season, and the forest would take too long to recover. Ten years from now there will be a fair amount of forest cover in all of the reforestation areas, but it will still be a desperate battlefield between the plants fighting for the sunlight. The underbrush would be far too dense for a large bird like the cassowary to work its way through, and it would probably take another ten years for the plant matter to finally die and be cleared away before the isolated pockets of cassowary are even given the opportunity to intermingle, that is, if they are willing to risk a long voyage over unfamiliar territory, something the birds have shown time and time again that they are not willing to do.

I watch the bird, thinking about its terrible situation, and my eyes well with tears. I didn’t even know that the cassowary existed a month ago, and now I am willing to commit myself entirely to their survival, but I am struggling to see how it is possible. A striking blue and black Ulysses butterfly flutters up from a nearby bush, floats in front of my face for several seconds, and then drifts away into the canopy. I am a pessimist, the forest is an optimist.

I am finally called away by Clayton, and we all pile back into the van on our way down to the river for our boat trip. We are making our way down the road, me still thinking about the cassowary, and Clayton begins to point out some more of nature’s miracles. Off to the left is an enormous, several generation old Australian brush-turkey nest. It is a giant mound of dirt and leaves on the ground, maybe three meters long by a meter high, and the male will use it to attract females. The most impressive mound wins, and the female, or several, will dig into the mound laying her eggs so that the mound acts as an enormous incubator. The male will then control the temperature of the mound to a single degree by sticking its bare head into a hole as a thermometer, and then adding or removing rotting leaves and soil accordingly.

A forest kingfisher flaps by overhead, another pocket of king ferns is clearly visible in the foliage, and I begin to feel a little sleepy, but then Clayton slams on the brakes for the ninth or tenth time this trip, and excitedly points off to the left of the van again. There is a second cassowary. It is a male, shorter than the female by nearly half a meter, but no less stunning. Just as startled by us as we are by him, he quickly makes his way deeper into the underbrush and is lost from sight. Two. I have seen two! I am so happy I could cry out, but am able to maintain my composure by drawing a crappy cassowary in my journal, and by shaking my leg excitedly as we make our way down to the river.

Once there we drive to the dock, where we meet up with our second guide for the day, who stops us and says “Do you wanna see a frog?” He points to a close by branch, and after nearly a minute of staring at exactly where he is pointing at, the frog finally reveals itself. It is a giant tree frog, clinging securely to a branch and barely indistinguishable from the bright green leaves around it. It is out of season, the forest is just showing off at this point. I have always had a special place in my heart for frogs, and this giant green critter is just about as exciting as they come for me. I get on the boat in a very good mood. The boat is called the Solar Whisper, and is powered by solar energy that is stored in batteries throughout the course of the day. As a result, it not only has almost no effect on the environment, but it is also a considerable amount quieter than the other diesel powered river boats, and I feel significantly better about myself and this tour.

We putter upstream for a while, making a circle around a rather large island in the middle of the river, and spot a variety of different birds. Two azure kingfishers, small balls of blue and orange sitting on a branch, the Australian darter, a large, heron like bird nesting in a branch; a tree-full of metallic starlings, calling loudly and nesting as well. In a small hanging nest that looks a lot like a plastic bag hanging out over the water we see a brilliantly colored yellow-bellied sunbird peeking its head out. The real reason we have come shows itself about twenty minutes in: a small, seven month old estuarine crocodile, maybe nine inches long, is resting on the nearby bank. Shortly after that we spot a larger, seven year-old croc named Stumpy (a local missing a few scales on the back of his tail) who is about two feet, but the real surprise of the night comes when we finally reach the opposite side of the island, looking west into the setting sun. There is a black mist on the horizon, a giant shifting and chaotic cloud of thousands of giant flying foxes taking off for the night’s hunting. From where we are, there collective squeaking sounds like a high-pitched hiss, and although the main group heads further up river, a few hundred make their way down to us, filling the air with their swooping and diving aerial acrobatics.

I watch them as the sun finally sets and the near full moon rises up, reflected over the still water. The stars begin to shine from the heavens, and still unfamiliar with the southern sky (both because they have a few different constellations and because everything is upside-down) I do my best to identify what I can, but only find the Southern Cross, Big Dipper, and Scorpio. A few species of micro-bat have joined the giant fruit bats, zooming along just above the surface of the water. Off to our left, a large common tree snake is stretching itself between two low-hanging mangroves, hunting for an unprotected nest or unaware frog. As the boat passes overhead, schools of fish and prawn are excited and begin to splash around in the water beside us. I’ve gotten into the wrong area of the study. I have always been amazed by the beauty and mystery of the central nervous system, but surrounded by all of these organisms, this incredible ecosystem; I begin to think that I have limited myself too much. There is too much beauty in nature for me to pass it by.

The fruit bats continue to drift overhead, and a thin mist has settled on the river’s surface as we finally return to the dock. I feel like we have only been on the water for ten minutes, but it has been over an hour. I sigh peacefully, and begin to reflect on the day, thinking it has finally coming to an end, but I am wrong. As we make our way up the dock and back to the main road, a brilliant orange glow becomes visible in the distance. It is a field of sugarcane on fire. Burning sugarcane just before harvesting was a common practice in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The cane burns too quickly to seriously harm the sugar inside, and the fire kills or chases away all of the rats, parasites, and snakes that were literally making harvesters drop dead in the field prior to burning. With the development of mechanized harvesting, however, the practice became wasteful, and is now only used for aesthetic purposes. The farmer waits for a perfect night with no chance of rain the next few days and no wind, brings up some wide-eyed city folk, and sets a crop on fire for their amusement.

Tonight was a perfect night, and as the crop before us erupted in flames, the smoke rose straight up into the air, enveloping the landscape with the smell of roasting marshmallows. Burning sugarcane is better than a fireworks show. Aside from the ten meter high flames, the cane pops and cracks, releasing showers of sparks that go zooming into the air in all directions. The field only lasts maybe twenty minutes, but catches at different times, so the fire and sparks come in waves, spreading across the field and then residing before spreading again and then doubling back to catch what it has missed the first time. And there on the ground in front of my feet, illuminated by the burning cane, is where I see my first cane toad. It was only a juvenile, but already it had giant purple poison sacs jutting out from either side of its head, and had the look of a creature built to withstand anything. I couldn’t kill it, though, Bob beat me to it. Taking his foot, he brought it swiftly down on the evil critter, than with a look of triumph he raised his foot to inspect the damage. The toad was still sitting there, as though it had just enjoyed a free massage, and then casually hopped off into the darkness. They’re tough little buggers.

The fire finally cools down, and we make our way back to the van, drive back into town and eat a late dinner, then begin to make our way back to Cairns, dropping the French off in Port Douglas as we pass. The Kiwis fall asleep in the back, leaving me to look out over the moon-soaked ocean view that we had passed earlier in the day. It is peaceful and serene, the dark blurring the line where the forest meets the ocean, fusing the two together in the moonlight. Bob is in the front talking about his navy days, and I catch bits and pieces of the fascinating story that is his past. We drop the Kiwis off, Bob calls them snooty (and you know it’s bad if a British botanist says it), and the conversation shifts to me. I explain why I came here, what I plan to do with my life, my fascination with MS, even though there is a surprising amount of doubt in my head now over whether that is actually what I want to do anymore. We eventually make it back to Bob and Bruce’s hotel, they wish me luck and I thank them for the company and tell them to enjoy the rest of their vacation. I know Bob will at least; tomorrow they are going on a “taste of the forest” tour, where they will drive around with a guide sampling the various fauna.

Clayton gets back in and we chat a little about the forest and what I will be doing for the rest of the week. I desperately want to go on a different tour that he is leading tomorrow, but have no money. I tell him I am thinking of going to Kuranda, and he gives me some locations that I should visit. We are back at my hostel now, it is 11:30, and I begrudgingly make my way out of the van. Clayton shakes my hand, says “Jonathan, you will be alright. I’m sure of it.” and for some reason this has a really large impression on me. I thank him, try and show him just how appreciative I am with my face and inflection but there is no way, and watch him drive away, wondering if he makes clicking noises and says “bump” when he is by himself. He probably does.

I walk into my bedroom, put down my pack, sit on my bed, and wait about five seconds before realizing there is no way I can get to sleep right now and walk to the boardwalk. I am too alive, have too much to process to possibly fall asleep. The tide is in and the waves slosh on the ground below me. The moon is high in the sky, reflected off the water along with the pale yellow light of the far off docked boats. It is almost entirely silent, and overhead a few flying foxes soar overhead, probably attracted to me by the swarm of bugs surrounding me, drawn to my smell of day old curried-egg and three day old sweat. I should probably shower tomorrow. I sit on a bench, looking out over the water, and notice several micro-bats darting in and out from below the boardwalk. There are three pelicans floating lazily around the bay. I watch them, drifting without a care, and then a royal spoonbill flaps down to a patch of mud beside me and begins to sift through it with its long beak.

When it lands I finally lose it and begin to cry. I’ve never really understood people being moved to tears, never dreamed it could happen to me because I am a rather stoic person, but I have never seen so much beauty in a single day. Never seen a rainforest tumble down hills into the ocean, never been so close to (and attacked by) a bird fighting so desperately for its survival, never seen so many species of dolphin, bird, tree, fish, snake, bat, or frog, all co-existing with such grace and tranquility despite the very real dangers of the outside world pressing in on them. Never so clearly seen both the dangers and beauty of human interference. Never seen such a perfect day and night. I sit, tears rolling down my cheeks, watching the pelicans continue their peaceful journey around the bay, and smile: this is the most perfect and romantic moment of my life, and I am spending it with bats, three pelicans, and a funny-looking bird rummaging through the mud. I’m pretty weird.

