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Queensland | ||||
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I. Cairns When I arrived here I decided to go budget accommodation for a change, and after one night of getting what I paid for, pulled out and stayed somewhere nicer. (There's only so much I can take of the snob in my mind giving everything around me a bad review.) I spent five days in Cairns and didn't even see the Great Barrier Reef - by day three I was already planning to come back. The sheer smorgasbord of places to go and things to see (Atherton Tablelands, Cape York Peninsula, various islands) and do (kayaking, diving, snorkelling, skydiving) meant that I couldn't possibly polish it all off in the time available. In that sense Cairns (which I had few expectations about beforehand) was really a revelation.
The lesser-spotted Levitating Turtle of North Queensland. Well actually no, his head is just poking out of some very clear water. The Kurunda Skyrail, just north of Cairns, is a terrific kind of ski-lift apparatus which transports you across miles and miles of rainforest which you can look down into from above, and drops you into the town of Kurunda, which is touristy but pleasant (there's an Irish pub). They have a butterfly garden and museum which was just fantastic. But it was impossible to take a good photo because the butterflies never seem to stay in one place ... a few days later I learned that the beautiful blue Ulysses butterfly lives for only seven days: no wonder they're in such a hurry. Anyway, you get out of Kuranda via a delightful old rail system that brings you around the mountains and gorges (with vertiginous drops on one side all the way) and back into Cairns.  Did a couple of trips into the Atherton Tablelands, where you can swim in volcanic crater lakes, view giant strangler fig trees, visit waterfalls (right) or the ruins of an old Spanish castle and so on. The guides tell you all these horror stories about spiders whose size is denoted by their names (the Bird-Eater, for example) or aggressive snakes with off-the-scale venomousness (like the Taipan - if it bites you twice you have about two minutes to get the antidote) or plants like the Gympie Gympie Stinging tree, which continues to burn your skin up to nine months after you've brushed against it. (We were told of a horse that had to be shot because it ran into one and the pain could not be abated.) One particularly amusing tale concerned a German girl who who was given a slender python to hold, and the snake somehow managed to slither its way into the bun in her hair. As the guides tried to untangle the two creatures from each other (I myself was in knots listening to this), the girl just stood there shouting 'Cut it off!' and the guys weren't sure if she meant the snake or her hair.
Fitzroy is a delightful tropical island just off Cairns, where they do some diving, kayaking and glass-bottomed boating. There are a couple of nice coral-festooned beaches to lie out on too. I took the trouble to traipse across the island to the abandoned lighthouse at the far end, where there are terrific views. Of course, idiot here didn't do the walk quickly enough, nor at the right time of day (got there arround midday) and so on the way back, despite all my preparations, I had dehydrated like mad and developed another pounding headache. I really believe the heat and humidity on this particular island were actually worse than what I experienced in the UAE a few years ago ... which is pretty bad. Anyway, a delightful time was had by all, blemished only the presence on the return boat of some English Ibiza-going types who cracked opened some beer cans and proceeded to collectively refer to everyone they started a conversation with as 'you c*nts'. (The guys were not much better.) II. Mission Beach On the Beach would be more like it! This little getaway just two hours south of Cairns was all but deserted when I arrived, as though some apocalyptic warning had just been issued (Malone's coming). There's a huge 14-km beach here ... which you can't swim in because of the stingers. Talk about water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. There's a big sign on the beach describing all the vicious creatures floating around out there (the potentially lethal Box Jellyfish is a local) and there are two jugs of vingear handy in case you get stung. There's one enclosed perimeter (ringed by a stinger net) in which people can go for a dip, but I imagine it's a pretty sad sight during the high season - a 14km beach to lie out on and all the swimmers corralled into a watery compound of a few hundred square metres. A few days later I would learn from a couple on Fraser Island that either shortly before or after the time I was there, a crocodile had gotten caught in the stinger net. Well, I feel a lot safer now.III. The Whitsundays  With Cyclone Whatsitsname parked a few hundred kilometres off the Queensland coast and threatening to move in, it looked for a while like the WhitSunday Islands were going to be a real washout. Just my luck to arrive at some of the region's most beautiful tropical islands and find them basking in Irish weather. It's pretty low season here - the climate at this time of year keeps the tourists away and it keeps raining every few hours. From the balcony of my room on the mainland at Shute Harbour I was able to watch a solid wall of greyness barrel in off the ocean, devouring small islands as it advanced, and then had to step back into my room thirty seconds later as the rain lashed the windows. I actually toyed with the idea of just not bothering to go out there, but then I thought what the Hey, I might be lucky ... and indeed I was. Spent a beautiful sun-soaked day on South Molle island, and managed to get around the walking tracks without suffering sunstroke for a change. The island is full of rainbow lorikeets (below), who are not at all bashful about coming right up to your balcony. I think they slyly work in pairs because while I was feeding the one below another one had swooped into my room unbeknownst to me. When I stepped back in I found this cheeky taloned thing sitting on the coffee table, having torn open and feasted upon a couple of my sugar sachets. Damn spongers.
My brief moment as St Francis of Assisi IV. Fraser Island ... was what you might describe as an enjoyable letdown. The world's largest (124km long) sand island didn't live up to the hype, but I'm nonetheless glad I went. Easily the best part of it was when six of us piled into a little propellor plane that took off from (and landed on) the beach. The views of the island from the air are truly spectacular ... it's only when you get up there and actually see the rectilinear 75-mile beach stretching way off into the hazy distance that you get a sense of the size of this shoreline. Our driver told us it was perfectly safe to swim in the lakes: there used to be crocodiles in the water, but the sharks ate them. Following silence from the Korean contigent in the van and perhaps some facial expressions which only he could see in his rear-view mirror, he added: 'Just kidding.'
Fraser unfortunately suffers from the typical holiday island micro-economy, with everything standardised to extortionate prices - what are you going to do, cross to the mainland for a non-outrageously-priced can of Coke? Even the accommodation here was pricey and not very salubrious - Eurong beach resort looks like a balconied asylum. Most of the day I hung around with Franz, a German guy, and we shot some pool in the 'Beach Bar' (nowhere near) later that evening. The mortuary atmosphere in there drove us out of the place in about forty minutes.
And so in summary
I've never been quite as in touch with nature, nor had my curiosity piqued about the natural world as much as when I travelled around the Outback and tropical Queensland ... one thing you'd miss by taking a 4WD and doing it on your own is the company of other slackers, and a guide to explain it all to you. Having spent a straight year at a desk (where I now sit typing this, dammit), it was a refreshing change. |
