Cairns

In late January we took a trip over east to Cairns. Cairns is a busy place by Aussie standards. It has stoplights and a road with more than two lanes which is more than enough to qualify as a major city in much of the country. It's also the northernmost point of true civilization on Australia's East Coast. There is a good road north to Port Douglas, but Port Douglas is little more than a crossroads. The area between Cairns and Port Douglas is noted for its stunning and treacherous coastline. I know of at least two 50+ ft yachts that were wrecked there just while I was in Australia. For geography and ecology buffs, its also the only place on Earth where two United Nations World Heritage Areas occur adjacent to each other. North of Port Douglas most places are easier to get to by bush plane than any other means. Up there you're closer to Papua New Guinea than most of the rest of Australia anyway, so why not fly?

Cairns was Angel's introduction to the Oz experience. We had planned to dive the Great Barrier Reef, but when I got to Cairns and collected her from the airport the prospects for our GBR dive looked grim. Queensland had been having record-setting rainfall for the preceding month, and the forecast was for more of the same. Queenslanders have a reputation around the rest of the continent for being crazy and part of that reputation apparently comes from their penchant for disregarding personal danger. In case your were wondering, Steve Irwin was a Queenslander. Lately the Queensland youths had taken to swimming in the flooded roadside ditches, which had led to several of them being stuffed irretriavably into culverts where they ulitmately drowned. It seemed like the whole place was under a veneer of hot chocolate-colored mud and and runoff, which hardly makes one want to don a mask and fins to go have a dip.

We figured that since it was raining, why not go see the rainforest? The Daintree rainforest is the oldest rainforest on Earth and sits between the Pacific and the mountains north of Cairns. It's truly unique, with lots of plants that occur nowhere else on the planet, including giant tree ferns that can reach 20 or 30 feet tall. It's the kind of place that you almost expect to find dinosaurs still walking around. The vegetation is so thick that in some places instead of walking on the ground you are actually walking on a solid mat of roots growing along the surface of the ground. The forest floor is in a perpetual twilight because very little light penetrates to ground level, and even during thunderstorms you often don't get wet because the rain doesn't get through the canopy. It's a good idea to stay on the path too, because if the excessively thorny plants don't cut you to shreds, there's always the possiblity that an irritable cassowary could kick your head in. The place was visually stunning, but the sounds of the forest were even more impressive. Foresters say that healthy forests are noisy places, but the Daintree exemplifies this concept to the extreme. The insects were so loud that at times we had to raise our voices just to converse even when we were standing right next to each other.

The next day we continued to make the best of the soggy situation and headed a couple hundred kilometers south to Tully. It's the wettest place in Australia and one of the few spots in the country outside Tasmania where whitewater paddling is possible on a regular basis. The record rains had long maxed out the reservoirs upstream of the town so the Tully river was raging. We geared up, hooked up with our guide and a group of like-minded adventurers and headed up to the top of the Tully Gorge. The road is cut into the south sided of the canyon well above the river, but you can't see the river from the road because the sides of the canyon are so steep and the vegetation so thick. The only hint of its existence is the constant roar from below and the numerous waterfalls on the opposite canyon wall that all seem to headed to roughly the same place below.

I don't have any photos of our trip down the Tully for several reasons. Taking a camera with us would have been comically stupid. The outfitter wanted a small fortune for the photos they took, and they weren't that good. Most important, as a member of the whitewater kayaking fraternity I have a natural aversion to rafts. Admitting in writing that I "pushed rubber" down a perfectly good Class IV river is bad enough; offering photographic evidence of the deed would be heretical.

My personal inclination toward hard-hulled whitewater transport notwithstanding, it was a hoot. We had six plus the guide in our boat. In the bow were two guys from the UK who were clueless but affable and physically able. They were useful as long as you could keep them paddling together and in the right direction. Angel and I were mid-boat until mid-day when we exchanged with the guys from the UK. Behind us were two blue jean clad Koreans who were utterly useless except as ballast and entertainment. The guide perched on the stern where he did an admirable job of keeping us safe from the river and our raftmates.

