Day 13 – From Cairns to Darwin

Today we leave Cairns for Darwin, the “Top End” of Australia. Our flight is in the afternoon, so we take the morning to stroll around Cairns. We are up early, but its already getting hot.

The hot climate around Cairns is great for sugar cane; this is a picture of one of the many cane fields that surround Cairns.
Our hotel in Cairns was very nice, set just across from the Esplanade, and with lots of tourists from many countries. But our early morning tour schedule has prevented us from eating breakfast anyplace except at the hotel. The hotel serves a very nice breakfast buffet, with everything from miso soup, to eggs and bacon, to breads and tropical fruits. However, it’s way more than we can eat, and, at $25 each, more than we care to spend.

We find a very nice, hole-in-the-wall type restaurant that has delicious, non-hotel style food and caters to our growing addiction to flat whites.

Then we walk on down to the central area. Cairns is on Trinity Bay; a bay named by Lieutenant Cook. Trinity Bay is a muddy bay and it also has saltwater crocodiles.
But the bayside part of the town is quite pretty. This is a picture of a kid’s free playground with fountains that sits right on the Esplanade.
We wander long enough to justify lunch, and eat facing the bay at the “Rattle and Hum.” It’s a delightful tavern with two emus in its logo and a most unusual urinal.
For lady readers who are not familiar with urinals, a urinal is a fixture in a men’s restroom into which men urinate. In the U.S. they are mostly individual porcelain fixtures that hang on the wall.

In Australia it is fairly common for the urinal to be a multi-person wall and trench affair, in which blokes stand shoulder to shoulder and direct their streams against the wall, so that the liquid runs down the wall, into the trench and away. Most of the ones I have encountered have been stainless steel.

But the Rattle and Hum urinal was unique. Instead of a trench and wall covered with stainless steel, there was a trench and a window. A perfectly transparent window looking out into a restaurant courtyard with tables and… people.

That meant that use of the device requires one to face the window, unzip, aim at the tables and people, and, well you get the picture.

I assume it was one-way glass, but I couldn’t be sure. I hesitated for a moment and then made the obvious decision: p*ss on it.

We walked back to the hotel, caught the shuttle to the airport, and had an uneventful flight to Darwin.

Day 12 – Cape Tribulation

This is our first thing that is not done with a massive group of dragon boaters and other people. Dragon boaters are nifty people, but we are realizing that we are not massive group types. This picture is of the 4 wheel drive vehicle in which we toured.
Cape Tribulation was named by Lieutenant James Cook (later made Captain) because he tore the bottom out of his ship in this neighborhood. It is wild but beautiful country.
Our first event is a trip down a river. We see our first wild crododile!
We also see Azure Kingfishers,
a tree snake and a frog.






















We walk through another rainforest,

We swim in this stream:
And go to a beautiful beach,
And prowl through the mangroves.
Then we go back to our room and, like always, go to bed way too early.

Day 11 – The Rainforest

We are picked up by a large tour bus and taken to the rainforest that lies inland from the Great Barrier Reef. The weather is still overcast, but the temperature is reasonable. The bus leaves us at a small train station and we ride an old fashioned, narrow gage train up to the rainforest.

The train track was laid mostly with hand labor, and the earth removed to cut the tracks was rolled out in huge barrels. This is a pretty hot, humid part of the world and the effort and suffering must have been immense. However, it’s a delightful ride for those of us who don’t have to cut the tracks and lay the rails.







The train drops us at a small development at the top of the mountain. We go into a butterfly preserve. Like a lot of the things we are seeing on the trip, it is operated by folks who care about preserving butterflies, and we get a fair bit of information about the habitat of butterflies, and how development threatens it. We also see a lot of beautiful butterflies.


We leave the butterfly place to take a trip through the rainforest in a World War II U.S. Army “duck,” an amphibious vehicle apparently built by women for the war, but still in service in this Australian rain forest.
The duck drives us through difficult and muddy trails, and we get to see amazing plants and a few animals.
After the duck trip we wander through a section that has caged crocodiles, a cassowary, iguanas and other animals.
We also see a demonstration of aboriginal dancing, digiridoo playing, and boomerang and spear throwing. It is interesting, but clearly put on for tourists, and the demonstrators, who appear to be college aged young men, struggle a bit to conceal their boredom. Miriam, however, gets a mild case of the hots for the young rhythm player.
The trip back is on a gondola, high above the rainforest. It’s beautiful.
Miriam grabs the following shot of cockatoos resting in a tree.
The ride back is uneventful and we go to bed way early again.