It’s okay, though, I don’t think I know of too many other people who would find the scene romantic (aside from my mom, but she is definitely weird when it comes to things like this), and I think it is the solitude that I prefer. Being alone on a boardwalk, observing nature at peace. I sit on the bench for a few hours, the spoonbill leaves, the bats leave, the tide goes out and the pelicans lazily flap away for a better location. I’m not sure what time it is when I finally head in, but I know that walking around Kuranda tomorrow (today) is going to be difficult, and lay in bed for a few more minutes before finally falling asleep.

I dream of a cassowary.

Quote of the Day: “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” John Muir

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: When you are pulled over in Australia, a breath test is mandatory.

Vacation within a Vacation

Disclaimer: This blog marks part 1 of a 5 part series that encompasses my week spent in Cairns. Originally, I had intended it to only be a single entry, but the amazingness that was my adventure required me to separate it out into an unnecessarily long story of my adventures, which is probably better suited for a book. As a result, the stories will all flow together and continually reference back to prior entries and such. For you lazy readers, it is not necessary for you to read all the entries, but it will be beneficial for you to do so and rest assured, once they are out I will retire from writing altogether, because pumping these things out on top of trying to actually survive school here is impossible. As well this blog marks a shift in my writing style, which I hope will help make the stories more dramatic and entertaining. For the course of these five blogs, I will be using the present tense rather than the past tense I tend to use while telling my stories (although occasionally you will notice I slipped into present tense in my prior entries, but this is me just being a bad writer). This is both because I think it makes a slightly better narrative, but also because a significant amount of these blogs were written when they were actually occurring, me feeling so overwhelmed that I needed to write my thoughts out on something before I exploded. Hope you enjoy.

On to the story:

The time for me to get out and explore Australia had finally come! Perhaps the most disappointing thing I learned when I first arrived here was that Australia is really, really big, and I would not be able to go out and explore the country as much as I had dreamed. All the same, I anticipated my short week in Cairns was probably going to be the best thing that had ever happened to me. Being a fan of the “fly by the seat of your pants” vacation style, despite the years of chaos and terror this has brought me, I had not really planned anything over the course of the week, other than my arrival, accommodations at a local hostel, a day trip into the Daintree on the advice of a friend of my dads, a day cruise on the reef, and my departure. This was going to be a challenge. I had to catch planes, trains, shuttles, and cruises all on my own, and with limited or no access to the Internet to help me. In addition, it would be the first time I would be staying in a place where potentially three other people would have direct access to my possessions. I used my backpacker instincts (consulting my dad) to work out a list of things to pack in a single backpack that I would be taking with me:

-Three shirts (wearing 1) -One pair of shorts (wearing), One pair of pants (My Daintree cruise recommended pants, otherwise they would be out) -Three pairs of socks (wearing 1) -Shoes (wearing), considered sandals but ran out of room… -Chaos by James Gleick -Collection of papers, including travel vouchers and itineraries -Flashlight -Camera with spare pair of batteries -Towel -Swimsuit -Binoculars (This is a bit of a risk, but they were a birthday present for me while I was in Australia and if I don't use them now, when will I?) -Spare pair of contacts and glasses -Small, worn journal, with pencil (This was my excitement boiling over. Here I was going into the unknown, in a country known for its crazy animals, and inspired by recent books I had read I decided that this would be the closest I would ever get to my true career aspiration: a 19^th century biologist) -Deodorant -Toothbrush -To be purchased upon arrival: soap, sunscreen, and toothpaste

As well, in order to help keep myself on target I drew up a quick “To Do” list in my journal:

-Catch first flight -Spend at least one full day at the beach -Avoid hearing the word “Iraq” for one week -Really find Nemo -See a Cane Toad -Kill the aforementioned Cane Toad -Get into the Daintree or on to the reef, regardless of whether you make your cruises -Relax -Come back with everything you left with - Catch return flight

Feeling I had sufficiently prepared myself, I packed my things the day prior to taking off, fell into bed relatively early, especially considering that Oafie was still in the house, and awoke at 4:30 Monday morning so as to catch a ride from Ally to the airport, planning to arrive an hour and a half before my flight departed. The plan was for Ally to arrive at 5:15 and drive me the 45 minutes to the airport across Sydney, which would give me about an hour and forty-five minutes to pass through security and board my plane. I had done this both for comfort, and because Ally is chronically late, almost like clockwork, so much so that it is safe to give yourself at least half an hour of leeway whenever planning events with her.

At around 5:10, I quickly woke up Oaf to say goodbye (he was leaving later in the day), finished off the last of my food, and began to look out at the dark road. 5:15 came and went with no sign of Ally. This was fine. I had known this was going to happen, and was safe until around 5:45. At 5:20, just to make sure Ally had woken up, I gave her a call. She had indeed woken up, but had not even left her house yet, and claimed that she would be at my house in 10 minutes. Ally lives 15 minutes away. Still, after ten minutes passed and she did not show, I began to get a little nervous, after 15 minutes I began to get very nervous and pace around the living room, and after 20 minutes I began to get worried.

I began making circles around the living room before moving out the front door, walking around the yard, and then returning to the living room. Having been late to a flight a few months ago, and therefore terrified of it ever happening again, my normally paranoid self was driven into hyper-drive. I was already five minutes past my leeway allowance, and Ally was nowhere to be seen. Why, why had I chosen a person I knew was chronically late to take me to the airport? I would have had to get up super early for a bus for sure, but I certainly would have arrived on time. I was just setting myself up for failure! My first test dealing with transportation on this trip, and I had already failed. I was going to miss my Cairns vacation! My heart began to beat incredibly fast and a horrible sinking feeling began to take over my stomach. Five more minutes passed before Ally finally arrived, totally oblivious to the enormous delay, and I threw myself into the backseat, leaped into the car, and was ushering her out of the parking lot before she had even come to a stop.

Luckily, Ally made up for her general tardiness with a lead driving foot, and the morning commute had not quite begun in Sydney yet, so me make excellent time across the city and arrive at the airport precisely 52 minutes before my flight departs. I thank Ally, rush out of the car and up to the line in front of the check-in counter, and realize six minutes later just how lucky I had been with the traffic. My flight, being an international one rather than domestic (it was flying to Thailand after refueling in Cairns) had a check-in deadline of forty-five minutes before take-off, rather than the usual thirty. I was a minute away from losing my seat on an overbooked flight.

I save a significant amount of time not having to check any bags, rush through customs and security, and arrive at my gate just in time to see that the plane was having technical difficulties and would be delayed. Nothing in this country runs on time. Slightly parched after my run down the terminal and my close call with the check-in, I rummage through my backpack looking for my water bottle, only to realize I had totally forgotten it, and then angry at myself, purchase a bottle of lemonade from a vending machine. This would actually turn out to be one of my better decisions on the trip, because the lemonade bottle, which I use for the remainder of the trip as a water bottle, gave whatever water I put in it a pleasant lemon twist.

After about a forty-five minute delay, we are finally allowed to board the plane, and after hitting my seat I immediately began to try and catch up on the week’s worth of sleep I had lost while Oaf was around. I want to be in top shape when I arrive in Cairns, and figure a good nap will at least give me enough energy to get to my hostel. I do an admirable job, as well, falling asleep shortly after takeoff, and waking only as we begin to descend through the highly turbulent clouds surrounding Cairns.

The highly turbulent clouds, it turns out, are storm clouds. As we taxi through the drizzle, I began to worry again. Being a vacation, I had assumed that all the days would be sunny and clear, and was entirely unprepared for rain. With a growing sense of unease I work my way through the terminal and into the main meeting point, where I was supposed to find a transport stand, which will have the number I need to call to catch a shuttle to my hostel. I find the stand, and aware that I have a history of being incompetent when it comes to finding the number I need, triple check the long list of hostels. Mine was not there. My sense of unease reaches epic proportions, and I began to panic a little. I had almost failed in part one of my travels, and here I was failing at part two. It was going to be a long vacation.

Luckily, a small interactive display box is located next to the phone, and it appears to have a search feature to find the number I need. I search, find it, and as I dial the hostel, look back at the written list. There, magically appeared, is the number and name I had passed over at least three times. It’s amazing how helpless I can be sometimes. A man answers, asks which flight I have arrived on, then tolls me to proceed outside, turn left, walk a little way down the sidewalk, and I will come to a green sign indicating that I will be at pickup station six, I should wait there for around fifteen minutes and a grey sedan will come to pick me up . I thank him, hang up, and immediately proceed to the nearest help desk to ask where pickup station six is. After missing the obviously displayed number, I have learned my lesson and “walking down the sidewalk a little way” is clearly not a direction I am going to risk trying to follow.

I approach the lady at the desk and ask “Excuse me, do you know where pickup station six is?”

The women looks at me, tilts her head in confusion, and replies “I’ve never heard of anything like that…”

Well damn.

I stand there confused for a few seconds, her looking at me strangely and me returning the look with equal enthusiasm, before she asks “Are you sure you have the right place? Who told you to go there?”

I tell her that the man from my hostel told me to go there for a pickup. She gives me another odd look and then turns to someone else behind the desk and asks if they have ever heard of a “pickup station six.” The second person responds that she too has never heard of such a thing, but adds it might have something to do with the domestic terminal. Ah ha! I realize that the hostel operator probably assumed I was arriving from a domestic flight and that is probably my problem. The lady behind the desk is telling me I should re-ring the hostel and clarify, but I am already looking for a sign to the domestic terminal. I hate phones, and more than that I hate calling people I don’t know to clarify things and making myself look silly, so I am going to walk to the domestic terminal and find the clearly labeled and easily found “pickup station six.”

