Oz is OK, for a wee mid-winter trip. The big plus is the wee-ness of the trip, you know, just a few hours in economy waiting for some ratbag to cause offense with their bare feet or by reclining their seat. But at least now you can make a sneaky video and then shame them on Instagram or Tik Tok as seems to be the new way.
A few years before phones were invented I took a bus from Brissy up to Cairns, stopping off at Townsville so I could pop out to an island to become accustomed to any underwater creepy crawlies. My plan was to take a diving course in Cairns and then explore in a Jacques Cousteau way the Great Barrier Reef.
So Magnetic Island… ‘natural beauty and serenity’, the brochures said. A bit of serenity is always good, especially if it comes with cold beer and chips. Tbh, I was more than happy to be snorkeling in the shallows, trying to find Nemo but being stung by baby jelly-fish and really truly, just happy not to have been mobbed by those Project Jonah Save the Whales volunteers – pushy, rescuey do-gooders. I was happy learning to be confident in the Aussie sea, which, as we all know, is home to bazillions of sharks, Portuguese Man of War jellyfish, crocodiles, sea snakes and amphibious killer-koalas. I had flipped and snorked my way out to the shark net stretched across the bay; it kept all the killy things out. And then I heard someone screaming, full-blast, passionate and emotional – not a good sound when you’re holding onto a shark-net and wondering if that flimsy thing really could keep a grumpy great white or a crocodile out… I looked back towards the beach and there was a woman in the water screaming and thrashing about and… pointing at me and then pointing down into the water. Uh oh, but there was none of that scary shark music so I looked below the surface and saw a herd of sting rays nearby. I wasn’t scared though because that was before I knew that sting rays are another dumb way to die.
So then on up to Cairns. Very high humidity, lots of cold beer (and chips) and more dumb ways to die, for example, a marine biologist in the diving school told us about a common wee shellfish that can puncture a wetsuit and inject a toxin into the diver. Another dumb way to die – the guy from Texas who nominated himself to be my diving school buddy and who, on our first visit to the bottom of the pool, grabbed my mouth piece. And later, out on the Great Barrier Reef, a guy from Japan who used his flippers to knock my mouth piece out. In case you don’t know, mouth pieces connect divers to their air tanks. Mouth pieces belong in the diver’s mouth, connecting mouth and lungs to bottled air and not out in the ocean when 25 metres below the surface.
Another way to die… night diving. I had no intention of being underwater in the dark with sharks, jelly fish, killer koalas, killer shellfish and now killer Texans and killer Japanese. An Australian woman told me she was terrified of the dark but she would go on the night dive because she was even more scared of people calling her a scaredy baby. So then I had to go too, right?
And exactly as I expected, it was terrifying. Little green eyes shining in the dark, giant coral things that appeared in the torchlight, spikey crabby lobster looking things and somewhere nearby, no doubt lurking, just waiting in the dark… sharks, crocodiles, those wee shellfish, a Japanese guy and a Texan. The whole episode was terrifying; worse than sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Finally we ascended and soon afterwards, downing a cold beer on the boat, I asked the Australian woman how she’d liked the night dive. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I was crying the whole time’.
See, Oz is OK for a wee trip.
eN-Zed 