Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2001

20 August 2001

G'day from Cairns

The tourism carries on apace! Jackie and I spent a very pleasurable two days on a sailing boat called 'Vagabond' at the start of the week, destined for the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, we had some unseasonably bad weather on the way out resulting in one of the other passengers heaving over the side and us having to spend the night hiding in the lee of Fitzroy Island instead of heading for the Outer Reef as planned. Having had recurrent ear problems for most of my life, I had thought diving would be a total no-no for me but the on-board dive instructor was willing to take me down to see if I'd be able to equalise the pressure. I'm very glad to say that I could and after two dives to pulsating coral, cruising turtles and extraordinary many-hued fish, I'm totally sold on diving. According to Jackie, my head is now swollen from all the praise heaped on me by the crew of the 'Vagabond' who reckon I'm a natural at diving and am, in fact, a fish. For someone who's never been that happy in the water, I've surprised even myself so I'm staying on an extra week in Cairns to get my Open Water certificate.

Friday saw us floating above the tropical rainforest just outside Cairns on the Skyrail. This is long, Alpine-style gondola that whisked us up to Kuranda which is nestled in the lush greenery of the surrounding hills. Kuranda's a total tourist town but we had a good day up there perusing the many shops and returning on the scenic railway through the Barron Gorge. Australians not only eat everything that moves but also skin it and turn it into leather. We saw wallets, hats, bags and furry golf club cosies made of everything from barramundi to emu to wallaby. I made it my mission for the day to leave wearing as many dead animals as possible and came away with a crocodile belt and a purse made from the front half of a particularly cross-looking cane toad. I had a bit of an ethical dilemma about the croc but cane toads are noxious introduced pests; they deserve to die and have $20 bills shoved up their warty little butts.

I indulged myself in a literary fantasy on Saturday when we took the ferry out to Green Island. I read about it in 'A Town Like Alice' when it was an undeveloped paradise hideaway. It's obviously changed a lot since Nevil Shute's day but it's still a great place for a day trip. We went on a semi-submarine for a quick tour of the reef and got all excited identifying the various species from our fish ID cards, then went snorkelling with an underwater camera. I don't know what the pictures will turn out like but the underwater world out there is simply stunning and I can't wait to dive on the Outer Reef.

Today, while Jackie got all horsey on me again and went for a canter in the woods, I bounced around on a quad bike for a couple of hours. I haven't spent this much money in a long time but it's great fun just to be on holiday again. Thanks to Les in the Alice, we have a great deal on a hire car fixed up so will be taking off for the jungles and tropical beaches of Cape Tribulation next week. You must all hate me.

27 August 2001

G'day from Cairns, part 2

Cairns, when Jackie and I first arrived here, reminded me of a British seaside resort. The sky was thick with low, grey cloud and there was a stiff breeze blowing empty crisp packets along the strip of scrubby, cigarette butt-strewn grass that serves as the Esplanade. Seagulls hungrily eyed our lunch and the tide was out, revealing a slick of gloopy mud instead of a beach. Add in a couple of tacky souvenir shops, a chippy and a few piles of dog mess and you'd have Weston-Super-Mare on a Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, the sun eventually came out and the illusion of old England melted into the pleasant, tropical Aussie town that I'd expected.

The sun's still shining and has been most of the week. We did, however, get the full-on tropical rainforest experience up at Cape Tribulation. With our bargain hire car and Natalie, my fellow mischief-maker from Alice, in tow, we first headed inland to the Atherton Tablelands. This is an often-missed area of lush hills and pretty farming country. We stopped off at a couple of tranquil crater lakes, waterfalls and two enormous, convoluted strangler fig trees that are amazing feats of nature. They start as little tendrils that creep their way up an unsuspecting forest giant, then slowly engulf it in ever-thicker ropes of vine. Finally, only the fig tree is left as the poor host tree withers and dies in its suffocating grasp.

We had another large strangler fig outside our bedroom at Crocodylus Village, a cluster of environmentally-friendly wood and canvas cabins deep in the rainforest near Daintree. We spent three nights there after stopping in at wealthy Port Douglas and the splendid Mossman Gorge, then crossing the croc-infested Daintree River. I'd had a postcard of Cape Tribulation on my pin-board at the BBC to inspire me and it showed a sweep of white sand fringed by dense rainforest on one side and a coral reef beneath a turquoise sea on the other. When we got there it was murky and grey, then the rain started coming down and we had to retreat to the Bat House instead and admired a handsome spectacled flying fox called Rex.