I scuttle out a door and begin to hastily make my way down a paved path in a direction I am sure will take me to the domestic terminal. I’m not sure how far away it is, and so I begin to jog a little, but arrive at the terminal within five minutes, and begin to orient myself with the building so I can follow the directions that were given to me. It is not difficult, and soon I find myself facing several rows of covered concrete islands located in between several divisions of road, one of which has a green sign with a number six on it. Score one for Fanning. I walk directly under the sign and begin to look into the traffic, trying to identify a grey sedan with my hostels signs on it.

There are several other travelers on the island with me, and every now and again a van arrives and takes a group of them away, and after ten or so minutes of this I begin to doubt myself. Was this really pickup station six? I don’t know for sure, no grey cars are in sight, and is this sign really green? It looks more turquoise… Maybe I should have just called back at the international terminal. Damn it! I was so sure I was going to do this right, and during my first test I decide I am going to go off and figure things out for myself just because I am afraid to call someone back. I can never learn!

As I sit there having my panic attack, a grey sedanish looking car with absolutely no company markings on it slides up to the pickup station. I give it little thought because it looks indistinguishable from any other pedestrian car, and figure it is here only to pick up a family member. Then someone calls out “Jonathan? Jonathan Fanning?” I look back at the car and a gorgeous, blond Australian woman has stepped out of the car and appears to be calling my name. She is wearing a tank-top and a short jeans skirt, which is weird, both because they do not look nor appear to have any company affiliation, and leave her seriously underdressed for the drizzly, relatively windy day. I look down at the rows of people, and after a few seconds when no one responds to her request and she begins to look a little frustrated I finally say “Uh… Yeah… That’s me…?”

She looks at me and smiles excitedly, becoming very animated and beckoning me into the passenger seat of her clearly-not-business-like car. I look at a few of the faces of the people waiting on the platform, almost as if asking them if they think it’s okay, but only receive envious and longing looks back, and then make my way into the passengers seat. This is not a company car. There are empty fast food containers thrown in various corners, and several changes of clothes in the back among the other rubbish that occupies the seats. The women climbs in the driver’s side and asks “Is that all you have?” pointing at my backpack.

“Uh… Yeah…”

“Wow… You pack light!”

“Uh…” I reply, and she turns the key, which starts the radio blaring music at an incredibly high volume, and begins to drive. I sit in my seat, squeezing as far back as possible and hugging my back pack close to me, and try to memorize all the scenery around me in case I am being kidnapped. We go on for a short distance before her cell phone rings and she turns down the music to answer and begins to excitedly talk about the crazy time she had last night: something about a pub crawl and an unknown guy. This conversation lasts for five or so minutes before she hangs up, saying she’s at work and can’t talk, leaving the car silent. I loosen the grip on my backpack a little.

We drive in silence for another five minutes, her cheerily humming to herself and me confusedly trying to understand what is going on, before I can’t take the awkward silence any lomger and say “So… How about this crappy weather?” She becomes rather animated again, talking about how it is very out of the ordinary and it shouldn’t be like this for very long, and this makes me feel a little better both because it means it won’t be raining the whole time I am here, and because it is the first time she has acknowledged my presence since starting the car. We turn onto another road, and suddenly we are driving next to a large bay overlooking the ocean. I immediately get very excited and forget about the odd car ride. A minute later we are pulling up to my hostel. I had no idea I had booked myself into a hostel on the waterfront, being happy only with the fact that it was cheap, had an airport pickup, and offered a free dinner every night, so this is a serious bonus. I get out of the car and thank the woman. She gets back in her car and drives off in the opposite direction from where we came from. I get the sneaky suspicion that she was just asked to pick someone up as a personal favor on her way to work.

In any case, I walk in and work out my room arrangements, get a map of Cairns with some tourist tips about the surrounding area, and immediately purchase twenty minutes of internet time so I can check the score of the Broncos game I missed. Five minutes later and seriously disappointed, I walk back out of the hostel so I can go walking on the beach a little and explore Cairns. I walk the ten meters through a little park on the waterfront only to find, much to my dismay, that there is no beach, only a long boardwalk that runs all the way down to the wharf several hundred meters to the south of me. Even more disappointing is that it is low tide, and so the water that it appears usually flows in under the boardwalk is several hundred meters out, leaving only a giant, brown field of mud. The mud, mixed with the murky grey sky, as well as the Broncos loss, all immediately put me in a sour mood, and I dejectedly walk down the boardwalk towards the wharf. The rain, at this point no longer falling, has pushed everyone indoors and so the entire city appears to be empty except for the odd passerby, and when I finally reach the wharf, I find that it is under construction and can’t be visited by tourists.

Beginning to feel a little tired, along with enormously disappointed, I quickly stop into a nearby shop for some toothpaste, soap, and a cheap, non-greasy sunscreen before heading back to the hostel. I am beginning to think that this vacation will not be quite what I had thought it was going to be. It appeared that Cairns did not actually have a beach, no one was out having the time of their lives, and the only thing exciting I had seen so far was a Royal Spoonbill, a bird which had always excited me, even when I was a little boy who didn’t care about animals and such, just because it looked so odd and clumsy. I arrive back in my hostel, climb into bed, and take a nap until dinnertime.

When I wake, I feel a little less downhearted, and clamber down to where they are serving dinner. My free meal is just that, and includes a mediocre pile of rice topped with a small amount of chili, masquerading as Chili Con Carne. I wolf it down, which is not difficult considering it is only about five spoonfuls worth of food, and go for another walk along the boardwalk, which is significantly more impressive now that the tide has come in and the lights from the far-off boats are reflected off the water. The City itself is still pretty deserted, so after about an hour of wandering through the streets I decide to turn in for the night so that I can wake up early and walk to the botanical gardens I had seen on my map, which didn’t seem too far up the road. I figure if I finish that early enough I can maybe catch a bus out to Kuranda, a city I had also seen on the map which apparently contained a butterfly and bird sanctuary, two things I figured at least my mother would seriously appreciate some pictures of.

I awake the next morning at six-thirty and hit the shower. Someone had taken the “hot” label from the shower faucet and replaced it with the “cold” label from the sink faucet so both shower faucets read “cold” and I get a chuckle out of this before realizing that it is not actually a joke. No matter how far I turn either faucet, the water remains icy-cold, and I am eventually forced to give up on my attempt at a shower, and just smear on some sunscreen before heading off down the road to the botanical gardens.

I have a fairly good plan for what I am going to do for the day, but after an hour of walking I realize that yet again I have underestimated the size of this place, and it was going to take quite a bit more effort to go to the gardens. I also realize that one of the things I had forgotten to include in my plan was any sort of breakfast, which the rumble in my stomach told me was not going to work. As this occurred, though, I happen to be walking past a bakery, and after consulting a menu, see that it is one of the cheapest bakeries I have seen since arriving in Australia, where the cost of eating is generally about twice as much as in the States. I settle on an apricot slice (apricot spread between two sugary pieces of bread) for the glucose, as well as a curried-egg and lettuce sandwich that I store in my backpack for lunch. I’m not sure what curried-egg is, but I know it has protein, and that is what I am after. The whole thing costs me eight dollars, and feeling happy about this and energized by the apricot, I continue along my walk, reaching the gardens only about half an hour later.

The gardens are surrounded by two large lakes, than a carefully managed piece of rainforest, and finally a more organized collection of flora. I slowly make my way through the lake and forest section, carefully trying spot a Cane Toad if one happens to show its ugly face, but only succeeded in spotting a large number of different birds either foraging along the forest floor or darting between the trees. It is peaceful, cool, and relaxing, exactly what I had hoped for. I can’t help but feel proud of myself for at least accomplishing one relaxing thing while on vacation. Eventually, I make it to the more organized section of the gardens and spend about forty-five minutes walking down the various paths and admiring the variety of flowers that are just beginning to bloom. More and more, though, I began to notice the presence of spiders, their giant webs spanning across multiple trees in some cases, and still not sure which of these can kill me, I walk as close to the center of the path as possible, trying to smell and enjoy the flowers from a safe distance.

Taking the opportunity to prove myself as a 19^th century biologist, I remove my journal and make a few sketches of some of the various flora, and remark on the uniqueness of the fauna around me. Particularly, I take special notice of the various examples of Similarity of Form, and ponder the deep philosophical questions that come on the heels these observations. All and all it is a very relaxing morning spent among the flowers, but soon enough I feel the need to depart and make my way up to Kuranda for the animal sanctuaries, being far more interested in animals.

The journey back to Cairns takes about half as long as the one out, and within an hour I find myself facing a giant bus stop, which I assume will have a bus to Kuranda. I notice a sign indicating that “Sun Bus” tickets are available from a ticket stand inside a nearby building, and so I proceed in to purchase a ticket. Confidently, I ask the rather sun-worn looking man behind the counter whether they have any tickets to Kuranda. The man spews forth a fountain of jibber-jabber, and I can only understand a single word: “mate,” and I stand there dumbly, trying to process what just came my way.

This was my first experience with the North Queensland accent. I have never really struggled trying to understand an Australian accent up to this point. I find that, where the English, Irish, or Scottish tend to be difficult to understand because they swallow vowels, Australians are rather easy to interpret because they generally extend or give a funny twang to their vowels. I had, however, been spoiling myself with the “high” Australian accent, and what had just issued from the vocal cords in front of me was the “low” or “redneck” Australian accent, something I had never before heard and which I had found quite incomprehensible.

