Travel with Indigo

Grant and I, having had quite enough of large red piles of rocks, flew three hours to the northeast coastal town of Cairns, where we were met by a driver who whisked us along a scenic coastal highway forty-five minutes north to the touristy but pleasant town of Port Douglas. With it as our home base, we rented a car and drove an hour or so north into the magnificent Daintree Rainforest, the world’s oldest continuously existing rainforest. Here at its visitor center we spent a delightful and informative several hours walking through a patch of the dense foliage on boardwalks thoughtfully installed for us tourists. Every thirty feet or so along the walk were helpful signs that explained this and that about the bewildering array of plant and animal life right before our eyes. You can also rent for a modest fee an electronic device that tells you in impressive detail much more than you’d care to know. Just give me the big picture and I’m happy.

Heading north from the visitor center, we drove along the coast on a paved road just barely wider than one car, wending our way enveloped in dense canopy.  At intervals along the road were those yellow diamond shaped caution signs that warn you of potential road hazards in the area. We had seen lots of these with the silhouette of a kangaroo (and in Patagonia one with an enraged bull and another with a guanaco) but here was our first encounter with what appeared at first to be a caution concerning a very large chicken.  This was puzzling until, resorting to our guide book, we learned it was not a chicken at all but a cassowary, the large, flightless and quite aggressive bird peculiar to Australia. Needless to say the cassowary, in keeping with the least admirable trait of the Australian animal kingdom, is known to attack and on occasion kill humans.

Near the end of the pavement we came upon Cape Tribulation, so named by Captain James Cook whose ship, Endeavor, came to grief on a patch of the Great Barrier Reef just offshore. He and crew put ashore here where they lived for many months until they could make repairs and be on their way again.

Returning to our hotel, the Sea Temple, in Port Douglas, Grant and I had dinner together enjoying each others company and recounting our experiences of the day. Not unexpectedly, he decided to sample the night life while I returned to our room, much as a monk to his cloister, for a restful night’s sleep.

Next day we boarded a 90-foot catamaran with about forty other people for a snorkel trip on the Great Barrier Reef. Just getting out to the first dive site took about an hour. The GBR is not a single reef as the name suggests but a patchwork maze of separate reefs, some miles apart, stretching for 1,000 miles along the northeast coast. Of the three different sites we visited, I dived only on the first as the water at less than 70 degrees was too cold for me, even with a short-sleeved suit on, while the ever intrepid Grant dived on all three, and without wet suit. In the gin clear shallow water of the reefs, coral colors were vibrant and reef fish plentiful, many of the species new to me. At this time of year (July) the water is too cold for the deadly species of jellyfish and we were—at least so the tour guides said—too far offshore for the crocs to reach us. Sharks, they said, are plentiful in the deep water passes between reefs but don’t hang around the shallow water in which we were diving.

Back in Port Douglas, we again enjoyed a dinner together and he, true to form, again explored the night life while I retired for more monk-like sequestration.