Walked along the Strand, a strip along the beach. Signs everywhere about
being careful to not get stung by box jellyfish while swimming, and what to
do if you are (pour vinegar on the wound, and there is emergency
vinegar supplied). Not relevant to us as they are only around during
the Australian summer. Along the Strand are some amazing banyan trees.
We went for dinner on Flinders East, and discovered the Townsville
Paradox - all the restaurants are open, but there's no one eating.
Isn't this high tourist season? we asked. Oh yes, it's much busier
on weekends, they claimed.
Two common items on the various menus: bugs and rockets. We never ended
up eating either.
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July 19. Went first thing in the morning to Billabong Sanctuary (except
for grabbing breakfast from Brumby's bakery, which was yummy). Saw our first
kangaroo, hopping across the road, very exciting. As we entered the
sanctuary were greeted by a kangaroo with joey in pouch, which we could
walk up to and pet! (A couple of hours later they were all gone, but early
morning, there were tons of kangaroos. They come out again at dusk.)
The kangaroo's claws are rather impressive.
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The koalas we held were junior males. (We were told that they were fully
paid up members of the koala union, and as such only got held half an
hour every other day.)
Note that this mature male koala has a scent gland on his chest. We were
supposed to be careful not to get scented by it, or else we might get
attacked by other koalas.
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| The ants here are different, too. Sofia got attacked by a different
species at one point, of brown, biting ants.
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It turns out that everything in Australia is named billabong - it means
(roughly) a watering hole. Billabong Hotel, Billabong Rentals, etc.
Grocery differences: Woolworths is a grocery. No liquor in groceries
in Queensland. Rice Krispies are instead Rice Bubbles. "Sanitarium"
is a brand of cereal. Arnott's is a huge brand, but is apparently no
longer Australian-owned, so you're supposed to buy e.g. the Dick Smith brand,
but that uses beef fats in the crackers.
We drove up to Castle Hill, then drove around to see up close what we'd
seen from up high. Found McDonald's, Sizzler, Blockbuster, but no Starbucks.
(Burger King is there, but is sometimes called Hungry Jack's.) Rented rollerblades
and bladed on the Strand, remembering to pass oncoming people on the left.
July 20. Drove to Cairns, the tourist capitol of Queensland. Stopped at
Babinda Boulders along the way; nice rainforest walk and impressive
creek cutting through stone. I hadn't seen rainforest before and was
really impressed with the density of vines.
Cairns is extremely touristy and has a big downtown walking area with
hotels practically atop one another. Went into Country Comforts, was
offered B&B at A$120. Not what we wanted for this particular night, when
we wished to just crash and leave very early, so the guy asked what we were looking
to spend; we said A$70. So he offered just bed at A$85. We'd had no idea
that these things were negotiable! (This wasn't a ma-and-pa place, but
a hotel chain.) After driving around and finding everything else taken
(including at Trinity Beach, which turns out to be a nice place to live
but you wouldn't want to visit - no hotel beds, just holiday apartments),
we took the Country Comfort offer.
It turns out we had come to Cairns on the last day of some three-day
Cairns holiday, and that was why everything was booked. We had several
scheduling coincidences like this during the trip.
We also went to the emergency medical center to get our dive medical exams.
It was about a 5-minute wait.
July 21. Went at 8 AM to the dock, to catch the boat to Fitzroy Island,
and start our three-day dive course.
The islands are all green, nothing like California. Spent all morning
in the classroom, watching videotape about diving practice, then hearing
the same material read aloud from hardcopies of PowerPoint slides,
then took quizzes. We also had to sign a waiver, giving up our right to sue
for murder ("death resulting from negligence, either passive _or_active_").
(Sofia crossed that part out, figuring correctly that no one would look
at it.)
Spent all afternoon in a very cold outdoor pool
learning to use scuba equipment. People look very different wearing
a snorkel mask with their teeth chattering. Everybody's least favorite
points: the cold, and the "remove your mask and breathe, without
breathing through your nose, for one minute" exercise.
Basically, the dive course was closer to army training than vacation.
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At dinner we hung out with our compatriots (three other couples, all
approximately our age, two English one Scottish), our common hardships
giving a feeling of camaraderie. The bar was showing 70's and early 80's
videos throughout, which was a definite plus. Beautiful starfield,
including the Milky Way and the Southern Cross (easily recognizable
from the Australian currency). Also Orion, with his sword upside down.