“I… Uh… You don’t… Uh…”

Fortunately, the man was able to interpret my stuttering and repeated himself, and this time after concentrating really hard on all the words, and then spending two seconds quickly running through the sentence in my head, I was able to understand it. Apparently, there were no buses to Kuranda from this station, I needed to go across the street. I thank the man and walk across the street to the sign clearly labeled “Kuranda” and look at the times. There are no more buses leaving today. Damn.

I sit down and start to think of an alternate plan. It is, after all, only around 12:30, and I certainly don’t want to spend the day in Cairns, which has so far not impressed me. I decide the ideal thing to do would be to go to a local beach. I had seen a few names I recognized my Aussie mates mentioning I should visit posted in the window of the ticket office, and so I make my way back to the ticket booth and ask the man if I can have a ticket to Palm Cove.

“Yeah, would you like to make that a return, mate?”

… processing time…

“Um… Yeah, sure.”

“Good onya’! Return to Palm Cove. That’ll be leaving from stand D in three minutes.”

…processing time…

“Stand what?”

“Stand D, mate”

…processing time…

“Stand D?”

Nods head

“Oh, okay. Thanks.”

I walk back out to the bus stop, make my way to stand D, and sit, waiting for the bus. When it finally arrives, I am not impressed. The “bus” looks more like an old van that someone had left on the side of the road and then “Sun Bus” had come along and ripped out a few seats to make a path, attached a rickety sign to the top identifying some distant stop, and added a cash box. Being the only vehicle at the stop, and having arrived three minutes late I am a little nervous that it might not even be my bus, and so I clamber on and immediately ask the driver if this is the bus headed to Palm Cove.

The engine is roaring, the strain of standing at rest nearly too much for it to bear, and this driver’s accent is even worse than the ticket operators’, so there is no chance of me understanding it. I hear a little something that sounds like “Jibber-jabber jim jam somthin somthin, mate” and then sit there gaping at the man, waiting for the translation to occur in my head. Nothing happens. The man is starting to look questioningly at me, wondering why I am still standing there, and so I flash my ticket and weakly ask “Palm Cove?” again. He says something else incomprehensible, this time nodding his head, and after a few seconds pass and the translation has still not occurred in my head, I decide to interpret his head nod as a yes. I begin to walk down the rows of seats, and hearing no objection from behind me, settle into one, praying to God I will be able to see some sort of sign indicating when I am near my destination.

The ticket operator had handed me a map of bus routes back when I was talking to him, but there were at least four different routes that went through Palm Cove, and there was certainly no indication on the outside of this “bus” as to which one it might have been. As the bus-van starts, I stare out the window, both to admire the scenery, but also to try and spot any sort of sign telling me when I should get off. On the map I see that there is a tropical zoo located near the Palm Cove beach, and figure it will be easy to spot and will serve as my marker.

We hit the highway and I notice a speed-limit sign which says 100 kilometers. There is no way the bus-van can make this speed, wheezing and moaning after just trying to get through the city, and traffic begins to whiz by on either side of us, despite the fact that there is only an official lane on our right side. The “bus” begins to shutter violently, and this continues for about half an hour as we make our way around various stops on and near the highway. At one point, the driver looks into the rear view mirror and begins to shot something. I don’t understand him and think he is talking to the people behind me, and so I try to avoid eye contact, but each time I look back it seems like he is staring right at me, and he continues to yell.

Eventually it becomes clear to me that he is, in fact, yelling at me: once everyone on the bus turns and faces me as well, and so I frantically look around to see if I can see a beach. This can’t possibly be Palm Cove! We are on a highway and there is no water anywhere near here. I look back at the driver and focus every bit of my brain power on trying to interpret what he is saying. After a few more seconds it comes to me, he is yelling “Tropical Zoo?” and wondering if he should stop. I give him my best innocent look trying to communicate “Oh, I didn’t know you were yelling at me because I know where I am going and wouldn’t possibly need your assistance and this whole time I have been looking at the interesting sign directly beneath your eyes” and say “Oh… No.”

By this time we have passed the stop anyway, and he grumpily sets his eyes back on the road, me looking around for any indication of Palm Cove. We turn off the highway and go down a side street for a little way before popping out next to a gorgeous looking beach alongside the road. The driver pulls the bus over and starts yelling back at me again, and despite clearly not being at an official stop, I decide it would be better not to contradict him a second time and jump out of the bus.

As I watch the bus drive away I realize what a huge mistake this was. I am in the middle of nowhere. My plan was to consult a bus schedule when I reached the Palm Cove stop, but there appears to be no such stop, and so I have no idea when the next bus will come, nor what it might look like. I desperately wander up the path a little while, searching for any sort of official looking stop, but only find stands with no schedules. I decide to forget about it for now and at least enjoy the beach; me being stranded might be worth it then. I climb into a nearby bathroom and change into my swimsuit, then open the second compartment of my bag to grab my book and some more sunscreen.

My hand hits a gooey mess. The container holding my curried-egg and salad sandwich has snapped open, and everything in the pocket is covered in a thick, yellow paste. My journal, my important documents, my flashlight and sunscreen container, and the backpack itself are all wet with egg. I dive down into the mess, desperately searching for the book and praying that the damage isn’t bad. In a stroke of luck the likes of which I will probably never see again, my book, which is the only thing that doesn’t belong to me, is stored in my clothes pocket, after I had accidentally placed it in there earlier in the morning despite my usual anal retentiveness about such things. I breathe a small sigh of relief, try and wipe off the papers and journal as much as possible, finish off what is left of the sandwich, and put on some more sunscreen.

I am angry at myself, I am panicking slightly, and I am worried about what my stuff might smell like after a week in the sun. I am not very happy, and all the relaxation I felt earlier is gone. More than that, though, I have no idea where I am, nor how I am possibly going to get home. I try to take a sip of water, but my cheap, non-greasy sunscreen is so greasy that I cant get a firm enough hold on the cap to twist it off. Grumpily, I repack all my things and head out to the beach, thinking that maybe staring out at the ocean will give me some magical sense of direction and I will suddenly know where I am. The first thing I see as I step on the beach is a group of women sunbathing topless.

Ah. I am not in the United States.

I wander along the beach for a short time, duck in to the water at one point to wet my feet a little, but it is pretty cold, and then settle in a nice sunny spot to read a few chapters of my book. It relaxes me a little, but I am still a little worried about my whole situation, and annoyed that I didn’t anticipate the sandwich container bursting open after I threw it into an overflowing backpack that I am constantly hurling over my shoulder or tossing on the ground. Half an hour later I realize that I have never actually liked beaches, and this one is no exception, wonder to myself why I have been so excited to get to one this whole time, and begin to pack up my things. I decide that the best plan will be to walk along the road I know the bus follows out of Palm Cove, and then turn towards the Tropical Zoo, where I know there is an official stop, and if I am luckily, the zoo will also provide some cool animals I have not previously seen.

I start walking down the road, and the sun is beating down on me and pretty soon fatigue sets in, not at all aided by my drop in moral as I pass several bus stops along the way, but do not see a single bus come along the road. On the pretense of putting on more sunscreen, I stop for a few minutes to rest, and begin to berate myself. Figures I pick the one bus company in the city of Cairns which is oh-so-happy to sell me a 24hour return ticket because turns out they only send out one damn “bus” every 24 hours. What is wrong with me? Why didn’t I think to check a map before I actually got here? “Stay at the beach in Cairns” what sort of lame plan is that? There is no beach in Cairns genius. I am not happy.

I walk a little further, feeling miserable and downhearted. About forty minutes into my forty-five minute walk I here a biker yell “Passing!” from behind me and I instinctually move to the right and nearly get run over. After apologizing for having to make the man slam on his brakes and screech out of control to avoid me, I watch him angrily pedal off and sit down on the path. I want to be eaten by a crocodile. Why do I suck at traveling?

Australia comes to my aid. I am yet to have a bad day here, and I am fairly certain that it is impossible. I get my crocodile feeding. I don’t get eaten, but rather the tropical zoo has a show on and I get to watch several crocodiles zoom out of the water to consume whole chickens while a presenter talks about various crocodile facts. I am part of a large crowd, and everyone just wants to see the croc eat and not actually listen to what the presenter has to say, so he begins to become a little agitated that no one is asking any questions and I oblige him. He really doesn’t know his stuff. I don’t learn anything very insightful about crocs, but it is still really cool to watch them thrash around as he pokes them with a stick and then feeds them. Afterwards, I wander over to a kangaroo feeding pen and get to feed a few kangaroos, and then finally I get to attend another show, this one about the various birds of Australia, which are well trained and repeatedly fly just inches over the crowds’ heads.

I spend a couple hours at the zoo, bad feelings once again having left me, and get some great looks at wombats that are actually walking on the surface, red pandas, and various other odd animals that occupy this side of the world. As the zoo closes, I make my way outside and across the highway to the bus stand. I figure I will just sit there and pray that a bus will come within an hour or two, and if not I guess I am spending a night on the beach. I only have to wait about twenty minutes, and a bus pulls up next to the stop. It has no “Sun Bus” markings anywhere on it, but I optimistically enter and hold out my ticket and ask “Cairns?” The bus driver says something incomprehensible, but does not protest when I continue past him, and so I sit down and try to identify anything recognizable out the window. Eventually I realize that the buildings outside look almost exactly like the buildings next to my hostel, and the bus stops almost directly in front of my hostel and I leap out just before the driver continues on his way.

