AUGUST 4-6 PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL Stoic Snoopy, Beautiful Beach, Pacific Pace Tuesday, August 4; Cairns - Mission Beach We caught the McCafferty's bus out of Cairns and headed south on a two-hour ride to Mission Beach. The movie playing on the bus was "Junior," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can't stand Arnie when he isn't blowing things up, let alone first thing in the morning, so I buried myself in the local newspaper instead, even reading the boring little articles on business and politics to keep my attention away from the TV screen. Denise had no such means of escape, although her occasional laughter seemed to indicate that she wasn't in as much pain as I had would have expected. Maybe girls are more attracted to Arnie when he isn't being violent. Or perhaps she was laughing in evil satisfaction at the idea upon which the film was based - men suffering through pregnancy and having babies. Such notions unnerved me, so I delved into the obituaries for some sobering distraction. Mission Beach takes its name from an Aboriginal mission that was founded in the area in the early part of the century. The settlement consists of three small and separate villages and several smaller townships scattered along the coast behind a quiet and idyllic twelve kilometre beach. Open countryside separates the villages which cluster around the north-south highway, and the villages themselves seemed laid back and happily sheltered from the pace and pretension of Cairns. Our plan was to stay in Mission Beach for two nights, during which time we would spend a full day whitewater rafting on the Tully river nearby. A friendly guy in a minibus collected us from the bus stop and ferried us to our hostel, the imaginatively named "Mission Beach Backpackers." Located close to Mission Beach's middle village, the hostel was set back from the road and nestled among tall trees. The setting was almost residential. The place was clean, the atmosphere was laid-back and the owner was friendly and helpful. I felt my pulse slide to snooze as soon as we pulled into the place. Even Snoopy was lethargic. Snoopy was the hostel dog, an inactive fellow with the build of a golden retriever and the colouring of a dalmatian. My most enthusiastic calls merited little more than a raised eyebrow from Snoopy, and my frantic beckoning only drew a curious stare. Snoopy. He did allow us to pet him for a couple of minutes, but when he laid his head back down onto his paws I took the hint. Here was a dog who was world-weary from having played surrogate pet for too many international backpackers who missed their own dogs. I figured Snoopy was tired of the love-him-and-leave-him masters who adopted him during their stay in the hostel, and deserted him when they decided to move on. Snoopy was Lassie backwards. In the afternoon Denise and I wandered farther down the quiet Wongaling Beach Road to what I presumed was Wongaling Beach. From the beach we could see Dunk Island located a couple of miles offshore. The small forested island is ringed by excellent beaches and crossed by meandering hiking trails but features little else. Water taxis from the beach offered trips to the island, but Denise and I had no need to escape from where we were. Happily falling victim to the relaxed Mission Beach pace, we lay down on the sand and fell asleep in the sunshine. Dunk Island. When I woke up the shadows of the palm trees at the edge of the beach had lengthened, cloaking my body in shade and revoking my immunity to the cool breeze blowing in from the ocean. We went swimming in the salty surf and afterwards dried off next to the water, out of reach of the fingers of cool shadow advancing from the palm trees. Later we went for a two-dollar steak meal at the resort pub across the road from our hostel. Obviously we weren't the only thrifty people around - we had to join a queue that stretched down half the length of the bar before we could load up our paper plates with chips and coleslaw and be doled out our laser-thin portion of steak. This was no backpacking crowd either - most of the diners were older, some middle-aged, some retired. People who had come to Mission Beach and never left. People who didn't finish their coleslaw. Whirling Whitewater, Total Thrill Wednesday, August 5; Mission Beach Pretty much every backpacker who goes to Northern Queensland goes whitewater rafting, and most of them choose to raft on the Tully. Denise and I were no different. Chris (Brums by his mates) of the long and sun-bleached hair picked us up in a Raging Thunder minibus and whisked us to the town of Tully where we joined up with the day-trippers from Cairns. A small convoy of minibuses headed out of the town and sped along back roads, past banana farms, and up into the hills away from the coast. We unloaded just below a dam and hydroelectric power station and divided into groups. Like a well-choreographed