Avoid Mackay

Things get off to a bad start: our train dumps us in Mackay at about 2:30 am, and we have to wait a good 45 minutes for our taxi. It’s not too long a ride to the hotel I’ve booked — the Whitsunday International Hotel, or “The Whit” as contraction-happy locals call it — and right away we learn that the Lonely Planet’s descriptions can occasionally be generous. It’s something of a dump.

To illustrate: I’m the first one into the bathroom when we enter our room, and it’s a good thing too, because I find the biggest damn cockroach I’ve ever seen, and that includes in the creepy-stuff sections of zoos, just hanging out in the bathtub, on its back, basking, surrounded by little brown things that are either its poops or its babies. I’m without a weapon in here, and can’t slam a shoe onto the porcelain tub without drawing attention, so I try to grab it with toilet paper to flush it away. But it’s slippery, and escapes into a crack above the door. The nuggets I just wash down the drain. I decide not to tell my mother about the encounter, and she still doesn’t know. This will be a good way to find out if she actually reads this weblog thing.

When we wake up we’re still undecided how long we’ll be staying in Mackay — the room’s only booked for one day, so it’s up in the air. We explore the little riverside town, not especially picturesque, though maybe we’ve been desensitized to picturesque by all the abundantly picturesque places we’ve already been. We eventually get ourselves to the tourist information centre, grab a few pamphlets, see what there is in this town with an economy based, I would wager, almost entirely on gambling. I would wager. (Bonus vocab lesson: “Pokies” are what contraction-happy Australians call poker machines. Which makes it an oft-seen word in Mackay.)

We get to the tourist centre in time to sign up for a tour, and an hour or so later we’re the only ones in the van with Kenneth, or Jeff, or whatever his name is, watching a fairly detailed history of the area on a monitor. He drives us out to Cape Hillsborough National Park, and takes us first to a beach (just covered in sand bubbler crabs), then along a nearby path up a steep hill through the rainforest. Let me tell you, this guy Kenneth-or-Jeff is a knowledgeable son of a bitch — he can not be stumped; knows all the trees, all the bugs, all the history. Man runs a good, educational tour, albeit a short one. We’re both sort of expecting a second location, but we just head right back to dreary Mackay.

There’s nothing to do in this town, which shuts down completely at 5 o’clock, save for the numerous Pokie houses (the gambling kind of Pokie, not the other, better kind), and the movie theatre, which isn’t showing anything worth seeing. But there is another theatre north of the town which has Apocalypto, so, as much as my mother probably isn’t interested in seeing voluminous on-screen carnage from the form’s current king, that’s where we’re going.

The cab drops us off at the theatre, one of those large ones out in the wasteland, far from anything but tract housing. And around midnight, when the movie ends (and it was a good one — Holocaust or no, Mel Gibson can make an exciting romp), I just can’t get the damn special payphone in the theatre lobby to work. I try to put in my money, but it won’t let me. So I just dial the number posted on a big sheet of paper right above the phone, and it connects, but then cuts me off after five seconds. I say screw it, and decide to find a real payphone outside.

Big mistake, because there’re no pay phones in the suburbs. But after a quick explore, when we give up and come back to ask the popcorn counter guy to show us simple-headed foreigners how a phone works, they’ve shut the theatre down. It takes us well over an hour to wander the neighbourhood (followed most of the way by a l’il scrapper of a dog named Elmo, who runs off right before I can call the number on his collar) before we find a 24-hour Pokie establishment, who are kind enough to call a cab for us, when I can’t get their payphone to work, either.

You may be wondering why we would see so late a movie, thus dooming ourselves to stay another night in Mackay. We would’ve been quite ready to leave that day, but recall when I said there weren’t all that many trains running in Australia? Well, when I said that I was talking about the south-eastern state New South Wales. Once we got to Brisbane we’d passed into Queensland, and compared to Queensland, NSW is abundant in trains. There was no train anytime after our tour with Kenneth-or-Jeff ended, and there are no trains today, so we have to stay another two nights (though our final will be cut short, as that train leaves at about 5 am).

And the really appealing tour we wanted to do on day three isn’t happening, because there aren’t enough people signing up (you need at least 3, they had 2). So I guess today will just be spent hanging out in Mackay, then returning to The Whit (not having told my mother about the giganto-roach, she decides we may as well just stay there). We do make a nice little trip in the evening to a beach north of the city, but overall, not much is done with this vacation day.

Mackay’s big attraction is supposed to be the Whitsunday Islands, and we saw a bit of them on our tour with K-or-J, and would’ve seen even more of them had our second tour happened. But I have to say, unless you love gambling, head a bit further north to Arlie Beach if you want to see the islands. Avoid Mackay.

The Weather’s Great…

…Wish you were here.

(This is so much cheaper than buying and sending out postcards.)

Moving Picture Shows

By God, using YouTube is almost too easy…

Spelunking our way through George’s Gold Mine:

Relaxed wombat at the Lone Pine Mall Koala Sanctuary:

Jellyfish at the Sydney Aquarium (tilt head 90 degrees for proper viewing — and turn off the volume):

Boy, you folks are just gonna be flooded with videos. Just flooded.