I am feeling pretty good about myself. The zoo cheered me up significantly, and then not only did I manage to get back into Cairns, but I also managed to exit the bus right next to my hostel. I am safe for at least one more night. I walk into the dining room of the hostel for dinner; tonight’s is a forkful or two of noodles with a small amount of sauce on top. After consuming this I decide to go for a long walk down the boardwalk again. The tide is in and the waves are making sloshing noises beneath my feet. It is a calm night, but the city seems to be more alive, and I buy myself an ice cream cone to walk with. Above me I notice that there are several large flying foxes (Australian for “bats”) overhead, and this makes me excited. They are about five times larger than any bat I have ever seen, and they follow along as I make my way down the boardwalk. I sit down on a bench at one point, gazing out over the water for a time, before I begin to feel extremely tired. I was up early and have been walking all day, and with a Daintree cruise the next day, I anticipate I will be walking a lot tomorrow. I head back to the hostel and read for a few minutes before turning over and almost immediately falling asleep.

Quote of the Day: “…the domain of the fundamental rights of the human person and respect for his dignity, of the progress of humanity, which cannot be at any price, of justice and equity, as well as the protection of the planet, all domains that concern the future of man and of humanity, and the responsibility of each generation.” Pope John Paul II

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: In Australia, automobiles traveling in the opposite direction as emergency vehicles sounding their siren are not required to stop.

To Oafie, Whom I Love

At long last, our mid-semester break was upon us! Now I know what you must be thinking; something along the lines of “Jonathan, didn’t you just get there? Why are you on break already?” And it’s true, I did only get to Australia about two and a half months ago, and I haven’t really done anything school related, but it was mid-semester break all the same and I sure wasn’t going to complain. The break was two weeks long, the first of which I was going to spend with my good mate from high school, Oaf, who was flying in with a couple of mates on Tuesday, and leaving the Monday afterward, when I took off for my second week of vacation up in Cairns.

Needless to say, I was a little bit excited. Sure I haven’t really gotten the opportunity to miss anyone from home quite yet (no offense guys, it’s just really awesome here), but it was still really cool to think that I would be hanging out with someone who has known me longer than the average lifespan of a goldfish. It was with quite a bit of excitement, therefore, that I stepped on a bus down to the city at a ridiculously early time Tuesday morning, so that I could pick him up at the airport. Upon arriving, however, I discovered via a desperate sounding email that Oafie was not, in fact, on the flight he said he was going to be on, and would rather be on a flight coming in at seven in the evening, ten hours later.

Having just spent approximately ten dollars and an hour and a half getting to the airport, turning around was not exactly an ideal option, and so after several minutes of consideration I decided that ten hours was not that long and I would just wait it out there at the airport. I had my ipod, I had my book (Chaos by James Gleick), and I figured all I was going to be doing if I went home was mope around and read so why not just change the location and add in a little people-watching? Several hours later I realized why not, because airports, whether laying over in them or just waiting in them voluntarily, still bring time to a stand still and suck all the life out of you. Despite my book being absolutely fascinating, boredom crept ever closer, and after about two-hundred pages of chaos theory, my ipod battery died, and I was desperate to find something interesting to do. I walked around the terminal, counted the number of stores, counted the number of car rental places, and began to count the number of tiles on the floor before mercifully falling asleep for an hour and a half, and waking up ready to force more chaos into my head, and this managed to keep me going until Oafie finally arrived.

Oafie’s day had been significantly more exciting than mine, but not at all in a good way, and included him missing his earlier flight due to a ticket complication, considering ditching the whole Australia thing, spending way too much money, an expensive cab ride, a desperate search for an internet connection to get in touch with me (still no cell phone), and then finally getting on his later flight. We were both pretty tired, so after failing to contact Oaf’s mates (they had made the earlier flight), we briefly looked at the Opera House, ate some pancakes at the restaurant I had eaten at after my cruise earlier in the year, and caught a bus back to my place for a relatively early bed time.

The next day we were up relatively early, successfully got in contact with Oafie’s mates, and agreed to meet at the Opera House. I felt significantly better about my self when Oaf got pretty excited about the Opera House and I realized I was not the only one, and soon after that had my touristy impulses reignited when just five minutes after meeting his mates they had already planned attending a show that night and catching a ferry ride as soon as possible. I guess that after a few months in Sydney I had become rather habitualized to the insane number of things that this city offers, but Oafie and his mates were up to the task of hitting everything in just five days, and it was pretty hard not to get excited myself.

Within ten minutes we were on a ferry traveling around the harbour, and then spent an hour or two at the aquarium so that the Kiwis (Australian for “New Zealanders”) could get a look at a platypus and the cool under-water shark tank. Then we were off on a hunt for lunch, the four of them determined to find some kangaroo to eat despite my warning that it is not actually a very good meat. Their desire to eat the national animal was far too strong to be swayed by my warning, however, so off we went until it was discovered that the cheapest kangaroo dish was going to cost us upwards of thirty dollars, and this was a sufficient deterrent to land us at a small outdoor grill eating plain-old, boring burgers and chips (Australian for “fries”). One of my Aussie mates stopped by and met the gang, and then I encouraged her to point out as many cool places to visit as she could remember and off she went reciting various touristy things to do around Sydney. Five minutes into this I looked around the table and saw that all of Oafie’s mates were pretty disinterested in what was being said, realized what needed to be changed, and said “No, Ally. That’s not really what we were looking for… Bars.”

At the sound of this Oaf’s mates all chirped up considerably and became very animated, asking for clarifications of certain areas and demanding that Ally draw out locations on the hand-held map they were carrying. Enough booze dispensaries highlighted to satisfy even the most arduous alcoholic, we then proceeded to walk to the most exiting sounding one, The Shark Bar, where Ally claimed they kept a live shark in a tank in the middle of the room. Excitement mounted as we approached, but it was all for not. Apparently some drunken hooligan had recently hurled an object at the tank, cracking it, and it had forced the management to realize that keeping a large, endangered, predatory animal caged next to a drunken crowd was probably not the best idea, and the shark had been permanently removed. There was widespread disapproval amongst the group.

Disappointed, we wondered back out onto the street and wondered what to do next. It was eventually decided that we should walk to Kings Cross, which was probably not the wisest idea since it was several kilometers away, but would give the Kiwis a good view of Sydney as well as the locations of many of the bars Ally had mentioned, most of which were in the Cross. With Ally as our guide, which did not help with the distance aspect since she appeared to struggle a little finding her way around the city she has lived in her entire life, we wandered through a rather nice looking park, stumbled across a rather impressive war memorial, and then finally found ourselves in the Cross several hours later, exhausted. After a brief drink to relax, it was decided that we should split up and go to our respective places of residence to change, and then meet up in front of the Opera House to catch the last-second, cheap tickets to an opera.

Oafie and I had quite a long way to go, and so of course failed to get back in time, and when we finally did arrive the opera had already started and his mates were nowhere to be found. We tried to see if any other shows were available, but the only other thing on was a jazz performance that was so close to being sold out we would not be able to see the stage, but it would still cost us twenty-five dollars. Deciding to pass, we instead wandered along the harbour’s edge for a short time before settling on a new location. Oafie had read my casino blog, and rather than scaring him off, it had instead excited him, and he was eager to try his hand at some roulette.

Reluctantly, I agreed, and a few hours later I was buying Oafie some dinner and a beer to help wash down the pain of far too much money lost. Afterwards, he treated me to a rather large bottle of questionably cheap beer, complete with brown bag, and we had a special moment sitting on the street corner basking in our failure, dignity and pride having left us earlier, pain and cheap beer our only companions, before Ally mercifully picked us up and took us home for the night. It was pretty fun.

Thursday began early as well, Oafie’s mates having booked him a ticket for a train up to the Blue Mountains the next day which required him to get on a five-o’clock bus at my place. Me being me, I of course took him to the wrong stop and we sat and waited for the bus, which never came, then tried to come up with another way for Oaf to get into town on time so he didn’t lose all his ticket money and not get into the Blue Mountains. Eventually we came to the conclusion that the only possible course of action was an expensive taxi ride. I felt really guilty for this, and promised to reimburse him for the cost of the ride, but did not feel guilty enough to hit my pillow and immediately fall back to sleep after he had left. I had planned to get a significant amount of work done, but this never happened, and instead I managed to sleep until around two in the afternoon, at which point I went over to Ally’s to work on a paper on prawn (Australian for “shrimp”) genitalia I had promised to help her with in return for driving us everywhere (be it dopamine or genitals, Jonathan finds it interesting).

After a couple hours of unsuccessfully trying to get Ally to focus despite the worst case of ADD I have ever seen, we eventually decided that dinner was in order, and grabbing Jo, who had nothing better to do, headed off to a nice Italian restaurant nearby. Halfway through, we got a call from Oaf telling us that they had returned from their day in the mountains, and arranged to meet at a bar in Kings Cross once we both finished dinner. This is where the festivities really began. The bar my mates had chosen was called World Bar, and specializes in teapots full of alcoholic mixes that are easy on the palette but dangerous on the liver. My favorite was the Chocoholic, a clever mix of Bailey’s, rum, kahlua, crème de cacao, and milk. It tasted exactly like chocolate milk. This was a dangerous drink. Cheap, sweet, and containing four different kinds of alcohol, it was easy to get a little bit carried away with this drink, and still feeling guilty about Oaf’s unnecessary taxi ride, and feeling like I would make up the bill by providing alcohol, it is safe to say that I got a little carried away. The management was kind enough to provide plastic shot glasses to go with each pot, but these were soon abandoned and drinking straight from the spigot was highly encouraged.

The night was filled with uproarious laughter and tales, as well as my aussie mates trying desperately to dig up dirt about my past life from Oafie, but walking away disappointed since I am and always have been kind of a boring person, and concluded with a stumbling tour of the Kings Cross area. I was propositioned by my first prostitute, but was far to inebriated to come up with a coherent negative or positive response in my excitement, which luckily she took as a negative response, and the night concluded with me and Oaf back at my house continuing to laugh uproariously and peruse websites such as catsthatlooklikehitler.com, which Oaf has a knack for discovering, before finally falling asleep early in the morning.

