SanFranciscoSooner

Let’s Go Ride Explore on Wally the Wonderbus, Visit with Crocodile Dundee, and Swim with Sharks and Shit!

17 Feb 2012 3 Comments

by sanfranciscosooner in Crossing It Off, New Adventures, Round the World Tags: Australia, Cairns, crater lake, crocodile, Falls, Forest, Great barrier reef, Hartley's Crocodile Adventures, rainforest, Round the wold, scuba, sea turtle, shark, snorkeling, Sydney, Uncle Brian's Fun, waterfalls

If I could sum up my time in Cairns in one word it would be: UNFORGETTABLE! I am so glad I decided to go there. The city was way smaller than I expected, it totally has a beach-town vibe which I love, but there are still a ton of restaurants and bars—actually that’s pretty much what the downtown area is. I also really liked that they have “night markets”, I mean, whatever, maybe they do or don’t sell cool stuff but at least there is something open past 6 or 7:00 p.m. that you can go explore if you’re not in the mood to go to bed or haven’t the urge to go rage by yourself at a club where 18-year-olds are allowed to drink. An urge I didn’t get so often … hmm … drinking, alone, with 18-year-old male-childs abound, making convo with yourself … puzzling really. Oh and Coke is only $3 a bottle there!

But aside from the city, the activities are endless. Good thing I ran into a straight-shootin’-pistol-from-the-hip sort of dude at the travel agency I popped into to grab a map from. So this dude hooked me up! He told me what sucked, what I should do, what I could do … so this is what I decided on:

The first day I was in Cairns I had gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to catch my flight from Sydney, so I got to my hostel around about 9:30 a.m. Well, couldn’t check in until 2:00 p.m. but they would obv let me leave my huge-ass bag there, so really all I wanted to do was to go plop down on the beach, fall asleep in the sand, and get my happy ass a nice tan started. But as it were, on the way to the “beach” (there aren’t really any natural beaches in Cairns, it’s really a really nice man-made lagoon—you have to go about 20 min in either direction to get to them. But it is jelly fish season anyway so you can’t swim in the water. Well, I guess you can if your idea of adventure travel is via a medi-flight chopper to a hospital where your insurance will  then proceed in forcing itself upon you—analy. Okay red squiggly line, please tell me the correct way to use anal as an adjective.  If “analyst” is the best you got, we’re just gonna have to go with my version) I met this booking agent who got me started on my Queensland adventure straight away. Ha! You totally had to go back pre-parenthesis to remind yourself what the fuck I was talking about.

I signed up for a half-day tour of a crocodile farm (yes they farm them, like cows. Except I wouldn’t shit myself if I accidentally wandered onto a cow farm) slash animal discovery something or other. Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures at 12:15 p.m. Then I signed up for a full day of scuba and snorkeling on the GBR the following day, and to round it all out nicely, the day after that I signed up for a full day rainforest tour. So by the time I had minded my Ps & Qs (what does that even mean? I don’t have internet right now or I would google) with the booking agent bloke, I had about an hour before I went to see Crocodile Dundee. So I did walk my happy ass down to the lagoon. But then I went and saw some crocs!!!

It was pretty cool, they have the farming part of it which they actually only show you for about 10 min. It’s really a croc-ton (like what I did there?) of just different sized crocs in cinder-block tanks filled with water. I thought at first, aw that’s sad, they raise all these little crocies and then kill them, but the aboriginal people of Australia still use the meat for their traditional meals and obviously the skin is used in high-end fashion. They said that making farming legal reduces illegal poaching immensely and protects the natural population. Any time a crocodile is caught in the wild, it can’t be released (usually they are caught because they are in an area where people are or in water where people surf/swim/snorkel and crocodiles don’t like when people creep on their turf aka DEATH ROLL) because even if they are released far, far away from where they were captured, within a year they would make it back there. So when wild crocs are caught, different wildlife preserves, zoos, parks, whatever get them in turn. These are the crocs that Hartley’s uses as breeders and as part of their wildlife park.

ANYWAY! Then I rode on this boat out in their lagoon filled with 16 crocodiles that could eat me in one piece (but did you know, crocodiles can go an extremely long time without eating?! Longer than a year sometimes!! But they are “opportunistic” feeders—meaning if your stupid wallaby ass wants to hop its way onto their front door step and say here’s my ass crocie crocie don’t you want to take a bitey-bite? They will say, why yes, stupid wallaby, I would like that very much, thanks. Boom. Dead.) and the skipper(?) put some chicken heads on a string and attached to the end of a pole and allowed me to get some really awesome pictures like this:

Holy shit! And then I saw some koalas, and some cassowaries, and some other fucking wildlife, oh! And the world’s most DEADLIEST snake. The Inland Taipan. And the dude held it like a foot from me. What a jerk. And he is all like, “People are so afraid of snakes, but more people have died from car accidents, pianos falling on them, etc. than from snake bites. So really driving in a car is more dangerous than this snake.” Now sir I’m going to have to stop you right there. This is ERRONEOUS! People who make statements like this clearly don’t understand statistics. Yes, you are more likely to die in a car crash than from the venomous bite from a taipan in Australia, but that does not make car crashes more dangerous than a taipan. Case in point: let’s play would you rather. Would you rather A) drive in a car, or B) pet the world’s most deadly snake … with your face? Also, let’s just throw in some death fun facts. The disparity in the rate of survival of a car crash compared to a taipan bite issss probably significant considering most venomous snakes usually possess one of three toxins: neurotoxins which paralyze your nerves, haemotoxins which cause the destruction of red blood cells, and myotoxins which causes your muscles to bind (aka your heart to stop beating). The taipan has all of them. So, buckle up, don’t drink and drive, and don’t get bit by a taipan! Because you’re fucked if you do.

