Kate and I were standing on a platform high in the air, near the highway. A warm wind was blowing. She turned to me and said, "You know, it's just like California." She was right, of course. We were at Wet 'n Wild, a waterslide theme park (very Wet, not at all Wild) just south of Brisbane, and one of several theme parks within a few square kilometers. It wasn't just the theme parks that seemed familiar, though: it was everything.
It was the KFC's and Pizza Huts and McDonald's. The Nevada Bob's Discount Golf and the Target department stores. The eight-lane superhighway. What we were doing felt more like vacationing than travelling. There were no surprises, no adventures, no weird cultural gotchas -- in fact, the biggest challenge for Kate and I was dealing with this familiarity. Why were we spending so much time here, in comfort and mild boredom, when exotic lands of adventure lay just to the north, across the Torres Straits?
To cap things off, we spent our evening doing something quintessentially American: we went to the drive-in. We saw Hannibal (pretty good, but the book is much better) and Shaft (not as good, but entertaining). The campervan's layout isn't as ideal for enjoying a drive-in as you might expect, but we managed pretty well.
When we went to sleep, the parking lot was deserted. When we awoke the next morning, it was full. This was a good sign.
We had spent the night in Eumundi, a non-descript town just off the main highway, which is famous for its Saturday market. We were unsure just how big it would be, but the mass of cars in the lot were a good sign. Before leaving the van, Kate and I invented a game. We tried to predict which things we'd see in the market, and we'd get a point each time we saw a vendor selling that thing. My list included things like "blue and green tie-died tank top sack dress" (only one point) and "tarot card readers" (three points). Kate predicted "koala magnets" (one point) and "wooden puzzles" (four points!), among others. This made our adventure into the rather large but ordinary market at Eumundi a bit more interesting. Oh, and Kate won: 12 points to 10.
Kate and I are now in Hervey Bay. This is the departure point for tours to the "World Heritage Listed" Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the world's largest sand island, and is a well-recommended tourist destination with great swimming lakes and interesting scenery. The tour leaves tomorrow, so we've got a bit of time to kill.
So, in the interest of killing things, Kate and I are trying a little fishing. We were out last night, but got nary a bite. This morning I awoke early, and while Kate was still sleeping I drove the van out to the pier. I walked out and set my lines, and after a little while I pulled in a fish! It was a tiny one, though. Also, it had a puffy stomach, kind of like a puffer fish. Puffer fish are poisonous. I carefully unhooked it and dropped it back into the water. A few minutes later I hooked another one, and reeled it up. It was another of the same species. I asked a passing gentlemen what it was and he said "toad fish". That explained the croaking noise the fish was making. He then said, "you can't eat those." That explained why they were so easy to catch.
A few minutes later I caught another and again I threw it back. A few minutes later Kate joined me. Alas, we had no more luck (if you call catching small poisonous fish "luck") and quickly ran through all our bait. It appeared that the fish were on to us -- as soon as we dropped a baited hook into the water it was stripped of its bait, and we would reel up a shiny empty hook. It was quite maddening and just a little strange. We'll head back out again this afternoon -- hopefully the fish will be a bit more cooperative then.
I've come to be a firm believer in beginner's luck. It comes up too often to shrug off as coincidence. In my own life, there have been instances. For example, when I was 16 I went to summer camp, and one of the girls there had a saxophone. I picked it up and started playing it, jamming randomly on the keys and blowing haphazardly on the reed, and actual coherent jazz music came out of the horn. It was an amazing experience. Onlookers were shocked to learn that I'd never even touched a saxophone before. The next time I tried to play it, I couldn't even get it to make a sound.
I believe beginner's luck arises from the lack of preconceptions one brings to an activity. Instead of us performing the activity, the activity performs itself. The next time around, when mechanics and timing are vaguely understood, we think too much. We try too hard. Beginner's luck vanishes.
That said, beginner's luck can't explain Kate's incredible fishing performance this afternoon. Kate had never caught a fish before, so when we dropped in our lines and she quickly pulled in her first, I took a picture. It wasn't a keeper -- none of them were -- but it was her first. A short time later, she caught her second -- and I took another picture. I actually had the idea that I would take a picture of every fish she caught that day. But after she had quickly reeled in half a dozen, I put the camera away. She didn't let up. While everyone around her stared at empty hooks (myself partially excepted) she effortlessly pulled in more fish. She caught familiar looking fish with strange names: squires, grinners, toad fish, whiting. Two local boys, having no luck of their own, gladly grabbed the odd catch to use as bait in their hunt for something bigger. By the end of the day, she'd pulled in an astounding 35 fish -- and not one of them was big enough to keep. (Including my 3 earlier toad fish, I caught 15 that day -- and again, no keepers.)
The key thing to keep in mind about Fraser Island is that it's all sand. From tip to tail, all hundred-odd kilometers of it, nothing but sand. It's covered in an astounding collection of trees and brush, with a few pretty lakes and interesting natural features, but underneath it's all grainy silica. Kate and I took a two-night, three-day tour to explore the natural wonder of "World Heritage Listed" (it's always described that way) Fraser Island.
The tour was pretty bad. We were shepherded onto large four-wheel-drive buses, and taken around to visit the island's hot spots. Some were actually quite amazing, while others were a waste of time. There are no roads on Fraser, only sandy tracks through the forest, and the driving was slow and very bouncy. At one point the bus got stuck and all of us had to get out and push. On the first day we visited Basin Lake for an entirely unnecessary swim in its murky green water, then took a couple of interesting short hikes through the forest before and after lunch. During lunch we were visited by a dingo, one of Australia's wild dogs, who casually sat by our tables for a few minutes before loping off into the brush. In the afternoon we visited the best spot on Fraser Island: Mackenzie Lake.
