Australia - Day 4 - The Dead Day

12/27/16, “The Dead Day”
Hobart International Airport, Tasmania, Australia (HBA)

I suppose this dateline and establishing shot pretty much sums up today.  Today is a very odd day of the trip, in that absolutely no activities are planned.  It is merely my transit from the southernmost city I am spending a night (Hobart) to the northernmost (Cairns).  The way the flights worked and the fact that I said “Tasmania Complete” last night and that the Great Barrier Reef (my purpose for going to Cairns) requires a full day was what necessitated the trip being structured with this dead day.

I will connect in Brisbane (pronounced BRIZZ-bin, not bris-BAYN as I would have expected, just as Melbourne is pronounced MEL-burn and not mel-BORN) before continuing to Cairns.  All in all, it promises to be an entirely uninteresting day.  To clear up any confusion, the title comes from the closing line of last night’s entry (Today was a crazy intense day, but tomorrow will be a dead day, so I guess it evens out.), and it has nothing to do with the tragic news I learned when I woke up this morning.

After I closed last night, I headed back to the hotel to publish before passing out.  I would need to stop by Budget in the morning to drop off the keys, but they didn’t open until 7:30 AM.  I woke up at 6 AM and saw that my phone was lit with notifications.  One of them was from my best friend.  All I could tell from the notification screen was that she forwarded me a picture and captioned it “Holy fuck”.  What could that possibly be?  I opened the message and saw that the picture was a screenshot of a news article.  The headline on the news article broke my heart.  “Iconic Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies at 60: ‘She Was Loved by the World and She Will Be Missed Profoundly’”.  No, this couldn’t be happening.  This couldn’t be real.  Surely I misread the headline.  A message from another friend confirmed it, as did my Facebook news feed.

I was still half-asleep, so I didn’t fully process the news, I suppose, and went back to sleep.  I woke up around 8 AM and walked over to Budget.  They were able to backdate the return to 7:30 AM so that I wouldn’t be charged, but they told me I would have to circle the block (one-way street) to return the car to the garage.  I looked at the angles and, knowing how tight of turns the car could make, I knew that I could I just drive it straight from the parking spot across the street into the garage if the street was clear of oncoming traffic.  I did just that.  Meanwhile, I had to decide on what to do for breakfast, and I opted for a place called Salamanca Wharf Café, which seemed the highest rated breakfast spot.  It was 15-minute walk from Budget, but the rain was starting to pick up, so I wouldn’t exactly be a peasant walk.

As I walked, now relieved of my obligations for the morning, the scope of the tragedy finally struck me and the grief found me.  I was completely heartbroken.  This was Princess Leia.  She was the ultimate survivor.  I just saw her in Rogue One receiving the stolen Death Star plans and saying that this gave them “Hope.”  She looked her youthful self, thanks to CGI, and that would be how I would always remember her.  General Organa will still be in Episode 8, and I suppose her character will have to meet the same fate as the actress, either at the end of Episode 8 or the start of Episode 9.  Han is dead, and I never expected Luke to survive the sequels.

The old is out, to be replaced by the new.  When the next generation of kids grows up, to them, “Star Wars” will mean “Rey, Finn, and Poe” not, “Luke, Leia, and Han” or “Anakin, Padme, and Obi-Wan”.  It will mean “Kylo Ren and Snoke” not “Darth Vader and the Emperor” or “Count Dooku and General Grievous”.  For better or worse, that is what Disney has made happen, and Carrie’s death has only reinforced that.

I soon arrived at the restaurant, thoroughly drenched.  For breakfast, I ordered the house speciality, along with a flat white.  It consisted of bacon, smoked salmon (subbed in for the chorizo), mushrooms, poached eggs, and sourdough toast.  It was heavenly.  When I was done, it was pouring, so I trudged back to the hotel, attempting to call my parents on the way to discuss the news, but they were driving and couldn’t talk,, and they couldn't quite figure the advanced technology known as the "speakerphone".

