Blogsplosion: More Cairns, Darwin, and Uluru

Easily the best part of scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, for me at least, was the spectacle that two humpback whales put on while cruising to the morning dive spot. My opinion is a little biased, since my ears didn’t equalize very well during the first dive, and I only got down to 16 meters after 20 minutes of agonizing effort. The second dive was a drift dive, and by that point I couldn’t get lower than 7 meters without feeling like my ears would burst.

Mama whale breaching, but the cafe was the one who put on the show. The Japanese people want to kill and eat these things... why would anyone want to kill a beautiful animal that puts on a performance without being caged or trained first??

The highlight of the diving itself was a grouper fish the size of a small car – actually the fish had been dubbed “VW” for that reason. Our group also interacted with a friendly bumphead parrot fish that had become accustomed to being feed out of hand. It was cool to be face to face with a beautiful meter long fish, but seemed to contradict the philosophy of preserving the natural habitat. In my opinion, this type of gimmick is a tacit acknowledgement that the sea life at the GBR is no longer as abundant or colorful as it once was due to increasing ocean temperatures and poor eco-tourism management (at least compared to the places I was fortunate to see in Southeast Asia). That being said, several people raved about a dive site near Townville where people went diving with Minke Whales and schools of sharks.

My last day in Cairns was spent walking around the town. In some ways it reminded me of Perth, which has warm weather and a slower pace to life. It’s a beach city, but there are no nearby sandy beaches like Perth, so people end up sunning themselves on the grass around the artificial lagoon in the city center. Aside from the diving, I can’t see a huge reason anyone would chose Cairns over a place like Perth, but maybe my three days there weren’t enough to “suss it out” (as they say in Australia).

I arrived in Darwin late at night and booked another guided tour for the morning, this time an overnight camping excursion to Kakadu National Park. The name comes from a mishearing of an Aboriginal word, which was then confused for the German word for Cockatoo. Personally, it makes me think of poop. Twice. Despite the name, the highlights of Kakadu are nice. Kakadu doesn’t beat the national parks of Utah (Bryce, Zion and Arches) nor Arizona’s Grand Canyon (and that’s coming from a guy who didn’t think the Grand Canyon was that grand compared to Zion). But if you like camping and hiking, there seems to be plenty on offer at Kakadu. Considering the park is half the size of Switzerland, it damn well should.

A feral and hyperactive-looking tour guide named Dan picked me up at 7am and I crawled into the back of a modified Toyota Land Cruiser. By modified I mean the cabin had been gutted and fitted with two parallel poorly-padded benches. The rest of the camping crew consisted of two Finnish girls, two Slovakian girls, an Italian girl, a German girl, and Russian guy. The seats were uncomfortable but at least the ratios were agreeable.

Our first stop was a jumping crocodile cruise, and as contrived as it was, my butt was numb and I needed to stand. A fiber-glass replica of the largest saltwater crocodile (a dangerous misnomer as they spend most of their life in fresh water) ever found was sprawled in front of the ticket office. It came in just over 8 meters long, originally weighing more than 1000 kilograms (in imperial units, that’s a fucking lot), and had a head the size of my body. It’s there in order to hype up the size of the crocodiles potentially in the estuaries but the crocodile leather trade, wholly unregulated until the mid 1970s in Australia, resulted in crocodiles being hunted nearly to extinction. So a very large crocodile comes in at about 5 meters these days and those don’t seem to be very common either. The biggest I saw was probably 3.5 meters. The cruise operator felt it necessary to remind us on each occasion that even those crocodiles were “big enough to kill you.”

The replica of the largest crocodile ever found, I think somewhere in PNG or the Philippines or another P country. 

He looks funny without long arms, am I right?

After lunch, I satisfied my daily culture quota when we hiked around a cave area featuring Aboriginal rock art. Dan told us that there are four distinct types of Aboriginal art (but I have some doubts on the veracity of the details): 1) Contact art, as in contact with Western civilization (or as in a euphemistic punch to the face and made into second class people in society); 2) Modern art (circa ~10,000 years ago), a period of rapid artistic development caused from rising sea levels which required less time for hunting and gathering, and hence more time for art; 3) Ancient art (circa 10,000 to at least 40,000 years ago), consisting of simplistic animal designs and geometric shapes depicting the “creation time”. Some of the ancient artwork depicts paintings of mega fauna which are thought to have gone extinct more than 50,000 years ago, which is pretty cool (if you define cool as giant sloths and enormous gerbils).

A story about a creepy guy who will beat adventurous women or children with a yam if they wander out of the sight of the men. Standard stuff.

That night, we ate kangaroo steaks cooked on a campfire and tried our best at playing the didgeridoo. In a cloudless sky, the gash of the Milky Way cut across the sky. Dan showed me the Southern Cross constellation, which is depicted on the Australian flag, and from that how to find due south. Fascinating stuff for which the details I quickly forgot. I fell asleep in my tent looking at the stars, thinking how easily 6 months of living in a city can make you forget the pleasantries of the simple life.

I woke up in the middle of the night with something hissing at me, and if you didn’t know this already, crocodiles hiss when they are threatened.  I quickly pieced together that was some sort of possum in a dispute with a neighbor opossum, but for the first minute I was a little unsure of my next move. I scared the beasts off and fell back asleep for what felt like an instant, and then was roused with an early morning wake up call.

Our second day had us off-roading through the park, and hiking to Twin Falls and Jim Jim Falls. Twin Falls had tantalizing crystal clear waters but fresh water crocodiles inhabited the area, so swimming wasn’t allowed. As it was the dry season, a more apt name would have been Singular Trickle.  At Jim Jim Falls, in a similar aquatic state, a turquoise pool of frigid water lay at the base and had no crocodiles to worry about. I swam the 100 meters across the pool and arrived on the other side entirely numb, where I climbed onto a ledge to warm up. I stood underneath the falls as it pissed cold water onto me until I summoned the courage to jump back in. The cold water stole my breath but I managed to make it back alive (just in case you had any doubt). After sunning myself dry, I had to suffer the long walk back to the truck where, once arrived, I needed another dip in the pool.

Jim Jim Falls

We had a three hour ride back to Darwin without much to look at on the way. Our guide passed a fellow guide from the company driving a tamer looking set of guests back to the city. This driver entertained us for 30 minutes by dressing up in various tasteless outfits. His first character was a member of the Towelie-Ban sporting an uzi, followed by Steve Irwin, Anna Nicole Smith, a guy asleep at the wheel (at this point, we were at a stop light), and some other crude animations I’ll leave unmentioned. It passed the time at least, but probably freaked out the passengers in the other vehicle.

The towelie-ban character (i.e. he is wearing a towel on his head which I didn't get in the picture). 

For the next two days in Darwin, I fought off boredom during the hottest parts of the day, either by not moving (at most lifting a beer to my lips) or visiting an air-conditioned building, like a bar or Darwin’s art-science-history museum. By the late afternoon, it was comfortable enough to sit outside with the friends I had made from the tour in Kakadu. The running joke between us was, “What suburb are you going to go to tomorrow?” because Darwin city is tiny and dull. To think this wasn’t even the hottest part of the year where it is typically 38^oC with 95% humidity. Also note that the risk of box jellyfish stings from October to May means you can’t cool off in the ocean during this time. Sorry to say it, but it astounds me that people actually live in Darwin on purpose, especially at any time before the tourism boom. Maybe it’s like America’s Florida where people go to retire and become forgotten by their children.

In travelling through Kakadu, I realized that Australia is too damn big for me to drive from Alice Springs to Uluru like I originally planned. In my last full day in Darwin, I re-arranged some flights and added another so that I could arrive by plane at Ayers Rock. In the end it was cheaper than driving too. Right now, I’m in Alice Springs’ airport waiting for my connection, and I’m thankful for my prudence. The outback is expansive and flat. If boredom hadn’t killed me on the drive, I’m sure a “Big Red” kangaroo would have jumped in front of my hired car in the middle of the night. You’ll have to be cleverer more clever (?) craftier than that if you want to kill me, Australia. You have four more days before I escape this lethal country.

(I wrote the above part earlier but since I haven’t had an internet connection, I’m combining posts).

There are two major rock formations in the Ayers Rock, Uluru and Kata Tjuta. These are sacred locations for the local aboriginal people, so they ask visitors to not climb Uluru, but they haven’t legally restricted access. Uluru is the one you typically see in pictures. I arrived with enough time in the day to watch the sunset at Uluru where they offer complimentary sparkling wine and hors d’oeuvres. I also organized transport to the two rocks sights for the following day.

Remember that night when I drank 10 complimentary sparkling wines in an hour? Funny thing, me neither really but I get the general sense I had a lot of fun. I’m happy to report that someone also turned in my daypack at reception, which contained my passport and camera.  I was still pretty hungover or drunk when the shuttle picked me up at 8:30am, but it was the holiday-mode hangover, not the working-weekend hangover, which, for reasons of perspective, the former tend to be more tolerable, um, comma.  

First attempt at catching the sunset.

There are many different types of people in life when they see natural beauty. Some people want to study it; some people want to put a house on/in it. Others want to take a picture. I’m the type of guy who wants to climb it. So for the entire hike at these rocks I thought about how epic a multi-pitch slab climb it could be.  Unfortunately, the hike at Kata Tjuta wasn’t that spectacular. As soon as you walk into the gorges, the looming grandiose peaks jutting into the vast flat landscape is lost. 

Uluru was more interesting. The rock is bigger, the facets on the rock are more varied and it’s just plain pretty. It was named by an explorer looking for suitable farm land in the 1870s, who found nothing but this rock and named it after the Chief Secretary of South Australia who commissioned his exploration, Sir Henry Ayers, but I doubt Ayers ever saw his rock.  Anyway, I took about a million photos and probably 50% of them are all the same. On a few occasions I took a picture of a cool rock feature, looked away, and by the time I looked back I took an identical picture because I was so excited by the rock features. Since I opted to do the walk around the base of Uluru, I had walked nearly 20 kilometers by the end of the day, my feet were sore, and my body was pretty ripe.

Some perspective. These people are climbing up the ridge that is visible on the most shadowed area of the rock pictured below. 

Sunset of Uluru on the second day. 

I got back to my dorm, showered, cooked dinner and sat down to write this blog post. I'll add a full set of pictures once internet is more reliable. Tomorrow I’m back in Sydney for the weekend and, after an epic flight across the pacific, San Francisco!