Jason Wells

Today? Mildly mundane. I checked out of Geoff’s Place and rode their bus back to Picnic Bay before breakfast. As I stood on the wharf I saw a Korean guy with frosted hair, wraparound shades and Fuct-type clothes; he looked more at home at a dance club than fishing off the wharf. I again slept through most of the ferry ride back to Townsville — that ferry has a powerful sedative effect. Then bad news; after I walked back to the bus transit center, no bus to Cairns until 5:30 PM tonight. The arrival would this be 10 PM — too late to book a hostel. So I broke my own little rule and booked in advance, sight unseen. Not a major compromise really. With plenty of time to kill, I clipped a few interesting photographs from that issue of the Economist I bought earlier, wrote down a few books it mentioned that sounded interesting, and through the rest away. One of the photos was the classic “Migrant Mother.” I bought a copy of the national daily here called the Australian, which had little of interest to report beyond recent INTERFET activities.

All that reading killed some time, but not enough, so I checked email. By this time I had quite a backlog! Email is really outstanding for backpacking — a welcome link back to family and friends when you’re far from home. It’s also an excellent way to keep in touch with the people you nmeet in your travels. I’ve gotten email already from Mette and Daniela as well as Michael and Craig. There is no other way to keep in touch with transient people — no address or phone number. Few backpackers carry cell phones. Hotmail and its ilk are the best answer I’ve found.

With only nine days left before my journey is over, the sense of completion and conclusion grows strong. Really just a week in Cairns plus an odd day or two in Sydney. Normally, this would make me a little anxious but all I feel is and unreal calmness, with a feeling that things are unfolding as they should. The situation feels completely handleable — a rare and welcome feeling.

Tonight is the full moon. A symbol for my one month journey? Somehow it feels more appropriate as the enduring cycle, an orbiting repetition, the semiotic signature of renewal written in the sky. Soon I’m coming home.

Well the night had a few more twists and turns. I went out later, back to the bar, to watch the drinking games. One involved four women lying on their backs with potato chips poured onto their breasts. Four men were blindfolded, and each one’s objective was to eat all the chips off the woman in front of him, using her verbal commands. The first to complete gets a jug of beer. The guys were playing to lose. Why hurry?

Which reminds me of another bar game out here I should relate to the folks back home: the Flaming Asshole. A few guys jump up on a bar, drop their pants and put a piece of TP in their ass crack. Then they’re handed a beer, and someone lights the TP. The objective is to drink the beer before their assholes get burnt.

After the festivities (and the endless U2 that they play every single night here), I walked back to the cabin. As I approached I heard a commotion inside, and I thought, “Hey, party inside?” Not quite. Turns out four new guys were in the cabin, checked in late. They were part of an Australian Army section that was here for R&R. Unfortunately they were the biggest assholes I’ve run across in Australia. Their first words to me were “Anything shaggable at the bar?” The like to call each other ‘cunt’, guess it’s an non-US Angophone thing.

Then they tore out one of the other backpacker’s bed, they were just too drunk and stupid to take the unoccupied bunk. Then two of them got into a fight over who got which bunk. The first one, part Aboriginal, managed to punch the second one in the face. His glasses were mangled and he bled freely from the temple. This, right in front of me! It was quite a scene. One of the partly sane soldiers tried to break it up, which caused the part-Aborigine to head to the bar. The beat-up guy, Will, was angry. I figured he was going to get back at the first soldier, so I took him to the bar and bought him a drink to calm him down. It was at this point that I learned who they were and was told with a straight face: “We aren’t usually like this.” Will tells me he’s going to make the Aboriginal guy pay for his glasses and how he doesn’t “trust dark-skins.” I guess he was feeling pretty insecure about losing the fight, because then he bragged about his prowess at mountain biking and at getting laid. He took off to track down his adversary, and I made a discreet exit myself. Poor idiotic losers.

But then it gets worse. They were already massively drunk, but with the bar right there, they were really outdoing themselves. I dozed off to sleep but re-awoke when they all barged in around 2:30 in the morning, hollering and farting and belching and just being generally vile. They slammed doors over and over and shouted ever word they said. After a few hours of this they finally slept, and mercifully so did I. Only to awaken at 7 AM this morning as the sergeant barged into our cabin and barked at everyone to wake up! They are the loudest, most obnoxious assholes you can imagine. I was much relieved to hear that they took off that morning, and apparently, Geoff’s won’t let them come back. Even a renown party palace has its limit cases. Wow, I hope the entire Australian Army isn’t like this crew. Yikes.

I tried to sleep in late to make up for the lost sleep, but it wasn’t working. So I got up and after breakfast I went into Horseshoe Bay to see if I could do the jet-ski tour. Turns out I missed it. So I went back to Balding Bay to nap on the beach and finish the tan. I was still pretty sore about last night, and I needed to relax.

On the hike over I met a girl from upstate New York with a Canadian accent. We talked all the way there and went swimming once we got to the beach. But I had worked myself into a predicament. Now that I was friends with her and all, we’d be at the beach together. But since she’s American, she might have a problem with my sunbathing nude. Which was the whole reason I came to this beach! So I asked if it was OK, and it was. She went topless herself. But at that point, she would get very quiet, unresponsive, and the conversation died. As soon as we re-clothed to go swimming, she could talk freely again. She began to talk about her boyfriend. (Just more goofy rules for the ‘psychology of beachwear’ table.) We spent hours there, sunbathing and occasionally swimming. It gets plenty hot there, so you really need to swim to stay cool. After a while I ran out of water and was courting dehydration, so I had to go. I never learned her name, nor she mine. How liberating.

When I got back I took a shower and did laundry. Dinner was served and I wolfed it down, having skipped lunch. After dinner I shared conversation and a few jugs of beer with Martina, another girl from Holland. She tells me that there’s a beach in Spain that’s the easiest place in the world to get laid. Cute.’ She wasn’t being very engaging, and more to the point was beginning to bore me, so I went for a walk in the moonlit woods. I found a great place to watch the nearly full moon and the racing clouds, all framed in the branches and trees. The blues and grays were elegant and taken from a subtle palette. It was a rare moment of tranquility, of pure beauty.

Tomorrow I leave Magnetic Island. Question is, another night in Townsville or off to Cairns directly? The fates, and the bus schedules, will dictate.

I slept 12 hours last night. Still don’t know why I’m so tired. I discovered this morning a terrible truth: no ATMs on the entire island! It was looking for a while that I’d have to take a A$14 ferry back to Townsville just to pull out some more cash. Luckily the post office at Picnic Bay does cash advances off major credit cards. Crisis averted. While at Picnic I got breakfast, which included an orange juice that was more like a glass of mashed orange pulp. The juice that eats like a meal.

As Balding Bay is an unofficial nude beach, I went back there today to get a tan the way nature intended. On the way down I met a friend, and she came with me. It’s ‘Unofficial’ because it’s really just a Queensland public beach that happens to be secluded, not some kind of official naturist type deal. At this point in my travels I was ready to try it; after a few weeks of backpacking and hostels, modesty goes pretty much out the window. Still, this was a new experience for me, and I admit my heart was really pounding for the first five minutes. After I realized that nothing was–um–popping up unexpectedly, I relaxed completely. It felt normal quickly, probably because I’ve always felt the idea of putting on a little swimsuit to swim was silly. It got to be fun when I realized that most of the women that walked by were checking me out!

A few hours later I hiked back to Geoff’s to clean up and go on a bushwalk to see the koala bears. About twenty people from Geoff’s took a bus to the trailhead. This was the trail up to an old fort, actually a very scenic trail.

I believe this is Radical Bay as seen from up on the trail.

The idea was to catch the koalas sleeping in the eucalyptus branches. We found three total, a mother/cub and one by itself. They just sleep and are very docile; both times we crowded around the tree and they wouldn’t react. The trail runs through a park that used to be a military fortification, much like Watsons Bay back in Sydney, so it had abandoned pillboxes and other weird abandoned structures. We ended up at an old concrete artillery turret that looked like an amphitheater with a central altar. There we drank champagne. I struck up a conversation with two German girls (2, always 2!), Britta and Sonya. Meeting all these people is forcing me to get very good at memorizing names. Britta thinks my name is funny; the feeling is mutual. We walked back to the bus together. They stopped at the koala mother/cub and petted them. How mellow, or perhaps feckless, koalas are.

Sonya pets the momma koala.

After the bus took us back to Geoff’s, I took a nap and ate dinner. What am I doing tonight? I have no clue. Getting drunk sounds boring. Maybe a little Nietzsche by the torchlight?

This afternoon I took my now habitual nap on the beach. My skin is more tan than burnt now so no pain is involved. Then for some bushwalking. Bushwalking his major on Magnetic Island — much of the island is protected wilderness, and the trails go over some rugged train so sometimes the view is money. I took a trail that begins at Horseshoe Bay and ends at the nude beach at Balding Bay. The course is, by my calculations, a 3.2km trip. It ascends up a steep hill featuring many rocks as large as a tank and shaped like an egg.

The, uh, 'trail' to Balding Bay. Extremely secluded.

Part of the path is a set of stairs cut right from the rock. Then it descends back toward a secluded beach. The beach is framed by these large ovoid boulders on both sides. I found a big one to lay on, to experience the warm breeze and crashing ocean while laying in the shade. Later I scampered up the boulder-laden slope like a puma and perched on the highest rock like a gargoyle. I note that women here dare to swim topless, filling in more observational detail on the psychology of beachwear in Australia:

• Any beach in Australia is at least topless. Pools, maybe.
• At a topless beach, women put their tops back on to go swimming.
• At a nude beach, people put their swimsuits back on to go swimming.
• At a nude beach, women will swim without their tops on.

Later I hiked back up the same trail, fording at one point a new tidal pool created by the rising tide. Fatigued, I took one more nap before dinner. (Full night sleep + 2 naps?? What is my deal today?)

I see that I’ve gotten far enough north in Australia that this is essentially a tropical setting. It’s always hot and sunny here. The trees are huge and colorful creatures abound. Really, I often hear that ‘ooo-ooo-ooo-aah-aah-aah’ sound right from some jungle movie sound track. It’s way too hot for jeans, almost too hot for shoes. The cabins are thin, non-insulated A frames, which I dig. Many women wear sarongs, and you even see a few men with them too. Quite a difference from Sydney, with its temperate quasi-American climate. Injuries (open wounds) take longer to heal up here too, the infections are more severe. Microbiology wonderland. My oyster cut has yet to heal completely.

Tomorrow, I hope to see koalas and to go on a jet-ski tour. Until then, just chill and enjoy the cool evening and music. Geoff’s Place is clearly for partying, it’s designed that way architecturally like most backpacker hostels. But this one especially so. When you first show up, you see the bar and the pool and the club right away. You have to look for the cabins. I see a lot of people on the island tooling around in these little cars, it looks like a Volkswagen Thing and has an gasoline engine but it’s the size of a golf cart. They’re called mokes, and they seem to be very unique to Maggie Island.

People seem less impressed with the beauty here than I am. Are they jaded, or am I just easy to please?

Things got a lot better almost immediately. I went to the Omnimax to watch a movie, mostly just to kill time. It was pretty empty in the theater, so I moved to the sweet spot in the center. Two girls were already there, and we struck up a conversation. They are Esther and Maud (pronounced ‘es-teh’ and ‘ma-ood’, I think), two recent college grads from Holland. They asked me what was good to the south of Townsville, they were headed that way on their trip, so I told them all about Airlie Beach. After the movie we went grocery shopping for dinner. They wanted to make this unusual casserole/stir fry deal with tuna, noodles, bell peppers, pineapple, and thick cream. We went back to their hostel to prepare the food. The hostel had a single can opener that was (I swear!) was right out of the Old West; it had no moving parts and relied purely on torque and angle to puncture the can lid seam. I had once read how these were used, so I was able to figure it out; and once I did, several other people asked me so that they could open their cans too. I had to wrap the handle in a dishcloth to prevent it from cutting my fingers. Very crude. While I was wrestling with this, Esther ran out and bought a nice bottle of wine. The three of us ate dinner outside near the pool. We talked for hours. They don’t like tatoos, it turns out. An anomaly amongst backpackers. Maud produced some pictures they had taken in and around Cairns. Very pretty there, I’m eager to see it for myself. After a while I regretfully realized it was way past 9 PM, so I had to leave. I was sad because I’ll most likely never see them again. At least I have their email. Two of the coolest people I’ve met, here or anywhere. How I love serendipity.

So at this point it’s after 10:30 PM, and I’m getting nervous because things are shutting down and I’m not sure where I’ll be sleeping. Luckily the transit center was still open so I got my backpack out of the locker, called Gordon (who was there, thank God), and took a taxi to his place. This was moderately expensive, at least compared to the bus, but ultimately wise, because Gordon’s directions were terrible and the taxi driver helped me find the place. It was good to see Chris and Gordon again. We watched footie on TV and talked politics and had a lot of laughs watching professional wrestling. Gordon really likes wrestling, which at first struck me as really strange; he’s way too bright for their target demographic. But he showed me the appeal. It’s like a masculine soap opera, with all the little vendettas and scores to settle. And it’s scripted like a TV show ought to be. And the campy gaudiness is so overdone it really becomes self-effacing. Huge sweaty guys with feather boas bellowing into mikes? Very amusing when you look at it like that.

The next morning Gordon had to take off for class, so I got his email and thanked him for the hospitality. Christ showed me to the bus stop and I took it back into downtown Townsville, where the ferries to Maggie Island pick up. I got to the wharf and made the ferry in seconds flat. The trip to Maggie Island was uneventful, and I slept most of the 15 minute ride.

Soon the ferry arrived at Picnic Bay, the primary port of the island. At this point I’ve been hauling my backpack all over town and it’s getting heavy. Lucky me, there’s a shuttle from Picnic Bay to Geoff’s Place, the hostel at which I decided to stay (on many recommendations). Geoff’s Place is on Horseshoe Bay, on the other side of this island. I have a room finally, I’ve eaten something finally. Now it’s time to explore.