The next day began late. The previous nights adventures had been a little bit over stimulating and the sun just gave me a rather large headache, and Oaf appeared to be the same way, so when we did finally manage to rise it was decided that the best way to avoid this problem was to hit the beach. Catching up with Oaf’s mates in the CBD, we had them relate what had occurred to them after we had separated, and then caught a ferry to Manly Beach. This surprisingly and sadly enough, was going to be my first time viewing the Pacific Ocean (apart from the stuff that forms the harbour) since I had arrived. The ferry passed rock cliffs that spilled out over the vast blue nothingness, and again I silently thanked Oafie (and now publicly, since he reads these) for reinvigorating my sense of exploration and touristiyness.

The ferry ride lasted around half an hour, after which we scooted down the boardwalk and found ourselves on a sandy beach overlooking the water. Part of the reason why I have been so hesitant to go into the ocean while here is because Australia’s knack for producing things that are bound to kill you certainly does not end, and perhaps even gets worse, as you enter the water. Everyone knows about the shark attacks. Australia leads the world in this particular statistic, with a hundred and sixty-five different species patrolling the coasts, but the far more dangerous presence is the seasonal swarms of stingers (Australian for “jelly fish,” or “nasty killing machines that kill you dead”). If those don’t get you, perhaps you will go the way of the Crocodile Hunter and be skewered by the many species of ray, or there are countless numbers of nasty pointed and poisonous fish that can prick, bite, skewer, or otherwise maim you. The ocean doesn’t even need living creatures to do it either, the rip tide is so bad here that several people a year die by just being swept out to sea, and so at any beach you will find red and yellow flags indicating where it is deemed safest to swim. The sun can even kill you, since there is a hole in the ozone layer above Sydney, it also leads the world in cases of skin cancer. I took my first step on the beach and immediately stubbed my toe on a hidden rock, making it bleed profusely so that if I stepped in the water now, every killing machine from here to Indonesia would know instantly that I was there.

Thus ended my Manly Beach expedition.

No, I’m not that pathetic. I had seriously considered it, but not wanting to be a bother to the others who had just taken a long ferry over, I toughed it out and followed along with them. We walked along the cool sand for a while (Yes, even the sand is better in Australia; it doesn’t get unbearably hot at the slightest sign of heat.), and then stripped off some clothes and put it in a pack I was carrying in order to catch some sun. Oaf ran into the water, and not wanting to seem lame I followed as far as I was comfortable, before heading back out for more lying in the sun. By this point in the day the sky was slightly overcast, which meant that the beach was fairly peaceful and empty, and we laid and napped until it became too cool to do so comfortably, before walking back to the boardwalk and I dived into my pack to get out the shirts and such.

This was when Oaf and I realized we were wearing the same outfit.

I’m not sure why we hadn’t noticed earlier, but as I pulled out my shirt and put it on, it felt oddly loose, and then Oafie said “Hey, I think that’s my shirt,” at which point I turned it round and looked at the tag. My shirt was special, and does not have a tag, but rather the writing is etched into the back of the fabric itself, something which is probably really common to the real world, but is unique and special to someone like me who is still wearing shirts from his sophomore year of high school. I looked at the writing scribed in the back of the shirt and confidently replied “No, it’s mine.” And handed him a similar looking shirt, which he tried to squeeze into but could not. Then at the same time we both realized that it wasn’t a similar shirt, it was the exact same shirt.

Oafie's shirt, which I was so confident was mine, was not only the same color and same pattern, but right down to the label and material they were identical. There was a long awkward moment, followed by me removing his shirt, and both of us putting on our own, and then another long awkward moment where we both looked at each other reproachfully. Not only was Oafie wearing the same shirt as I, but we both were wearing blue swim trunks and sandals.

“Where did you get that?” demanded Oaf, just as I was thinking the same thing.

“I got it in Massachusetts, where did you get yours!?”

“I got mine in California!” It was actually kind of incredible. Here we were, in Australia, wearing the exact same shirt which we had purchased on opposite sides of the States.

We decided it would be best if we walked on opposite sides of the group for the rest of the day.

Oaf and I avoided each other until we were back in the Sydney CBD planning our next move, and since both of us desperately wanted to change, and Oaf’s mates desperately wanted to shower at their hostel, we decided that we would split up and meet later in the night. Oaf and I proceeded home, sitting on different seats in the bus, and just as we entered the house we were met with the most wonderful smells in the world. My Kenyan roommate Ima (I mentioned in an earlier entry that I thought she was American, but this was only after a single conversation with her where I noticed her American sounding accent. Turns out she’s Kenyan) had invited over her fellow mates from around the village and they had spent all day preparing a feast of traditional Kenyan foods, which they immediately offered to us.

Neither of us the type to turn down a free meal, Oaf and I immediately sat down and began eating and chatting away with the assembled mass of people. We never went back into the city, but instead spent the rest of the night partaking of the wonderful Kenyan entrées and desserts that were offered to us, by far the best meal I have had since arriving here, and having several interesting conversations across the table. At one point, Oaf and I were apparently deeply engaged in a chat with the kingpin of all the Peruvian weed grown in Finland who, with only three hundred dollars and a dream, managed to “forever influence the Finnish weed market.” I suppose you never know where the night is going to take you…

Saturday saw Oaf and I split up for the most part, me going off to help a mate write a report on dopamine injections in crickets, and Oaf going out on a hunt for kangaroo meat. He was successful and, as I warned him, disappointed. We agreed to meet up later in the evening for a house party that one of my mates had suggested we attend, but Oaf being adventurous got side-tracked and ended up at a party of his own, and then unsuccessfully attempted to get into a Led Zeppelin cover-band concert, which left me and my mate wandering around a Sydney suburb, touring the local bars before meeting up and heading to the party. At one point my mate and I wandered into a bar called the “Monkey Bar,” and I was immediately struck by how similar it looked to the bar often featured in Scrubs (My most favorite T.V. show of all time. Frankly, though, if you don’t know that why the hell are you reading my blog?) A little bit loosened by a few previous bar stops, and feeling particularly motivated by the surroundings, I decided it was high time to satisfy my urge to be like my hero, J.D., and order a masculine drink, so I sidled up to the bar and confidently said “Excuse me, can I have an appletini?”

The bartender looked sideways at me, put down the drink he was working on, loosened his ear like he had not heard me and said “What?”

“Um… Could… Could I have an appletini?”

There was a long pause, where the bartender continued to look confusedly at me, and I began to get a little squeamish.

“Um… Or not…”

“No, no, I can do it mate.” The bartender picked up his drink mixer and walked over to the other end of the bar, where he whispered something into the ear of another bartender before nodding his head in my direction, and they both looked at me with sideways looks. Good thing I hadn’t asked for it to be light on the tini…

Eventually the drink arrived in the exact same glass that J.D. always gets his in, which made me uncontrollably giddy, and then the bartender took my money, gave me a little shake of his head, and moved to the opposite side of the bar. I slowly sipped away, trying my best to enjoy the beverage, but unfortunately it was not as spectacular as I hoped, and my next order was a rum and coke. This confused the bartender even more, so that he asked “Your following an appletini with a rum and coke?” then shook his head a second time, rolled his eyes, and served me my drink. I did not order from him again.

We eventually met up with Oaf and his mates and headed out to the house for another night of drinking, laughing, and general merriment. There were a fair number of people at the party, including three Maori (traditional New Zealand islanders), who midway through the night held up a half empty bottle of rum and challenged the assembled Americans that if we could finish off the bottle with one swig each, they would show us a Hakka. Just as I was beginning to feel that there was probably a better way to trick them into giving us a Hakka, one of Oafie’s mates, Bill, grabbed hold of the bottle of rum and began to chug, and chugged, and chugged, and chugged, until he had finished off the whole thing by himself, and there was a widespread murmur of admiration and some applause.

Conditions satisfied, the Maori then stripped off their shirts, revealing their full body tribal tattoos, and proceeded to perform a live Hakka, just a meter from my face. It was pretty intimidating. I’m fairly certain that if I were a nineteenth century British officer facing it, I would have run like hell, but as it was, instead I sat eyes wide and open-mouthed as they screamed and pounded their bodies. I didn’t see much of Bill after that, bless him…

The bright sun coming through my bedroom window and waking me up with a not-so-pleasant headache was the final proof that it had been another long, good night. Again, Oaf and I weren’t really interested in doing anything, and it was another late start. We agreed to separate once again, Oaf going off with his mates to do some last minute touristing before they flew out a day before he did, and me following Ally to a food festival in a never before visited suburb of Sydney. The first booth we stopped at was one selling bags of chocolate coffee beans, and I purchased one straight away.

This was a mistake. Having not eaten anything since waking up and still feeling very tired, I tore into the bag and had finished it in minutes. I immediately was hit by the worst caffeine rush, brought about by 400 grams of cocoa bean, which forced me into fits of uncontrollable shaking, and I would run circles around Ally as she slowly walked from booth to booth.

At one point she asked “Jonathan, you look kind of funny, are you okay?” and I responded “yesIamokayareyougoingtofinishthatdrinkbecauseitlooksrathergoodandInoticeyouhavenotdrankfromitinawhileoooohlookatthatprettyclock!” This did not seem to convince her that I was okay and we sat down while she ate lunch, my legs bouncing uncontrollably under the table. As we rose, though, someone grabbed me from behind, whipped me around, and asked “Excuse me, mate, but I’ve been sitting here for a while and I can’t figure out why you have a psych test on your shirt.”

