We picked Lee up from the scenic train she had taken up from Cairns and our first mistake was listening to me: I had seen a really cute restaurant in a brochure and we went there for lunch, where I paid $16 for a “turkey sandwich,” which was two slices of store bread, not toasted, smeared with butter, some cold turkey and a slice of processed cheese. Not even a bit of salad on the plate. The view was as lovely as promised (“Rainforest View Cafe”) – I think they were wise not to advertise based on their menu; good marketing strategy. 
After wandering around a bit and deciding not to go to the butterfly sanctuary (read: the bastards vetoed my desperate request to go the butterfly sanctuary), we took the Skyrail down the mountain and back. There is no good story to tell; the reason I mention it is so that anyone reading this who ever passes through Cairns will know that this is a must-do. You can fit up to six people in each little space bubble thing, which takes you through the middle of the mountains, with a waterfall on one side, a river on the other, lush green canopies all around you – just gorgeous. None of the pictures will do it justice, as amateur point-and-shoot pictures of trees are never big sellers, but believe me that it is the lushest, most peaceful space bubble trip you could ever take, as if you're flying through the forest. Sometimes the trees scrape the bottom of the space pod.
Lee was pretty freaked out for the first good twenty minutes, as well as every time we’d pass a transfer point and our little rail car would bump and swing – I don’t think her green face was just the reflection from the trees – and I’m sorry to admit that Mark and I still speculated out loud on how solid the rail cars were and what would happen if someone fell out. (Trying to reach out and comfort her just made the car swing more, so it wasn’t really helpful – sorry again, Lee...)
There are a few stops along the way, including a mini jungle walk – where we saw a huge, beautiful, blue and purple boa constrictor sitting in a tree just beside a look-out point – and an information station that smelled awful but had great information on rainforests. (Really, it smelled awful.) At the bottom we discovered that the base station is about five minutes from our house and we could have just parked there, rather than driving up, going down and up on the Skyrail and then driving back, but I guess you learn as you go. Skyrail: do it! It’s great!
For Christmas we drove down to Townsville, where Mark’s entire family had gotten together, which doesn’t happen often. I can never really believe that it’s Christmas when I’m sitting in a sundress, sweaty and hot and barefoot – because my humidity-swollen feet won’t fit into my sandals – so I mostly just considered it a nice visit. Yes, there may have been a Christmas tree and lots of gift-giving, and Andrew wearing a Santa hat and doing a lot of shouting, but if you’re too hot to eat dessert, it’s just not Christmas. (Our big lunch was a heavily air-conditioned seafood buffet, though we did have Christmas crackers on our plates...) One of my personal Christmas Day highlights is that Mark and his nephew happened to be wearing pretty much the same clothes, so Ewan looked like's Mark's mini-me.
Cairns is supposed to be hotter than Townsville, as it’s 300 km up the coast and in the jungle, but Townsville was SUPER hot, very sticky (everything brown and ugly and sad) and if you didn’t have air conditioning on, you felt sick to your stomach. It was about a week after getting to Trinity Beach and I thought I’d settled in, gotten past the immediate shock to the system, only to start all over again with the wishing I were dead.
Mark and I drove back up to TB, followed the next night by Anna and Nathan, Mark’s sister and her husband, who stayed for a few days. One highlight of their visit was a day spent up in Port Douglas at one of many wildlife places, hand-feeding kangaroos and gazing at koalas, which really are the cutest creatures on the planet. Man, would I love a koala. (I’m less enamoured of the crocs, which are super cool – I touched one and it mostly feels like a snake – but not so great to have around.)
We did have a pretty intense, real-live nature moment: we were among all the big kangaroos, after so many little ones and wallabies, and were disappointed that they weren’t interested in the food we were trying to feed them. Suddenly, one of them came down towards us. Great, we thought, this kangaroo is looking for some snacks and some love, and we’ve got both.
Except that an even bigger one followed the first one down and as they passed right in front of us and his very dangly balls dropped and swung back and forth as he chased after the pretty lady, we realized there was probably something fishy going on. And oh, there was.
Here’s how kangaroos do the deed: First he drinks her pee – or maybe not pee - I wasn’t involved enough to know; 
then he follows her for a bit, stands on her tail, presumably to block her escape; and then he does the pretty standard move that we’ve all seen on nature shows.
(His penis is shaped really strangely, though, and Mark got a great picture to prove it. Look closely!)
Keep in mind that all this was about three feet from where we were standing, which was crazy enough, but then this other male came in and started growling at the first one, the two turning circles around the other while the female came straight towards us, maybe looking for somewhere to hide? Anna and Nathan moved pretty quickly but Mark and I wanted to see the story unfold – until, that is, the two males started moving their fight towards us, following the lucky girl, and we decided that we didn’t need to get kicked in the face by horny and aggressive kangaroos. Maybe another time, you know? Anyway, check out the pictures. It was very cool.