The guide's name was Stubby, and we had a lot in common. He also preferred kayaking to rafting on his time off and had competed internationally in whitewater slalom. We traded kayaking stories and he told us about the geology and ecology of the of the river. He even had a boogey-man type yarn about a primitive Aboriginal tribe that supposedly practices cannibalism like some of the Papua New Guinean tribes do to this day. This tribe is supposedly located far up in the remotest parts of the Great Dividing Range where the Tully River originates. His tale included supposed confirmation of the tribe's existence by SAS soldiers who had sighted tribe members while conducting survival training in the area. Even if the cannibal Aboriginal tribe only existed in the guide's imagination, it added some local flavor to the trip.

Altogether the trip down the river took about five hours and we covered roughly ten kilometers of the rivers. There were several Class IV rapids and one Class V with enough strainers, rock seives, and hydraulics to make it interesting. Although the road follows the river the whole way, the steepness of the gorge, low hanging mist, and forested shores made the place feel more pristine than it actually was. We had a great time and I swam some of the rapids after we paddled them for grins. If you're into that sort of thing and are in the neghborhood I'd recommend a trip on the Tully.

Considering the record-setting rainfall Queensland had been having I was beginning to think that our reef trip was going to be a washout. The dive company had also called to tell us the boat we had scheduled was in dry dock for emergency repairs, which deepened my concern that the three-day dive trip we had planned was not going to pan out. But the company was able to fit us in on their other boat and the day we were due to depart dawned bright and sunny, so we grabbed our gear and trod down the waterfront about a kilometer or so to the harbor.

Plenty of high-speed catamarans are available to get divers out to the reef and back. For several hundred dollars you and about three hundred new friends can pack onto one of these air conditioned espresso bar toting rocket barges and get the outer reef in such sanitized comfort that you'd hardly know you were at sea at all until you jumped over the side. Then if you could manage to navigate out of the mass of pasty white tourist blubber around you, between the forest of legs and swim fins you might actually see something. Angel and I wanted a more relaxed experience that focused more on diving than caffeine and horsepower, so we chartered a sailboat that carried only fifteen or so people including crew. The cleintele was very cosmopolitan and included two Japanese, a couple from Spain, a very entertaining girl from Milan, a couple from Norway, two British guys, and us.

There were five crew, and they were as interesting as the passengers. J.P. was the skipper-he looked about my age but had leathery skin from a life on the water, several earrings, a handful of tattoos, and an obsession with cricket. Put a frilly shirt on him and a sword in his hand and he would have looked at home on the set of "Pirates of the Caribbean". Richard was the slightly older owner of the vessel, but he left the running of the operation to J.P. and spent most of the three days tinkering in the engine room. I think I only saw him once when he did not have grease smeared over much of his hands, arms, face, or torso. He was a pleasant guy, I just think he preferred the smell of diesel fumes to the company of his customers. The two divemasters were Jason and Aumeneh. Jason was British and had done the job long enough to be tired of it, although he tried to hide his contempt for tourists. Aumeneh never said much at all. Then there was Crystal-the cook and most colorful of the lot. She was half Philipino, half Aussie and showed up to the boat dressed in a green and yellow bikini and Australian flag. She kept us well fed and even cooked special onion-free dishes for Angel. Crystal took her role as cook seriously, but after dinner she was the first to have a drink and the last to quit. It made for some interesting late night conversations on the rear deck.

We got a total of five dives and tons of snorkeling in at the reef, all at a reef called Thetford. It's nearly due east from Cairns and had enough other dive sites on it that we could have dived twice as many places just on Thetford without getting bored. A word about the Great Barrier Reef-I had a mental image of a ribbon-shaped reef stretching the length of the coast with a gap or two here and there. In reality the reef is more spread out than I had envisioned. It's better thought of as a series of individual reefs than as the living monolith I had imagined. The other surprising thing about the reef is its size. On a map of the entire Great Barrier Reef the area we were in is little more than a dot, but when you are actually looking at it on the water the dot on the map actually stretches nearly to the horizon. You have to be there in person to understand how massive it is in real life.