Day Ten - The Great Barrier Reef

We get up, have breakfast, and take the bus to our Great Barrier Reef outer islands tour. As we get on the bus the driver informs us that it is windy and the sea is choppy; we can decide to go another day. Since we are booked for our other days and don’t mind heavy water anyway, we board the bus.

The boat departs from the city to the North of us (Port Douglas). It’s a huge, all welded aluminum motor catamaran with at least three decks and space for oodles of folks. We sit outside. The sky is grey, and there is a moderate chop with very small whitecaps.

I don’t know what we were expecting, but it wasn’t this. The catamaran drives for over an hour at about 35 knots to get to the reef station. This is a huge, floating pontoon structure that is more or less permanently moored to a section of the outer reef. The pontoon structure has ropes with floats strung out in the water, and you are permitted to snorkel, but only if you stay withing the floats and ropes. The pontoon also has boats with deep plexiglass hulls; you can sit down in the hull, have an excellent vies of the underwater scene, and leave the driving to the tour operators.
I am eager to get in the water and am the first on the boat to don snorkel, face mask and fins. It’s still grey, cool and choppy. Miriam decides not to snorkel because she had trouble last time we went in choppy water with the chop filling the snorkel. I stay out for between half and hour and an hour. There is a wide array of different types of coral, and many, many fish. It is actually most interesting to float quietly on the surface; that doesn’t spook the fish and just floating allows me to see more because I don’t have to think about where I’m going or how to coordinate my breathing with my paddling.

I see a giant clam with a crenellated shell; it’s three feet long. I dive down to it, and can see its siphon extended about three inches out into the water from between the crenellations; the siphon hole is about an inch and a half in diameter and moves slowly in an otherworldly fashion.

It’s probably the grey sky and lack of sun, but the colors are all very muted, except for a few fish. We snorkeled in Hawaii, and the colors were more vibrant.

I climb out and find Miriam, who is just about to board one of the boats with the transparent bottoms. We climb in, but must wait to sit while an attendant fills holders on the side walls with medium sized white paper bags. I don’t understand what they are for. Miriam leans over and explains that they are barf bags, and that they all got used up on the last trip. I notice the chop is increasing.

The trip is interesting. We see several squid, a small shark, a barracuda, giant clams, pretty fish and lots and lots of coral. But it all looks grayish because of the clouds and chop. Miriam and I both realize that there is no bathroom on this vessel, and that we should have used one before we boarded. We are not able to focus as we should on the wonders of the last half of the trip.

After making the required visits to the smallest rooms on the boat we have lunch. It’s a nice buffet and we are hungry. We eat looking out over the ocean, which has grown increasingly grey and choppy. We each have a rum on the rocks. The rum is made nearby, where a lot of sugarcane is grown. I admire Australian pricing. The rum costs the same as a coke, and only slightly more than a bottle of water.

The trip back is rough, but the high point of the day. Miriam and I ride back the whole way on the upper deck. The wind is blowing so hard that we can’t easily look straight ahead. Then the wind and waves increase and we have to move to the side of the boat because the blowing spray stings so badly we can’t open our eyes at all. The boat starts to buck and we have to hang on to the side railing with both hands and take in the shock with our legs. It is almost like waterskiing without having your feet in the water, and with a much better view. Miriam wears her biggest grin of the day through most of the ride back.

We take the bus back to our hotel and, as we are wont to do, go to bed early.

Day Nine

We get up in time to get on the beach by 5:30 am. We take another walk, Miriam snaps a few photos, and we walk back in time for flat whites and (for me) another streusel.

Then we clean, pack and queue up for the bus. The bus is chock full of dragonboaters who have lots of luggage. The luggage all needs to be packed under the bus. The driver stands about 5 foot three, is portly, and is wanting to load all the luggage himself. The day is hot, the driver is disheveled and perspiring, and after 20 minutes only about a third of the luggage is loaded. It is already apparent that all the luggage may not fit.

I see someone put their luggage directly into the baggage compartment themselves. Lightning does not strike them dead. I start helping to load, and incidentally load all Miriam’s and my luggage while there is still room. We finally depart for the Brisbane airport. The driver, still perspiring heavily, picks up the microphone, thanks us all for coming to Caloundra, and requests that, if we come again, we bring less luggage.

