We arrived at our hostel, Gilligan’s in Cairns at around 7pm on Thursday evening. Tired from a long afternoon of planes trains and automobiles, we shuffled down the hallway and pushed open the door to our new temporary abode. Nothing could have prepared us for the cast of characters that awaited us inside. To preface this, it should be noted that I have stayed in plenty of hostels, and there always seems to be at least one person that makes you raise your eyebrows for whatever reason...I have never encountered a hostel roommate that made my entire jaw drop. Our six new roommates consisted of six guys, all around our age, and all from the UK out of sheer coincidence. Five of them were relatively uninteresting, average, perfectly nice guys. Their accents and slang words were obviously near impossible for us to properly understand, so I just did my best to follow their thought processes while speaking to them, and let details and actual facts fall by the wayside. Now the sixth member of this perfectly motley crew is difficult to explain in any way that does him proper justice. Before I go on, let me first establish that he was one of the nicest, most fun and most personable people I have ever met in any hostels or even in any of my travels thus far.
That being said, I want you to picture Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, and somehow cross him with Aladdin. Now take off the hat, get rid of the sparrow tattoo, lose the monkey, and that's him. He had scraggly looking dreadlocks with an occasional feather hidden amongst them. He later explained to us that his dreads were actually fake, but were attached to tiny actual dreads of his actual hair which he was trying to grow out. That's a lot of effort for some pretty low maintenance hair if you ask me. He was tall and thin, had black nail polish on his fingers and toes, a not so dainty lip ring, a touch of Jack Sparrow's eyeliner and typically wore pants which he had clearly stolen from Aladdin. All in all, a pretty impressive hybrid as far as I'm concerned. That night, as we all sat around getting ready to go explore the town, someone asked Jack Sparrow if he had ever been to the States. He coughed a little into his drink upon hearing the question and then said, "Funny story about that..." Immediately the room was all ears. "...I'm not really allowed into the states for 25 years." This statement was at first met with a wall of silence, but eventually erupted into a chorus of astonishment, skepticism and concern. "Relax you ninny buggars, it's just a few misunderstandings along the way." Nobody paid too, too much attention to his bizarre response to a seemingly simple question and we laughed it off. "Well, if any of us go missing this weekend, my money's on this bloke." said UK boy #4 with a hint of concern in his voice. We never did find out why he wasn't allowed into the States. Ignorance is bliss...
The next morning, Diane and I were up early and walked the three blocks down to the marina in the humid morning sun. Being so much further north, there was close to a 15 degree difference in the air, humidity aside and it was definitely a nice change. After some brief but fairly serious confusion as to what boat we were supposed to actually be meeting, we eventually figured it out and boarded "Osprey V" for a day spent on the Great Barrier Reef. We left the dock at just before 8:15am and slid across to the reef amidst great conditions and almost no clouds. Once I had come to terms with just how many bodies that they had crammed on the boat, I was able to enjoy myself much more. I watched as young Asian tourists and fairly older German tourists stood at the back of the boat staring at the other snorkelers bobbing around the water. I'm assuming that their thought process was something along the lines of, "Hmm, looks easy enough." Which then led them to the decision that they too could easily hop in the water and everything would be fine, right? Wrong. I watched the following scene six times in a row: Uncoordinated tourist determines that they can swim, collapses (not jumps) into the water, disappears for a second or two, then reappears to the surfaces thrashing around inhaling water and screaming into their snorkel. Sorry, you still can't swim, and you clearly didn't learn in the past eight seconds. Someone would then either have to jump in and retrieve them, or they would throw them something to drag them back to the boat. SIX TIMES THIS HAPPENED!
Anyway, after the chaos had cleared and all of the hideously uncoordinated tourists had exhausted their limit of 12 minutes of exercise and retreated to the boat, I seized the opportunity to see more fish than people and hit the water. The stinger season (apparently) begins in the summer months, and being that it was the beginning of November, we were now toeing the line of their locational probabilities. In turn, this created hysteria amongst the uncoordinated population and also resulted in all of them squeezing themselves into bright blue full body stinger suits. I took my chances and nixed the suit, even though the Blue Man Group look seemed to be the predominant trend of the day. Call me edgy.