I became ecstatic! I was wearing one of my many geeky neuroscience shirts that I am so very proud of, specifically the one with a Stroop test (look it up), and I have only ever had one person recognize it for what it was, so I excitedly laughed and replied “I’msogladyourecognizedit!IstudyneuroscienceandIlovetestslikethese!”

The man laughed, and we became engaged in a very random conversation about amusing shirts that he had found on the internet and that I should look up when I got the chance. At one point he showed my shirt to his clearly drunk mate who looked at it, squinted, blew out some air in concentration, and then tried to read the first few colors before contorting in obvious mental pain and moving on. The first man and I chatted for a while longer before Ally and I moved on and wandered through a few more booths, me finally beginning to settle down a little, before sitting again beside two raucous and clearly inebriated Aussies to take a break.

We were only just beginning to talk about what to do next when I heard off to one side: “Hey, mate… Can you… Can ftyou tell me… why the fuck you have a St… St… Stroop test on your shirt?”

I couldn’t hold back and actually let out a shout of glee. I once took this shirt to a neuroscience presentation, and surrounded by fellow neuroscientists, only one recognized it for what it was, but here at this random food festival in the middle of Sydney two people within thirty minutes of each other had recognized it, one of whom was the drunken hooligan currently sitting beside me. I let out a loud laugh, which startled the man, and then explained about my love of neuroscience.

The man responded with “You know… now. I just read this here study here which said… which said… which was about this guys in India. And this guys… This guys hypnotized some people… told them not to pay attention to the word… then put them through the Stroop test and BAM. It didn’t work! They stopped it! Raas, or something… 2005. Look it up.”

Again, I began to talk about studies and such that I had run across, which he really didn’t seem interested in, but which I was far to excited to contain, and only stopped once the next group of interesting people walked past and he began cat calling them, turning completely away from me. Ally took me by the shoulders and wrenched me away, and we wandered around for a little while longer before hopping back in the car and driving to the CBD to meet up with Oaf.

This was when the caffeine crash hit. All the energy was sucked out of me, and as we walked around another cultural festival taking place in Darling Harbour, all I could think about was sleep. Luckily Oaf was thinking the same thing, and the rest of his time in Australia was spent lounging around my house, Oaf packing to go home and me packing to head up to Cairns the following morning; a calm end to a more than satisfying week. Can’t wait to go hiking through Middle-Earth with him in November.

Quote of the Day: “The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear,…and that these few are alone to be regarded, -- the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these are the essentials, -- these, and the wish to serve, -- to add somewhat to the well-being of men.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: Australians may be the only people in the world who eat all the animals on their national crest.

If you would like to witness a Hakka, in case you are not aware of what one looks like, there is a video available at:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=c-lrE2JcO44&mode=related&search=

Conception, Cars, and Birthdays: Usually it’s the Other Way Around

I need a cell phone. Since arriving here in Australia I have tried my best to function without one in a desperate attempt to rediscover a simpler way of life. Trying to break free of my dependence on technology, I decided before coming that people were just going to have to knock on my door to get in touch with me, but after just over two months of a luddite’s paradise, it has become painfully obvious that I cannot function without the aid of my pocket sized daily dose of radiation. This stunning realization came to me after a weekend of miscommunication, misinterpretation, and missed opportunities, but like always, my misfortune always seems to make a mildly entertaining story.

This story begins on a Friday; the Friday before my mid-semester break. This particular Friday featured a campus-wide closure for a Conception Day party. What is Conception Day? That is a very good question, and even now I’m fairly certain no one knows why we had a giant party on this particular Friday based around the idea of bringing new life into the world, but that certainly didn’t seem to stop anyone from enjoying it. Basically, the point of Conception Day, as far as I could tell, was to organize a day long drinking binge for the entire campus, beginning raucously outside my window at seven in the morning, and ending at some point late at night when everyone finally passed out.

Luckily, I was able to avoid the seven in the morning call to begin drinking with the excuse that I had work. I didn’t really have to go into work, but I figured watching mice cavort around with one another was probably a better option for my liver, and would also give me a few extra hours that I needed to catch up on. At eleven, though, I left my mice mid-coitus to meet up with my mate Jo so as to head down to the Conception Day celebration. Jo was not at the meeting point, but no matter, I was in a good mood, the mice having been mildly interesting for the first time in a long while, and so I sat and waited, looking out over the giant fenced off area that was the Conception Day alcohol-full party zone. Jo never showed up. If I had a cell phone, she might have been able to tell me that she was stuck in traffic or her house blew up or whatever excuse was keeping her from me, but as I did not, I sat there for thirty minutes before giving up entirely and heading back to my house to change. When I had left for work it was overcast and cool, suggesting that I put on pants and a jacket, but now it was becoming excruciatingly warm and there was barely a cloud in the sky.

I also decided that perhaps a little sunscreen was in order, seeing as how the ozone doesn’t exist here, and soon enough I was making my way back to the fenced off area, ticket in hand, pastily white, and alone. Not a problem, though, since halfway down the monstrous hill that divides me from campus I ran into some of my other mates, headed in the same direction, and with little delay we were inside the gate looking up at the giant slide next to us trying to decide who would go first. We went three at a time, competing for who could get all the way down the ten meter slide first, and I soon found out that my slow starts were more than made up with by my late pushes to the front. After several races with me victor every time except for once when I got off balance on my sack and accidentally dragged my arm along the slide for a meter, slowing me down considerably and leaving me with a nasty friction burn, I was feeling pretty good about my sliding ability, then realized that the company I was with had been drinking for the past several hours and I was entirely sober, and this in turn sobered up my victorious feeling slightly.

Next it was on to the bumper cars, my mates enjoying all these childish sorts of games because of the drink circulating their nervous system, me enjoying them cause they make me feel like a five year-old and I wasn’t cool or popular enough as a five year-old to actually do any of these things with friends, so I always enjoy the opportunity to make up for lost time. Again, I turned out to be a far superior driver than my inebriated companions, using the PIT move I had learned from some past Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game play to inflict maximum damage on others while limiting the effect on my self (So ha Wes! It wasn’t all just a waste of time!). After a few goes at the cars, I managed to spot Jo walking through the crowd with the mates I was originally supposed to meet up with, and ran off after them.

Jo had slept in. That was her great excuse. I need a cell phone because my generation appears able to do only about half of what it says it will. I think it is a side effect of being in constant contact with everybody.

We wander a while through the festivities for a while before settling down and chatting, and someone notices I don’t have a drink. Damn. I begin drinking at 12:30, and pretty much don’t stop until 10:00 at night. Unlike others, though, I am able to keep a steady and low intake of alcohol going which keeps me excited, but not out of control. The best part of the day was when I challenged one of my mates to an inflatable boxing match. We entered the ring and I immediately began my go-to strategy, which is to bounce around my opponent, wearing them down mentally with my seemingly endless energy, before physically wearing them down with cleverly placed punches. This turned out to be a fairly difficult strategy when the world around me was already bouncing around, and I very quickly became fairly nauseated, but kept it up because my opponent, who was even worse than me, could not keep up with my movements and spun around a few times before becoming seriously confused and allowing me to go in for the kill strike (or slightly off-balance push).

Later on in the day, a mate stumbled up and asked “Jonathan, you like nerve… stuff… right?”

“Um… More than my unborn child, yeah”

“Well… do you know anything about dopa… dope… hee hee… dopamine?”

“Are you kidding me! I LOVE dopamine! I am, in fact, filled with dopamine when I hear about dopamine!” At this point I choose to drunkenly trip on a table leg, tumble to the ground and hit my head on a decorative tree. There is no more dopamine in my head.

“Well… ooh are you alright…? Well… would you like to come to a study session with me and a few of my classmates? We… We don’t know what we are doing..?”

“Come to a dopamine study session!? Like, yeah!” Dopamine has returned.

Somehow, in the middle of a drunken party celebrating the beginning of mid-semester break, I get roped into a dopamine study session for the next week, and thinking about it makes me happier than the giant party does. I’m probably not right in the head.

Midway through the day a rather large thunderstorm swept through, soaking everyone and everything and temporarily shutting down outdoor activities, but as soon as it had passed everyone was out again and the live bands were on and the mud fights began, wreaking havoc on the beautiful hillside where I used to sit and eat lunch. It was pretty sad. As the sun set, people began to move indoors for several hours of dancing, more drinking, and horribly unhealthy food. The night concluded with a group of us sitting around a T.V. screaming insults at each other over the footy game we had taken sides on, despite the fact that the game was rather boring and we had all agreed that it was a pretty dumb game in general. A fairly unproductive day.

The next day only got worse, though, since all I had planned was to attend a mate’s barbie (Australian for “barbecue”) in the evening. Again, not having a cell phone turned this into a bit of an issue. Having not gotten to sleep until about three or four the previous morning, I didn’t even wake until around three or four the next afternoon. The barbie was scheduled to start at five, and I had no idea how to get there, and as frequently happens here, the internet had chosen this day to be down, so I had no means to communicate with anyone. Alas, like so many of my fellow generation X-ers, at one point I memorized numbers to call people, but have not memorized a number, nor looked one up in a book in about seven years, and so I was lost and hopeless in my apartment, thinking I would have to eat dinner on my own.

Luckily, though, one of my mates was wise enough to realize that I have no idea what I am doing or where I am going most of the time, knew my home number (which I don’t even know), and called me, figured out the situation, and arranged a pickup for me. Just as I was about to give her major kudos, though, I was put through the near death experience that was my mate’s transportation arrangement.