The Brisbane airport is awash in dragonboaters and their traveling companions. Huge queues snake through the lobby, going to unknown destinations. After several false starts we are able to get boarding passes, check our luggage, and go in search of food. We have little time and the food queues are impressive. Miriam instinctively moves to the longest and slowest moving. After a while I convince her that some food is much better than food you want but don’t get to each. We order from an Asian counter with no line; it is delivered quickly and quite edible.

We munch and run to the plane. We don’t have seats together but we both have aisles. The flight only takes a couple of hours and is uneventful.

We all arrive in Cairns. The City’s name s pronounced something like “Canes” because the “r” is silent.

Actually, we don’t all arrive. My large bag with most of my travel gear decides to stay in Brisbane and party with other tardy luggage. The kindly but overwhelmed lady at the lost baggage counter says it will probably be the next day before they can get my bag to Cairns, because the tardy luggage party in Brisbane is huge, and the next flight to Cairns is already full of luggage that is tardier than mine.

We get to the hotel about 6:30 pm. We are going to the Great Barrier Reef at 8:15 am the next morning. All the conventional, accessible stores are closed at 6:30 pm, and don’t open by 8:15 in the morning. I need swimming gear, so we ask at the desk and are directed to the “night market” on the Esplanade in central Cairns.

The hotel has a shuttle that leaves every hour. We wait for the shuttle. It arrives on time, but we are too polite and end up missing the shuttle because some people who started waiting after us are not so polite. However, the shuttle comes right back. It takes us to downtown Cairns right near the water. The drop off point is a small park at the end of several blocks of well-lit niche stores. It’s raining lightly but warm, and the area is very pleasant. We find a “Billabong” surf store and a very nice young man helps me pick trunks and a “rashy.” A rashy is a stretchy shirt with UV protection that can be swum in; it keeps you from getting a rash when you lay on your surfboard. I choose basic black, and look rather sheik if you ignore the unsightly bulges in the stretchy top, which are no doubt due to poor Australian tailoring.

The very nice young man gives us directions to a building on the water that has several restaurants. We walk by the “lagoon,” which is a lighted pool just next to the ocean and quite lovely at night. The restaurants have indoor and outdoor seating. We choose “outdoor” and are directed to our table by a very pretty aboriginal woman.

Miriam gets a lamb dish, and I get “prawn and bug salad.” Both the prawns and the bugs are local. The bugs are like a large, saltwater crawfish with a very thick shell. My salad consists of some lettuce, several different kinds of melon, citrus wedges of unknown type, a sliced passion fruit that is both beautiful and quite tasty, a half dozen prawns, and one horizontally bisected bug about seven inches long. It is all delicious and we wash it down with the house Shiraz.

It is still raining lightly but still warm. The walk back to the shuttle is pleasant, as is the wait on a bench at the end of the tiny park. A lot of people come after us. The shuttle arrives. Miriam, who is much better in crowds than me and learns more quickly from experience, secures us a place in the front of the shuttle. We ride home and go to bed.

Day Eight

This is the final race day. Race placement information is not available when we arrive early in the morning, but we eventually learn that Team SOAR has qualified for the first (the fastest) division. We also learn that SOAR ’s arch rival, Pink Phoenix, is also in first division and has faster cumulative time on the first day.

The women of Team SOAR set their jaws and vow to beat Pink Phoenix.

SOAR ’s first race is very close. Six boats race at a time, and only the top three boats will move to the semifinals.

Team SOAR is in a tough struggle for first for most of the race, but ends up taking third. Team SOAR is the only U.S. Team to make the semifinals.
Before the semifinal races are run the boats are filled with volunteer paddlers and women who are too sick to paddle. They do a demonstration race and then all the boats are maneuvered side by side in the middle of the raceway and the women cast out flower petals in remembrance of those who did not survive to be at this race. It makes both Miriam and I cry. Soon she will have her tenth anniversary. We were told she would not live five years. We both feel very, very lucky.

Pink Phoenix has not made it into the semifinals. Nevertheless they congratulate and support SOAR . They get very high marks from me for sportswomenship.

At this point I suffer an ethical lapse. I am not proud of this, but I left Miriam’s side to see how the Canadian team with the wispy bit of a man did. They finished last in their first race, and were not even in first division. In other words, SOAR crushed them. I smile; I gloat. I am not proud of this.

The last race is a tough one. All the boats have good paddlers, and all the boats have finished within a few seconds of each other their prior races. Team SOAR is clearly one of the fastest three boats, but only the fastest two will go on to the finals.

Team SOAR finishes less than two seconds behind the winning boat, and a long way ahead of three of the six boats in the race, but it is not quite enough. SOAR takes third and is done for the day and the race.

