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Published: April 19th 2012
We ended the first of our back-to-back cruises in Sydney on Friday the Thirteenth and were met at the Pier by our old Aussie friend, Diane Prior. We were also met by our old Denver pal, Paul Briggs, who was in Australia for a couple of weeks visiting our old Aussie friend Diane. Long story short, back in 1980 Diane and her then boyfriend Wayne were backpacking around the world and staying at the Denver Youth Hostel when I met them. At the time, I was running a small demolition company called "The Ball Busters," and I would sometimes hire casual labor out of the hostel. Wayne and Diane, or "Wank" and "Dag" as they called each other, came to work for me removing nails from studs and rafters. We got on well and that winter ended up sharing a house I owned in Five Points. We’ve been friends ever since.
Paul and Dag took us to a coffee shop nearby where we waited for our other Denver friends, Bill Mahoney and Joan Martin, who joined us for the final two weeks of the cruise. That "arvo" (afternoon) we took a cab over the Sydney Harbor Bridge and
joined Diane’s father Dave and her sister Marian for a spot of lunch.
Dave’s something of a spell binder, and loads of fun to talk to. He was a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Company and ran the network’s Singapore Bureau in the early 1960s. This was around the time when Singapore was taking its first steps towards independence from Malaysia. As a journalist, he was on a first name basis with the likes of President Lee Kwan Yu. After Singapore, he reported from New Guinea. These were the scenes of our friend Diane’s childhood, and an adventuresome one it was, too, "
fair dinkum (truly)."
As you can tell by the lingo, this cruise has been an Aussie emersion for us. The vast majority of passengers are Australian. No better place to get to know people than on a cruise ship where you’re eating, sleeping, and hanging out together 24/7. We did five stops in the “land dan unda” -- Darwin, Cairns, Airley Beach, Brisbane, and Sydney. Some brushstrokes:
Darwin Named after Charles, Darwin is the capitol of Northern Territory. Everything’s upside down in the "land dan unda," so North means hot. South – as you
get closer to Antarctica – means cool (though by no means cold). For a capitol city, the town is surprisingly small, with a population barely topping 78,000. What strikes you initially is that there don’t seem to be many -- if any -- old buildings for a city founded nearly 150 years ago. That’s because Cyclone Tracey blew the town clean off the map back on Christmas Eve, 1974.
It’s since been rebuilt, but for all intents and purposes it’s a brand new city. The core consists of a wide pedestrian mall with canopies built over it to provide shade. We only had a few hours to enjoy Darwin -- enough to shop for a pair of walking shoes for Nancy, browse the souvenir shops, have lunch at a famous Darwinian eatery (Subway), check our email in a local net café, and get back to the ship in time for an early sail away.
But then, an hour out to sea, we turned around and headed back. The captain came on the horn to explain that a passenger had become ill and needed emergency treatment. This, from my experience, is not unusual on a cruise ship. The median
Green Island
About 17 miles off the coast of Cairns, Australia.age after all is around 70, and there’s been a heart attack on almost every cruise we’ve taken. On one Trans-Atlantic crossing on the QE-2, a crewman jumped overboard and was never heard from again. They never really say anything when something dire happens, but if you hear the words “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo” over the speaker system, it means somebody, somewhere on the ship is in deep kimchee.
Cairns Further down the Queensland coast, Cairns is the jump off spot for tours of the Great Barrier Reef. We walked the two blocks into town and stopped off at a travel agency to book a tour. We decided to “
splash the lot” (blow every last blessed nickle) and get the total package, which included the Buffet Lunch Experience, the Semi-Submersible Sub Experience, and the Glass Bottomed Boat Experience.
Then we jumped on a municipal bus and took the poor man’s tour of Cairns. I do this often in ports, jump on a city bus and go where it’s going. The driver kept apologizing because this particular bus took us into a low income neighborhood where there was public housing. But that’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m interested
in.
The following morning, Easter Sunday, April 8
th, we took the launch out to Green Island where a catamaran called Big Cat was waiting for us at the end of a long pier. From there we boarded our various smaller craft. We saw giant clams. We saw sea turtles. We saw lots of tropical fish. We almost saw my $20 Buffet Lunch Experience go over the side, the boat was rocking so hard. (Australian slang for that one, by the way, is Technicolor Yawn). (FYI, I did manage to keep my cookies).
Airlie Beach The next day we tendered in to Airlie Beach and walked the boardwalk round to the “Lagoon,” which is actually a giant salt water pool the city built to render swimming possible year round. It seems that from November to May the waters around Airlie are infested with an almost invisible species of jelly fish known to science as Chironex Fleckari, and to the Aussies as ‘stingers.’ Get one of those little bastards into your "budgie smuggler" (Speedos) and you'll win a free trip through hell's own carwash. Ergo, the “Lagoon.”
We had lunch at a
traditional Aussie restaurant (McDonald’s), then took a walk through the local outdoor crafts market where one nice old dear was advertising milk shakes for $4.00, which would be a screamin’ deal in this colossally expensive country. So I stepped up.
“I’d like a chocolate milk shake,” I said. She poured whole milk into a blender, squirted in some chocolate sauce, blended it up, poured it out, and handed it over.
“Um…no ice cream?” I said.
“Nar,” she replied. “Don’ ‘ave any oice cream.”
“Okay, how ‘bout some ice?”
“Nar, nar oice oither.”
So I walked around with my tepid cup of chocolate milk until I found somebody selling ice cream, and bought a $4.00 ball of chocolate to add to the milk.
“Thanks,” I said as the guy dropped a scoop of Berry Blend into my cup. “All out of chocolate,” he said.
“Well, okay, I guess. Thanks anyway.”
“No worries, mate” he said.
Brisbane Brissy’s the capitol of Queensland, and a "beauty bonzer (really terrific)" city it is. (Fair dinkum). It’s Australia’s third largest city, and a 50 minute, twelve dollar bus ride into
Don in Semi-submersible
I was feeling a little green around the gills when this pic was snapped in a semi-submersible near the Great Barrier Reef town, which we didn't have to pay since I was, nominally at least, crew. A river wends its way through Brisbane and there are lots of Victorian-era buildings mixed in with the skyscrapers.
The bus dropped us off a block from Queen Street Mall, a pedestrian area with a covered performance space where it just so happened some "Abos" (Aborigines) were performing traditional song and dance. Didgeridoo is, I discovered, onomatopoetic. It’s the actual sound the instrument makes.
The most interesting thing about this particular group was that only one dancer in the whole tribe was black. The balance appeared to be various shades of white. I asked the woman seated next to me about it, and she said “Yeah, they’re totally inbred, the Abos. See, lots of people claim Aborigine blood to collect the subsidies.”
The story we’re getting from a lot of white Aussies, who tend to sound off when it comes to the the Aborigines (“We haven’t got a lot of time for them,” said one lady from Perth), is that the government has spent millions to house and feed them, but few of them have actually gotten with the program. Many
are brain-damaged from too much alcohol, not to mention the petrol sniffing. So the song and dance thing, reviving their ancient ways and honoring their ancestors, seems to me like a step in the right direction. (“It’ll take another coupla generations, I expect,” said the husband of the lady from Perth).
I’ll close with my favorite Aussie joke.
Q: What’s an Australian kiss?
A: Same as a French kiss, only Down Under!!
G'dday, Mate.
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