ballet, the river guides issued bulky red buoyancy vests, blue paddles and matching blue plastic helmets to the teeming throngs of adventurous tourists. Once decked out in the stupid-looking safety gear, I felt like a fat lemming, and if the other prospective rafters were anything to go by, I looked like one too. In keeping with the lemming idea, we headed en masse down through the trees towards the river, but thankfully stopped short of throwing ourselves suicidally into the fast-flowing water. Chris reappeared. In addition to being our driver, he doubled as our raft guide. He was rigged up in safety gear too, although his buoyancy vest was a different colour and he seemed to carry off the ensemble with some panache. He was a well-built and tanned guy who looked about 30, and his character was true good-natured Aussie. He cheerfully led us to where our bright yellow raft was bobbing up and down impatiently, and helped us aboard. Since our raft was one of only two carrying a first-aid kit, we were to act as the rear guard of the 15-raft armada being run down the river by the Raging Thunder company. According to Chris, the hydroelectric station would be generating 54 megawatts of power for the duration of our trip. He looked like he was expecting an enthusiastic response, so I nodded at him as if impressed by the figure, although I really had no idea how much that figure would affect our run over the rapids. He seemed to think that 54 megawatts was a lot, and who was I to argue? The more power the station needed to generate, the more water they needed to release through the dam, and the higher and faster the water down the Tully. An increase in water level meant that we would float clear over some rocks, giving us a smoother ride in places, but it also meant that we would have farther to fall over the rapids. The Tully consists mostly of grade one, grade two and grade three rapids, with several grade fours. There is one grade five rapid (five is the highest grade, officially deemed "commercially unraftable," and we would be going around rather than through it. Skipper and crew. There were seven in our raft, including Chris who guided from the rear. Two Australian girls who introduced themselves as Jenny and Yvonne sat in front of and on either side of Chris. In front of them were Denise and an Irish girl called Mairead. I climbed into the front opposite Mairead's boyfriend Joe, a perpetually grinning and agreeable Irish guy whose efforts to disguise his nervousness fell well short of the mark. I guessed from his indirect comments and his worried laughs that he wasn't a very confident swimmer and was more than a little concerned about falling out of the raft. The Australian girls didn't look terribly gung-ho either. I was all ready (and partially hoping) to be thrown into the water, or to have the raft capsize just for the excitement, the disorientation, and the adrenalin rush, but I could tell from the others' attitude and Chris' safety briefing that we would be doing everything possible during our run to keep everybody in the raft. "We are experiencing a little turbulence..." The first rapid we hit was a grade 3 called "The Alarm Clock," so named because it is the one that wakes up the rafters every morning. The first splashes of the cold water were startling, spattering across my exposed limbs and generating trickling teasers that slowly ran down my back and monopolised my sensations. I longed for a thorough soaking that would reset my expectations of warm and cold and signal the beginning of the serious rapids. I didn't have long to wait. Within minutes we were shooting over exciting rapids with names like "The Staircase," "The Shark's Tooth," "The Corkscrew," "Wet and Moisty" and my personal favourite, "The Devil's Toiletbowl." A cameraman and a photographer recorded our flailing paddles, our wild screams and our undisguised exhilaration as we plunged through the most dangerous whitewater. After clearing one particularly nasty grade 4 set of rapids, our boat, which had been reassigned to lead position during one of the calm stretches, waited beyond the rushing whitewater to see the other rafts through. There was a swirling bowl of backflowing water just beyond the final drop of the rapid which posed a potential danger to rafters. The current surged backwards and downwards in the vicinity of the bowl. A rafter who fell into the pool would be trapped, fighting against a unrelenting torrent of whitewater trying to push him below the surface. Apparently the best way to escape from such a pool is to swim down to the bottom of the recirculating bowl and let the current carry you forward and spit you up and out downstream. In theory that sounds simple enough, but it goes against all of our natural instincts and I daresay it is difficult to think so clearly when fighting for a breath. Unfortunately, from our vantage point just below the rapids, we got to see just how dangerous the