Banana Bending

My week on the catamaran complete, I disembarked back in Airlie Beach and the Club Crocodile Resort. That week cost me a veneer, a bit of pride, and the further understanding of and respect for the dangers of diving.

I flew up to Cairns, where I became far more distracted. Unlike the week before, there was a lot to do and see, with little planning done on my part as to what I might do. I was just banana bending (slang for having nothing better to do than laze around and bend bananas; don’t believe me, look it up).

My accommodations were great. The Cairns Colonial Club Resort was definitely posh, certainly far more opulent than a hostel. It has a central pool, swim up bars, small cafes and clubs tucked away throughout, everything that someone accustomed to resorts in the Caribbean would expect, but nestled in the centre of the city, close to the piers, the travel agencies, and the Esplanade and the Cairns Square. There were a number of fine restaurants, tiki torches, the rooms laid out like cabins in a maze. I got lost in there once, walking around and around for about 45 minutes trying to find my room. That only happened once. I made a point of memorizing its layout after that. All in all, it was a great place to hang my hat for a week. What more could anyone ask for?

A companion.

Travelling alone has its costs, loneliness being one of them. I’ve never had difficulty meeting people while on vacation, but all that probing for day pals can be tiring, especially after having spent a week on a 60-foot catamaran with the same six people, three of them crew. That week almost didn’t happen. The boat almost didn’t leave, citing a lack of paying passengers, but the travel agency in San Rafael, California I had dealt with, and would deal with again, had insisted they take us out, cajoling and ultimately threatening the boat owners with a future boycott were they not to do what they’d been contracted to do, full boat or not. It did. They honoured their bookings, despite having presumably done so at a loss. I guess you sometimes have to take a loss to maintain goodwill. So small a group made for an intimate group, with little to no separation between crew and customer. I missed that in Cairns.
Cairns was a blur of possibility. Trips to the outback. Day trips to the reef aboard high-speed catamarans, taking 30 minutes or so to reach the inner reef, compared with our sedate hours to reach the outer reef the week before. Four hours isn’t that long when one spends it unconscious, sleeping off sea sickness and jetlag.

I found myself shopping, browsing more accurately. I did buy some t-shirts and souvenirs, but not a lot as I’d have to cart it back with me. I looked into day trips, but found most trips out into the outback were for a week or more. You’d think it was a big place or something. I was paying top dollar to stay at the resort in Cairns, so sadly, the outback was out.

That left the sea. I looked into day trips to the reef. I couldn’t see how it could possibly top what I’d just experienced, but I didn’t just want to spend a week drinking in Australia. I could have done that at home.

I did club it for a time. I met a lot of backpackers. I also discovered that despite my having met Australians working in Timmins, and despite their reputation for being world travelers, many of whom end up in Whistler, working as ski bums to help finance their stay, most Australians prefer to travel almost exclusively in Australia. They certainly have the room for it. They have a temperate south, and vast metropolises thereabouts, but they also have a tropical coast to the north, a reef the world envies, replete with innumerable archipelagos. So, most backpackers I stumbled across were Australians.
With one notable exception. I found myself escaping the midday heat of the Esplanade with a Scot. I found his accent thick and indecipherable at first. Oddly, a couple beers cleared that right up.

We chatted. He showed me his TD bankbook, explaining how he hid his money in Canada for tax reasons. I grew tired of trying to suss out his words amid such a bray, so I suggested a game of pool. He accepted. We had the table to ourselves for a while. Then a group of Aussies arrived, and asked if they could play, too. We accepted. They employed some rather dodgy rules. The Scot and I conferred. We compared the rules I knew to the rules he knew and found them largely in step with one another. Not so the Aussies’ rules. We asked if there were bar rules posted, but there weren’t. And we were unwilling to get in a scrap for the sake of a pool table when we were clearly outnumbered.

We left. We hopped a few bars.

At least until I was told by an Aussie we met in one that I should lay off the beer, once he discovered that I had booked a dive the next day. I’d had too much already, he said. I disagreed, at first. It was likely only a shallow dive, not terribly technical. They took bookings off the street, after all. “Real” divers booked actual dive vacations with travel agencies who specialized in that sort of thing. I certainly did.

I found I’d had enough when the sun plunged down to the horizon, painting the unseen outback as red as it had the Cairns shallow skyline.

I cabbed back to my resort, ate a late supper, settling on water over wine.

The next morning, I rose. I was a little worse for wear from the night before, but I didn’t think that I was so hung-over as to be risking life and limb on the dive.

A shuttle picked me up, I boarded the high-speed catamaran, and found myself among clusters of happy little cliques with little interest in the fairly experienced diver among them. We flew from cap to cap, landing hard. I wrenched my shoulder, putting an end to more daytrips for the remainder of my time Down Under. There was little enough time to do much more by that point, anyways.

How was the dive. Not bad. Not great. The reef was as grey and as dead as that first one I’d ever dove in Jamaica. Innumerable touchy, feely tourists had left their mark over time. The divers were novice at best. They fought the current, gripped the coral to stabilize themselves, killing each polyp they brushed up against.

I was a good boy my last evening, I stayed within the confines of the resort, trying to gain what feeble tan I could muster in too short a time. I failed and became resigned to the fact that I’d return to Timmins almost as white as I’d left and destined to having to explain to seasoned sun worshippers how I could travel to the tropics and not come back with a tan.

My final evening at the resort, my eyes were drawn to a group of like aged young adults sitting across from me. They were a loud cluster of twenty-somethings, their faces as rosy as the sunset I’d just watched, laughing, smiling at one another, clearly enjoying each other’s company. I watched them, trying not to appear that creepy guy across the bar. What I hoped was that they would notice this solitary creature at the next table, one of like age amid so many middle-aged sun seekers, and take pity on me, bringing me into their fold.

They didn’t. I didn’t expect them to.

I asked the bartender who they were. She told me they were a Contiki tour. I had no idea what a Contiki tour was. She enlightened me. Contiki tours catered to tourists under 35. I filed that information away for later use.