Yay learning! But moving on. Day 2! Are you for scuba?! I am! I am! So I’ll sum up what we all already know from experience, the Discovery Channel, or Google: the Great Barrier Reef is incredible. So much diversity, so much color, and so much coral! But to the good stuff. I was snorkeling right along in the turquoise water and I take a gander below me and what do I see? Why, that’s a shark Nikki! Okay, it was only a reef shark, but it was about 5 feet long. It was AWESOME. I stalked it from above for a bit, mainly to make sure it wasn’t interested in a limb sampler course, but it was so cool to see.

Then I went scuba diving. Scuba is not something I ever thought about being scary … like at all. I wasn’t nervous on the boat or suiting up or even getting into the water, but when you go under with your instructor for the first time and are breathing down there it is so bizarre. And thenyou freak out a little. I was about 5 feet under the water working on my skills (getting water out of your mask/clearing the water from your regulator) when I started thinking, “ohmygodohmygodohmuhdawwwwd I don’t want to do this, what if I’m down there and something goes wrong and I can’t breathe, what if … ah … ahhh … what if … AHHH! Let me out let me out! No, I don’t want to! I’m still close to the surface, I can get out now. Get out now! Get out!” All this was all going on in my head … but another kid in my group (there were 3 of us) couldn’t reign in his emotions and he actually did freak out. He went to the top and didn’t come down to dive at all. So right when that happened I got an extra boost of confidence that was like, “Well thanks to Captain Scaredypants I’m gonna have to suck it up because I can’t bail too … so unoriginal at this point really.” So I scuba-ed and it was so friggin cool. I got to see and pet a sea turtle! So incredible. But, I think maybe once is enough. We’ll see. My instructor told me I should get certified in diving because I was “like a fish”. Not sure if that meant I was good, or if he was just making a comparison because I too could breathe under water?

Onto day 3! Which, honestly, was probably my favorite day of maybe the entire trip thus far. I signed up for Uncle Brian’s Fun, Forest, and Falls and the shuttle bus picked me up outside my hostel (oh I stayed at Gilligan’s, it’s like a backpacker resort—only $18/night for an 8 person shared room) at 8:00 a.m. Cuz (cousin—get it because it’s Uncle Brian’s …) Rohen was our guide for the day. There were 21 of us and off we went! Cuz Rohen made us tell everyone our name, where we were from … and then gave us some fun forest facts on the way to our first stop. Then he introduced us to Wally the Wonderbus (our bus’s name) who could talk to him via honking. Wally likes to go through U-turn turnabouts so when we passed one, we went around it full-circle. 3 times. Cuz Rohen also taught us the wave and oscillate—which means, every time he honked at the locals, we wave real big and oscillate from side to side making sure no one is left out of the wave. The locals loved us.

First stop was Devils Pools where we saw some cool boulder falls, went for a swim in the non-deadly area, and had morning tea (orange juice and cookies) at some picnic tables. Then off to Josephine Falls where again we saw this amazing cascading waterfall and went for a swim. There is a naturally forming rockslide that we all went down a few times. It was really awesome and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Then we stopped at Cuz Lunch’s for lunch. That wasn’t the actual name of the place but, whatevs.

We made our third stop at Millaa Millaa Falls which translates to “water water” or “a lot of water”. It was a really pretty waterfall but the water was way colder than the other places, so I got in, swam out to the waterfall, swam underneath it, and then swam back. Between our 3^rd stop and our 4^th stop, Cuz Rohen made us play a game called “Where’s Wally”. And the way you play is you each have a matchstick in your mouth and you have to pass a lifesaver around the entire bus via the matchsticks. Great fun with complete strangers, but everyone was a really good sport.

The fourth stop was at Lake Barrine, which is a giant lake in the crater of an extinct volcano. I crater lake, if you will. It was hella-deep … up to 70 meters in some parts. Freaked me out a bit swimming in it. Then we had afternoon tea: hot chocolate, marshmallows, and homemade muffins! On the way back to Cairns we stopped and saw wild platypus in the river! Oh, and we had Wally Sing and Dance Along on the way back to town, and Cuz Rohen slammed on the brakes to show us a deadly rock frog (it was actually just a giant frog painted on a rock—hilarious!). It was so much fun, and when I left I felt like I knew everyone on my tour so well. And I made a new friend, Gemma, from Scotland! I would recommend that tour to anyone who is in Cairns, who wants to check out the rainforest, and meet really cool people. And obv have tons of fun!

Being in the sun and swimming under waterfalls for 12 hours sure makes a gal tired. So I went to my room, packed up my shit, and PTFO (passed the fuck out). On to Singapore the next day!!!

♥Nikki