recirculating bowl could be. One of the rafts bouncing over the final dropoff lost an Asian guy about my age into the surging bowl. He was thrown from the raft and disappeared into the thundering whitewater. I expected to see him pop up momentarily but he didn't. We were only about ten metres downstream but were powerless to reach him - the current had us braced hard up against a downstream boulder protruding from the water. After what seemed like a minute but was more like eight or ten seconds, his head broke the surface and his arm swung desperately into the air. Then he disappeared again. By this time a couple of ropes had been thrown at him by his raft guide and by a Raging Thunder safety spotter on duty on the river bank for just that purpose. The swimmer didn't seem to catch either of them. He surfaced momentarily again just as another line was expertly thrown at him from the opposite bank. He grabbed at this rope and caught it. He was pulled out of the nightmarish bowl and hauled up into his raft looking very shaken and soggy. As we continued soberly downstream, Chris told us that the day before, a girl had been thrashing in that same bowl for about a minute before she had caught a line. Suddenly I wasn't so eager to capsize anymore. Laughing all the way to the rapids. We had lunch on the forested riverbank miles and miles from the nearest access road. I dug into an enormous hamburger. Tens of fish gathered in the shallows to compete for offerings of bread roll crumbs. They weren't so keen on the grated carrot and onion that I generously tossed at them. Ungrateful bastards. If my mother had been around, she wouldn't have let them leave until they had eaten all of their vegetables. We set off down the river again and came across a small waterfall known as "River Guide's Revenge." The narrow waterfall bypasses the Tully's only grade 5 rapid that is considered too dangerous to navigate with inexperienced tourists. Still, "River Guide's Revenge" provided enough excitement to keep us laughing. Chris had all six of us huddle together at the front of the raft facing him, while he paddled us over the waterfall into a deep pool below. Of course the concentrated weight at the bow meant that we all tumbled backwards into the water in a confused jumble of arms and legs while Chris sailed happily away. The cameraman had just enough time to record Chris' gleeful look of Hold on! satisfaction on video before he and the photographer sped off downstream in their kayaks to get processing and editing back in Tully. Veterans of the worst the river had to offer, we sauntered over the remaining rapids and finished with a swim. There is nothing like drifting in a fast flowing river with a tight-fitting buoyancy vest. Making no effort to move or stay above water, I floated effortlessly alongside the raft like a bloated and laughing corpse. Like so many platoons of helmeted ants, groups of rafters shouldered the deflated boats out of the river and up through the trees to a truck. Chris bused us back to Tully, where we were fed, shown part of the video and given photographs of ourselves to pore over and purchase. Later that evening, as the sun was setting, we meandered from our hostel along the beach to Scotty's, another nearby hostel that had been given the entire rafting video to screen. We met up with Joe and The HBB. Mairead from our raft in the intriguingly named "Hard Banana Bar" and had a good laugh watching ourselves bounce down the river. We spent the evening having a few drinks and playing poor quality pool before walking back along the beach in the moonlight. We didn't disturb either couple that we passed, although they looked so wrapped up in each other lying on the soft sand that I doubted if even an incoming tide would shift them. Torpid Townsville, Idyllic Island Thursday, August 6; Mission Beach - Magnetic Island I bid farewell to Snoopy as we loaded our backpacks onto the hostel minibus that was to take us to the McCafferty's bus stop. Snoopy looked up, yawned, and slowly laid his head back down on his paws. He was too busy sunning himself to fret over our departure. I got the feeling that he wouldn't pine after us. Out of spite, I decided not to pine after him either. Denise was decidedly pleased by this resolution of mine, for she carefully guarded her monopoly on my affections. I probably would have only put Snoopy in danger if I had continued to speak of him, for Denise was well capable of posting a bone laced with arsenic back to Mission Beach if she suspected she was competing for my attention with an apathetic mongrel. Seriously though, Denise and I had been getting along famously for our trip. We had had brief quarrels and minor disagreements, but nothing serious. I was relieved, but not surprised - we had travelled alone together before, and apart from a memorable incident in the southwestern United States when Denise's navigation error had caused us to miss the