Left to right (Nat.): Nicolas (B), Alex (D), Yours truly, Talitha (NL), Max (D)
The abrupt end to the music that’s been pumping at Gilligan’s night club brings the inevitable shouts for more music infallibly falling on deaf ears, followed shortly after by the raucous clamor on the streets, below my single-paned sliding-glass door-window, followed shortly after by laughing, joking, flirting voices in the hallways of Gilligan’s adjacent hostel, and an earnest and intimate conversation (whose hilarity merits analysis in the next paragraph) directly outside the door-window to my room, where I have abandoned the notion of sleep for the next few hours. Unfortunately, I took no pictures of the idiosyncratic Gilligan’s Backpacker during my whole stay.
I have re-emerged to write in my journal at a table in the filthy kitchen-dining area of the first (second) floor; on the way, I encountered for a third time the earnest couple. The first time, when I left my room for the dance floor at around 9 or 10, they were standing close to each other, not touching but with desire burning like a flare between them. The second time was when I retired to my room for the first time, probably around 1 or 1:30; they had started kissing and I was happy for them as I thought, ‘get a room,’ at which point I didn’t reason that they didn’t have a room, a fact which was all too apparent around 2:30 when I chanced upon them once again—looking much soberer and more frustrated than the two previous times. I dwelt a bit on the irony of my 4-person room (about $6 more expensive per night than the huge dorm rooms that are the norm among backpackers) which I shared with exactly 0 people during my whole 4-night stay, a mere 20 feet from the table over which the couple was standing.
For its shortcomings, Cairns played host to the highlight of my trip and one of the true marvels of the Earth. My short day of scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef was an explosion of color, form, and spectacle. Not having an underwater camera, I only have photos of myself above the reef, but check out my blog post for the Great Barrier Reef on Tim Thinks for a description of the marvels to which I bore witness.
My departure from Mission Beach was indeed bittersweet. I spent most of the day on Dunk Island, a $30 ferry ride out into the Pacific Ocean (snorkeling gear included, though visibility was close to nil). On the Island, I 
met a pair of Norwegian sisters and their Dutch travelling companion who played Frisbee with my on the beach, saw a bunch of ugly “bush turkeys”, and lazed on the beach in the sun. While the underwater views proved almost nonexistent, I was nonetheless greeted by some pleasant land fauna: a friendly butterfly that landed on the strap of my snorkeling bag and stayed long enough for me to take out my camera and snap it (see bottom left corner of the photo of me). As I walked from the ferry landing to the beach via a strip of large rocks that had been baking in the sun, I saw dozens of small lizards squirming away from me. Dunk Island was sunny and pleasant but forgettable. (I saw with some incredulity an enormous billboard outside of Melbourne’s largest rail station, Flinders Street, promoting the insignificant island.)
Returning with my new Northern-European friends to Absolute Backpackers, I packed up my suitcase, chopped my last piece of Rusty’s Market fruit: a succulent (dollar!) pineapple to share, 
and made arrangements to get a ride to the bus station 50 meters away. I then bade a fond farewell to Ben, David, Talitha, Sweden, Carlotta (whom I would fortunately see the next day at Gilligan’s dance club in Cairns), Max, Nico, Gregory, Massimo et al, before getting on the 6 o’clock Greyhound bound for Cairns where the Great Barrier Reef and the rest of my travel adventures awaited me.
A few days later in Cairns, with the hours dwindling to an end on my time in tropical northern Queensland and indeed my time in Australia, I would pause to reflect on the past several days. (The unexamined vacation isn’t worth taking.) Overall, I’ve spent too much time in Cairns—similarly, I spent too much of my time in Australia in Melbourne. Very good to see Ben again and to chill on the decidedly un-British vibe he copped in paradisiacal northern QLD. This enchanted place has a way of chilling people out: of slowing them down to appreciate the scenery and the ecstatic, palpable beauty of every moment. The Aussie expression, ‘chilled out’ applies aptly to it.
I awoke fresh and rested at the crack of 11 to get my second day in paradise (or third, depending on how you count) started right: Avocadoes on buttered toast! Ben accompanied me and we split the (dollar!) rockmelon (cantaloupe), eating and giving away one half while saving the other half for the next day. The weather was not great, so Sweden and I played a game of cards, then two games of chess and mulled around the hostel, checking email and sharing photos of the previous days while Ben did his 2-5 (what a way to make a living) shift. 
