Cairns: Tourist Level: Ultra

Cairns seems to have a habit of spitting on me. I am taking this as a sign that Cairns doesn't much like me; to be fair though, it may just be that Cairns doesn’t much like people. It does appear to be particularly inhospitable to human life. Going in the water is an iffy idea, because of stingers (just about the cutest way possible to say chemical-weapons-grade jelly fish) and crocodiles and sharks and god knows what else; spiders the size of my hand just wander across the sidewalk (apparently harmless, but still, is that really necessary?), the sky regularly tries to pull a Noah’s ark and wash everything away to start fresh, and the mosquitoes (or mozzies, again, just an adorable name for the worst thing ever) engage in guerrilla warfare throughout the streets. After seeing a sign warning about the dangers of Dengue Fever in the airport just after I arrived, I was a little concerned about the mosquitoes feasting on every part of my exposed flesh; I asked one of my tour guides about it, and he assured me that it was quite rare, and completely curable, but may be a “little unpleasant” in the meantime. Dengue Fever. A little unpleasant. I am not a doctor, but I feel like that may be a bit of an understatement. But when you live someplace where everything is trying to destroy you and all of your progeny, I suppose understatement is necessary to save your sanity. 

Cape Tribulation

It doesn’t so much rain in Cairns (which, by the way, I will never learn to pronounce correctly; each time I think I have it, a local corrects me. I have compensated by making it as American-sounding as possible, punching that ‘r’ like a Texan) as perform a magic trick in which the sky and the sea trade places for periods of time. It goes from zero to monsoon in about half a second, rendering umbrellas, jackets, roofs, completely obsolete. They apparently get about 20 feet of rain a year. Just let that sink in for a minute. Once, they got 33 inches of rain in 24 hours. That’s more than San Diego has gotten since Pangea split up into individual continents. When they were building a railway from Cairns into the rainforest at the end of the 19th century, the horses would get so bogged down in the muck that there was nothing to do except shoot them, wait for the mud to swallow them completely, and then build the railroad over the top of them. And yet people live here, presumably by choice. 

The thing about Cairns is that there is no compelling reason to spend time in the city. However, the trips you can take out of the city are completely remarkable, and account for the stubbornness with which this city holds on to its tiny foothold of land, no matter how much Australia tries to shake it off. On the one side, you have a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, and on the other, you have the oldest rainforest in the world. I was only in Cairns for 3 days, but I think I accumulated about a million tourist points (that’s how this works right, with points?) by going on every damn tour I could book. Consider this my foray into hardcore tourism.

If you look very carefully, you can find a fish!

First up, the reef. If you don’t know a bit about the reef, go spend a hot second on Wikipedia and educate yourself a little, it is a natural wonder after all. I spent a day on Flynn Reef, which is on the outer edge of the whole reef, and was able to scuba dive in 3 different areas. In the grand scheme of things, this means I have seen about 1/1000000 of the Great Barrier Reef. The weather (damn you Cairns) was unfortunately fairly overcast and squally, so some of the colors didn’t pop quite as much as they would have in bright sunshine. But it didn’t matter. I can’t imagine a calmer, more beautiful place to dive. The current isn’t too strong, the reef is quite shallow, and even on a bad day, the water is so impossibly clear and blue. Now, I don’t have much to compare to, given that all 4 previous dives I’ve done have been in frigid cold waters with about 5 feet of visibility, but I was amazed by the variety and quantity of fish swimming around me. Just thousands of them, swimming in these vast schools, creating whirlpools and eddies of fantastical colors. Truthfully, I have no idea how or why fish could be these colors - they look like a cross between an abstract painting and wallpaper samples. Color-block fish like something out of a Mark Rothko painting, Jackson Pollock scribbles and splatters, and Behr hardware geometric dots and lines. It felt a bit like swimming around in a giant aquarium. The coral is stunning, huge architectural structures in a myriad of colors and shapes - cathedrals and domes and naked forests of coral. I saw sponges that looked exactly like something I would use in the bath, little igloos that could house 5 or 6 people, ghost coral that changes color whenever it senses vibration in the water, and even an outcropping that looked just like (nerd alert) the Starship Enterprise. We swam through coral canyons and up out into dazzling sunlight cutting through the water - I’m not afraid to admit it, I felt a bit like the Little Mermaid, except that I couldn’t sing underwater. I did hum ‘Under the Sea’ quietly into my regulator though. For those who are wondering, we did see a couple sharks, pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and completely uninterested in us. We also saw a sea turtle, who was going to town on some algae in the coral - apparently, the algae has an intoxicating effect on the turtles, so they basically go around all the time stoned out of their little turtle minds. The only down sides of the day were the realizations that underwater photography is much harder than I had expected, and that seasickness pills are not optional. There was a whole gang of us walking wounded on the back part of the ship, staring resolutely at the horizon, and trying, with various degrees of success, to not toss our cookies wantonly over the side of the ship. The crew, anticipating this, were nice enough to give us little white paper bags, and ice chips. Luckily, the desire to just end it all and let a shark eat me subsided the second I got under the surface, which is good, because I think I would have had a devil of a time convincing either of the sharks we saw to take a good chomp. 