I picked up some souvenirs on the way and was soon back at my hotel.  I didn’t want to put my wet clothes in my suitcase, and I had to change into my suit to fly, so I tried to dry my casual clothes, but the washer/dryer had some weird features and wound up making the clothes even damper than they already were.  I packed and headed down to wait for a cab.  The cab took me to the airport, and I got my boarding passes for both flights.  The rain had stopped, so I sat down outside, where I lit up a Graycliff and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close (along with having to cut my cigar short) so that I can head to the gate.

Cairns, Queensland, Australia

I suppose that dateline and this establishing shot seem as insignificant as the one from today’s first entry and they are, but it is what it represents that matters and what is on the other side of this building further down the road.  Datelines of Aguanguen, Michoacan, Mexico and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories and Syangboche, Nepal are just as unassuming, but they, too, are united by this common theme, the one reason I came to Cairns.  That reason, of course, is the Great Barrier Reef, a Natural Wonder of the World.  For those playing along at home, Paricutin Volcano, the Northern Lights, and Mount Everest would be the Wonders associated with those other datelines.

However, for my purposes, perhaps the datelines of Mont Tremblant, Quebec and Vienna, Austria and the Drake Passage and Xi’an, China would be the better analogs.  Those are, of course, where I have previously smoked my 2008 Christmas Pipe during my various Christmas trips.  The sites whose visits I recounted during each of those smokes are far more interesting than anything I saw today, but this entry is not about today.  It is about tomorrow.  It is about seeing the Reef.  I killed an entire day to get from Hobart to Cairns.  I’ve been known to see countries in less time than that.  The reason for this is singular: to see the Reef tomorrow.  The reef is the last Natural Wonder of the World that remains for me, and, since today is an otherwise boring entry, I will recount the journeys that took me to the other six.  Tomorrow, I will compare and contrast the Seven Wonders, as I did with the seven continents.

First was the Grand Canyon.  For fifteen years, that trip was considered the greatest trip I had ever taken.  The extensive planning that went into, in a time before smartphones and sites like Wikitravel, set the stage for all the travel planning I continue to do to this day.  There was no Hotels.com, you had to call and book the hotels (and flights).  It was a beast of trip to plan, and it would have been no easy task to do even with today’s technology.  We did it, though.  We flew to Vegas, spent a few days there, and then drove to Arizona, where we found it, again, in a time before GPS navigation was widespread.  When I think of the “good old days”, to me, that trip will always be the epitome of it.

It would be over ten years before I saw another of the Seven.  That was when I began travelling on my own internationally.  I had arranged a three-day tour in Mexico, a detailed and intense agenda, the first time I had Enrique as a tour guide, and he picked me up at the airport early in the morning after my overnight flight.  We drove straight to Michoacan and had lunch at a café in Aguanguen before he set me up with a local guide for the Volcano.  It would be cheating to scroll up and look up these adventures, so I will only recount the details I can remember offhand.  I was still wearing my travelling suit, and the horse hands looked at me like I was crazy, until I expertly mounted the horse in one movement and their looks turned to respect.  It was a long ride to the base of the Volcano, then a bit of a hike up to the top, but, there we were.

At that point, I didn’t really think it was realistic to expect to visit the other five within the next few years.  After that came the Northern Lights, just a few months later.  The biggest challenge there was simply luck.  Unlike the other six, which are fixed and accessible, this one is in the sky and subject to luck if it’s visible.  I got lucky, very lucky.  I had to take three flights, I think, to get to Yellowknife.  Once I was there, it was easy.  I lucked out the first night and saw them from my hotel.  The second night I had a guide to take me to an even more remote location with a better view, and we were just as lucky.

It would be over two years before I would see another of the Seven.  That was my 28^th Birthday and my first trip to Africa.  Two flights, a long one from Kennedy to Johannesburg, then a short one from J-burg to Victoria Falls.  Once I was there, a short taxi ride to my hotel and a short walk from my hotel to the Falls.  That was four down, three to go, and, by that point, I had figured out the logistics of the remaining ones, so the end was in sight.