When the weather improved, Jackie found another horse to canter about on but ended up gallantly preventing a fellow rider becoming unconscious after falling off and at the same time stopping the horses galloping into the forest. I had a less dramatic morning paddling out in a sea kayak at sunrise and having a tropical breakfast on a deserted beach. A spot of sunbaking at Cow Bay, a few games of volleyball, a midnight swim to watch phosphorescent plankton in the sea and an excellent Night Walk to search for beasts in the forest completed our time in the ancient wilderness of the Daintree.

2 September 2001

G'day from Cairns, part 3

*waving arms around madly and in singsong voice* I'm a certified diver! La la la la la!!

As you know, I did an introductory dive a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it so much that I decided to go through the whole Open Water course to be able to dive without the need of a hand-holder. My guide on this mission was underwater guru, Ray, a moustachioed geezer from the island of Jersey, now resident in Cairns by way of New Zealand.

The fun - and, as Ray would often say, "Diving IS fun!" - started on Tuesday with an 'O' level physics revision class on the basics of pressure, volume and density. Then it was onto intermediate physiology with the calamities that can befall the careless diver like nitrogen narcosis, lung over-expansion and "the bends". Finally, I got to grips with a scary-looking thing consisting of three tables of numbers called the Recreational Dive Planner. And that was just the morning. In the afternoon it was on with all the gear and lurching into the swimming pool feeling like a hippo with no centre of gravity. Amongst other necessary skills, I had to learn to fill my mask with water and snort it back out again, accidentally-on-purpose lose my regulator mouthpiece and find it, then pretend to run out of air and use Ray's spare. On paper it all seemed like a case of ''You want me to do WHAT?", but in a few feet of still water it was actually really easy.

On Wednesday I ploughed through the Open Water maunal. Thursday morning saw me sitting in front of the TV watching dodgy 70s computer graphics and a woman with very long, red finger nails doing her scuba course without breaking a single one. I then sat a series of tests to make sure it had all sunk in. There was more sinking in of a different sort back in the pool when I had to thrash around doing bizarre things like taking my weight belt off and putting it back on again underwater.

With more homework I was ready for the moment of truth - The Final Exam. I was feeling quietly confident and when Ray had marked my 50 answers there was a big ''100%" in red letters on the whiteboard. It was time to hit the open ocean. I had hoped to be going back on the 'Vagabond' for my four open water dives to complete my training, but everyone's gone to Brisbane for the Goodwill Games and there weren't enough bookings to justify taking the boat out for the weekend. Instead, we did two day trips at Moore Reef.

On Saturday, things started to go a bit pear-shaped. The worst thing I had to do during the entire course was swim 200m round the boat then float for 10 minutes. I'm not the strongest swimmer and hate being out of my depth with nothing to hold on to. In the process I managed to lose my mask. This wasn't just any old mask; this was the mask on which I spent the $100 I earned from my first travel writing publication, so I was seriously annoyed with myself as well as being knackered and a wee bit panicked. Consequently, my first dive, which should have been an easy cruise around just admiring the fish, was all a bit of an effort especially when I couldn't get my buoyancy right and kept crashing into the coral or floating up to the surface unexpectedly. On my second dive, I'd calmed down a bit and we started doing some of the skills work. Throughout all this Ray, bless him, was the model of patience and encouragement and wisely didn't ask me to do the no-mask swim that day.

Some kind soul rescued my mask from the parrotfish and today was a different story. I sailed through the tasks and we had two fabulous pleasure dives. I saw a cuttlefish for the first time who sat watching us, quietly changing colour to match the coral, while I did my skills. Wally, the ugly-but-cute Maori wrasse, made friends with the snorkellers while clown fish snaked in and out of their favourite anemones. Yesterday's turtle and humpback whale didn't reappear but fish in a myriad shapes and colours cruised past, darted in and out of the violently-hued coral and flitted around my head. It's been a tough week but it's been so worth it. It's a mind-blowingly beautiful world down there and now I have the means to explore it.

11 September 2001

G'day from Airlie Beach

Luxury. Relaxation. Minimal effort. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, that's what I've had for the last three days. It wasn't all sloth - I did do the odd bit of swimming, hauling on a rope and half an hour of steering, but when you cruise the Whitsunday Islands the emphasis is most definitely on leisure. I sailed on the 'Iluka', an 80-foot wooden ketch with 10 others, plus three crew. We were fed six scrumptious meals a day, taken to some of the best snorkelling sites in the area and dropped off on beaches made in heaven. I also dived on a patch of pretty reef for 40 minutes, caressing coral, chasing fish and watching giant clams gulping. On two snorkelling trips I swam down into canyons between huge coral bommies to watch parrotfish munching on the coral, giant barramundi cod being groomed by cleaner wrasse and shoals of yellow-tailed fusiliers cruising in the filtered sunlight.

