22 July 2010

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.