There are many weird trees here; the "fern palms" are among the coolest
(and look exactly like you'd think from the name). Another is a sort of
planar palm tree; the fronds only go in two directions. I don't
know what this tree is.
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The beaches here are amazing - there is no sand, only bits of coral!
Walking on it, or hearing the surf roll back through it,
sounds just like broken glass. It's amazing to think that
everything on the beach was once the skeleton of a living animal.
Also, all the roads on the island are marked not with gravel, but with
coral (not obvious on a first look; we assumed it to be some form
of concrete that came in small turdlike shapes).
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July 22. We awoke incredibly sore, some from the bunkhouse accomodations
(think summer camp) but mostly from having carried around these heavy
tanks for much of the previous day.
More scuba; our first two actual dives. Mostly pretty murky
but we did see a giant clam, about rib-cage sized. It was open enough
that one could clearly see its intake and outflow holes. Sofia touched
one edge of the opening and whoosh, it closed up about halfway.
Rather few fish, but whole forests of anemones. We have to kneel on the
bottom for the scuba exercises (like, signal that you're out of air,
tell your buddy you want to share, expel your regulator, find his,
blow the extra water out of it, and start sucking on that).
As such, everybody's knees are scraped up. What with the soreness
and the cold, Sofia is miserable, and the Scottish girl actually drops out
of the course.
At night we saw at least five bats, often very close by (something whistles
past your face at night; probably not an owl).
July 23. Our third and fourth dive. I saw five or so great big batfish
in midwater, looking very surprised at our presence (or so I imagined).
Hanging out in midwater was very beautiful, blue water with divers
below spewing air bubbles. Our dive instructor picked up a big black
sea cucumber and we passed it around.
Took the boat back to Cairns; car was where we left it (lucky thing,
since we weren't so good at interpreting the parking signs).
So nice to shower in hot water!
July 24. Little done. Had breakfast at the fine Old Ambulance Bistro
on Grafton and Aplin. There, we were approached by a seventh-generation
penal colonist who was very insistent on our going to an aboriginal village.
We went to the information kiosk and reserved a Great Barrier Reef dive
with TUSA. (Pretty daring, given that a day before we weren't sure we
ever wanted to dive again!)
In the evening we went to the ReefTeach show, which was rather overdone
on the voice acting but fascinating in the biology and the ecology.
Lots of time spent reassuring us that fish pose no danger to us,
in particular sharks, then said "but there are some VERY BIG fish
down there". Next slide, a sweetlips fish about three times the size
of the divers around it. "I saw one about 2/3 the size of this one
last week" as audience continues to gasp. But in fact this fish is
just close to the camera, while the divers were far behind! D'ohh!
We learned some fascinating stuff in this talk, like the fact that
coral and giant clams are essentially photosynthetic - they've got
one-celled plants in them that they feed and derive energy from them.
The sex life of coral is really odd too - it all happens once a year on a
certain early morning in November close to a full moon, when the ocean is
flooded with coral eggs.
We bought a laminated card with fish pictures and
names on it, designed to go on your diving vest.
July 25. Went to Kuranda in the morning; a lovely drive through rainforest.
Kuranda is mainly known for its open-air market, which was mostly selling
dull tourist stuff, but there was someone selling coinpurses made from
cane toads, a terrible scourge.
We saw them and said "these look like toads!" since they had faces and
front legs, then "these ARE toads" and Sofia was totally grossed out.
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From there we drove to Chillagoe to see the limestone caves, over many
miles of dirt road that get washed out during The Wet (what Queenslanders
call the Australian summer). Along the way we saw literally thousands
of termite mounds, up to four feet tall! It makes sense if you think of
the fact that all trees eventually end up termite food, but where are
the American termites? Underground, I guess. (More info
here;
this and other references say that the mounds can get more
like twenty-five feet tall!)
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Chillagoe is a tiny place with maybe ten businesses; one goes there to
see the limestone caves. These are rather imposing and
scary looking from the outside,
whereas on the inside they get weird formations called "cave coral"
which require wet cave walls and dry air, an uncommon combination elsewhere.
Actually, we almost missed seeing the caves, but luckily we were there on
a Wednesday, when there's an extra tour that we were snuck onto.
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On the way back we saw lots of kangaroos on the road, usually in
threes or fours. Boing boing boing!
July 26. We went for our first post-certification dives, at the
Great Barrier Reef, with TUSA.
