John, Mary & Kathryn's Travel Page

February 8, 1997

Cairns

It was the rainy season in Cairns, something none of our guidebooks had bothered to mention. Being outside in a rainstorm here was like taking a shower fully dressed. The rain poured down under pressure in fat drops as big as marbles, and after just a few seconds in the rain our hair was lank and dripping and our shirts clung wetly to our backs.

We decided against roaming around in the rain to find a hotel, and instead consulted our books and headed straight for a cute little B&B called the "UpTop DownUnder". The books were wrong here too, as the UpTop DownUnder was actually a large, lively backpackers hostel. However, it was the first hostel we had found that welcomed little babies, and the price was right, so we were happy to check in.

Life in the UpTop DownUnder was relaxed. The rooms were clean and spare, with white Formica shelves and narrow beds. Our room was soon criss-crossed with clotheslines and drying clothes, which made Bertie, the weekday manager, laugh. "Chinese laundry?", he would ask as he walked by. Kathryn liked to crawl out through the sliding glass door and onto the covered walkway around the courtyard, where people sat, talked, and read. It was usually hot and still in the room, so we took her lead and usually hung around the common areas. After a month of restaurant meals, I particularly enjoyed shopping for fresh food and cooking in the large communal kitchen. One side of the kitchen was lined with cubicles and refrigerators where guests and staff stored their food. The food was guarded with hand-lettered signs discouraging borrowing. Some were matter-of-fact: "Warren's Food". Others had emphatic messages like "Hands Off!" and "Don't Touch". I liked the gentle approach taken by two women whose flowery sign said "We Love Our Food". The lounge next door held couches, several patio tables with plastic chairs, some vending machines, a pool table, and stacks of magazines and tourist brochures. Early or late, there was always someone in the lounge, reading or writing letters or drinking the inexpensive beer that was sold in the office until 10 p.m.

Travellers from all over stayed at the UpTop DownUnder. Most of the hostel staff were young English backpackers, working for a few months and saving a little money before continuing their travels. They received free lodging and $A120 a week. Few had any plans after their return home, except to find work for a while until they could travel again. Among the guests, English and Irish backpackers were the most common, but there were also many Danes, Canadians, and Germans. I spent several evenings talking a lot with a middle-aged Englishman. He worked in a pastry shop in a small town and had planned this tour of Australia since before his wedding. His children were several years old now, but his family did not object to this month-long absence. "It has always been understood." Somehow in the heat his pants were always neatly pressed and creased, and he wore leather shoes, neatly laced with white socks. He had spent many years in the Territorial Army, the British equivalent of the Reserves. They had participated in several exercises on the Continent, practicing to repel the long-feared Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. The plan was for the T.A. units to reach their pre-positioned equipment in Germany, joining American paratroopers and Canadian units, on the second day after an invasion. His unit manned anti-tank guns towed behind Land Rovers. They expected to fire two shots before they were located and killed by Soviet tanks. They practiced the third shot but did not really expect to fire it.

The kitchen and lounge were in an low block building, open to a compact courtyard of palm trees clustered around a small swimming pool. During the day, people sat out by the small swimming pool, listening to the tree frogs croaking, reading and dozing in the sunshine, cooled by short, light rainshowers. Every few hours a burst of hard rain would drive the sunbathers from their poolchairs. Some would wander off to do laundry or take naps or make telephone calls, and others took refuge at the tables and chairs of the lounge, talking and watching the rain filling the grass. After the rain stopped, they would retrieve their towels and slowly gather back at the pool. In the evenings most of the hostel staff and guests collected in the kitchen to cook, or headed off in shuttle buses to a local pub for the free meals offered to UpTop DownUnder residents. As we waited for the bus, small fruit bats often flew overhead. They lived in the trees around the hostel and were headed out for an evening of hunting.

