A Nostalgic Look Back at Cairns (part 1)

A long time ago, in a land far, far away…

I’ve struggled up until this point trying to write these things in the present tense, to give’em that sense of off-the-cuff, as-it-happens, YOU’RE-part-of-the-action reportage. But it’s been so long since we left Australia, my mother and I, that at this point it’d just be a farce to write in any tense but that past. And farce has no place on my webspace. Which rhymes, by the way. Or try it like this: “And farce, it has no place on my webspace.” Iambic pentameter.

So past tense it will be. Also, it will be full of errors, again because it was quite a ways back that all this happened. I’ll do my best, but I give no promise of accuracy.

It says “Bat-tree.” Curse you, loss of sharpness due to transfer from bitmap to j-peg plus shrinking to fit into alotted blogspace!

One thing I know for certain is true: Cairns did not break tradition. Upon arrival at the train station, we had to walk to our hotel, carrying out heavy luggage, for a good seven hours (adjusted for inflation). Best part of the walk: bats. Did I mention the Brisbane bats? I think so, but let me go back now and check … Yeah. Yes, I did. Good, because Brisbane is downright bat-deficient compared to Cairns. Walk down Cairns’ charming city blocks and bats will swoop by a couple a minute. Where are they going? To the Tree. This big tree in a park had hundreds, maybe even twos of hundreds of bats swarming it, the sounds of their flapping and screeching filling my Q Tip-ravaged ears. It was very, very cool, and very, very too dark to photograph.

The hotel room was probably the nicest one yet. A cozy little affair with tiles and a back patio and … closets. And whatever else you need it to have to get what I mean by “cozy.” There was a pool too, in which I must admit I indulged on more than one occasion. But I mustn’t let this luxury get to my head.

In the morning we went for a long walk along the waterline, back to the city. I took my strides proudly, confidently, and sunblock-free on that hot, 16-degrees-from-the-equator summer’s day, secure in the knowledge that the steady beating the sun had already been giving me up to this point in my vacation had coated my skin in an impenetrably protective tan. Guess I don’t really understand how that all works.

But that pain won’t come until later; for now, we still had this little city to explore, and touristy junk to set up. After booking ourselves on a little trip for the next day, we hopped a bus to an entirely unspectacular beach. It was so unspectacular, I don’t even know why I mention it.

Oh yeah, because some fishermen there caught a shark. One of them bottom-trawling sharks. It was pretty big.

That night — Ohh the flesh, how it did burn. Oh my. The pool was nice, though. And laying back in an outdoor pool on a warm night, looking up as it rains and as bats flap by overhead, it’s an image worth remembering. I’ll share it with everyone once Hewlett-Packard figures out how to hook an InkJet up to my limbic system.

Our excursion the next day took us to Fitzroy Island, a jungleous resort rock an hour or so from shore, right on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. It was a very nice spot, with shiny coral beaches, and 50 year-old cement roads so steep and tiring you would’ve thought we’d had a hotel booked at the top. Slippery, these paths were, too, because it was raining. But it was a pleasant summer’s rain, cool and loud and horribly painful as each drop stabbed at my burning, red shoulders.

It was while walking along these paths that I developed a new theory. Now, it’s still a bit rough, I haven’t completed all my research yet, nor have I consulted my peers, but I feel fairly confident in its validity. Here it is: there are more lizards in Australia than there are molecules in the universe. It’s like you can’t see the forest for the skinks.

Folk say you gotta go diving along the Great Barrier Reef when you’re in Australia. I say you gotta go diving along the Great Barrier Reef early when you’re in Australia. In these last, burnt days of the trip, we just weren’t interested in learning to SCUBA, as nice as it would’ve been. So we settled for second best: glass-bottomed boat ride.

It was just a short little putter around Fitzroy Island, and I guess the weather wasn’t optimal, but we got to see some nice colours down below. No turtles though; the guy said they see a lot of turtles, but we didn’t see any. But that’s okay, because right now, where I’m sitting as I type this, all I gotta do is turn my head to see a turtle. Let’s take a look right now … Aww, he’s sleeping. Or she. You can’t tell until they’re like 10 years old.

More Cairns to come, within the next six months guaranteed.