We recommend them warmly - they were very efficient, very pleasant,
handled all our cares, and served a surprisingly good lunch!
We left at 8 AM, had two dives, returning around 4 PM.
One more thing TUSA does right is to bring along a videographer, so you
don't have to even think about taking pictures - instead of a few badly
taken still frames for which you sacrifice some of your dive time,
you get an hour of expertly taken video (including of yourself),
a bit expensive but well worth it.
The single most awesome moment came on the first dive, finding a giant
hawksbill turtle - about as large as us, and surely older. Pretty soon
there was a great big cluster of humans around, admiring this turtle
(so it's easy to compare size on the video, and see that I'm not
exaggerating the size!). He (?) was tearing at the coral with his mouth,
and sweeping it up with his front fins. Pretty impressive, given that
we'd generally thought of coral as being like rock!
We hired a dive guide (A$30/dive for the two of us), partly because he
knew the reef where we were diving and could point out the more interesting
stationary things, but mainly because we wanted someone else to handle
the job of getting us back to the boat at a reasonable time. My sense
of direction is already bad enough in 2-d!
Sofia's ReefTeach card (with all the fish - of whom we saw and identified
about half) came off through no fault of hers, but just before surfacing
we saw it on the sand below, and our guide rescued it.
Some other highlights: a lionfish, which our dive guide carefully teased
out of its lair (you mustn't touch them -- they are aquatic porqupines);
christmas tree coral, which
instantly disappear into their holes if you wave nearby them; unicorn fish,
which look like Pinocchio; lagoon stingray; many psychedelic parrot fish.
That night we ate at Marinades, a fantastic Sikh restaurant in Cairns.
Incidentally, these were the only Indian/Pakistani-looking people we
saw in Cairns (except for Sofia), and we never did see anyone of
African descent. We were told that Sydney is rather more cosmopolitan
in this way.
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July 27. Drove to Yungaburra, which is in the
Atherton Tablelands,
a huge mesa at 2500m elevation comprising many towns. The Curtain Fig Tree
is up there.
Apparently fig trees start life on the branch of another tree, send down
roots (through the air), then slowly strangle their host. This one's
host died and fell onto another tree, at which point the process
repeated; this is also why this one's so big. The little white splotch
in the middle bottom is my shirt.
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This first night we stayed in the Lake Eacham Lodge, which is a 19th
century hunting-lodge-looking place, with an enormous lounge with
wood paneling everywhere and fireplace. The fireplace was a necessity, as at
this elevation we actually began to believe it was winter (at night it
got to 38 Fahrenheit!). We got a room with no windows; everything else
in town was booked, apparently because the next day was to be the monthly
crafts fair (one more bit of scheduling luck). We went out to see wild
platypus in the stream - there's a standard place, where one guy mentioned
having seen one earlier that afternoon - but no luck.
Incidentally, one thing that really struck me consciously on this trip
that hadn't before was that every animal you see in a zoo, or a pet store,
has a native habitat somewhere. More about that to come.
July 28. Stayed in Yungaburra, both of us pretty torpid due to a nasty
cold we must've caught diving.
Canoed for an hour on Lake Tinaroo and I got badly sunburned on my legs.
Watched Aussie TV; the weather report came with a fish report. First they
showed two proud guys with rather large fish, then this other proud guy
with this ridiculous little fish, about the size of his two hands.
Was this an enormous minnow or something?
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July 29. Slow recovery from our cold. Drove from Yungaburra back to
Townsville, which we could now see is just as dead on weekends as on
weekdays. Weird! We dined at Bountiful Thai, which Sofia loved - all
fresh herbs.
There were so many lorikeets outside (a particularly colorful kind
of parrot), creating such a din, that we had to move farther from the
restaurant door. We couldn't believe that such beautiful birds are
out there, where Americans or Europeans would have pigeons. Conversely,
if pigeons sounded like lorikeets, people would have them exterminated,
or an active hawk-breeding program, or something.
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July 30. End of honeymoon. Spent a couple more days in Canberra,
working with Terry Tao, and admiring the sight (but not the sound) of
the wild cockatoos on campus. These are the white kind with the yellow
crest, and are if anything more annoying than the lorikeets.
The other picture at right is, we think, a possum (again from campus);
if so, Aussie possums are also cooler than American ones.
Update 2002: We now think that it's a
red-necked pademelon.
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Odds and ends: this is from the Ibis hotel we stayed at near the
airport. The cylinder in the corner is the bathroom!
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