Grand Canyon (how can you miss the Grand Canyon?!), we had never had any problems. People say that if you really want to know how compatible you are with your partner, you should travel alone with him/her. There is nothing like constant and exclusive companionship and absolute mutual dependence to expose the cracks in a relationship. The most beautiful scenery and the most exotic locations are wasted on a traveller fed up with a companion, brooding over an serious quarrel or exposed to the irate face of a loved one. After hearing horror stories from other backpackers about once-in-a-lifetime trips ruined by relationship break-ups, I began to appreciate how lucky I was. To be fair, most of our travels as far as Cairns had been made as part of a group of some sort, so we weren't in each other's exclusive company all of the time. Now that we were travelling via scheduled bus transport and had more immediate responsibility regarding our own accommodation, meals and transport, we were open to more opportunities for argument and more likely to tire of each other's company. Fortunately, now that Snoopy was out of the picture, there was no reason to believe we would be anything but a happy couple for the remainder of our trip, and beyond. McCafferty's took us south out of Mission Beach. Robert, our driver, was friendly and courteous, the second such amiable McCafferty's driver in a row. We were on a lucky streak. The weather was equally pleasant - blazing sunshine, a cloudless sky, and air-conditioned comfort. When we pulled into the quiet coastal town of Cardwell for a break, I stumbled squinting onto the bright and baking pavement, a little irritated at the abrupt manner in which Robert had shut off the movie just before I got to see whether the dog escaped the explosion in the tunnel or not (the previous two times I had seen the movie, he had made it, but you never know...) My good spirits returned almost instantly. Just across the road from the bus stop and behind a line of slender trees, the waters of a sheltered bay nervously lapped up onto the golden sands of a deserted narrow beach. Denise and I and several of the other passengers lounged on the grass and on picnic tables in the shade provided by the trees, sipping cool drinks, murmuring contentedly, and dozing in the mid-morning heat. If we had been cats, we would definitely have been purring. If all bus stops and transit stations were like Cardwell, I would long for delays and deliberately miss my connections. If Tennant Creek transit centre was Hell, then Cardwell bus stop was Heaven. We got to Townsville at about lunchtime. Townsville is the "capital" of North Queensland. It was founded in 1864 as a settlement into which stockmen could come from the outback to trade, resupply, and presumably drink themselves into a stupor. Nowadays, it is the last outpost that could be considered a city on the route north, and serves as an important military centre and as the home for a university. In contrast with Cairns, Townsville exists quite happily without prostituting itself to tourists. While this may be a characteristic quoted with pride by the local council, it unfortunately also means that visiting Townsville is about as exciting as watching cabbage grow. Denise's usually enthusiastic guide book had few good things to say about the city, and after wandering from the bus station over to the central mall on Flinder's Street for lunch, our initial impressions forced us to agree. We ate poor quality food in a jaded and listless food court. Uninteresting shops and unimaginative urban design throughout the entire mall emphasised the functional rather than the fanciful - the shops sold items that consumers actually needed rather than what slick advertising and presentation could have convinced them to buy. Good for the practical shopper maybe, but hopeless entertainment for window shoppers like ourselves. The only interesting (and wonderfully impractical) item my browsing succeeded in uncovering was a pocket Irish-English dictionary. Virtually useless even in Ireland, I found it difficult to imagine why anyone in Townsville would need such a book. Maybe they received TnaG via satellite. It was just as well we hadn't planned to stay long in Townsville, for we probably would have been arrested for wearing colourful clothes and charged with attempting to have fun. Such activities are only condoned (and even encouraged) on Magnetic Island, a small and popular holiday spot located about ten kilometres off the coast of Townsville, and our next destination. The island was named by (you guessed it) none other than the illustrious and excitable Captain Cook. He was in rather better form when passing the island than when his ship had been taking on water near Cape Tribulation, but he still blamed his erratically malfunctioning compass on it. Instead of reading the operating manual and learning to use the compass properly, he cursed the