Cairns

Once again I have procrastinated in writing this for so long that I am rushing to finish it the night before I leave on a new adventure. But ah, that is to be expected.

--Scratch that last bit. I am now sitting on one of the three free-internet computers in the Frienz hostel, where I am staying in New Zealand. I abandoned my last effort in favor of two hours' sleep before my plane left.--

---Once more, I have been back from New Zealand for a week, and am only now putting this post up. I think I might have a procrastination problem...---

Anyway...

My second-to-last journey was to Cairns (the pronunciation of which is something between "cans" and "canes"), a rapidly growing city on the tropical north east of Australia.

My first full day in Cairns was spent with a small boat over the Great Barrier Reef. The weather was cold - or maybe more like "cold," as it was about 70 (Fahrenheit, of course; Australians are weather wimps, by the way). I would not have been able to complain about the "cold" weather, except that it was accompanied by rain (which, in comparison to the temperature of the air, actually was cold) and wind. Even still, I was determined to see the GBR one way or another, and hey; I'm from Buffalo, I can deal with chilly weather. The hour and a half ride out was like a roller coaster. A kiddie roller coaster, but a roller coaster nonetheless. Personally, I found it exciting, but it seemed that about 3/4 of the people on the boat disagreed. They just found it nauseating. So, I spent most of the ride out there in the front of the boat, trying to immerse myself in Harry Potter (which got very wet, by the way, and now looks very.....loved) and pretend that nobody was throwing up.

Regardless of a slight bout of facing my worst fear on the way out, it was worth it. To fully express why this is, I feel that I must explain what I expected, and what I got, for they are two very different things.

I expected it to be pretty cool - obviously, or I wouldn't have spent $100 on it. But they way I pictured it was a vast expanse of reef. A large, shallow area coverd with coral and fish. I expected the water to be clear and blue, and everything to be just out of my reach. I suppose what I expected looked something like this: http://www.tourcart.net/tourmate/img/tours/7642-1.JPG Beautiful and amazing, no doubt.

But the day I went was cloudy, and real water is never that clear. We were nowhere near an island, but instead set up camp where all we could see in any direction was ocean (with the exception of one other boat in the distance, who was out there for the same purpose as us). I do not have pictures to show you, but even if I did, I doubt they would mean anything. Some of the people I was with took pictures, and they look like they came from a different world than the one we were in.

This is one of only two pictures taken of me that day:


That is one of the big things I have noticed here. Pictures never do anything justice. I think it has to do with peripheral vision, to an extent. A picture can concentrate on one thing, or one group of things, or one area, just as vision can, but it can never give the whole context. For example, many of the pictures I have taken (including many of the ones that I will put up with this post today) look like they were captured from a remote hiking trail - some special, secret spot. In reality, many (though not all) were taken from cemented pathways where crowds of tourists all stood and take the same exact picture. In this way,the limited view of a camera works to my advantage. However, there have been far more situations that I have been in here where the camera cannot capture enough. I wish that my camera had an ultra-zoom-out button.

Seeing the GBR was, clearly, one the later situations. There is no way that a camera, underwater or not, could ever show what I saw. So, while I am sad that I had no waterproof camera and could not capture the likeness of a parrot fish (my favorite of the ones I saw), it could be worse. In a way, I am glad that I do not have pictures, for the fear that looking at them would morph my memory to one less spectacular than it was.

So what was it actually like, you ask? My first impression was of an underwater mountain. Rather than a vast expanse of flat ocean floor covered by reef, when I first jumped into the water I could see nothing. Well, I could see water, but nothing else - no bottom or anything - it was not even remotely shallow. But as I swam in the direction that the crew told us to go, communities of coral began blossoming out of the point where my vision could no longer penetrate. Higher and higher they built, and as their altitude rose, more and more fish swam about, until eventually we hit the peak of the mountain, which was just about the depth from the surface that I had expected the entire thing to be, but was only a very small area. Things were not as brightly colored as I expected, but that did not make them any less spectacular; only spectacular in a different way.

I don't know what more I can say about it without babbling. Any more attempt at description feels as though it would be futile, for I know that I simply do not have the vocabulary (perhaps nobody has the vocabulary) to properly describe it. I wish there were more words in the English language.

Another exciting note to make about this trip was that I was stung by a jellyfish! Several times! I don't know what kind it was; clearly not the deadly type, though. As it turns out, they are virtually invisible in the water. I felt it, but did not see it, which is why I cannot identify it. The sensation was quite different from what I expected - it was less sharp than I imagined, especially since the word used to describe their defense mechanism is "sting." It felt much more like a burn than a sting; slow to take hold, but once it did, it sucked. At first, I didn't even realize it was a jellyfish; I just thought the salt in the water was starting to bother me! Most of the stings were completely better by the end of the day, though, and the one that wasn't was fine within about 72 hours.

The next day we took a tour of the tablelands, a "fertile plateau" (I stole that from Wikipedia) on which there are vast farmlands and rainforest. I DO have pictures from this trip, and therefore, I shall continue on my (perhaps bad) habit of letting those speak for me:









This was a waterfall by where we stopped to eat. Ironically, I think it was the most epic one of all the ones we saw (unfortunately, I forget the name of it).


As we drove, it felt like we left Australia and ended up somewhere in the European countryside:





This is Millaa Millaa Falls, the most photographed waterfall in Australia:



And this is on a trail near Millaa Millaa falls, after which I found land leeches looking for sustenance on my legs:





One of our stops was at a giant fig tree. As it turns out, fig trees use another tree as a host until they grow large enough to suffocate the parent tree and take over for themselves. As you can tell, they are very loving.




Although it is difficult to see here, this is a picture of a GIANT ASS SPIDER. If I recall correctly, it is a golden orb web spider, which is easily bigger than my hand and can catch birds in its web. They are poisonous, but not enough to kill humans (just enough to make you barf for a few hours x.x). (I would like to note that I might NOT be recalling correctly, because while the picture of the spider on wikipedia LOOKS like what I saw, it says they only grow to ~2 inches. This spider was significantly larger than that; so either my memory fails me, or the last person to update Wikipedia is an idiot.)


Worse than poisonous spiders, though, are poisonous plants. This is known as the stinging tree (despite the fact that it is not a tree), and simply touching it can kill. Albiet, it kills by mere touch rarely, but it still kills. More often, it just cases months worth of excruciating pain.


One of the last rainforest sights we saw were these HUGE, 2,000 year old trees:


Although the most adventurous part of our journey was over, we spent the next day wandering around the city, our friend Jade acting as a guide through her native land. The rest of this entry will be of random pictures taken throughout the city!