It began around four-thirty, when another one of my mates picked me up in her car. It was a two-door four seater, and her significant other was in the passenger seat. Interestingly (for me at least, as a neuroscientist), while in Australia I have become quite familiar with the concept that the driver’s seat is on the right side of the car, but when I was asked to jump into the back I immediately made my way to the right side of the car again, thinking that it was on this side of the car that you bent the seat forward for people to climb in. This quickly left me lost in my own thoughts, thinking about the different coding schemes in the brain, but was only a momentary distraction before my head was filled with pure terror.

My mate, despite the complicated and difficult Australian system for getting your license, cannot drive. Add to that the screaming and condescending significant other and I am lucky I walked out alive. The ride was filled with conversations like:

“Why are you stopping?”

“It’s a yellow…”

“Yeah, so why are you stopping? Yellow means speed up. Everyone knows that!”

“Well fine… Here, I’m speeding! Are you happy?”

“Well no, because now you just ran a red light.” (Screeching cars all around)

----

“Change lanes here and take the next left”

“Um…”

“Change lanes! Change lanes! CHANGE LANES!” We pass the intersection we needed to turn at, still in the wrong lane. “Why didn’t you change lanes?”

“Well, you have to give me more warning… It takes me a while to change lanes.”

“What? Why? What’s wrong with changing lanes?”

“I don’t know…”

“Well then do it!”

Exasperated: “Well, yeah! I would! But I get scared when the cars are coming at me!?

“What? Like when there moving… always?”

----

The problems of miscommunication and poor driving were only magnified when Significant Other and I became aware that my mate did not know her left from her right.

“Turn left up here. Left. Left! LEFT! Why did you go right?”

“Um… Well, you need to give me more time! I can’t… I don’t… I need to process left and right…”

“What!? You don’t know your left from your right!?”

“Well I do, it just takes me some time…”

“Your left hand makes an ‘L’” I provide, helpfully. They both turn and look at me like they forgot I was in the car.

----

The real trouble began when Significant Other decided waiting for my mate to catch up with his directions was taking too long, and offered to help by hitting the turn signal and easing the wheel in the right direction, much to the surprise and continued bewilderment of my mate. This reached a climax when SO told my mate to turn right, thinking that they would pull over and plan a route, but being all the way over on the left lane of a four lane road my mate did not understand. She flicked on her turn signal anyway, planning to make a turn across three lanes of traffic.

In response, SO became quite agitated, tried to point out the inconsistency in an incoherent yell, then took hold of the wheel in a manner which shocked my mate into making her turn, and we went careening around four lanes of traffic towards a fenced off driveway. Luckily, no cars were in the road at that particular moment, and my mate had the presence of mind to slam on the brakes before hitting the fence, but this left the car half in a driveway and half in the road, so that when I looked out my window I could see the approaching traffic bearing down on me.

It was at this point that the two love-birds decided to get into a screaming match, arguing over who was right and who was making worse mistakes, while I watched the incoming vehicles come closer and closer, trying my best to interject something into the quarrel, but being largely unsuccessful. Just as cars started honking and swerving to avoid our rear, my mate had the good sense to straighten out the car along the side of the road before continuing her quarrel. It was decided that Significant Other was going to drive now, with my mate giving directions. While SO was a much more confident driver, this did not necessarily equate to safer. He would often use the bike lane to pass other cars, and several times zipped inches away from concrete barriers on the road with one hand on the wheel, looking into the car and adjusting the radio saying “This song is tops!” My mate was significantly better at giving directions, but SO chose not to listen to these, so the rest of the ride became a series of “told you so,” “well you wouldn’t have gotten the chance if you had done it right the first time!” and backtracking. When we finally reached the barbie forty or so minutes later than anticipated, I shakily stepped on the ground, gratefully stroked it, and immediately found a different ride home.

The third and final strike against my luddite ways came on Sunday, when I was supposed to meet up with some mates for a birthday party. The plan was for us to meet down in Kings Cross, the red-light (fun) district of Sydney, and after a fancy dinner, spend a night at various fun-loving bars to celebrate a twenty-first. We were supposed to meet at seven, so at around five forty-five I jumped on a bus and headed into the CBD, where I then caught a train into Kings Cross, arriving around ten minutes early, and not finding anyone there yet, sat down to wait.

I began to get really hungry, having not eaten anything in anticipation of the dinner that was coming, and with my hunger came impatience, and so with seven minutes to go until seven I decided to go up one of the two exits and see if my mates were waiting just outside the station. Kings Cross is the red-light district, but in a city like Sydney, that really doesn’t mean much. As I wandered down the street a little ways, it became apparent that the only thing in any serious danger here was your sense of moral self, since every other shop seemed to be something adult-related, but aside from that the dark side of Sydney appeared to be kind of like the dark side of a bunny. After a while I came across what must have been my mistake, there was another, more fancy entrance to the station just down the road, and I assumed that I must have gotten off at a side exit. I rushed down the stairs, and was immediately cheered by the sight of many people milling around in the station; the one I had just come from was rather empty, and so surely I would be able to find my mates here.

After unsuccessfully searching the crowd for a fair amount of time, however, I began to become dismayed, and then I noticed that empty, this station looked fairly familiar. After walking back up to the street, looking at my surroundings, then returning to the station and looking at all the ticket booths and such, then going up another set of stairs to the street and looking at my surroundings, I realized that the reason it looked so familiar was that it was, in fact, the exact same station I had walked out of the first time, and that I had just come down the opposite exit as a train arrived so it appeared more full. Oops.

I sat back down and waited for several minutes, becoming more and more nervous. It wasn’t until nine after seven that I finally realized my big mistake. It wasn’t entirely my fault, I suppose, just a consequence of growing up in a city with fewer than a million people, but when someone says “meet at Kings Cross” I immediately think it only refers to a single location. When I heard that, I had assumed that Kings Cross meant the station, but the Cross was in fact a rather large suburb. I realized, in a great moment of despair, that “meeting at the Cross” actually probably meant meeting at some big cross, which probably had something to do with a king… Shoot.

Desperate now, I rushed up the stairs, back onto the road, and began to search for a giant cross. Finding none, I then looked at street signs and found Kings Cross Road, which looked promising, and began to walk down it. This was dumb. I had no idea where I was, and walking away from my only means of leaving was just about the worst thing I could have done. Even worse than that, however, was my next decision, which was to leave Kings Cross Road and start to weave my way through side streets when the road appeared to be going nowhere special. Within minutes I was desperately lost, alone, and wandering around the dark side streets of Sydney’s red light district at night. Despite the nice overall appearance of this section of the city, this situation was probably not ideal, and I began to get a little scared.

My first, and perhaps wisest, instinct was to run for lights, which I was eventually able to reach before again wandering down the well-lit, totally unfamiliar road. It was about half an hour after seven at this point, but I still believed that if I hurried, my mates would be waiting for me, and so I ran down looking around like a very lost tourist trying to find their way. It didn’t take long for someone to take advantage of me. Luckily, it was not a gang of muggers, but instead the bouncer to the adult shop I was passing at that point, who reached out and grabbed me and encouraged me to enter his place of business, The Sex Machine.

“Come on, mate, I’ve got the place for you right here!”

“Um… No… That’s okay…” Ease out of strangle hold… Slightly scared…

“Oh come on, mate! I see you looking around trying to find yourself! This place will do it!” He grabs my shoulder again.

“Um… Yeah… Um… I… Uh… Friends… Um…”

“Yeah! Come on now!”

Sudden inspiration!

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t like my sex mechanized. I prefer it to be more personal.” This statement confused the bouncer, and I took his momentary hesitation to escape and run further down the road.

A little ways down I finally ran into what I assumed, must be the “cross.” It was in a small, rather homely looking park, with a giant circular fountain off to the side. The cross itself was much like a street crossing sign, except that it had several large international cities on it. My friends were nowhere to be found. Defeated, I looked up at the Cross and discovered that I was 19395 kilometers from New York. I was totally lost, and way too far away from home.

To calm my nerves, I went to a nearby homely ice cream shop (located between Porn Palace and Badda Bing) and purchased a two scoop ice cream cone. I couldn’t decide between mango and mint chocolate chip, so I decided to go with both and just eat one at a time, but this was before I knew that they mixed the flavors before putting them in your cone. Then, sitting there eating my minty-mango with a hint of chocolate, which looked a little bit like a frozen ball of puke what with the green and orange occasionally separating from the overall brownish mess, I re-evaluated my situation. Luckily, calmed by the ice cream and actually sitting rather than running around frantically trying to avoid the sex solicitors, I was able to create a mental map of where I was relative to the train station, based on the directions of my wandering, and using this mental map I was able to relatively successfully meander my way back to the station and make my way home, essentially a fifteen dollar cone of ice cream in my stomach.

Turns out what I thought the cross was, was not the cross at all, just a park. Kings Cross is a giant intersection, sort of like Times Square, but smaller. I had passed it only a minute after leaving the station, too focused on the road to actually look around and see where I was. And so here is the third reason I need a cell phone: I am not a very wise traveler, and to get from point A to point B, I need someone to hold my hand and take me there. It is very sad, but very true.

Quote of the Day: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Jonathan’s Interesting Fact about Australia: Australia’s national crest displays both the kangaroo and the emu. While both these species are native to Australia, arguably the more important reason for why they are on the crest is because both species cannot walk backwards, and are perpetually moving forward.

This blog, despite its questionable content, is dedicated to my grandfather, who passed away earlier this week. I would wonder where you were off to, grandpa, but I’m pretty sure it is a golf course. Enjoy yourself, and I’m glad that you went surrounded by caring family and friends. Despite what this blog might suggest, I promise your grandson is trying to do something extraordinary with his life.

Farewell.