I liked late nights at the UpTop DownUnder. The heat of the day was gone and the air was pleasant and cool. One by one, the other guests finished their letters or beers or cigarettes and headed off to bed, and by one or two in the morning I was usually alone with the tree frogs. The hardest rain fell at night, torrents pounding the buildings and thrashing the palm trees. The lawn in the courtyard disappeared underwater and streams poured off the roof, splashing on the walkway and splattering into the lounge. Sometimes the swimming pool overflowed and a hostel staffer would come out, dressed in shorts and a plastic garbage bag, to lower the water level and check the pumps. I would sit, shirtless and barefoot, on the picnic tables that lined the walkway and look out at the rain, drinking a beer saved from the evening and smoking. Then I would walk down the walkway, splashing in the pools of rainwater, slide the door to our room wide open, and lay on my bed, under a thin sheet with the breeze from the ceiling fan, listening to the rain and the frogs.

We met many long-term travelers in Cairns. Many of our fellow guests at the UpTop DownUnder had been on the road for several months or a year, moving from hostel to hostel, exploring Australia more deeply than we could hope to. The kings of the long-term travelers, though, were Xavier and Muriel Ballandre. We met them over breakfast on the Esplanade on our third day in town, as they strolled their little boy down the sidewalk. The Esplanade was the place in Cairns to buy a used vehicle. Campervans, some dusty, some shiny, were parked up and down the street, for sale as their owners prepared to leave Australia. Xavier and Muriel had been touring Australia in a troupe of campervans for the past eleven months. They had just sold their campervan for five thousand dollars after a week parked on the Esplanade. As each member of their group sold his vehicle, the group had celebrated with a large tub of shared ice cream. Their son was neatly dressed in a sailor's outfit. He had been born in France but had spent most of his life in Australia. Now Xavier and Muriel were deciding where to go next. As French citizens they could get work permits in the French possessions, and they were considering Tahiti or French Polynesia, weighing the chances of finding work against the costs of airfare. Xavier was a draftsman by trade, but I had the feeling he could do many things. He did not much like his home town of Lyons. People there had a good life but still complained too much. Xavier and Muriel sometimes went home to work and save money, but soon wanted to travel again. Their last trip had been to China: six months in a university, studying Chinese, and then the next year roaming around the country. They had traveled like this for the last eleven years. As Kathryn and little Monsieur Ballandre made faces at each other, we exchanged addresses with Xavier and Muriel and urged them to visit us someday in the United States. Perhaps someday they will.

One day we took a short cruise out to Fitzroy Island. It was raining hard in town, and the passengers were drenched as they crowded up the gangway to the Tropical Sunlander. The ship was packed with wet bodies sitting on towels and clinging to posts, and rain and spray obscured the windows. As the ship picked up speed over gray choppy seas, it began to roll and pound and passengers lurched to the toilets, hands cupped tightly over mouths. We felt better when the sky turned bright blue and the island came into sight.

The hills of Fitzroy Island were covered with tropical rainforest, still shining and dripping from the night's rain. The rainforest was a vertical world, where the trees stretched high, competing for a precious share of the sunlight falling on the forest canopy. A small stream splashed down a narrow course between jagged rocks. Butterflies followed us on the track and sometimes I saw colorful parrots waddling through the tangled bush. There was a type of green ant whose rear ends carried a citrusy juice, used by Aborigines as treatment for colds and sinus ailments. They squeezed little bursts of the juice from the ant, or boiled and separated an entire hive.

A seedling in the rainforest needs the darkness of the forest floor to germinate. It grows to a meter of height in the dark undergrowth. Then it waits. When a tree fell, from disease or age, and opened a space in the forest canopy, the seedling grows furiously skyward, struggling to reach the sun before the nearby mature trees close ranks, spreading their branches and shutting off the prized sunlight.