Star Trek!

Once I made it back to land, and after I had sat on a bench for about an hour convincing myself that the world was not, in fact, moving, I decided to spend the next two days as far away from the ocean as possible. To this end, the next morning I boarded a historic scenic (aka not very good at actually getting you anywhere, but very pretty while it does it) train to a tiny rainforest town in the mountains called Kuranda. The train ride truly was beautiful, winding up the side of a mountain, passing some tiny little waterfalls, and one quite majestic one, which went crashing down into a huge gorge. The town itself, unfortunately, has subsisted on the tourist industry for so long that it feels a bit like Disney-does-rainforest; perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had had more money to spend in the little markets that make up the heart of the village. I did, however, get to visit a venom museum, which felt like a slightly disturbed 16-year-old’s pet project. It was tiny, and mostly located down a long ramp in the middle of what appeared to be an unused basement that had been painted black and liberally splattered with skull and crossbones insignias. One wall bore the inscription “Long Live the King” and a number of articles about Steve Irwin, just in case one might be wondering what Elvis had to do with venomous snakes. I was slightly scared for my life the entire time I was there, whether because of the snakes and spiders or because I was convinced there was a gimp hiding behind one of the doors, I won’t say. On the plus side, I got to see the most venomous snake in Australia yawn, which seemed very profound to me on some level. Afterwards, I took a walk through the rainforest along what seemed to be a more or less unused boardwalk before returning to Cairns via SkyRail, which consists of gondolas above the rainforest. It’s remarkable, about 12 kilometers over the tops of the trees and then sharply down the side of the mountain. On my budget, it’s the closest I can come to a helicopter ride; I tried making ‘copter noises to enhance the experience, but sadly I’m not very good at it. 

Gondola off a mountain!

Croc on a log

After this adventure, I was under the impression that I had seen Australian rainforest. I was wrong. The next day, I did a guided tour (shudder), which was actually quite good (less of a shudder), into the Daintree Rainforest, another World Heritage-listed site. It’s a bit of a drive up from Cairns, into the northeastern tip of Australia, but it’s alright because you’re driving along a coastal highway with huge eucalyptus and ferns and cycads and other dinosaur plants on one side, and miles of white sand, black rock, empty beaches on the other. It’s a simply stunning drive, along a very tiny and twisty road, that it’s best to just not think about. Once you cross the Daintree River, you are into rainforest; about 600 people live up in this area, which is vast, but no amenities have made it this far, so there is no power, no running water, certainly no cell phone towers. The only way to get there is by car ferry across the Daintree, which houses one of the largest populations of crocodiles in the country. But not to worry, the guide on our little croc-spotting cruise (in a disturbingly tiny boat) assured us that the only people that get eaten by crocodiles are people that really deserve to get eaten by crocodiles, and they probably shouldn’t be part of the gene pool anyway. We (sadly?) didn’t see a full grown croc, but we did see some babies, ranging from 4 weeks to 2 years old, which our guide lovingly referred to as ‘finger-munchers’, although the 2 year olds looked fully capable of taking off a whole hand or foot if the opportunity arose. The most exciting part for me, however, was the deduction I did in my head after the guide told us that sharks also occasionally get into the river (it feeds directly into the ocean and is, in fact, salt water) - sharks and crocs both live in this river, which sets the stage for an epic battle the likes of which have only been seen on the Syfy channel! Unfortunately, we saw no sharks, and the baby crocodiles looked decidedly unlikely to try to wrestle one anytime soon in any case.

A swamp wallaby (like a small kangaroo)

Beyond our croc adventure, we also took a beautiful walk through the rainforest, saw trees older than the United States (hell, older than Australia for that matter), tried funny-looking tropical fruits, swam in a (croc-free) stream in the middle of the forest while it poured down rain, fed tame kangaroos, visited a beach where the rainforest actually grows onto the sand (those plucky mangroves will grow anywhere) and watched one of our guides make billy tea, which is a terrifying ritual involving boiling water in a giant tin can, throwing in tea leaves, and then twirling the whole damn thing over your head in order to get the leaves to settle to the bottom. A full day, to say the least. 

So Cairns, while I may not like you, or your silly name, very much, I do appreciate everything that surrounds you. Keep up the good work. 

Swimming in a rainforest, like you do