18 July, 2010 part II

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.