The weather still failed to cooperate as I wrote post cards (somewhat uninspired post cards, having yet to live the dramatic portion of my trip—as dramatic as beach shadow puppets are and as beautiful as the stars from the beach, they still lack the visceral elation of the Great Barrier Reef) and waited patiently. Finally, I decided to come out of my shell and went down to the beach with a Frisbee and Nico. On a whim, I invited a young couple from the hostel, who had mostly been keeping to themselves, to join us at the beach. They said they’d come later, which they did! They arrived just as Nico and I had begun to tire of throwing a wet, sandy Frisbee in the rain and wind.
The four of us continued playing, with lots of encouragement for the lady whose name I don’t remember). Finally, tired of the flying disk, the man (whose name I also don’t remember) and I went for a swim in order to get out of the rain, which had picked up a bit. We swam and body-surfed for a while before the four of us walked back to the hostel, somewhat soggy but happy. 
The staff at Absolute Backpackers had organized a social excursion for the evening to “the local” (Aus-speak for the local watering hole)—which was not actually 'local' to Wongaling Beach (the true name of the village we’d been calling Mission Beach) but a 15- or 20-minute van ride away. Arriving at the hostel a mere 20 minutes before the van was to depart, I decided to (give it a) pass in favor of a shower and a little relaxation (at wast!), despite the offer of a free drink and snacks upon arrival. No use rushing when your vacation is already so short.
Clean, relaxed, and once again itchy to get out of the hostel, I slightly regretted missing the van. Fortunately, a critical mass of new friends and other AB guests had also missed the first van and still wanted a free drink, so around 7:30, we loaded up the van again and headed up to North Mission Beach and the Shrubbery Taverna (a nod to Monty Python? Most likely).
At the door, we were greeted by door-openers extraordinaire Talitha and Carlotta. Queste due carine were “paid” (in food and drink) to “open and close the door for servers and patrons” and keep the music of the Alabaman bluesman playing inside from disturbing the neighbors. The food was quite good, if overpriced (par for the course in Australia, really), and Talitha managed to sneak me a free beer or two while I danced to the music and socialized with my new hostel friends and a group of retirees from Victoria and NZ who were caravanning together.
Clean, relaxed, and once again itchy to get out of the hostel, I slightly regretted missing the van. Fortunately, a critical mass of new friends and other AB guests had also missed the first van and still wanted a free drink, so around 7:30, we loaded up the van again and headed up to North Mission Beach and the Shrubbery Taverna (a nod to Monty Python? Most likely).
At the door, we were greeted by door-openers extraordinaire Talitha and Carlotta. Queste due carine were “paid” (in food and drink) to greet customers, “open and close the door for servers and patrons,” and keep the music of the Alabaman bluesman playing inside from disturbing the neighbors. The food was quite good, if overpriced (par for the course in Australia, really), and Talitha managed to sneak me a free beer or two while I danced to the music and socialized with my new hostel friends and a group of retirees from Victoria and NZ who were caravanning together.
The photo below shows me and Carlotta, who is hard at work.
Well lubricated and reluctant to pay for more booze after the music had stopped, we hopped in a cab and sped back down to Absolute for tomfoolery by the pool, a few games of cards, the acquaintance of un grande di nome di Massimo, a pancake feast cooked up by Chef Ben, and a movie. It was then that my proffered veggie burgers paid off; while Chef Ben was hard at work over a hot stove, serving up pancakes for my new hostel friends and me, my new Kiwi veg-o (Aus-slang for vegetarian) friend Tim invited me to play cards with him and his new hostel friends. I sat down and they offered me goon and explained the rules of the game they were playing.
At this point, I feel that a brief explication of the backpacking phenomenon that is goon, is now in order. I had come across the term once before while reading profile pages of potential hosts in Cairns on couchsurfing.com and it registered only puzzlement. According to Urban Dictionary’s third entry, goon is “the cheapest possible cask wine.” In Australian backpacking circles, it is truly the stuff of legend; it provides a counterfeit touch of class to that hostel-favorite meal of pasta or rice with ketchup and fuels the handful of diehard party-makers who prefer dark hostel debauchery to early-morning (early-afternoon even) sightseeing. I passed on the offer; I would only succumb to that temptation once on my trip, a few days later in the hostel in Cairns, but I enjoyed the game, whose name is too coarse to repeat on this respectable blog, and the company.
