The last city on the east coast tour and a good launching point for trips out to the Great Barrier Reef. I stayed there for three weeks to save up the energy for the next leg of my journey.



Cairns.
(photo from a postcard)



I was going to stay here, but then I peeked inside and noticed that the place had absolutely nothing to do with U2 and changed my mind.



The Rattle & Hum Pub. Also had nothing to do with U2. Very strange.

From: Jeff Nyveen To: my friends and family Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 04:34:28 -0400 Subject: Time to Relax Airlie Beach was the last place that I was with the group of friends that I had made travelling up the coast. Everyone is starting to go their separate ways. The Oz bus out of Airlie Beach was overbooked, so I had to call McCafferty's, another Aussie touring company, and pay to take one of their buses out of Airlie Beach to Townsville. The bus left at 12:50am. Some drunk Norwegian guy showed up at 1am just as we were pulling away and made a scene after the bus driver refused to let him on. The trip was lousy. We drove through pouring rain over dark, creepy back roads. My aisle seat was very uncomfortable, and two loud girls in the front seat were joking with the bus driver and cackling the whole way. I didn't sleep a wink. The bus finally rolled into Townsville at about 4:30am. Townsville itself is a very boring town, especially at 4:30am. Even during the day, there's not much for tourists, being almost entirely residential and industrial. Instead of staying there, I decided to take a ferry to nearby Magnetic Island at 6:50am later that morning. I walked 45 minutes through Townsville with my very heavy bags, thinking I was gonna break a collarbone at one point, and hopped on the ferry. Magnetic Island prides itself in having "320 fine days a year" and is supposed to be one of the sunniest places in Australia. It was pouring rain when I got there. The island is basically an island of boulders, surrounded by beautiful but box jellyfish-infested waters. The island has a permanent population of about 2000 people and about 45 million mosquitos. Magnetic Island is so named because every time Captain Cook sailed past it, it would make his compass go haywire and erase the hard drive on his iBook. I slept all afternoon and woke up at about 3pm, just in time to catch Emily, Gemma, and James, three backpackers from England who I met on the Oz bus a few weeks ago, and join them on a guided tour around the island. Dean, our driver, took us around the island in what he said was the only stretch jeep in Australia. We stopped to feed rock wallabies (they look like rats with kangaroo legs) and lorrikeets (they look like rainbow-colored parrots) out of our hands, drink cheap wine, and douse each other with water guns. It was a good time. Because it was still raining the next morning, I decided against staying in scenic Megnetic Island and instead return to Townsville by ferry and continue on the Oz bus up to Mission Beach. As I hung up the phone, it stopped raining, the clouds parted, the sun came out, and the sky turned blue. So I decided use the little time I had left to go on a mission: to see my first koala in the wild. With my backpack and camera, I followed a track into the bush that was cleared by horses and laden with horse manure, but to no avail. I doubled back and found signs pointing down a path to a "Koala Walk." I followed the path into the bush. As I worked my way inland, the path became harder and harder to follow. There were branches in my way, and spider webs everywhere. I picked up a broken palm frond and used it to bat my way through. I kept walking. It was getting hotter and wetter. There was no more path anymore. Still no koalas. "Koala Walk" my ass. I turned around and went back to the hostel. I have yet to see a koala, kangaroo, croc, or shark in the wild. I could go to a zoo like everyone else has, but that's cheating. Took the ferry back to Townsville and boarded the Oz bus, meeting up with a few old friends. I was fortunate enough to have Clarke, the kick-ass tour guide I had for the first leg of my trip up the coast, as my driver again. We passed a makeshift baseball field (the first one I've seen down here), a clearing covered with enormous termite hills, and sugar cane and banana plantations. We drove through Tully, the wettest city in Australia, and arrived in Mission Beach later that afternoon. It rained the whole day. I had dinner at the hostel pub and met a guy named Honest Mick, an older guy who owned a nearby crocodile farm. Mick let me pet the baby croc he brought with him. She was named Gerty. I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with Will, a tall skinny guy from Bristol, and Jody, a spitting image of Shannon Dougherty from Vancouver. Feeling there was not much to do in rainy Mission Beach, I left the next morning on the Oz bus for Cairns. We stopped at Honest Mick's croc farm, got to see him sit on a 2 ton croc, and watch his assistant it a dismembered chicken. He had lots of animals there: kangaroos, wallabies, snakes, cockatoos, and a blind dog. Honest Mick joked around with me the whole day and then offered me a job at his farm cleaning croc teeth and scooping croc poop. I declined. Later that afternoon, we stopped at SkyRail, a tour of the rainforest from a gondola and a complete waste of time. At the end of the day, the bus stopped at an AJ Hackett bungy jumping center. I held off. I'll do it in New Zealand. It's supposed to be better over there. Then we rolled into Cairns and got dropped off at a hostel, thus concluding my Oz Experience tour of Australia's east coast. I think I'm going to chill out here for a while before setting off on the next part of my journey, Darwin and Alice Springs. Cairns seems like a pretty cool place. If you check out the map, it's on the top right corner of the continent. It's a medium-sized city, a good place to stop and rest and catch up on my sleep, showers, laundry, and e-mail. We passed a hostel called "U2 Backpackers," and there's a "Rattle & Hum Pub" right next to my hostel. Spooky. Lots of drunk and homeless Aborigines here. I decided to bring in all of my film to get developed. Yes, it cost an arm and a leg, and it'll be a pain carrying around all those pictures, but I wanted to make sure my camera was working properly after the beating it took on Fraser Island, I was too impatient to wait months to see them all, I wanted to be able to share my pictures with the people I'm travelling with, and I didn't want to let my unprocessed film color shift in my hot bag or get fogged by x-ray machines on the way home. I have some good ones. But I'm nothing compared to Peter Lik. Peter Lik is some guy who went all over Australia with a large-format camera, a bunch of Cokin filters, and a tripod and took beautiful photographs of Australia. There's a Peter Lik gallery right around the corner from my hostel. I bought one of his books. You'll find a rack of Peter Lik postcards in every supermarket, drug store, photo lab, souvenir shop, and tourist attraction along the east coast. Once I find out for sure if I can get an extension for filing my federal tax return, I'll be booking the rest of my trip around Australia and New Zealand. I still have to decide if I want to visit Perth. Some say it's fantastic, others say it's not worth the time and energy to get there. It's a pain in the ass dealing with all of the local travel agents. They all want to sell me packages and won't give me straight answers to my questions. I'll let you know when I figure it all out. No Regrets. Liam: No one I have talked to has heard of the Hash Harriers. Not even Clarke, our Oz Experience driver who lived in Cairns for 16 years and has been up and down the east coast 85 times, knew what I was talking about. Jeff

