Arrival in Mission Beach

18 July, 2010

Sitting at the picnic table with Carlotta and Nico, Swee joins us. We're listening to the soft, steady patter of rain on the veranda roof of Absolute Backpacker’s front porch and talking about travels: plans for travelling in Aus, travels so far in Aus (of which I've had shamefully few), around Aus, and elsewhere. We're recounting shared experiences; namely, the previous day (having known each other for 12-18 hours at this point).

It has certainly been an eventful 12-18 hours:

17 July, 2010 (the previous day)

With a few hours of alone time and a page in my journal under my belt, I arrived in Mission Beach around 3pm Saturday and was met by my new friend David. Ben had told me that David would be driving a van between the Greyhound stop and the hostel and was awarded a free beer for every two backpackers without bookings he brought back to Absolute. Our first interaction was approximately as follows:

“Hey, mate, have you got accommodation in Mission Beach?”

“Hey, you must be David.”

“And you must be Tim! Ben told me you were coming.”

We waited for the van for about 10 minutes under the 10-foot Cassowary statue near the gas station, grocery store, and two Thirsty Camel bottle shops--the entirety of the town. It arrived to let people off in “town,” and we piled in. The van took about as long to turn around as it did to then drive to Absolute Backpackers. We unloaded, I saw Ben across the kitchen, the two of us reunited with a hug, and I scampered off to get a photo of the wallaby I’d seen on the other side of the pool area (success! See photo of wallaby).

“That’s nothing, mate,” he told me. “I’ll show you some animals!”

But for me it was something: my first proper marsupial in eleven months in Australia! Still no wombats, no platypuses, no koalas, no kangaroos. For shame! (A quick farewell trip to the Melbourne zoo should hopefully rectify that).

Ben took me around the side of the patio area, back behind the staff quarters to where a broad-leafed tree overhung the concrete. To the bottom of one leaf-stem clung a 4-inch long praying mantis. The second and final of the animals on Ben's impromptu tour was sitting implacably on its meter-wide web near the entrance to the parking lot, the largest spider I’d ever seen. None of my helpful new friends knew what type of spider it is; any ideas, dear reader?*

*This just in: the spider appears to have been identified correctly as a Golden Orb Spider by Rachel Dutton. Golden orb spiders have been documented, on more than one occasion, preying on birds that have flown into their webs.

Cairns to Mission Beach

17 July 2010

Inspired and oppressed by greenery rolling past my Greyhound window, QLD palm trees, banana trees, billboards blowing in the wind. Lost along the middle-of-nowhere tropical highway. It’s the balmily bleak midwinter and sugar cane fields are tall enough, vast enough to eat a grown man alive.

I arrived in Cairns last night, gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and beacon city of Tropical North Queensland, checked bags into hostel: 12 m² for $45 a night, complete with lumpy mattress, metal bed frame, and all-hours shrieking of the antiquated plumbing from the adjacent bathroom, not to mention a free veggie burger and a beer with the purchase of one $5 beer from the oh-so-classy Rhino Bar (open till 5, reinforced tables and bars for dancing upon, ‘THE place to B after 3!’ Repairing early to my hostel room after just the two beers and veggie burger, I was unable to verify this pithy couplet).

The walk back along the waterfront Esplanade with its tangled strangler-fig trees and tiled saltwater lagoon was quite agreeable. The strangler figs are actually other large hardwood trees upon which birds have dispersed seeds of the Ficus. The seed then sends down intertwining tendrils that snake along the trunk and hang from the branches; when they reach the ground below, the tendrils harden and grow into thick roots that eventually choke and kill their host tree.

A warm breeze came off the tepid salt marsh at high tide. I basked in the exhilaration of the air against my skin, the palpable quality of life’s beauty in the tropics; I smelled the slight salt air, swiped sweat off my forehead with a smile. I’m not in Melbourne anymore!

As it turns out, there isn’t much in the way of natural aesthetic beauty in Cairns’ beach, such as it is. Mostly devoid of appeal in the evening, it’s unspectacular in the daytime. People sunbathe on the grassy banks of the man-made lagoon rather than the uneven, rocky, soggy sand that is all but completely submerged at high tide. To Mission Beach, then! I woke up this morning in time for an unassuming free breakfast of toast, cereal, and fresh, local tropical fruit: rockmelon (cantaloupe), honeydew, pineapple, papaya, paw paw (I’ve been unable to determine whether this silly-named fruit is at all different from papaya or just a different name for the same thing), pineapple, and coffee whose redeeming virtue was its slight drinkability. I packed my bags, bade farewell to my room, left bags in another one, and wandered in-land to Rusty’s Market for another tropical fruit experience before picking back up my personal effects and jumping on the bus for Mission Beach.

Shorts, t-shirts, wife-beaters, flip-flops in the coldest month of the year, 50¢ avocados, dollar cantaloupes and pineapples? I could get used to this. I could get used to the flow of the Heyerdahl gyre, bringing warm ocean currents and accompanying sea breezes from the equator to caress my skin and thaw the cold in my heart. I could get used to the humidity of the air, salt on my skin and in my hair. In all likelihood, though, I won’t. This paradise fiction will remain a lovely escapist dream, a modicum of respite from the real world of work, struggle, hardship, heating, and layering. In my heart of hearts, I know that this is the dry season in QLD, the season where tourists don’t get eaten by insects or crocodiles. Where they (we) can swim outside the stinger nets without fear of being maimed by lethal jellyfish. Pretty soon I’ll have to own up to the evanescence of my vacation and head back down to Victoria, my job, and the city.

But for now, I don’t have to think about any of that. It’s only day two (and the first whole day) of my trip, and I’m in an air-conditioned bus, sugar cane fields stretching to the east as far as the foot of the distant mountains, punctuated by banana trees with protective bags over their abundance like so many crude, silver loincloths. Somewhere beyond those mist-shrouded hills lies a thin strip of off-white, overhung by palms and mangrove trees, buttressing the South Pacific Ocean.