The outer fringe of the Barrier Reef was unlike anything I have ever seen. To say that it blew my mind is an understatement. Before I even got in the water, I could tell that it was something special, and not just because it’s kind of a known fact. From the top deck, it was reef as far as the eye could see, branching out in ever direction imaginable - including up. I hustled out of the deeper water and was immediately greeted with a blast of warmer water and life everywhere. For me, the most surprising thing about the reef was that it was not linear - it was just below me at a relatively shallow depth everywhere I looked, completely void of a stopping or starting point. The coral was more colorful than anything I was prepared for and at first I had to blink a few times to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. Massive spreads of table coral, sea anemones with clown fish darting in and out, little white tip sharks cruising by, enormous parrot fish - I could ramble until I ran out of names and had to just start describing things so I’ll spare you. Take home message: it totally blew me away.
Tired and salty, we rolled ourselves back to the hostel around 6:30 and our charming roommates were already gearing up for the night. I was standing in the doorway talking to roommate #3 when Jack Sparrow came out of the bathroom. I moved aside for him to walk by and noticed his carefully applied eyeliner. I complimented him on his appearance choice and he responded in true Jack Sparrow form, “Aw, cheers, love.”
The next morning was another early one and we were outside Gilligan’s by 6:50 waiting to get picked up for our trip to the rainforest. One the tour company retrieved us, the day’s first stop included the Port Douglas Zoo. Diane and I passed back out almost immediately on the bus as our delicate roommates (much like my Sydney roommates) were gifted snorers, aside from the fact that we were all out late to begin with. So the Port Douglas Zoo was a nice little zoo that broke up the long drive north on the way to the Daintree Rainforest and to Cape Tribulation. We spent about an hour wandering through their little exhibits with tree kangaroos, koalas, kookaburras and the usual Australian suspects. Considering that we were definitely the first people through the door that morning, the kangaroos were quite ravenous by the time we got to them. We spent some time hanging out with the roos, feeding them as well as the ducks which came in tow.
After the zoo, it was off to Mossman Gorge which is hardly a gorge...more like a river with some nicely smoothed rocks. Either way, the walk into the “gorge,” was really nice and was the first real look at what an Aussie rainforest is like. I saw my first wild kookaburra in there which I mentally noted as a major accomplishment. Once we reached it, the river water in the gorge was crystal clear and quite cold, but had created some pretty cool rock formations along it’s path making the whole scene seem like it was ripped from a magazine somewhere.
Next, we were off to Cape Tribulation for lunch and a little beach combing. We drove for another hour or two, deep into the rainforest but sticking moderately close to the coastline as we continued our northern push. Finally, we pulled into the Cape Tribulation Beach Resort where we had a great dinner of local fish and game before darting down to the beach. Again, totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen, the beach looked like something from a movie as well. There were a grand total of five people on the beach when we walked down, but they were tucked so far back into the shade of the trees it was as if they didn’t exist. The lush rainforest came crashing down to the beach practically right to the surf line. The wall of tropical trees shot up from the sand for several towering meters and at a few points, totally blocked the beach, forcing us to either clammer over fallen trees or venture out into the stinger infested waters to walk around. Talk about having your own private tropical beach. It was the type of beach that I could imagine it looking exactly the same for thousands of years prior to my tramping around it that day. It was totally untouched and even more untamed, as the forest that framed it was too dense to even make a few true steps into.
After prying ourselves away from the beach, we went for a pretty cool little walk through the Daintree Rainforest and into the mangrove forest within it. It was unmistakably a rainforest, but not nearly as wet and dark as the Amazon or Panama and Costa Rica. The fauna itself looked similar enough, but there was a huge amount of light penetrating through the canopy and the forest floor was still quite dry. I suppose it was what an Australian rainforest would logically look like, considering the better portion of the country is entirely desert. Anyway, there were enormous ferns and palm leaves with vines dangling from the highest trees all the way to the ground. Of course, the spiders were abundant and we saw two spiders that were clearly amongst the groups of steroid-ridden arachnids dwelling within the continent of poisonous critters. What would a trip to the rainforest be without some semi life threatening animal sightings?