It is hard to be so close and not make the finals. Team SOAR has won many, many races including the World Championships in Shanghai two years ago. It had very high hopes.

We gather up our things and go to the shuttle bus pickup spot. We hear a rumor that the race managers have stopped the shuttle buses from running to make sure everybody stays for the closing ceremonies. The closing ceremonies are a couple of hours away.

We walk to a regular bus stop and catch a bus back to our hotel. Miriam and I finally get some good news from our travel agency. The same organizational process that resulted in us not being on the list for a bus ride out to Caloundra has resulted in us not being on the list for a ride back to Brisbane. Miriam has been nagging at the travel agent most of the week without success, and we were told that a new bus listed would be posted when we got back from the final race. We have some anxiety about this because it’s Sunday, the travel agency is closed, and the race announcer has paged our travel agent several times at the race, with increasing pique at being ignored. When I first heard the first page I thought Miriam was going after her, but not. The first bus the next morning leaves at 5 a.m.; if we are on that we will have an eight hour lay over in Brisbane.

The new list is posted and our bus leaves at 11:15!

I go take a short swim in the ocean. The water temperature is pleasant temperature, but the surf, at this time at least, is too mild to allow my modest body surfing skills to catch me a wave.

We gather with our friends for dinner. We decide to walk a bit to a Thai restaurant down at the next beach. The restaurant does not have a license, but allows BYOB, so the men are all carrying baggies with bottles of assorted alcoholic beverages.

Everybody is really pooped. Once couple locks both their keys in their room, and the husband stays behind to rouse management (it’s Sunday and the office is closed), while the rest of us walk on ahead, swinging our baggies. Again we fail to look like the elegant people in travel magazines.

The restaurant is half a block down a side street, and the wife of the keyless couple wants to stay out on the street corner to flag down the key hunting husband. I take her place, she goes in, then comes out again, doubles over and puts her hands to her face. It turns out a sizeable bug (not a bird of paradise) has flown up her nose. The wife is such a lady that she can not bring herself to deliver an eviction-level snort. However, the bug is finally induced to leave, the husband arrives with keys, and we sit down to a wonderful dinner.

We do another race post mortem and everyone loudly agrees that Team SOAR has done very well, that the quality of breast cancer survivor racing has improved dramatically, and that Team SOAR is entitled to feel great: the only U.S. team in the semifinals, and less than two seconds away from being in the finals. More quietly, however, everyone acknowledges it would have been a lot more fun to win.

We walk back to the hotel. Miriam has amazing energy and starts to work on our laundry (we don’t know when we will next have easy access to a washing machine and dryer). I crash.

Day Seven

We have flat white coffees at the local bakery, and I indulge in a slice of apple streusel. It’s about 9 inches long, almost three inches wide, and about two and a half inches high. It’s stuffed with a delicious mixture of mostly apples and a few sultanas (Auzzie for “raisin”). I eat the whole thing and grin.

We take the bus to the race site. The race site is very nice, sheltered water almost like a pool, with tents erected along the raceway to shelter racers. More than 70 teams are registered, with about 20 paddlers on most teams.
Team SOAR has three races today.

Miriam’s first race is very close and they take second place.
Her team wins her second two races, the third handily. That's them in the white uniforms.


Teams will be placed in three different divisions the next day, based on total time in all three races on the first day. We think her team has done well, but no hard information is available.

We take the bus back and go with a bunch of paddlers to “Aussie World.” It has rides, music, carnival games and food. Dragonboaters have rented the whole thing, and most things are free. We are greeted with a packaged snack and a small bottle of sparkling rose, appropriately packaged in dragonboating pink. We much and slurp it down, sitting in a nice, covered area and listening to a singer with a guitar and a computer that plays her backup. She rarely touches her guitar and sounds like a whole band.

Miriam starts to move to the music so I ask her to dance. We are the first, and initially the only, dancers. I’d be too self-conscious to do this at home, but hey, I’m on sabbatical and in Australia. It’s really fun to dance together, and a number of people join us.

Then we do bumper cars and wait in line for the roller coaster. Waiting reminds Miriam that rides like that make her sick, so we go queue up for food. The buses are scheduled to leave at 9:00 pm to take us back, but Miriam’s team is in training so we leave at 8:00 pm, go home, and fall asleep.

Later we learn that a woman from another team was so inspired by our dancing that she started dancing herself, fell, broke her hip, and was awaiting hip replacement surgery in Australia.