One month it has been

Since Marglish received my love

Haiku for lost time

From over the sea

A visitor to fair Oz

Time to show it off

Down to Jervis Bay

Whitest sand in the whole world

Water clear but cold

I have a new job

Which combines my passions for

Design and nature

Fall is coming now

Goodbye to sun soaked beaches

I’ll see you next year

You can see more photos from Jervis Bay on flickr.

Though I’m not one to glue myself to the news, I’ve watched enough coverage of the floods now to see a few differences between the Aussie and American responses to disaster.   For one thing, the Australians are just as bad at producing maps of disaster areas as they are at making weather maps.  To say Queensland is large is a bit of an understatement.  In my many attempts to find a map of the affected area I simply came up with map after map of the entire state, blocked out in one solid color, with a few useless dots here and there.  Had a flood of these epic proportions happened in California, news stations would have probably presented viewers with a constantly updating map, covered in an animated blue slime that crept along engulfing towns in real time.

The newscasters themselves also presented a decidedly calm face to the events they were reporting.  They were appropriately urgent with the warnings, appropriately somber with the statistics, but overall they were always quite calm.  On most news stations in the States, I believe we would have been presented with a much more manic reporting style, supported by a constant ticker of updates, shouted phone-ins from reporters on the verge of being swept away, and then lively debates about the flood’s impact on our economics.  And it wasn’t just the news reporters but also the flooded out residents who were restrained in their response.  There were tears and frustrations, mourning and fear, but all surrounded with an air of “It’s nature.  We can’t do anything about it.”  Relief centers were generally so well prepared that the beds were all made before anyone arrived, volunteer numbers were well suited to those of the displaced, and entertainers came to sing to the children.

The floods were also another chance for Aussies to show the world their strong spirit of resilience, wrapped in wet blankets of humility.  Queensland premier Anna Bligh was right when she said Australians (not just Queenslanders) are the people they “breed tough.”  They are also the people that take things in stride, and won’t accept too much praise for their strengths.  All last week, people helped each other build sandbag barriers into the night, rescued animals by boat and did it all without extra flair for the news cameras.  Some quick thinking tugboat drivers even saved major infrastructure from damage, by guiding an estate sized piece of rubble away from a bridge.  But to the tugboat driver it was just his job and “couldn’t have been done any better.”  I wonder if good ol’ “Sully” Sullenberger said the same thing when he safely landed his plane in the Hudson river.

That’s Australians for you, calm, collected, accepting and understated, even when underwater.  Perhaps part of the attitude came from the fact that this disaster occurred in a warm country at the beginning of summer.  With the calming effect of the season in full swing, everyone might have been thinking, “I may up to me waist in water, but no worries, I had thongs and swimmers on anyway.”  Here’s hoping they can maintain that attitude during the lengthy rebuilding process.  In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed for blue skies and sunshine in Queensland.  And don’t forget to make your donations to the relief fund.    Much appreciated, Mate!

And after a day spent with my feet in the surf, I traveled north to Brisbane.  Walking around the center of the city I realized an eerie truth about every major Aussie city I have seen in the last year and half.  Like every street set on every major movie lot, they all have the exact same things.  There are civic halls, town squares, statues and waterfronts.  There are streets named George, Victoria, Margaret, William, Edward, Queen, King and just about anything else that sounds British and royal.   And the old is always off set by a touch of the new.

We Americans tend to think of homogeny as an overabundance of Mcdonalds, Walmart and rows of matching houses with faux marble columns on the porch.  But it comes in many forms and crosses country lines.  At least in Australia, it also means every city has its fair share of sunshine, thriving flora in the parks and some cheeky urban wildlife.

You can see the rest of my photos from the Gold Coast and Brisbane on flickr.