The last activity that we crammed into that day was a swelteringly hot, but equally entertaining “Crocodile Cruise” down the Daintree River. The river itself definitely looked like what I remembered the Amazon to look like. It was a dingy brown color with vegetation shooting straight up out of the water on either side with mountains in the distance. We saw two healthy sized crocodiles, one of them spotted thanks to yours truly and the other tucked up on the river bank located by the guide. Exhausted and a little sun-kissed to put it lightly, we again, passed out immediately upon getting back in the bus and slept for most of the long ride home.
The next day, we said an early morning goodbye to our roommates and headed for the airport thinking we were going home that day. Little did we know that we were about to become a participating party of Australia’s largest airline strike in history. Qantas, or more - Qantas’ president, Alan Joyce, was apparently quite fed up with the labor unions operating and protesting within his airline. In what I’ve deemed to be a not-so-mature response, he more or less threw his own hissy fit and grounded the entire fleet of “Flying Red Roos,” totally without warning stranding passengers all around the world. Including me!! So to make a long and very, very stressful story short, Diane and I got an extra two days in Cairns in a real person’s hotel, (the Hilton) not a hostel, and even ate real person food and not whatever was the cheapest thing on the menu with the understanding that Qantas had given us a stipend for every day that we were stranded. The first day however, was spent almost entirely on hold with Qantas, (and never getting off hold after 3 hours,) room service, frantic phone calls to anyone I could possibly think of that might have even a slight inkling as to what I should do to get home, and a desperate combing of the internet for any method of transportation back to the Gold Coast that wasn’t the 30 hour bus ride I so desperately wanted to avoid. Although we were in two crisp king sized beds and the world’s most comfortable mattresses, I slept very little that first night. All I could think about was the Qantas guy at the airport, the only Qantas employee I had made contact with, telling me that I had better sort things out quickly because the flights that were supposed to leave for Sydney that day weren’t going to get out until Thursday at the earliest. It was Sunday. At 4 in the morning I had the brilliant idea to call our Student Flights office back at school and see if they could help me. After that stroke of genius I slept pretty hard under the forced belief that they would definitely be able to help sort things out, and luckily that’s exactly what happened. The next morning at 9am, I called Student Flights and thanks to all things holy, we figured out a new route home on a different airline and on Tuesday morning. It was the biggest sigh of relief I’ve breathed in a while, as a Thursday departure date was seeming even more and more likely as the minutes ticked by.
We spent all of Monday wandering around the little city of Cairns and exploring as we had no activities to occupy ourselves with. We were like new people operating under the understanding that the stress was over and we would definitely be going home - eventually, and not on Thursday. We quickly discovered that Cairns was riddled with gift shops, but also had the best prices compared to the other gift shops in other cities such as Surfer’s, Brisbane, Sydney and Airlie Beach. Needless to say, we did some serious Christmas shopping, and as I write this, I’m looking at the growing pile of trinkets in the corner of my room, wondering how I’m going to get these home...That afternoon, and night, we treated ourselves to two awesome meals at great restaurants on the esplanade in the marina. Thanks for paying, Qantas. I got to talking to the manager of the place where we had lunch after I practically asked to hug the chef who made my lunch. We chatted about Qantas, as it was all anyone in all of Oz seemed to be able to talk about, and he helped me to get a better picture of what had actually happened within the airline. He basically confirmed my assumption that my anger should be directed entirely at this Alan Joyce character for pitching a fit and making what even the Prime Minister condemned as a “rash decision.” It can’t feel good to be trash talked by the PM.
Overall, Cairns was a great place, and we had an absolute blast aside from the little set back from Qantas. It felt less like an American city the way that Surfer’s can sort of feel like Miami and there was always something to do everywhere you looked. There were restaurants everywhere, bars and nightclubs were not exactly hard to find, the lagoon down towards the water was packed with locals lounging around with their families and the people were friendly as always. It was nice being able to see the city from the point of view of a backpacker traveling on a budget and trying to see as much as humanly possible, but then also seeing it from a more laid back, vacation style approach, once Qantas told me that I had a certain amount of money per day that I was entitled to. I think it says a lot about a city when you can see it from two totally different points of view and love each side for different purposes. As a backpacker, I loved the nightlife, the activities, the little shops scattered around the town and the scenery. As a vacationer on Quantas’ dime, I loved the food, the atmosphere and the feeling that it wasn’t just a tourist town after seeing families running around down at the lagoon and in town.
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