Another fun time with Anna and Nathan was our pretty intense game of Taboo, which we had gotten them for “Christmas,” and in which we were all surprised at Mark’s and Nathan’s competitiveness. I, usually known for being so competitive in these games that it stops being fun (or so I’ve been told), felt totally laid-back and zen about the whole thing. Maybe people really can change, you know?
Less successful was when I decided to be "Helpful." I noticed that Nathan had a hole in his shirt, his favourite red t-shirt, some kind of New Zealand lamb wool fabric that supposedly breathes really well and thus never smells bad. A hole in the front of your shirt? No problem – give it to me! And off I went with my sewing kit, thinking that this hole would be like every other hole I’d ever sewn, where you turn it inside-out, hold it in a tight line and do it up. Right? Who’s with me? Except that – and we’re blaming the weird fabric here – it puckered up the whole front of the t-shirt and it looks like hell. And Nathan is polite to a fault and would not admit that I had butchered his favourite t-shirt, so he kept thanking me for my “help” while I named all the various items of holed clothing I’d fixed over the years... Lame. And lesson learned: mind your own business, always.
An update on the bird situation: I hate cockatoos. Think of the worst possible alarm clock sound you could design – would hundreds of squawking birds do it for you? Every morning at 7:00, then again in the evening. I hate them.
I am very pleased, on the other hand, with the beautiful green parrots that come to munch on the tree beside the balcony. They’re quite discreet – so much so that we didn’t notice them until very recently – and just so pretty. Unfortunately, they’re
resisting my attempts at friendship and have actively ignored me (and my sunflower seeds) for three days running. I make all sorts of noises that I see no reason for them not to love, I offer them the seeds, I move my head around a little from side to side, parrot-style, to let them know that we’re on the same track, but they’re just not interested. One might even use the word “disdainful” if one were so inclined, but I’m choosing to go with “not yet fully engaged.” All in good time, my sweet parrot friends, all in good time. As far as how stupid a person can be, how many times have I lived in tropical climates? How aware am I by now of how painful and dangerous the sun can be? Might I remind you that the big, famous hole in the ozone layer that we’re all so worried about is pretty much directly over my house? And yet – and yet. Off I went to the beach to get some sun.
I'd been using lots of good sunscreen and therefore remaining quite white and pasty, so I figured that if I went in the morning, until no later than 9:00, then I would get good sun but before it gets dangerous, and if I did that enough times I might start to have a general tan. Except that I’m someone who dawdles, pretty much always, our washing machine was broken, the laundromat was not open when it said it would be, everything got moved up in the day – long story short, I fell asleep on the beach and was lying in the sun until about 10:30, when I woke up, thought “well, I didn’t get any colour but I don’t want to push it” and went home.
Now. You can never see that you’re getting burnt – it only comes out later. I stepped out of the shower and was a lobster from the neck down, except for the blinding white of my bathing suit lines, like I was painted red and wearing white underwear. And it’s not like I can ask for sympathy, right? Because everything here is about slip, slap, slop, panicky covering up of skin, staying out of the sun... to have gone sun-bathing in the first place is pretty much a guarantee that nobody’s going to have anything to say except “look at the scars from the various melanomas I’ve had cut out of my white, Irish skin. You should know better.”
It was incredibly painful for two days, then nice and brown for two days (I dared get my hopes up) and now, of course, comes The Great Peel. You know those plastic-type face masks that you peel off? That’s the entire front of my body. It’s fascinating (or incredibly gross, if you’re, say, Mark) and also heartbreaking, because of course under the peel, I’m just as white as ever. So not only was it dangerous, but it didn’t even serve its shallow, superficial purpose. I’d like to say “lesson learned,” but who knows – sometimes I’m just an idiot.
Otherwise: Mark and I are continuing our war against the ants (and losing); the washing machine has been fixed; schools are closed for another week and I’m not sure whether to try to find another job or to just wait and get good money; they don’t have the feta dressing that my dad mixes with cucumbers and I when I tried with herb dressing and pieces of feta it was revolting and I don’t know what to do; our friendly neighbours are a cop and a soldier, respectively, which has exciting potential; immigration has confirmed that if I want to stay for 18 months, I’d better get fruit-picking (or fishing/pearling, which the lady said was actually lots of fun - ?!!?) and I really don’t want to; and finally, after over three weeks of waiting, they connected our internet – only to cancel my phone plan so that there is more work to be done.
Happy New Year to you all and here’s hoping that 2010 is the best one yet.
Kathryn