I have also been busy dealing with that thing called everyday life.  Bills and groceries, logistics and planning, phone calls and meetings, forgetting my umbrella, missing the train by a split second, and hearing plenty of call hold music.  Why is it always so bad?  In fact, the only thing that seems to be lacking from my life right now, is some inspiration.  The images that normally dance through my mind and the voices that tell me interesting stories, have all been pushed out and replaced with to do lists and deadlines.  My mind looks less like the a color wheel of infinite shades, and more like the greyish mush that comes off on your hands after reading the business section.  How boring!

So I’m on a mission to rectify this situation.  I have to wake up those voices and clear the fog so I can see those images again.  The potential for fascinating stories and stunning images is all around me.  It was in Joss Whedon’s words when he talked about why he wrote.  It was in the manic eyes of Tim Burton’s scrawled out characters.  It’s in the puffy clouds outside my window, the sweetly scented spring air, the fascinating cast of characters I met in the emergency room, and even in the terrible call hold music.  So it’s time to sit back and let it all soak in.  Time to fill my head with ideas that are good, bad, or downright insane, and see what emerges into the tangible world.  I’m finally ready.  So come on Australia!  Inspire me!

In the meantime, check out more of my photos from Melbourne on flickr.

You can see the rest of the photos from my adventures in pastoral Oz on Flickr.

There are a lot of theories as to why this trend exists; that the films coming out of Australia tend to be underdeveloped, don’t appeal to a large audience and are marketed poorly.  Another theory points to the quirky nature of Australian films.  Indeed, all of the films I have worked on since moving here have an element of what I’d call “fantastic reality” to them.  But if anything I think quirkiness helps sell a film because it generates a buzz.  Think about the Aussie films that you probably saw in a theater, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Babe (should have won the Oscar that year), Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Moulin Rouge.  Pretty quirky, hey?  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the final number in Priscilla is to drag queens what the final number in Center Stage is to dancers, or what the Pamchenko twist in The Cutting Edge is to figure skaters; physically impossible but oh so deliciously fun.  We all love a little fantasy, so I doubt that’s the problem.

Even though my filmmaking experiences in Oz thus far has been limited and I’ve no knowledge of the marketplace on a professional level, I’ve developed some different theories of my own.  The first is that Aussies, and particularly Australian film makers, suffer from a crippling case of self deprecating humor.  It exists in the best of us.  Anyone with a modicum of humility makes fun of themselves and those of us with artistic talent tend to do it lot.  But Australians in entertainment do this so much that even American TV star Johnny Galecki, in his recent trip to Oz, felt surprised by how prevalent it was.  And he attended the Logie Awards (the Australian Emmys) an event intended to praise the great talent on Australian television.  You’d think that perhaps this applies only to the old hats, the vets of the industry who have probably done a few things worthy of making fun, but I find it amongst the fresh-faced hopefuls too.  I’ve already read three scripts by Aussies that each contained jokes about the hopeless state of the Oz industry.  Apparently they’ve never heard of self fulfilling prophecies.

But I think the main reason Australian films tend to fail in the US (the ultimate money spending target audience for most international fare) is because Americans don’t know a damn thing about Australia.  Bill Bryson said it best in his book In a Sunburned Country, “We pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins down under.”  Before I got here everything I knew about Australia I either learned from Steve Irwin or remembered from a brief Australian Renaissance in the 1980s thanks to Crocodile Dundee and Men at Work.  It was very little and hardly representative.  I have yet to see The Castle, a film that’s a cornerstone of Australian comedy.  And why is that?  Because it’s very Australian.  I probably wouldn’t have understood half the jokes in the film before I had moved here.  I’ve since been loaned a copy and I will see how many I understand now.  And with a great percentage of the film industry in Oz supported by government grants (a luxury for indy filmmakers if you ask me) many films coming out of the country are bound to be very Australian.  With plots, places, characters and jokes heavily colored by Aussies unique culture, those films are going to be mis-understood by international audiences.  Just imagine trying to explain Aussie rules football or, better yet cricket, to a Giants fan.  It just wouldn’t translate.

I’m not suggesting Australians write American stories and make American films.  If anything, we have too many of those already and the Hollywood machine is churning out more sequels then there are popcorn kernels consumed while watching them.  What I suggest instead is that Aussies spend a little more time advertising not just their movies but themselves.  They could stand to learn a little from their loud, self-important cousins to the north.  If we knew more about Australia, its history, its people, its traditions, its music, its fashion, its pop-culture, its slang, its lazy Sunday activities, its drinking games, its knock-knock jokes and everything else that comprises a unique culture, then when we see a preview for an Australian movie we’d be able to say “yeah, I get that.”  Stop making fun of yourselves and start telling the world how awesome you are.  Chances are, we will listen.  After all, in America everyone gets their 15 minutes, including a lot of people who shouldn’t.  Separate yourselves from the tabloid darlings with your talents and you might even get a whole 45.  Just don’t expect us to ever understand why you eat Vegemite.

whinging = whining.  I like this because it can never be confused with wining and dining, something I would never whinge about.
flat out = busy as hell.  This is a personal favorite of mine because it conjures of the image of being flattened by a steamroller, which is how being busy as hell can feel from time to time.
full on = intense, holding nothing back.  If work is full on you might feel pretty flat out, but try not to whinge about it.
rug up = layer up.  Winter is coming so I’m going to have to rug up.  Since most of the housing in Australia lacks insulation, I’m even going to have to rug up in doors.  That is something I will whinge about.
rock up = show up.  It’s pretty much the opposite of bounce, the way New Yorkers say they want to leave.  I haven’t adopted either, so I’m not likely to rock up and then bounce from anywhere.

There are also a lot of words that Aussies use in ways that Americans tend not to use them in.  I believe it was a former boss (the same one who hated the expression “no problem”) who pointed out how rude it sounded to start your statement with look or listen.  Not that I ever did that, just a lot of other people I had to listen to him complain about.  I became quite sensitive to it after that.  It does, in fact, sound like you are starting your sentence with “look, dumb ass.”  But it’s very common practice in Oz.  Not only do you hear it in interviews, on news programs and in casual conversation, but politicians also use it during debates and press conferences.  Of course, to their opponents they may very well be saying “look, dumb ass.”

Americans also tend to think that scheme means something bad.  People are always coming up with hair-brained schemes on sit-coms, which tend to go very wrong.  In the States, criminals and crooked politicians scheme.  But in Oz, a scheme is quite literally “a plan, design, or program of action to be followed.”  Thank you dictionary.com.

And for our last lesson of the day, when an American might say knock on wood and Aussie will say touch wood.  I won’t get into why that would be misunderstood.  Just know that I’ve adopted that one too, so try not to laugh when I say it.

As you fly from Oz’s tropical coast to its aptly named red center, you watch the landscape below slowly change from rolling hills covered in copious greenery, to long stretches of neatly divided farmland, and eventually to smooth, rust colored sand as far as you can see.  But the martian landscape at the red center was nowhere near as empty as I had expected it to be.  Thanks to a long rainy season this year, it was covered with scrubby bushes, sprinkled with desert oaks, the occasional gumtree (eucalyptus in the desert!) and even broken up by the a few lonely pools of water.  But it’s still empty enough that when Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) sneaks up on you, you can’t help but think it was dropped there by aliens.  And contrary to popular belief it does not stand alone.

Yulara

From the plane you can also see the neighboring peaks of Kata Tjuta (formerly The Olgas) and a tiny sparkly dot in between, the resort town of Yulara.  As much as Upolu Cay was the coolest place I’ve ever been, Yulara resort was the weirdest place I’ve ever been.  This resort/town was built in the mid 80s specifically to service tourists to Uluru, a site which receives a steady flow of tourists year round.  Yet somehow this college campus-esque resort felt practically empty.  The only constant company you have during a walk around the resort is a multitude of beetles, stickbugs, crickets and a constant entourage of flies who seem more interested in the moisture in your eyes than in the resorts four pools, or the sprinklers that water its needless stretches of bright green lawn.  But empty or full, it’s the only place to stay within five hours of Uluru, and with it’s surcharge on all credit card purchases, additional charge for any bus transport to Uluru itself and rooms in need of renovation at over $400 a night, I think it must be the most brilliant tourists trap in the entire world.

Nonetheless, we took advantage of what it had to offer, starting with a self grill BBQ at the Outback Pioneer Hotel.  The menu offered such Aussie meats as croc and roo, but I opted for the emu sausages, which were quite delicious.  The Outback Pioneer also became my first introduction the Northern Territory’s tendency toward lack-luster service (although I won’t lump the tour bus drivers into the group) and one of its undeniably backward notions.  At the bar you could not order a drink without showing them your room key.  The lackadaisical bartender explained that the local aboriginal population was not allowed to drink, thus the policy.  I was shocked.  Never before have I truly understood what it must have been like to live in a pre-civil rights movement society.  It turned out she had dramatically oversimplified the law.  As I now understand it, the vast majority of the Northern Territory is dry with the exception of certain areas, chiefly resorts and hotels, that are allowed to sell alcohol, but none is to be sold or even consumed within a 2 kilometer radius of said areas.  The general belief is that this will discourage the aboriginal population from drinking, without having to enforce a blatantly racists law.  Of course, the Outback Pioneer’s policy (which doesn’t seem to be backed by any official law that I could find) would prevent anyone from the local population (mainly aboriginal) from having a drink.  Do feel free to bring this up with the management there, should you happen to be heading that direction.

Kata Tjuta

The next day we decided to head out and see one of the sites that had actually brought us out in the first place.  Kata Tjuta is a striking series of rock formations in the same area as Uluru but decidedly overshadowed by its fame.  It’s a testament to how vast the center of Oz is, that you can see both Kata Tjuta and Uluru from the resort, but it still takes at least 45 minutes to get to one of them.  With the heat desert sun only increasing exponentially throughout the day, you have to get an early start.  We stopped along the way to check out a closer view of the range of helmet-like peaks.  Once out in the open desert, you immediately befriend the flies, so many that the constant buzz around your head is like a special sound effect from a horror movie, and the fight against the urge to whack at every tickle on your arms becomes a matter of mind over fly.  But even a short hike around Kata Tjuta isn’t spoiled by your buzzing chaperons.  Between the mounds of conglomerate rock that look like bright red concrete, sits a pleasant gorge full of little pockets of fresh green growth and trickles of water containing tadpoles, lots of them.  Imagine that, frogs in the desert!  Life will always find a way.

Sounds of Silence

One of the better advertised and more deservedly praised events offered by one of the tourist companies at Yulara is the Sounds of Silence dinner.  This outdoor Aussie buffet starts with canapes and champagne at sunset overlooking Kata Tjuta (which the bus driver accurately observed looks like a sleeping Homer Simpson) followed by a dinner in the pleasant silence of the surrounding nothingness, and ending with a star talk during which you learn that it’s not at all easy to find south using the stars.  Through the telescopes they had set up nearby I saw Saturn, which looked just like a glow in the dark sticker, and the super bright moon which looks more like a slowly boiling potato soup than cheese to me.  I would have gladly stayed up to look at the stars until the moon dropped below the horizon, but we had to make a 5:15 am bus to Uluru the next day, so back to the 80′s era hotel we went.

Uluru, a.k.a. The Rock

The day started while it was basically still nighttime (4:30 am) and so dark that you couldn’t see a thing behind the headlights of the bus except the bright stars in the sky.  I didn’t realize until then that I had so well adjusted to the site of the southern cross that it looked rather odd upside down.  But I was very energized (which is hard to do on instant coffee) and ready for the world famous sunrise over Uluru.  We stationed ourselves on the sunrise platform . . . and so did everybody else.  As the light crept into the sky, tour bus after tour bus filled up the parking lot, and the entire sunrise viewing area slowly filled up with a colorful sea of T-shirts, hats and backpacks.  Cameras clicked and beeped all around us.  And the flies eventually figured out we were standing there, ready to be buzzed at.  Maybe I’ve seen one to many beautiful red mountains in my lifetime.  Maybe I’ve just seen too damn many postcards of Uluru since I moved here, but I simply didn’t get it.  The mountain didn’t look like it was on fire.  It didn’t seem to glow from within.  I wasn’t touched spiritually.  It was a beautiful sunrise in a beautiful place, and that’s all.

We started our base walk at the same point where the climbers were scrambling up the well worn path to the top.  Despite a few shallow patches, I can see why people tend to faint, vomit and otherwise experience general discomfort while trying to climb the rock.  It’s far from a gently sloping hill.  And even though a lot of people were starting the climb, it still seemed like less than half the people from the sunrise platform had come out for the up close and personal view, and less than half of them were doing the base walk.  So for the next few hours it was essentially us and the rock.

Uluru is not just an amazing shape, but an amazing combination of shapes, positive, negative and everywhere in between.  There are niches and little shady gorges all around the edge, strange holes resembling alien and monster faces carved into its surface, and flat little pockets with surprisingly lush trees growing right out of them.  The skin of the rock itself is not completely smooth, as the postcards would have you believe, but scaly flakes in a multitude of browns and reds.  And the environment around the rock changes with every kilometer, ranging from flat sandy nothingness to waist high grasses and sparse forests of twisty trees.  I couldn’t take pictures of the all of the beautiful places at the rock, because much of it was sacred ground and there were signs requesting that no photographs be taken.  I was a little disappointed that honoring the aboriginal culture in this way, meant not honoring our cultural tradition of photographing beautiful places we want to share with others, but maybe if I hadn’t seen so many pictures of the Uluru sunrise before I had gotten there, it might have maintained a bit more of it’s spirituality. Nonetheless, the base walk proved to be an even better experience than I had imagined.

Unfortunately, after you have spent 4 hours walking in the increasing heat of the day, the park around Uluru has one last hurdle to throw at you.  The bathrooms you’re so desperate to visit at that point (the only ones near the rock itself) are at least five minutes away from the road.  And the visitors center, which you need to get to in order to make the bus ride back, is another 2 kilometers away!  The parks planning people may have had to work around a lot of sacred ground when building the visitors facilities, but I still can’t forgive them for building the worst planned national park ever!  It’s no wonder the flies hitch a ride on all the tourists, they too are probably too tired to fly the distance they have to go for a simple bathroom break.

Don’t spend 4 days in Yulara

If you don’t have a car, or preferably a private jet, to get to any of the other destinations near Uluru (and by that I mean within a four hour drive) don’t spend more than two days in Yulara.  You can only go to the same resort restaurants, swim in the same pools with the other trapped tourists, and walk across the same nonsensical green lawns so many times before your life starts to feel like Groundhog Day.  But I was rather happy that I had stayed near Uluru much longer than the average tourist’s in and out in 20 hours visit.  The culture diversity that this one rock brings to the dead center of one of the more isolated countries in the world is astounding.  Even if most of them weren’t quite sure why they were there, they had been drawn there nonetheless.  We came from every corner of the globe.  We stood together and watched the sun rise and set over the blazing red desert.  We ate kangaroo just because we could.  We swatted at (and occasionally swallowed) the same flies.  And we all got stuck with the same surcharge on every credit card purchase.  And that, to me, was a spiritual experience.

And it’s in tropical North Queensland.  Now that’s a tourist slogan if I’ve ever heard one.  Of course, in order to get to said paradise, you have to fly to Cairns (call it Cannes or no Aussie will know what you’re talking about) acclimatize to the potent humidity, fight the urge to jump right into the ocean from the beach, lest you get stung by a jellyfish or eaten by a saltwater crocodile, and then take a boat at least an hour off shore through the fame-worthy Great Barrier Reef.  But once you’ve arrived, the postcard perfect beauty melts away any wear from the journey along with any of your concerns about all the things in the ocean that might kill you.   Hey, true beauty always comes at a price.

Cairns

The trip from Sydney (made shockingly easy by the non paranoia driven security procedures and continued belief in customer service) takes you over the coastal cities and then a long stretch of lush green emptiness before you arrive at Cairns, a tiny blip of a city in the center of a tropical wonderland.  Once at our ridiculously luxurious apartment in Bellevue at Trinity Beach we found managers Jim and Doreen as helpful as could be in planning out the next four days of our trip.  And despite the shocking omission of swimmers (bathing suits) from my packing, I was able to find a swimwear shop just a block away.  Cairns is a city clearly supported by tourism as much as by its surrounding hectares of sugar cane.  We couldn’t go rushing into the deep blue coral sea just a few steps away from our hotel due to an increase in Irukandji (a nasty little jellyfish that essentially gives you the flu) but our first day in Cairns, spent drinking a Bundy and Coke on the beach and watching the distant lightening from our hotel balcony, as the tree fogs chirped and the geckos laughed, was a great way to get into the tropical rhythm.

The Reef

The next day we took an all day ocean adventure on the Ocean Freedom, a cruise company that provided a truly pleasant day supported by a staff of sun bleached young Aussies, willing able and eager to get you swimming amongst the wonders of The Reef.  Our timing for the visit was perfect.  We had arrived on a crystal clear day at the tail end of Jellyfish season, making stinger suits unnecessary (which is good considering the one I tried on had several holes in it) but still during the tourist off-season, which meant our introductory dive, normally over $150, was only $20!  So after our trip through increasingly clear waters out to the first docking point, and an easy talk through the need-to-knows of diving, it was time to don our gear, duck walk to the edge of the boat and take a leap of faith off into the water.

For me as a first time diver, this was a surreal experience.  Not only are you breathing underwater, an odd sensation in and of itself, but you’re doing it through a curtain of bubbles with a Darth Vader-esque rasp to your every breath.  I had a little trouble adjusting, probably more than I realized since my instructor had to pry my hand off the security bar in order to get me swimming.  But once you start to swim around the reef you forget all the odd sensations of diving and get lost in the odd beauty of the reef itself.  There are fish representing every color in the rainbow and every shape suitable for swimming, some in schools so large they look like curtains of glitter in the water.  There are cartoonishly large giant clams, with alien insides that seem to glow in the sunlight.  The sandy bottom is littered with bright starfish and gelatinous sea slugs, which only move when your back is turned.  We even saw a huge spotty eel, winding his way between the points of coral.  And at the base of it all, is a huge forest of bright coral in every shape nature can conjure.  I did spot a jellyfish or two, but luckily they were harmless kind.  Gabe spotted a reef shark, which I was glad I didn’t see.

The dive was only a part of our adventures for the day.  We also snorkeled, an easy way to see just as many wonders as you can during a dive, took a glass bottom boat tour with an informative guide who confirmed my belief that every form of life in the ocean is just plain weird, and we took a trip out to Uplou Cay.  This little sand island, surrounded by nothing but bright blue reef waters, is officially the coolest place I have ever been.  The sand was as soft as sand can get before turning into vapor, the water, just lapping at the edge of the island, was clear for miles around and almost the same temperature as the air.  I would have been very happy to set up a hut in the middle of this tiny cay and content to share it with the flock of migrating terns running along the shoreline.  Alas, we had to return to the boat.  It seems tour companies have given up the habit of leaving people behind.  At least while we were on the trip back I could be grateful that I wasn’t among the tourists now bearing brightly sunburnt backs.

Daintree

The next day a long drive through a lot of sugar cane, and a car ferry across the most certainly croc infested Daintree river, got us to Daintree National Park, a stretch of rainforest surrounding the famous cape tribulation.  The time you spend in your comfortably air conditioned car, winding through the dense green tree cover, past all the signs warning of possible cassowary crossings (although we didn’t see any) and occasionally sighting a bright blue Ulysses Butterfly, leaves you ill prepared for the conditions you step out into.  To experience the humidity in Daintree is to experience what it must be like to hike through soup.  Even with a palpable layer of bug spray on, you’ll be quickly surrounded by a gang of mosquitoes.  And they were a minor concern compared to the acid spraying Green Ants, or the possibility of running into a Golden Orb Weaving Spider, a harmless but enormous bug.  I thought the spiders in Sydney were large until I saw these sombrero sized monsters.  Gah!

But the beauty of the rainforest quickly removes your concerns about its insect residents.  And though I could never live next to a beach you couldn’t use most of the year, jellyfish (stinger) infested waters make for a pristine coastline.  Instead of being inhabited by tourists the beach is a playground for sand crabs, whose little marble-like piles of sand remain undisturbed.   And even with a storm rolling in and booming it’s thunder across the mountains, Daintree was a truly magical place to visit.  Between the afternoon downpours, we managed to make one last stop at the Daintree Ice Cream factory for a little blueberry, banana, soursop and wattleseed ice cream.  I don’t know what the last two are either, but they were delicious.

Kuranda Railway

For our last day in Cairns we decided to let the tourist industry chaperon us around, by taking the Kuranda Scenic Railway and Sky Rail.  You start the journey at a historic train station with a small museum dedicated to the making of the railway during the areas gold rush.  A quick read about the difficulties they experienced while constructing it, makes you wonder why anyone ever wanted to build a railway in the first place.  Nonetheless, I’m glad it was there for us to take.  The journey winds up the mountains offering stunning view downs into the lush green valley and past some amazing waterfalls churning out iced coffee colored water.  The trip ends at Kuranda, an artsy little mountain town that somehow manages to remain quiet as can be, even with trainloads of tourists getting off at half hour intervals.  I wonder if that was a consequence of it being the “off season” or if such places simply encourage a hush in their visitors.

To get back to the base of the mountain we took the Skyrail, a series of sky buckets like the kind you might find in a zoo, but which soar you over the lush canopy of rainforest, and offer two view points to stop along the way and take a quick tour through the trees.  We may have gotten stuck at the second view point when some lightening forced them to stop the buckets for a while (lightening + steel cable = bad combination) but our holdover gave us some extra time to appreciate our surroundings.  And an informative ranger took the time to teach us why Cassowaries have bony helmets on their heads (scientists suspect it’s to pick up on low frequency noise) and that most of the fruits in the rainforest can kill you.  Yet somehow the aborigines in the area figured out how to cook and eat them anyway.  Who did they get to test those recipes?

There’s always room for Magic

Eventually we made it down the mountain, which included another beautiful view on the way, and were left to seek entertainment for our last night in Cairns.  We decided to hit up the one show that had its brochures stuffed into boxes in every tourist office, Extreme Illusions.  Our tickets included dinner in the Cairns casino, another surprisingly sleepy place.  Once again, I wondered if it was a consequence of the off season.  But the show attracted a decent audience, probably because of all those brochures.  Magician Sam Powers is a cute Aussie, whose 90′s era flame covered poster doesn’t do him justice.  He puts on a fun show full of classic illusions complete with a scantily clad assistant.  Very entertaining.  If he ever makes his way back to Sydney, I’ll happily be his volunteer from the audience.

The next leg of our journey took us from the Tropical North to the Red Center, a place vastly different from Cairns in more than just complimentary colors.  Stay tuned for Part II of the journey in my next entry.  Till then, just sit back and enjoy the view.

But do try to stay out of the water, for your own good.