Under the surface the Great Barrier Reef is even more outsized. Individual corals on the Great Barrier Reef can be as big as some entire reefs I've dived in the Caribbean. All the fame and pressure the Great Barrier Reef has been subjected to over the years notwithstanding, I think that you could spend a lifetime diving the reef and still find new wonderful things all through that time just because the place is so big.

The diving was mediocre by Great Barrier Reef standards due to sub-par visibility, but even under those conditions we enjoyed it thoroughly. There were more damselfish, parrotfish, and angelfish than I could count. We saw a Napolean Maori wrasse that was probably 2/3 as big as us, plus whitetip reef sharks, sea turtles, stingrays, morays, and

even a sea snake. We found Nemo, even though we're told he's a lot scarcer than he used to be as collectors have been pursuing him relentlessly since his movie debut. The fish are used to divers so they hung around long enough for us to get a good look and snap a few photos. We even had a giant trevally that loved to eat watermelon rind living under the boat for most of our time on the reef. Although dead coral is common now, what remains is stunning and after every dive our first words upon surfacing were "Did you see....". We've both wanted to dive the Great Barrier Reef since we were kids and we agree it was well worth the wait.

After we got back we wanted a day of dry activities so we took a drive up to the Atherton Tablelands, which is the plateau on the west side of the Great Dividing Range. The Great Dividing Range hugs the east coast of the continent; they're like the Appalachians of Australia. It was very relaxing. While we were there we did some local wildlife spotting (although we didn't get to see a crocodile or a platypus, our main targets), checked out a four-century old fig tree that's so big it creates its own microclimate, and ate at a roadside lunch stand named after Australia's most common vermin. Between all that we even found time to be breathalized by an overzealous cop, take in some great views of the coast from the front of the range, and nearly make road pizza out of a bandicoot.

The next two days we continued packing in as many activities as we could. We went fishing on the Cairns estuary with a colorful Scottish guide, whom Angel cut down to size by asking if the grunts we were catching were intended as bait for real fish. We even went back to the Daintree and hopped on a crocodile spotting cruise where we got the rare treat of seeing a mother saltwater crocodile guarding her eggs. The guide didn't want any of us getting chomped so he only got us to within maybe ten feet of her, but that was still close enough to count her teeth and see how big she was.

Photos:

1. The Great Dividing Range meets the Pacific north of Cairns.
2. Walking on fig roots in the Daintree.

3. Palms in the Daintree. Each leaf was several feet long.

4. The Daintree's way of saying"Go Away". Would you touch this?
5. Looking back toward Cairns on the way to Thetford Reef.

6. Rum Runner 2, our boat for the reef trip.

7. Some of our boat mates for the trip.

8. A common coral on the reef, maybe Acropora?

9. Two giant clams. These things were everywhere, some up to about 4-5 ft long and with every color mantle imaginable.

10. Honeycomb cod. Aussies call groupers cod, which makes things really confusing if you know cod actually are.

11. Angel harasses a pineapple seacucumber. It felt like one of the those spiky rubber dog chew toys. We returned it to the bottom unharmed.

12. Another unidentified coral, maybe Porites?

13. Paddletail in a crevice in the reef.

14. Napolean Maori wrasse. Unfortunately this photo provides no scale or context but the fish was enormous.

15. Whitetip reef shark.

16. Movie of the giant trevally that lived under our boat. Look quick toward the middle and you'll see a jack crevalle too. (Caution: this file is 20 meg so it may take a while to open especially on slow connections).

17. Black anemonefish. Again its hard to tell sizes here but the anemone was over a foot in diameter.

18. Stream outside Yungaburra in the Atherton tablelands. When I heard there might be freshwater crocodiles in it I couldn't resist looking for them.

19. Trunk and aerial roots of the Curtain Fig. This tree is so massive the first branch meets the trunk over 70 feet above the ground.

20. The Termite Takeaway outside Yungaburra. They make a good roo burger.

21. Female saltwater crocodile. She was about nine feet long and closer than she looks in this picture.