Thus ended my second day in Wongaling.
After the spectacle of the marsupial and the monster invertebrates, I checked in to room A1 of the hostel. Ben was working his shift when I arrived, and I took the opportunity to hit the town's Woolworths an hour before it closed for the day (not to reopen the following day, it being Sunday in a small town). To accompany my avocadoes, I bought a loaf of bread and a stick of butter. For three of my holiday breakies, I would have one avocado spread onto four slices of buttered toast with a bit of salt. For the free hostel-wide barbecue that evening, I bought a pack of veggie burgers which earned me not only inclusion in the feast, but the friendship of a young Kiwi veg-o by the name of Tim.
The barbecue was nice and a good ice-breaker for the 30-some backpackers at Absolute. Tim traded me a beer for two veggie burgers, and I had bought some wine at the second of the town's two bottle shops. I was glad to have found my wine for $7.50 a bottle; cheap by Australian standards. I sat with Ben, David, and several of their coworkers: Max from Munich, Sweden from Sweden (his real name is Joacim, which is much tougher to remember than Sweden), Talitha from Holland, Carlotta from Milan.
As we ate and drank, clouds rose, fell, slid slowly across the sky, gathered above us and dispersed, re-gathered, and dropped occasional sprinkles of warm drizzle on those backpackers not eating under the veranda roof. Alternately, they obscured and revealed windows to the cosmos. As Ben told me about a previous evening spent stargazing on the ocean shore, I reflected that the last time I’d properly stargazed had probably been on Orcas Island in Puget Sound. While the stars seen from Mt Rainier were brilliant when not blocked from view by wind-blown fog, the sub-zero conditions at night were less than conducive to "gazing." We pocketed a couple of beers, a deck of cards, and a small but powerful flashlight, and headed down to the beach.
There we spread beach towels and two bed sheets smuggled from the hostel linen closet on the sand, and the seven or eight of us sat in a circle. The loud wind and persistent surf obscured our conversations and fractured the group into twos and threes before Ben hit on the idea of lying in a circle with our heads close together. We did so forthwith.
Not only was the group reunited as a single unit, but we all became (quite vocal—bordering on obstreperous) witnesses to the dance of the stellar windows and shooting stars that occasionally featured therein. We talked, joked, and laughed. I conducted an informal survey regarding the longevity of the acquaintances among the eight of us. To my credit, I knew all their names after hearing them just once (though I admittedly had trouble remembering the order of the consonants in Talitha’s name). Elisabeth Carr would be so proud!
Participants in the survey were asked to raise their hand if they had known the majority of the rest of the group within the time frame specified. I began with 6 hours and we all raised our hands. Lengthening to 12 hours, Nico, a Belgian I’d met earlier that day and I put our hands down. Eventually, by the time I got to about two weeks, we had all put our hands down, and yet, here we were: heads together in a circle, chatting merrily while scanning the skies, which at this point had cleared considerably, revealing countless Southern Hemisphere constellations.
The wind howled above us. We put our hands in the sky to cut dark forms in the dimly luminous sky and played the flashlight against nearby palm trees swaying in the breeze to play shadow puppets. I tried to photograph the shadow puppet show, but, unsurprisingly, was unable to hold my hand steady, even braced against Max’s shoulder. Tiring of the shadow puppets, but too exhilarated yet to return to the hostel, we sang songs and made Nico embarrass himself by striking poses in front of a wind-blown bed sheet as Talitha snapped away.
I decided that the water on my skin was too agreeable to leave the beach without at least wading knee-high. Ben joined me, and the two of us obliged Talitha’s happy shutter finger.
Mission Beach is truly a beautiful place and Absolute Backpackers a haven filled with beautiful people; it merited more than the three short days and two memorable nights I spent there. Fortunately, I reflected, after we had reluctantly returned to the hostel and I lay restlessly in bed while my two roommates slumbered, there was still 19 July, 2010 ahead of us.