We moored the first night at Whitehaven Beach which usually features in all brochures about the Whitsundays as it was voted Best Beach in the World eight years in a row. The sand has the consistency of icing sugar being almost pure silica which would instantly form glass if you heated it up enough. If it wasn't for the heinous sandflies I would quite happily live there forever. As it was, we played cricket on it and swam off it, and I made a sneaky midnight visit to it to watch the moon, shaped like the bottom half of a boiled egg, come up. As the sun went down, green turtles, for whom the area is something of a singles bar, came up to surface and I could hear them gasping as they took another deep breath before submerging. Today we had the company of a bottlenosed dolphin bow-riding.

I had more Nature than I could get my senses round on a trip out from Townsville last week to dive the wreck of the SS Yongala. This schooner was built in 1903 and sank in a cyclone in 1911 with the loss of all 121 lives. Since then, it's turned into one of the top ten dive sites in the world with a proliferation of soft corals supporting a truly mind-numbing array of sea life. Among the highlights on my two dives were four whip stingrays flapping lazily along the bottom with a white-tipped reef shark, a venomous-looking lion fish hiding in a porthole, huge cod and groupers lurking in the sinister shadows under the bow, a three-metre shovel-nosed shark hanging in the murk beyond the wreck and a friendly turtle called Oscar who likes having his shell stroked. On the way to and from the site we saw mother and baby humpback whales. The female was breaching and thundering back into the ocean on her back and the calf jumped right out of the water with the fun of it all. I think it was nearly as excited as I was.

As well as doing the Yongala, I also went over to beautiful Magnetic Island from Townsville. If Australia is laid back, Maggie is horizontal. My first stop out from Cairns on the Oz Experience coach was Mission Beach which I had to visit for the Big Cassowary and a spot of nocturnal skinny-dipping. Well, what else do you do on a deserted tropical beach on the night of the full moon?

15 September 2001

G'day from Hervey Bay

I suppose in the future the appalling terrorist attacks in the States will be one of those 'Where were you when...?' events. I heard the news while shuffling into the kitchen of my hostel in Airlie Beach, head muzzy from a big night out with my 'Iluka' shipmates, in search of a cup of tea and a slice of toast. The TV in the lounge area was showing CNN News direct from New York and Washington, but at first I thought it was tuned into some Hollywood action movie. I stood and blinked at it for a while until I spotted the local 7 Network logo in the corner of the screen and realised with horror that the 'breaking news' was for real. I joined a small group of other backpackers sitting in stunned silence as CNN replayed wobbly images of the second airliner smashing into the already-crumbling wreck of the World Trade Center.

This week there seems to have been an unspoken, collective agreement by the backpacker community to have fun whatever. The pubs and clubs in Airlie were pumping as usual on Wednesday night and the next night on the Oz Experience bus was one that will go down in history according to our driver. We trundled on through the flat sugar cane country to Rockhampton, home of the Three Big Bulls, and Bundaberg where Australia's only brand of rum is produced. We've been travelling down the lush east side of the Great Dividing Range since leaving Cairns but crossed over to the drier, more outback-like west side of the mountains to get to the one-horse town of Dingo. Our beds for the big party night were at Namoi Hills Cattle Station, a 25 000 acre property where we tried our hands at whip-cracking, boomerang-throwing and didgeridoo-playing, and some folk had holes shot through their clothing with a pump action shotgun. I earned myself a free beer simply for wearing my Akubra hat which has serious street cred out in the bush. The evening was given over to line dancing, drinking races and tug o' war against the northbound bus, then frenetic dancing on the tabletops until the small hours. Yesterday morning dawned to some seriously sore heads and a healthy dose of gossip.

We rolled into Hervey Bay this morning, actually a collation of five communities. I'm staying in the charmingly-named Scarness and was hoping to throw myself out of an aeroplane this afternoon but it's too windy. I'm off to the biggest sand island in the world, Fraser Island, tomorrow for three days so I thought I'd squeeze this email in before I left. The thing about Australia is that it feels so very far away from anywhere else but at the moment that seems like a good thing. It may be largely ignored by the rest of the world most of the time but I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else just now.

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