The next summer I went to Rio for the Olympics.  That was the easiest one to reach, actually.  A direct flight to Rio, a car to my hotel, and then a short walk to the Harbor.  The rest of that trip was what made it the GOAT and displace the Grand Canyon trip.

A few months later was my recent trip to Nepal to see Everest.  It should come as no surprise that the Mountain was the hardest to reach, and I didn’t even set foot on the mountain, just seeing it from the distance.  I went to England first, but the journey would have been exactly the same if I had skipped England and went straight from Kennedy.  I flew from Manchester to Kathmandu, connecting in Doha (as I did on the way back home).  After my night in Kathmandu, I took an early (and adventurous!) flight to Lukla, where the helicopter picked me and took me to the hotel in Syangboche.  From the back of the hotel I could see the Mountain.  That was that.

Only one remained: the Reef.  My readers have been following along the journey that brought me to Cairns, and, even if this was my only destination, it would have required three flights and 27 hours in the air just to get to Cairns.  Now, here I am, and, tomorrow morning, I will take a day boat tour to the Reef, and that will be that.  It promises to be an interesting day, but, first, I need to recount the rest of this boring day.

After I closed at HBA, I went through security and picked up a little snack: espresso, a “Proper” scallop pie, and a signature dessert called a Lamington.  We soon boarded, and, though I struggled getting my overstuffed bag in the overhead “locker” as they call it, the flight was entirely unadventurous.  They served “Christmas cake” (basically a mini fruitcake) and hot drinks.  I chose more coffee, of course.

When we landed in Brisbane, I had two hours to kill.  I wanted sugar, so I got a milkshake from Carl Jr’s and waffle fries.  The milkshake was like water.  I said something, and the guy seemed to think that’s how it was supposed to be.  Maybe that’s how they make them in Australia, but I was severely disappointed by it, especially since this was an indulgence for me.  He asked if I wanted him to remake it.  I took him up on that offer and told him to just use half the milk.  I underestimated the milk, and it was too thick this time, but I preferred that to too thin, as it soon melted down to the right consistency.

After I was done, we soon started boarding, and I updated my travel spreadsheets during the otherwise unadventurous flight.  This time, it was some type of lemon jam cookie and juice this time.  I hadn’t realized how far north we were going, just inside 17 degrees south of the equator.  It was in sharp contrast to the temperate climate of Tasmania.  They called this region “Tropical North Queensland”, and the weather was appropriate to that name.

The whole area reminded me more of a Caribbean island than anything else.  The taxi ride to the hotel was short, and I checked in and changed into my still-damp casual clothes.  I had chosen the top-rated seafood place on Tripadvisor, which was called Prawn Star.  I thought it was just a seafood restaurant, but, apparently, I misunderstood.  I walked through the happening Esplanade, which was the first touristy place I had seen all trip, and, with some difficulty found the restaurant.

It was a repurposed fishing boat with one large table that could seat ten.  They specialized in prawns.  It was a bit of wait, but I was soon seated and ordered my platter of prawns, along with a beer.  The prawns were cold and unpeeled, so it was a vastly different experience than I expected, but they were fresh and delicious.  Unfortunately, though, since this was technically on a boat, I could not count it as my first “Official” meal in Queensland.  After I was done, even after washing them, my hands reeked of prawns.  That smell would not be going away easily.

I made my way back to the hotel and even debated swapping my Christmas Pipe out for a cigar, since I would sooner smoke a cigar with smelly hands than my pipe.  The difference being that I have to rub out the tobacco before putting it in my pipe, while the cigar I do not have to smoke any part that my hand touches.  I used the scented body wash to kill the smell of prawns on my hand, but that wasn’t much better, since the scent of the body wash would affect the tobacco and seep through to the pipe.  I then vigorously used soap to wash off the body wash, to the point where I wound up peeling off some skin in the process, but my hands finally smelled neutral.  I then went outside, where I sat down, lit up my 2008 Christmas Pipe, and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can publish and post some photos before going to sleep, as I need to get up early tomorrow to go see the Reef.