Vignette de voyage: Ben

With the hours dwindling to an end for my time in Cairns and indeed my time in Australia as well, I pause to reflect on the past several days. Overall, too much time spent in the underwhelming and fairly tacky tourist town, and too little in the laid-back idyllic Wongaling beach hamlet. Analogously, too little time of my precious year in Australia was spent seeing the invraisemblables wonders this country/continent contains.

It was great to see Ben again and to chill on his vibe for a while. Tropical paradise has a way of chilling people out: slowing them down and gradually extracting the British-ness from them, as the case may be.

gILLIGAN'S

22 July 2010

The abrupt end to the music that was pumping at Gilligan’s night club brought the inevitable shouts for more music infallibly falling on deaf ears. Shortly thereafter, the raucous clamor on the streets below my single-paned sliding-glass door-window transitioned to laughing, joking, flirting voices in the hallways of Gilligan’s adjacent hostel, and an earnest and intimate conversation (whose hilarity merits analysis in the next paragraph) directly outside my room. I subsequently abandoned the notion of sleep for the next few hours while the revelers moved on and quieted down. Unfortunately, I took no pictures of the idiosyncratic Gilligan’s Backpacker during my whole stay.

I re-emerged after being awoken to write in my journal at a table in the filthy kitchen-dining area of the first (second) floor; on the way, I encountered for a third time the earnest couple. The first time, when I left my room for the dance floor at around 9 or 10, they were standing close to each other, not touching but with desire burning like a flare between them. The second time was when I retired to my room for the first time, probably around 1 or 1:30; they had started kissing and I was happy for them as I thought to myself, ‘get a room,’ at which point I didn’t reason that they didn’t have a room, a fact which was all too apparent around 2:30 when I chanced upon them once again—looking much soberer and more frustrated than the two previous times. I dwelt a bit on the irony of my 4-person room (about $6 more expensive per night than the huge dorm rooms that are the norm among backpackers) which I shared with exactly 0 people during my whole 4-night stay, a mere 20 feet from the table over which the couple was growing steadily more frustrated.

For its shortcomings, Cairns played host to the highlight of my trip and one of the true marvels of the Earth. My short day of scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef was an explosion of color, form, and spectacle. Not having an underwater camera, I only have photos of myself above the reef, but check out my blog post for the Great Barrier Reef on Tim Thinks for a description of the marvels to which I bore witness.