Some of the leaves in the forest were bright red and ready to fall. Dead leaves lay on the forest floor as a thin rich carpet. Under the rotted leaves, the soil was poor. When a patch of rainforest was cleared away for agriculture, the first few years' crops would be good, nourished by the rich topsoil, tropical sun, and heavy rains. But when the thin layer of fertile soil was exhausted, the crops would fail and more rainforest would have to be cleared. The abandoned patch would lay exposed and in the heavy rains -- in the rainforests around Cairns, six inches of rain in a night was not unusual -- and any remaining topsoil would be washed away until the land was barren and dead. The runoff carried soil out into the ocean, browning the clear blue water and shutting out the sun until the reef was as dead as the cleared forest. Logging accelerated this process. All over the tropical rainforest the battle between loggers and agriculture, and environmentalists and tourism, was being fought.

The environmentalists had won the battle on Fitzroy Island, which was almost entirely national park with a small resort at dockside. We sat around the swimming pool and watched Kathryn practice her crawling under the chairs and tables. I took a walk on the beach. It was white and broad but there was no sand. Millions of tiny coral fragments clinked under my sandals, sounding like broken crystals.

Another day we rented a car and drove out to the Atherton Tablelands west of Cairns. The steep hills were lush and green, dotted with cows and tidy white-painted farmhouses built on stilts. The small towns held feed and fertilizer businesses, coffee shops, hardware stores, and dusty trucks. It was a day of patchy rain. Dark clouds chased clear blue around the sky, and we drove from bands of dark rain to glistening sunlight. The ridges and valleys were covered with an exotic mixture of evergreens, leafy trees, and large spiky palms. The forests held hidden waterfalls plunging into rocky pools, ringed with ferns and red and white flowers, and we dangled Kathryn's feet in the cold water as she looked down with her mouth open. Late in the afternoon we turned on the car radio and found a news programme. An official inquiry had concluded that young Aborigines were dying in police custody at an alarming rate. Two competing commissions investigating governmental corruption were trading charges of interference and subpeonaing each other's files. Farmers and rightist politicians were in an uproar over a recent decision of the High Court jeopardizing pastoral leases of traditional Aboriginal lands. We turned off the radio and continued our serene drive through the Tablelands.

Traveling On A Budget

Cairns is a fine place for budget lodging, if you stay in a backpacker's hostel. At the Uptop Downunder (which we liked very much, and understood from other hostel guest to be the best hostel in Cairns) double rooms were around $A20 and beds in dormitory rooms even cheaper.

As far as activities, the tourism business in Cairns was very competitive, with hundreds of competing tour operators offering car hire, bus tours, reef cruises, scuba diving, rainforest treks, scenic flights, four wheel drive expeditions, and so on. With all this competition, there were good deals to be had. The travel agency staff at the Uptop Downunder were very helpful in pointing us to the best operators for our needs and steering us away from bum deals, such as the hire car shops advertising impossibly low rates loaded with hidden conditions, like a minimum one-month rental ($A38 is about right for the smallest enclosed car without air conditioning, in the off-season.)

An intriguing feature of hostel life in Cairns was the nightly free meals. Some of the bars and clubs around town offered free dinners, every night, to backpackers staying at the Uptop Downunder and a few other major hostels around town. Shuttle vans even came around to the hostels to collect guests for dinner. Other clubs offered similar perks on a semi-regular basis. You could choose to drink away whatever you saved in food, of course, which was the idea, but with some restraint a backpacker could dine nicely, with a beer or two, for only $A2 or 3 every night. If you got tired of the club food, cheap eateries were common and stayed open quite late at night. For breakfasts, the booths along the Esplanade were great value as well.

Staying Connected

The nearest Compuserve node was in Brisbane, a long-distance call, and the Uptop Downunder had only one coin-operated payphone in the lounge, so going online was not very convenient and rather costly. I usually logged on after midnight, when there was no chance of holding up other phone users as I hooked up my modem, computer, and coupler and logged on. In addition, even in a well-run, friendly hostel I would not be inclined to bring expensive gear like laptop computers into the common areas. Our little palmtop computer was inconspicuous and kept us in touch.

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