contraption, pointed at the land and declared it to be "Magnetic Island." After one of his crew explained the intricacies of headings, bearings and magnetic deviations to Cook, the ink had already dried on the navigating chart and the island was stuck with its undeserved label forever. In my universe, tourists can be simply classified according to how they spend their holiday. At one end of the scale, there are restless explorers who know their guidebook inside out, have a regimented itinerary and rush around from attraction to attraction in a dizzying frenzy to ensure that they see and do everything. I call these types "active holidaymakers." At the other end of the scale are the tourists who are seeking pure rest and relaxation - they wander from their fully-catered accommodation down to the beach at midday, lie in the sun all afternoon and spend every evening lounging in the same bar drinking colourful cocktails. These are "passive holidaymakers." A popular holiday spot will cater towards both of these tourist types. Magnetic Island is one such destination, despite the fact that it is small enough to circle on a jet ski in a few hours. Beautiful beaches ring the island, clusters of coral await exploration in the clear water, and hiking trails thread through the eucalypt and vine forests blanketing the undulating hills along the island's eastern and northern shores. Much of the western half of the island is designated national park, while small settlements and leafy suburbs cluster along the road hugging the island's eastern coast. Patrons of cafés and restaurants idle on sunny patios while brightly-coloured mini-mokes speed past carrying childlike tourists. A military fort on Magnetic Island that kept a watchful eye out to sea during World War II is open for exploration. The highest point on the island, Mount Cook (what else?) challenges hikers to tackle its slopes. Koala bears sleep in the trees. Denise and I had another reason to visit Magnetic Island. We planned to meet up with good friends of ours from Sydney, who had arrived there the previous evening. BrianO, Bernice, Eoin and Hannah were travelling north with Oz Experience, a popular backpacker bus tour that plies the east coast and beyond. I was looking forward to seeing their familiar faces again and swapping stories over a few (or several) drinks. They were staying in a hostel called "Coconuts" on the island for a couple of days. Unfortunately Coconuts was the one hostel I remembered that another friend in Sydney had warned us against, proclaiming it as noisy, dirty, and poorly managed. With a little trepidation, we made a reservation and caught the afternoon ferry out to the island. We stepped ashore at Picnic Bay (Captain Cook must have stopped for lunch) and were met by a tattooed girl with bleached hair extensions. She chattered randomly as she drove us and the other arrived guests north along the coast to Coconuts in a well-used minibus. As we topped a crest she pointed out the hostel spread out along the beach below us. It was a little unusual. Rather than consisting of one or two accommodation blocks, the hostel was made up of many small structures huddled together - canvas frame tents, wooden A-frame dormitories, a small kitchen block, a reception block, a bathroom block. This veritable backpacker shanty town was fronted by a terraced area that served as a bar which opened directly onto the beach. A swimming pool facilitated those guests who were allergic to salt water. Hammocks hung between tall palm trees that shaded the mellowed-out guests. I didn't see any coconuts anywhere. Denise and I got lucky and were assigned the frame tent farthest away from reception - it was located high up on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The front door (i.e. zippered canvas flap) of our tepee-like home was only a few feet from the edge of the promontory and our spectacular view out to sea was untainted by any evidence of mankind, despite the fact that there were about twenty other frame tents clustered directly behind ours. We met up with our friends - everybody was in top form, thoroughly View from Magnetic Island. buoyed up with enthusiasm and completely deprived of responsibility (the latter evidenced by Eoin and BrianO's recently bleached and proudly flaunted hair). All six of us hiked up the beach and shared pizza on a takeaway terrace strung with naked bulbs. Afterwards we smuggled beer into the licensed hostel and chatted on the rocks in front of our tent. The near-full moon rose into the clear sky and painted light onto the shimmering water, providing the perfect backdrop for our shared tales of adventure, romance (i.e. lust), action and drinking. We were visited by a possum who crept out of the shadows looking for food. We didn't have any, so we gave him a beer instead. He tore off the cap, downed it in one, and promptly toppled off the cliff. PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL