8.7.04 Cairns

Exerpt from an email I sent from Australia:

Greetings from Oz. I'm in Brisbane, Queensland with my college friends Robyn and Dulcey, and we're in the middle of our three week tour of Australia. I'm having a blast. After the first few days in Sydney, where we took numerous ferry rides through the beautiful harbors of the city, refreshed our knowledge of all the strange Oz creatures at the Zoo, went to a Mozart concert at the Opera House and went on a long hike through some of Sydney's most amazing "bush", we headed north to Cairns via Brisbane.

Cairns is the starting point for many amazing Queensland destinations, including the Great Barrier reef, Daintree National Park and Rainforest, Cape Tribulation, and the many beautiful sand, coral and continental islands offshore. We managed to sample all of these in our three full days there and still feel like we had lazied around the whole time. Though it is currently winter in Australia, the temperatures in Cairns were a tropical 80F. On our first day there, we took an all day catamaran cruise to the Great Barrier reef where we had hours upon wonderful hours to swim, snorkel, and scuba dive. Though we have both been tremendously afraid of scuba diving, Robyn and I convinced ourselves to sign up for the free ten minute scuba diving course. I've always been afraid that my allergy prone nasal passages were not meant for underwater, high pressure conditions, and I was hesitant to take myself out of my cozy comfort zone of lazing around near the boat with my snorkel gear. But it was free, so how could we resist?? After the first few moments of panicked hyper-ventilation, I remembered everything the dive instructors had told us in our short -but very repetitive- training, and I started to breathe. It was great! I could breathe underwater, move around easily wherever I wanted to go, lay backwards on the sand and look at my bubbles going up to the sky, chase after little Nemos other beautiful colorful fish hiding in the coral, touch squishy sea sponges, peak in on hiding rays and look deep into beautiful blue clams that had somehow embedded themselves in the coral. Robyn and I were both ecstatic, so much so that we dove for an entire hour, visiting two separate coral reef sites. Afterwards, when I tried snorkeling, I kept swallowing water, as I was so determined to have that freedom to go wherever I wanted to go and breathe easily the whole time.

The next day, we rented a car (oh, the freedom of having a car in a foreign land!!!) and drove to Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation. Beign that I love to drive, I took possession of the car keys, and had a thrill of remembering to drive on the left side of the road. It was a lot easier to get used to driving (and merging and even pulling off the road) in the opposite direction, though I never mastered the turn signal very well, so we had a particularly clean windshield by the end of the day. Cape Tribulation has the unique distinction of being a place where the rainforest meets the coral reef, and we had our lunch in an idylic setting on a beach, under a palm tree, with the thick, scary rainforest (crocodiles, cassowaries, spiders, crocodiles, ack!) drirectly behind us and the light blue ocean lapping on the coral reef in front. It was beautiful. Later on, we also happened to stumble on a beach house/bar hidden in the jungle where we had a much deserved pitcher of Victoria Bitter.

Our last day and night in Cairns was spent on Fitzroy Island, a continental island, about 4KM in circumferance, 6 KM off shore. We started our day off with a hike to the highest peak (800 meters), with 360 degree views of the ocean, land, and reef around us (once you gingerly scaled the steep rock that served as the best lookout). From the peak, we decended to a lighthouse on the other side of the island, passed a 1949 grave a man had built for his dog Rufus (I took a picture and will include the inscription later), and saw "Little Fitzroy" that had been separated from the main island by a big storm some years ago. The rest of the day was spent lazing around onthe coral beach, collecting coral, playing with coral, etc. Robyn even frolicked around in the chilly ocean long enough to get to swim along with a two foot long turtle for a while. In the evening, we drank beer with our new Czeck cabin friend Zdenka, and lost hilariously in a beguiling game of Trivia at the island's only bar (we were playing for a free drink, but were aparently losing so miserably that the game's host brought us a free pity pitcher of beer.)