Mackenzie Lake is a large depression in the sand dunes that slowly filled with rain water. The water is clean and clear. Swimming in it is incredible: no salt, no chlorine -- just pure water. We spent an hour splashing and diving and wrestling and paddling and just being very happy in the water. Then we were herded back on the bus for some enforced social time back at the resort.
The resort is huge -- capacity for 1,000 guests -- but well-designed to hide the population. We stayed up late, talking with the people on our tour and participating in a few bar games. Kate won one of the games, which involved picking up some cardboard off the floor with your mouth. While I didn't win, I did discover that I was much more flexible than I'd anticipated. Kate and I were BOTH winners in the best-name-tag competition, which is kinda cute and kinda creepy. We're the keener couple.
The second day involved even more driving, to visit highly boring locales that for some reason are on the must-see list of every tour company. Indian Head was a long drive for a rather bad view; Eli Creek was overhyped; the Champagne Pools were unreachable in our big bus. We lurched back to the resort over the bumpy sandy tracks for some time beside the pool before dinner, and then an early night.
The final day found us at Lake Wabby -- the deepest lake on the island, and one which is slowly being devoured by a huge sandblow. The desert-like surroundings were interesting, and the huge and friendly catfish in the lake entertained us for a while. We then hiked through the forest to the beach where our guide was preparing our lunch. By the way, the beach is also officially a road (with police patrols and speed limits) and a landing strip. Right-of-way is observed in the following order: birds and other animal life, airplanes, pedestrians, vehicles. Sand castles don't even make it on the list.
Instead of a visit to another murky lake, our guide bowed to popular opinion took us back to Lake Mackenzie for some more time in its healing waters. Kate and I splashed about for the entire hour before reluctantly getting back on the bus. We then lounged by the pool for an hour before getting on the ferry back to the mainland.
The tour was a disappointment. It was expensive and overly-wrought, crowded and long. The location of the resort meant we spent the vast majority of our time slowly rolling around the bumpy sand tracks of the island. The two saving graces were Lake Mackenzie and our guide, Bob. He was humorous, professional, and incredibly knowledgeable. He kept us up to date with all kinds of info about the island, the flora and fauna, the history of the aboriginals, and even some gossip about the resort itself. I shudder to think what our trip would have been like without him leading it. Bob is from New Zealand and will be returning there shortly to start up his own guided tour company in the area near the Bay of Islands. We're definitely going to look him up the next time we're in New Zealand.
In April of 2000 I went to Costa Rica to do some volunteer work on a sea turtle nesting beach. It was an incredible experience (and one which is partially presented here on my website). I got to witness first hand the laying of sea turtle eggs (I mean that literally -- the eggs were layed directly into my hand while I counted them). Unfortunately though, I didn't get to see the freshly-hatched turtles erupt out of the sand and make their mad dash for their new home. Sea turtles nest on warm beaches all over the world, including Australia, and there is a site about an hour or so north of Hervey Bay that offers nightly tours on the beach, so Kate and I drove up there from the ferry to see if we could witness the second half of the sea turtle reproduction miracle.
After a bit of a wait we were brought out onto the beach where a few stragglers were emerging from a nest. They were collected together while the next was excavated and measured, and then we used flashlights to lead them down the beach to their new home in the sea. It was an interesting experience to watch them being born, but the best part of being there was being reminded of my time in Costa Rica.
I remembered walking on the beach in the gloomy darkness of midnight, silent, like solemn pilgrims on a mystic journey. I remembered the smells and the colours; the feel of the sand and the sound of the waves. I remembered marvelling at the struggle of the huge sea turtle as she heaved herself up the beach -- she was in a foreign, uncomfortable place, but she was drawn there by the inexorable weight of instinct. In Australia I watched that instinct being born again in the minutes-old turtles, as they turned towards the brightest thing they could see (in nature, that's always the ocean) and began struggling, flapping their weak flippers against the sand, waddling towards the sea, to the place where they already knew where they belonged.
Kate and I would love to have more time. When planning our trip, we assigned about a month to each country. I mean, most people only spend a week on vacation, right? But then again, most people don't venture more than ten miles from their resort. In case you haven't noticed, Australia is a huge country and a month isn't enough time to see even the tiny sliver of the coast that we're driving along. We're now rushing our way up to Cairns, skipping huge chunks of coastline, so that we can have some time to explore the very far north of the country before flying back to Sydney. It's a shame, but I've always understood that, while travelling, it's impossible to see everything. Skipping stuff is part of the journey -- albeit a very difficult part. As I find myself constantly repeating while we zoom along the highway -- there's always next time.
We're now in sugar cane country. The bushy stalks occasionally give way to open grassland with sparse trees, and the road gently rolls through low hills and wide river valleys. The air is hot and humid. Whenever we step out of our air-conditioned van the heat grabs us in a big bear hug. We're slowly adjusting to the heat, though, which will come in handy as we head ever nearer to the equator.
Our mad dash is interrupted by the occasional bit of excitement: on the 22nd we took a tour of the Bundaberg Rum factory, which was rather a waste of time because a) all alcohol production facilities look pretty much the same; and b) I don't like rum. The tour guide's enthusiasm for all things alcoholic was a bit creepy. Later in the day we stopped at a rest stop for a pee break, and when we tried to start the car we found that the key wouldn't turn. A few phone calls and a few hours later, a locksmith had our car fixed. A few days later a cyclone (same thing as a hurricane, but spinning in the other direction) came bearing down on the region. We stopped for info in a small town south of Cairns and once again the car wouldn't start. The rain came pouring down, and nobody in town had any info about the approaching storm. Several hours later the car was fixed and we learned that the cyclone had already passed through Cairns, and we'd missed it (much to Kate's disappointment).