Australia 2004

Cairns

City code 7

6 April

Drove to Daintree. Watched a show about Rene Magritte.

7 April

Daytrip to Cooktown

The daytrip to Cooktown didn't happen. Today I drove from Daintree to Wujal Wujal to see Bloomfield Falls. Amazing! The whole trip was on dirt roads. I had to ford streams and drive around felled trees. Amazing! I decided that going the additional 75 or so kilometers to Cooktown would really cut into my day. (I wanted to get back to Cairns before sunset so i could see some of the scenery in the daylight.) I started my drive back and stopped in Cape Tribulation for lunch. (Captain Cook named Cape Tribulation when his ship hit a reef a day after leaving there.) I made the drive back to Cairns and dropped off the rental car early enough to save a day's rental on it. Now I'm in the airport waiting for the shuttle bus guy. He told me he was waiting for a flight to get in about 30 minutes ago. I checked the board. Nothing is due in for an hour and 20 minutes. I think I'll take a taxi. (Update: The shuttle bus guy never showed. Jerk! I ended up taking a taxi.) BTW, I met some Aborigines in Wujal Wujal who seemed very nice and didn't smell. Maybe it's just the Alice Springs Aborigines that have problems.

My rental Nissan X-Trail before. It's clean now.	This is bogus! I didn't see one wild kangaroo anywhere. I think they put these signs up for the tourists.
I did see some farm animals grazing just outside my cabin in Daintree.	They were right about this.
Here's one of the streams I had to ford. It was about a foot deep. To the left of the pointy rock is the road. I kid you not.	I was rewarded with views like this.
Wujal Wujal, like many Aboriginal communities, is pretty serious about being a dry town.	This stream had a causeway but that didn't make me feel much better.
The Wujal Wujal community centre	Bloomfield Falls
My rental Nissan X-Trail after. It's not so clean now.	The view from the road on the way back into Cairns

8 April

Dive the Great Barrier Reef

This is me underwater at the Great Barrier Reef.

Dove the reef. Saw a shark. Didn't get eaten. Many more details to follow. Right now I'm beat and have lots of stuff to do before I call it an early night. See you in Brisbane.

My fancy hotel room. It's nicer than my apartment.

My fancy hotel

OK, my reef story. Well, it was a bit of a bust. I got a bit of a cold a few days before. I think I wrote about that. That morning I felt a little sniffily but generally pretty clear. I thought I'd be OK. I stayed in a hotel very near the pier because I had to be there by 7.30a. I got there in plenty of time. I ordered some raisin toast at a cafe (You don't want to eat too much when you're diving.) and met a woman from Texas there. Randa had been traveling for a while (months?) and was going to travel for much longer. She said she goes home to make money and then spends it all traveling for months. She's been to Europe and Thailand before this trip. She's staying at a hostel. There are a lot of young people doing stuff like that. I think I'm just too old to rough it. (My hotel in Cairns, a Radisson, was the most expensive yet.)

Anyway, 7.30a came around and I went to check-in for my trip. There are at least a dozen places with desks at the port. Taking SCUBA divers and snorkelers out to the reef is big business. I got on my boat, ReefQuest, and we headed out. This was a pretty big boat. It has two decks with a air-conditioned, closed area and an open area on each. The trip to the outer reef takes about 90 minutes. It's about 70 kilometers from shore. Well, this ride was a bit bumpy. I heard someone say that swells up to 1.8 meters were predicted. We must have hit every one. I'm usually pretty good on the water but not this time. I don't know if it was the cold or what but I started feeling pretty queasy. One of the crew said you'd feel better in the open air so I left the closed-in area and stood out back, barf-bag in hand. The breeze and a few dry heaves made me feel somewhat better. Another reason hot to have much for breakfast.

