Tropic Days
Here I am in Australia, in Cairns, up North on the East coast. The pick-up at the Cairns' Airport is late, thus I get a first breeze of the Australian air and sun: it's hot and humid and burning! I am lucky with the choice of my hostel: Tropic Days (the name is a program...) and my flatmates. I make friends with another German girl and an Irish young lady on career break, Corinna and Catherina are good company in these days that we explore the surroundings of Cairns on a scooter and get out to the Great Barrier Reef! Hostel life is pretty unusual to me, people getting into the room and out without greeting, leaving just after one night. I am pretty surprised by the tourist business going on in this place and feel totally overwhelmed by the offer of guided tours that one can do: Rainforest, Tablelands, Aborigines culture centre, Great barrier reef sailing and diving tours...and hundreds of more that I don' even remember. After a deep breath and a good night sleep - actually the long talks with Eva and John left me very tired - I decide to do two toors: Passions of Paradise (mmmmhh...a Katamaran tour out to two sites in the reef) and Uncle Brian (which I will tell you more about later on).
Fish-ing in the Reef
Passions of Paradise is a tour in a humongous catamaran, with a young crew and all very friendly greeting us when we get on board. We are prepared with suncream, hat and scarfs to cover ourselves. The sun is really burning and in a way makes me really worry. The light is so sharp as it could cut a paper. The sky is actually quite cloudy as we leave the harbour, the feeling on board of this beautiful boat is great: I am out on this boat and heading towards the Great Barrier Reef! The tour has been awarded various times, and supposed to be one of the best. After a lot of thinking I decided to do a day tour snorkelling to start with, as I got a bit anxious about snorkelling. In the end a wise decision as it turned out.
My first Cat-suit
It is stinger season! Get used to wild-life in Australia....there are deadly animals around almost each corner. But there is a measure against almost everything, which means I get to wear my first stinger-suit! In beautiful blue, it covers me completely, inclusively my head. So, here I am, in a cat-suit, with my snorkel getting out on this small island, feeling like Bond-girl...shitting my pants full that I could meet a shark. I am not sure if I should trust what I hear: there are only baby sharks out there, they are more scarred than we are, etc. I put myself a cushion around my hips - very bond-girl-like - in order to feel safer and in order to float! This strategy turns out to be a very good choice: snorkelling is actually very tiring, particularly in this heat, and with the body cooling down in the water, thus I do very relaxing breaks floating on my back, smiling, looking into the sun, thinking about what I am seeing down under my feet: a beautiful world of its own, full of colours, sparkling in the sund, fishes that look like someone has painted them and I start to believe that someone must have designed this! It truly feels like paradise, and you do get passionate about it (so the tour mission achieved 100%)....I am completely absorbed by the beauty of it, that it is difficult to acknowledge also the fact that I see part of the corals damaged, without color, grey that is evidence of the pollution doing its work in the reef. I feel too happy about the beauty, but it is healthy to see also the pollution, thinking how bad we do to destroy the beauties of the paradise we have been given! Completely exhausted by the experience we get back happy and safe into the harbour at night. Noone beeing eaten by a shark or stinged to death by a jelly fish! How lucky we are.
Uncle Brian
Uncle Brian is my second tour that I do the day after Passions of Paradise. The name of the tour seems much less exciting, but....it was recommended, and I do trust recommendations of people that I trust. So here I am with an Irish couple from my hostel waiting for Uncle Brian at 8.30am in the morning.
He is late, not Uncle Brian, but Cousin Brad and Gus (the bus, but you are not allowed to call him bus, he doesn't like that we are told in the introductory speach of Cousin Brad). In 5 minutes Cousin Brad already gets us falling down our seats in the bus, he is a real COMEDIAN...too funny to believe that this is true and where I got into! He is tall, long legs, and arms (they actually seem too long for his body), he has rasta hair and probably has accumulated all Australian's humor. So we are introduced into his world, and during the day I start to believe that he must have made up the story when he was smoking something as it is too crazy and too funny for an adult person with a clear mind to come up with. The tour is a great combination of fun, fun, fun: as Cousin Brad put it in the morning introduction, we get to swim, eat, swim, eat, swim, eat! He keeps his promise and drives us up to beautiful locations in the rainforest.
At the first stop we get to see HUMONGUOUS spiders...I don't mind the spiders, they seem pretty calm, I admire their nets as they are the largest I've ever seen. I refrain to swim in the creek, as I heard too much about sweet water crocodiles. Last week there was one on a playground in Cairns. Mmmm I haven't told my Mom about it to not worry her too much. So, after we swam / or some of us, we eat, and drive to the next stop: a beautiful waterfall (I think the Josephine Falls) which serves us as a slide! FUN FUN FUN we get to climb up a big rock, Cousin Brad secures us and we have a rope to cling to. We slide down, dump under water and again: this is FUN! The water is crystal clear, green, like a smaragd. A guy in our group is scared to death of the water, however in the end with Cousin Brad's help he makes it to the rock, and slides down under our applause. Next thing to do: ride on Gus and do lots of funny games that I forgot about and was probably playing last on teenager parties, but again it's FUN. Everyone is enjoying this, and Cousin Brad's humour seems to release all the tensions.
As we enter the Tablelands, the lanscape suddenly changes and we see green meadows and cows: how happy they must be here, having so much space! We have lunch in a local guesthouse, get to eat my first Chocolate Mud cake (not my most favourite I have to say, I hereby confirm Italian dolci to be the most delicious!) and we continue on to our last destination for FUN: the 16m high waterfalls that was used as a background in one of the commercials for deodorant (no promotion here). Remember the beautiful lady in the lake, raising her hed throwing around her beautiful long hair? That's where we went! And get to do the same photo, Cousin Brad is a very professional photographer and motivates a lot. However I decide to swim to the waterfall, there are rocks where you can sit, and damm, the force of the waterfall is so bit that you feel it already meters away from it. It scares me a bit, it's a special thing to do, as I get closer and finally up on the rocks. The water dumps down from 16m in front of me and is STRONG! Some of us dive unter the waterfall, I couldn't do that. My heart is beating strong, it takes my breath away and I need to calm myself. AFter a little while I decide to swim back, and as I "land" it starts raining! So Cousin Brad is happy, as we promised us some RAINforest...how funny he is!
Driving back to Cairns, we stop in place where he gets us to know his grandmother who waits for us with a basket full of stuffed animals (supposed to be the wild creatures in the outback), he makes us sing: the men for the women, the women for the men, and finally as he puts on "What a wonderful world" we are all moved. We get to get some disco light as well (the alarm light of Gus), so as we get into Cairns we seem to be a party bus so we need to bend down when we pass a police car. However we were a good group: have greeted all the people doing roadwork (happy people that deserve a smile, according to cousin Brad), and it's somehow sad to leave the bus, what an excellent day full of laughter! It was the best time I had for a long time.
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