There’s Nothing “Banal” About Bris-”bane” … Oh Yeah!!

Brisbane begins, as all Australian tourist destinations apparently do, with a painful hike uphill in thick heat carrying heavy bags. By the time we get to our hotel, I’m drenched in sweat, and have all too little interest in exploring Australia’s third-largest city. But a quick Internet check of my credit card balance fixes that. Every moment must be seized for all that it is worth! (Approximate worth of each moment: $61.11)

Now, I’m not normally one to go all gooey about architecture, ragging on a city for having ugly buildings and praising another for its beauty, but Brisbane really does have some nice buildings. Overall, it seems this city was built with very careful attention paid to its aesthetics. A wide variety of interesting, clean, colorful towers; quirky little urban art installations around every second corner; and the water fountains all require puzzle-solving skills to get them to work.

It has a reputation for being a very laid-back city, and it’s deserved, if our first stroll is any indication. Neither Toronto nor Seoul ever have such empty streets downtown, except during a blizzard or Chuseok. And nothing’s really open, because it’s evening and it’s Sunday (also, probably, a factor in why it’s so laid-back), but we get in a nice stroll, and at the end we find a charming little garden area near our hotel, with fountains and flowers and some birds walkin’ around, but by then I just don’t have the energy to lift my camera, so you don’t get any pictures of that.

Pictures abound the next day, many of which I’ve positioned up above, to give the illusion that there were pics from the first walk. Another, longer walk through the less-laid-back (but still relatively laid-back) Monday afternoon Brisbane, including a lengthy walk along the Brisbane River, made all the lengthier still when we realize we’ve passed all the bridges for a long while and have to turn back to get to our side of the water again.

And we find a toy store, and in the toy store, I find this bad boy:

That’s a 1:1 scale T-800 statue, with crushed-skull-decorated base and Big Ass Gun, going for a measly ten grand. For ten thousand dollars I expect it to actually travel back in time to kill people of my choosing. I forget to ask the clerk, so I don’t actually know if it can do this or not.

On our last Brisbanian day we hop a bus and head over to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (formerly the “Twin Pines Koala Sanctuary” until the 1:1 scale Marty McFly statue inadvertently travelled back in time and killed one of Old Man Peabody’s breedin’ pines). No shortage of adorable critters there, let me tell you. I take lots and lots of photos of these cuties, from the dingos to the wombats, the turtles to the titular koalas. The most amazing part is: the animals can all talk. If only there was someway to capture it in a photograph, it’d show you. But there ain’t, so you’ll just have to take my word on it: all the animals in the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary can talk.

There’s also a big, open area where all the (talking) kangaroos hang out, and you can mosey right in and hang out with them. It seems these ‘roos aren’t so interested in looting; they’ll let you come right up and pat them, feed them, and look at their balls:

After that it’s back over to the hotel for a bit of a rest, then downtown again to take the City Nights bus tour, as advertised in the Lonely Planet guide book. Well Lonely Planet needs a talking-to, because their instructions on where to go for the City Nights tour are a smidge out-of-date. So, instead it’s more downtown-walking, and in this we get to witness one of the more unexpected things about this major Australian city. There’s a big tree in one of the downtown’s outdoor plazas, one we had walked past a few times already during the day, but this is our first time by at night. First we hear the loud squeaking, then we see a pair of big black wings flap by overhead, and being a pair of (on average) 40th parallel-dwellers, we just assume “man, they’ve got themselves some big birds down here,” but then we come to this tree and see that it’s holding about a dozen bats. The third largest city in Australia has a downtown tree that houses bats. (The first largest city in Australia apparently also has a bat-tree, though we never see it while in Sydney.) Though again, you’ll have to take my word on this, as taking clear photos at night ain’t easy.

Byron Bay: Australia’s Cool Table

Byron Bay is a hip little town. My mother chose it over giong to the the Gold Coast because, in her skimming of the Lonely Planet guide, it struck her as a quieter, less-crowded place. Wrong again, Mum (the previous instance of Wrong being when she turned into oncoming traffic).

It’s like spring break here. Backpacker’s hostels abound; trendy shops line the street (that’s singular, “street” — it’s popular, but small); and things here actually stay open up to — and sometimes beyond — 10 pm. We spend our first evening walking the beach in the dark, though pretty far from the main beach area because that’s where all the young people have congregated, with their loud music and their drinking.

The next day, armed with towels and swimsuits, we head down to take our first actual swim in the ocean (actually, it’s just the bay, but it’s salty enough to pass). We swim in shifts, naturally fearing for our possessions in this thick crowd of young people. It’s a good time, battling those dastardly waves, and I know my mother enjoys it too, though I don’t really see her enjoying it, distracted as I was by the line of topless sunbathers situated between myself and the water. I didn’t even choose this place to set down, my mum did.

That’s all you need to know about Byron Bay. Topless sunbathers.