A pass for the Wool Shed. A wild place.



The Ultimate Party crowd. Lots of fun.



Whenever I could get my hands on napkin, I tried to impress people with my knowledge of England.

From: Jeff Nyveen To: my friends and family Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 19:45:40 -0400 Subject: Still in Cairns It's March 1, and right now I am supposed to be on a plane back to Houston. But I'm still in Cairns. I've extended my stay and plan to return to Houston on May 15 after seeing the rest of Australia and New Zealand. We got nailed by Cyclone Steve the day before yesterday. It was a pretty mpowerful storm, with 140 kph winds and lots of rain. Trees got ripped up, signs and fences got knocked over. All the English tourists were outside staring at the storm in disbelief, but I, a Houston boy who has been through several hurricanes, relaxed inside and rode it out. It rains so much here. Even when the rain lets up, it's hot and muggy as hell (is hell muggy? or is it a dry heat?). Did a one-day tour of Cape Tribulation and the surrounding tropical rainforests a few days ago. We got up at 7am to get into and out of a 4x4 every 20 minutes to do 10 minute nature walks. Rainforests are cool when there are parrots and monkeys screaming and shitting on you from the branches above, but when it's just trees and vines, it gets pretty boring. Our tour guide sucked too. I destroyed my new pair of sunglasses by putting them on my hat and falling asleep on them inside the 4x4. Almost every night since I've been here, I've gone to a bar called the Wool Shed. Pretty cool place. And I've been having smoked salmon pizza from the pizza shop next door every night when I get back to the hostel. All of my Oz Experience travelling buddies are starting to filter into Cairns and go their separate ways. It's nice to see everyone again, but also comforting to know that the rest of the way I'll be doing it without them, making new friends along the way. I'm already meeting new people. On the bus here, I met a guy from Galveston (45 minutes from my Houston home), and when I first got here I shared a room with 3 Americans. I seemed to have a lot in common with Alex, a kid from Bermuda who was wearing a USC T-shirt (his brother was a film major there), wants to start up an Internet business, and enjoys the stock market. Alex was soon replaced by Derek, a typical American. He fits the stereotype perfectly: loud, obnoxious, and uneducated. He spent about an hour and a half last night making a bullshit argument about Aborigines when all he knows about them probably came out of tour brochures. He came back to the room with a didgeridoo today, proclaiming that he wasn't taking it home "as an artifact" but instead planned to play it for his friends. He's the kind of guy who stomps into a room and looks around to see who noticed. He's the kind of guy who wakes people up in the middle of the night by whistling on his way to the shower. He even coughs loud. What a schmuck. It is guys like him who give Americans a bad name internationally. I've been hanging out with an English girl named Barbra. She explained to me that she has travelled up the coast with her ex-boyfriend and that she plans to meet up again with him in Thailand. After seeing people come and go every time I hopped on and off the Oz bus, it's nice to stop and get to know someone for a change. But then you have to say goodbye to them, probably forever, just when you're starting to get close. It's a trade-off. An old Aborigine man on crutches fell on me yesterday while leaning over to pick up a cigarette butt. I'm booking a whitewater rafting trip for tomorrow, diving on the Great Barrier Reef the next day, and flying to Darwin to continue my tour of Australia on Sunday. No Regrets. PS: I just noticed the other day that I have stopped biting my nails. Jeff

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