Day 8: Saturday, Feb 16, Cairns

Today we had to get up at 4:40am to drive to Melbourne and catch a flight. (We snuck out, but I still felt bad for our roommates.) This was the result of a planning mix-up, but it was not without its benefits. I walked out the next morning to load the car and instead spent some time staring at the sky. Halls Gap is a tiny town (the auto show might have added 50% to the tally) with little light pollution, so you could clearly see the entire sky. It was probably better than the time I went to Brazos Bend to go stargazing. The Milky Way was clearly visible. Staring up with no noise and almost no lights was great. As I drove to Melbourne I got to watch the rising sun slowly erase the stars as it painted sunrise colors in the sky.

The other thing I got to see were all the drowsy driving signs. I have only seen a couple of drunk (or “drink”) driving signs, but there is a plethora of drowsy-driving signs. I can’t remember a lot of them, but some included:
-Yawning? Take a powernap.
-Microsleep can kill in seconds.
-Drowsy? Change drivers.
-A 15 minute powernap could save the rest of your life.
They were accompanied by regular “powernap stations,” which we would call a public rest stop. We also passed what is our Aussie lingo for the day: “lorry train.” A lorry train is just a cab pulling several linked trailers. Depending on your state laws you may have seen this sort of thing with UPS trucks or the like in the States. However, they are always two shorter trailers. Here all the trailers are full-sized. We didn’t see any with more than two trailers, but apparently they can be a couple of trailers longer.

We caught our flight to Cairns. As we arrived and taxied to the gate it looked like arrived in Papua New Guinea. The airport was small and was enclosed in tropical plants. We got off the plane and were greeted with a blast of hot, humid air that made us think we were back in Houston. It’s the rainy season over here, and when they say the rainy season, they mean it. Very day the pattern has been cloudy in the morning, drizzling most of the afternoon in ten or twenty minute spurts, and then dumps monsoon-like rains in the evening.

The girl behind the counter at our hostel was eating lychee, and I was very happy to see them. Lychee is a fruit that I loved in Singapore. Apparently it’s out of season, however, and I’ve had trouble finding it since.

Cairns is probably my least favorite place so far. It is very touristy – though really it’s just concentrated tourism, since the “touristiness” of Sydney and other places is diluted over a big city. Cairns by the ocean seems to be a series of restaurants, tourist trinket shops, and travel agencies. I hadn’t seen any anywhere else we have visited, but there are an unbelievable number of travel agencies focused on the “beach bum student” crowd. I feel like I’m living in a tourist bubble instead of in Australia. The reason Cairns is on the map, however, is that it is near the tropics and also a good jumping-off point for the Great Barrier Reef.

There are also a lot of places that cater to or focus on Japanese/Korean tourists. Lots of things are also written in Japanese, which hasn’t been the case elsewhere. There is a little mall that is pretty much Korean and includes a job-placement outfit devoted to Koreans. I have seen more people who look like they are aboriginal here than everywhere else combined, but it is still a small number. Of that number, most look like they are living on the street and the others don’t look like they are much better off.

Australia seems to be very diverse, but only in certain ways. There are hordes of Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese. There are lots of Europeans and Canadians, but most are traveling. What is conspicuously missing are Africans or anyone black besides aborigines, South/Central Americans, and people from the Indochina peninsula. I’m not sure if that is simply because I have seen a small sample of Australia, if it is due to Australia’s immigration policies, or if those people just don’t want to come here – though I know that the last is not true for Indonesians, at least.

Australian lingo for the day: “-ie.” Take any noun, add “-ie,” and you have a new word. People talk about brickies, surfies, barbies, etc. which mean bricklayer, surfer, and BBQ, respectively. It seems to be part of the general Australian language that has shortened versions of lots of things.