ReefQuest

Hannah and Nicolas getting geared up

We finally get to the dive site and I pop a DayQuil hoping to clear up whatever little might be clogging up my head. I'm buddied-up with Hannah from Sweden and Nicolas from Belgium. We're all at about the same experience level so they put us all together. Usually it's only two buddies. Anyway, we get geared up. I'm still a little queasy but figure that once I got underwater I'd be fine. You tend to forget everything else when you're gazing around the deep blue. All you hear is your own breathing. It's an odd sensation. Anyway, as soon as I started descending I feel some pain in my sinuses. I try to equalize but I'm just too clogged up. After a little bit the pain eases up and I figure I'm OK. Also, I think I started paying attention to other things. The photographer (They send down photographers and vidographers so they can sell photos and videos. The picture of me above was taken by the photographer.) was gesturing frantically pointing down. Communication underwater is a lot like being a mime. I look down and see a white-tipped reef shark swimming about five meters below us. It was so cool! I wasn't that big--about a meter and a half--and it was swimming away but it was really cool to see even for a minute. They said not to spend much time looking for sharks because there's so much else to see down there but we just got lucky.

Nicolas just about to enter the water

Nicolas in the only underwater photo I took before my batteries died. Argh!

Well, not that lucky. When I saw the shark I tried to take a photo with my fancy underwater camera set-up. It didn't work. It told me to change the batteries. Well, that would be a little difficult UNDERWATER! I charged these batteries the night before. They worked fine with no warnings on the boat and as soon as I got in the water. Now they're bugging-out!?! I was so annoyed. I tried again a few times but they were just dead. BIG BUMMER! Anyway, by this time the dive was pretty much underway so I figured I'd just enjoy what I saw and take photos on my second dive. (I had extra batteries on the boat.) We swam along the wall of the reef and saw lot of small, colorful Angel fish and Parrot fish. Lots of anemones and coral growth. The reef itself was pretty brown (I though it'd be more colorful.) but it was huge. We followed the wall down to about 19 meters. Then we turned around, came up to about 12 meters and swan along the reef the other way. All this time my sinuses were not equalizing well. At one point I thought I might give up and get back on the boat. By this time we had gone under the boat and was now seeing th reef on the other side. Again, lost of little and medium-sized fish and it seemed more colorful. I think iot was because we weren't as deep.

So we're swimming along. I'm considering surfacing. We do an air check. We have to get back on the boat with at least 50 bars. (We started off with about 230 bars.) More advanced divers learn to use less air. I usually gulp it down but I was doing pretty well on this dive. We've been under about 25 minutes and I was at 110 bars. Nicolas was about the same. Hannah was at 50 bars. That means she'd have to go back on the boat. (She said later that she was tired because she was constantly sinking and was fighting that. Maybe that's why she used up so much air. If she had inflated her buoyancy compensator a little more I think we all would have been better off.) The dive leader said in our briefing that if one of a group of three runs out of air but the other two had air that the two could just make sure the one got to the boat and go back down. Well, I don't think Nicolas heard that. We all surface pretty close to the boat on the far side (We forgot to do a safety stop at five meters. Oops!) and discuss. Hannah is out of air so she has to go to the boat. I ask Nicolas if he wants to go back down. He says that we can't once we've surfaced. I don't fight this since my sinuses weren't the best for most of the dive.

So we all climb back on the boat--not an easy thing to do with all that gear--and someone tells me that my nose is bleeding. Then I sit down and someone else tells me that my ear is bleeding. This is not good. I wipe off the blood and there isn't much of it in either place but it still has me worried. My hearing seemed OK, though, so that was a little comforting. Also, my head is now totally stuffed up. It's like my ears are completely blocked. I can hear myself in my head when I talk. It's really annoying and much worse than i was when I went in the water. After I get me gear off and dry out a little I talk to the dive master and he says a nose bleed is no big deal but bleeding out your ear is bad. This doesn't make me happy. I decide to forgo the next dive.

A school of Yellowtail, I think they're called	Most of a big, colorful fish
The famous sea turtle	Sonya and two other boat friends whose name I didn't get

They served a very nice lunch about then--fresh fruit, ham and cheese sandwiches, lots of salads--but I'm feeling so lousy that I can hardly eat any of it. The boat then moves to a different dive site. I gave my camera to Nicolas with fresh batteries so he can take photos for me. After the go in I feel miserable. Remember when you were a kid and for some reason you couldn't go in the water but you'd just sit there on the shore watching everyone have fun? That's how I felt. Plus I was worried that I did something terrible to my ear. Everyone had a great dive...except the snorkelers. The surface current was strong so Sonya, another boat buddy, said you couldn't get anywhere. Nicolas and Hannah saw and get a picture of a small (about a half meter) sea turtle. Others saw Moray eels and stingrays. It seems like this wasn't the dive to miss. Oh, well. I didn't want to hurt myself any more.

So, the boat trip back to shore is even bumpier. I'm feeling really sick, now. I have to stand on the second-level deck because the seats were constantly being battered with sea spray. I'm worried about my ear. I have a completely stuffed-up head. I'm nauseous. And I'm getting chilly being sprayed with seawater. Oh, and the smoking section was near I was standing. That 90-minute ride back to shore lasted 90 days. About twenty minutes from shore I managed to get downstairs to the "infirmary." There were about five or six people who looked worse off than I was. Two crew members were attending to the sick and wounded. Somehow that made me feel a little better.

My 24-hour medical centre

I read about toad racing but I didn't get a chance to see it.

Back on shore I find out about a local clinic from Guest Services at the hotel. (The dive master suggested I go to a clinic because he figured I'd wait forever at a hospital.) I get there and there about 30 people waiting. I tell the woman behind the counter that my ear was bleeding and she says, "Oh, that's not good." Thank you. They call me in about 15 minutes. I think I got bumped to the head of the line. The doctor looks in my ears and says that I have a small perforation in my right ear and that it should heal in about a month. Phew! That's good. I thought it might be worse. He told me to keep it dry and prescribed a decongestant and an antibiotic. (Infections from seawater can be pretty bad.) He also tells me that I should be OK to fly on my trip back in four days. I went next door and filled the prescriptions. (This is one-stop shopping.) The whole thing cost me about $100 Australian. I wasn't happy about that but I do have travel insurance which may reimburse me for this. But the cost is nothing compared to what could have happened. The moral of the story is don't go diving if you even have a tiny cold even though you've traveled 10,000 miles to do so.

The Cairns boardwalk at low tide. The building on the far left is my hotel.

Buying a didgeridoo in Australia is a didgeridon't.

I made it yet another early night. I did a little shopping and took some Chinese food back to my hotel room. I wanted to ge t lot of sleep so I would feel better but also because I had to catch an 8.15 train. Cairns is really pretty nice. It has a esplanade with shops and restaurants. It's a little touristy, though. Many restaurants have menus posted in English and Japanese. They get a lot of Japanese tourists. Some restaurants had menus in French, German, Italian, and other languages as well. It's very much like Miami Beach or any beach town like that. I liked it. it was accessible and reasonable. I'd go back.

9 April, Good Friday

Tilt Train to Brisbane, 8.15a-9.10a

Tilt Train so named because it will tilt up to 5 degrees in a turn.

A view from the Tilt Train. That's sugarcane in the foreground.

I'm on the Tilt Train to Brisbane and boy is this cool. It's a new, business class train with all the accouterments--a personal video screen showing movies and other on-board entertainment, plenty of luggage space, and a power outlet at my seat. Yippee! Now I can compute all the way to Brisbane, a 25-hour trip. Of course, it is Good Friday so in compliance with state and federal regulations they can only sell alcohol on the train if you order it with dinner or breakfast. Australia has a weird sense of holidays and holydays.

Notes: Movie review: The In-Laws: Bad. Food review: Sausage roll and salad for lunch: Pretty good. Movie review: Curse of the Jade Scorpion: Not too bad. Woody Allen is now the worst actor in his movies. Food review: Pork dinner: Bad. Very bad. Movie review: Pirates of the Caribean: Good. Very good. I could watch Johnny Depp read the phone book and be entertained. Food review: Old raisin toast and an apple for breakfast: It was as good as you might expect. I didn't want to pay for their breaky especially after how bad dinner was.

We're coming into Brisbane right on time or perhaps even a bit early. It was probably the most comfortable train ride I've had thus far and I don't think my next (and last) one will be any better. But it's not easy to sleep in a seat no matter how comfortable it is. Besides, I think I had a snoring Nazi sitting behind me. I think he woke me twice for snoring and I know he woke a guy sitting farther back for snoring. Who does he think he is, the king of the train? I met him before on The Ghan. My head is still stuffy. I hope this goes away.