31 December 2009

LAST POST OF 2009! Whoa!



Holiday season has been busy. On Christmas Eve day, I went to a quick barbecue with some friends-of-friends in Glebe, which unfortunately turned out to be more of a political rally for the Labour Party. Luckily some of the people had brought significant others who were just as glazed-looking as I felt, so we holed up together in the kitchen near the booze and ice cream and had a fun international discussion (one Canadian, two Americans and an Aussie)about nothing in particular, and yelled at anyone who wandered in and tried to ask us who we voted for.

That evening, went to Christmas dinner at…a Vietnamese Restaurant in King’s Cross! Sadly Aussies do not watch “A Christmas Story,” because I was the only one giggling (increasingly inappropriately, as the night wore on) and singing “fa ra ra ra ra” and screaming every time someone mentioned eating duck.



On Christmas Day, woke up with a wretched cold. Took the nearly-abandoned train down to Frank’s place, and met his extensive family; there must have been twenty-five tipsy uncles, aproned aunts, gossiping cousins, bespectacled grandmas, neighbors, golden-haired toddlers…it was food and chaos. We sat around an enormous table, each in front of what can best be described as a trencher piled with ham and applesauce, chicken, turkey, pumpkin, roast potatoes and gravy, with at least three glasses each for water, wine, and champagne. I would have enjoyed it more, but I experienced it through a haze of stuffy nose and stuffy head and dizzying anti-congestants. Still, it was fun, and Frank has promised to take me sailing with him and son-in-law Sean in a few days.

The next day, Boxing Day, dawned cold and rainy. This was a good thing, because it meant we got good seats for the start of the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race. The teams train all year to sail down the eastern coast and finish in Tasmania.



Tonight—New Year’s Eve—at seven pm, we are heading out in friend Simon’s yacht to watch the 9 o’clock fireworks from Rushcutters Bay, then returning to a party at King’s Cross for the midnight celebration and famous fireworks over the Harbour Bridge. Depending on how late we stay up, we may welcome the dawn of the New Year from the waters of Bondi Beach!

Nothing much else is new. I have been volunteering at hospital as usual; I am going on Sunday to visit my octogenarian pen pal--the one who used to send me, when I was a kid, little kangaroos and boomerangs and books of Aus animals. Have been, of course, cooking madly (see quiche, below), painting my coffee table, and sanding my newly acquired pew. I hope you all are having a fabulous holiday season! See you in the new year!

The Latest

3/47 Moira Crescent is all decked out for Christmas! This is Raymond the Tiny Christmas Tree, wearing his little silver bells. And I made gingerbread cookies. If I had a rolling pin, they would have been gingerbread men...but I don't have a rolling pin.



Last night I took my friend Karolina to a pretty legendary Malaysian restaurant in Sydney, called Mamak. We had roti tisu with sweetened condensed milk for dessert. We were trend setters: all the tables around us kept sneaking glances over at our roti pyramid and then they all ordered it, too.



Today is warm and incredibly windy. I wonder if it will be this windy all summer? Garbage cans are being blown all over the streets. I rode my bike through Centennial Park, past the duck pond and bus crossings and horseback riders and rollerbladers, and kept getting blown sideways. I just discovered Centennial Park. It's flat (compared to my suburb, anyway) and only takes ten minutes to get to, and has a vast bike lane that goes all the way into the city! I haven't gone that far yet, but I will one of these days.

Latest Coffee Table!

Latest photos of my progress on the coffee table. For those of you who don't know, I bought a plain white wooden coffee table at a garage sale. Mom and Dad helped me sand some of the white away and I am now painting it, imitating an artist named Ian Tremewen's interpretation of Sydney Harbour.



Two hours. Three paintbrushes. One bowl of turpentine, spilled on the carpet. Sixteen boats. What a day!



On a good note, though, thirteen tiny buildings down and only seven tiny buildings to go. Also I fixed the bridge, so the cars are driving on the right side now (har, har, har).

Conference in Kioloa, Dec 4-6

Friday, Dec 4, I was off to a student-oriented national security conference on the southeast coast. I met the USCG representative, CDR Karen Jones, at the airport. She currently lives in Japan, where she works with CG’s Activities Far East. Man, do I want her job!!! It was a four hour drive down to Kioloa, to the Australian National University campus, and we stopped twice, once on a Scenic Outlook where we took photos, and then in "the historic town of Berry" where we went to a bakery and grocery store to grab fruit for the weekend. The CDR is super friendly and so sweet! A little on the quiet side but absolutely projects confidence. It was very cool to meet such an obviously competent (female) officer and she gave me some career advice, too, which is nice because the CG is going to write to me in December to ask where I want to be assigned...



As we drove farther south, following the coast, the highway shrank to a single lane each way. We drove through farm after farm with a teensy town every fifty kilometres. It was like driving through Iowa, except that every ten km we'd see another "wombat crossing" sign. Then we were in a huge forest, the trees banded with black from old bushfires. Finally we took a left off the highway toward "Kioloa Village," and the road turned briefly to gravel, then back to pavement. Now the trees were threatening to overrun the road. We passed a three-car parking lot with a single convenience store, a post office, and an ATM ("Kioloa Shopping Centre"). We turned east and the ocean was around us, to the north and in front, and at last we passed the tiny sign for ANU. We drove through the gate and over the cattle grid, up a track past a dozen or so wooden cabins, to a rather nice house at the top of a hill. From the hill we could see a few dozen cows and a gate that ringed three or four big fields--the campus, enclosed by ocean on two sides and with forest pressing in all round. The nice house belonged to the ANU Resident, who was working in his garden, and directed us back down the hill to a little gravel parking lot ringed by stones.

I had suspected, from looking at the map, that we would be in the middle of nowhere: on Google, the little dot for Kioloa is buried in a big green patch that, as you click to zoom out, just grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Sure enough, we were in the middle of nowhere. The campus is only used for research students who need access to the ocean: they bring their own sleeping bags and stay in the cabins, in solitary, silent pursuit of whatever the heck they're working on. There were no students there now, but there were about eighty of us: mostly young (20 to 30 year old) government workers from the Australian Department of Defence, Navy, Air Force, Army, military and civilian, Customs agents, Australian Federal Police, a few guests from the New Zealand Department of Defence, and four or five Master's students aspiring to jobs in the DoD. The speakers were ten or so experts from the above agencies, including the second-in-command of Australian Border Protection! Then, of course, my CDR gave a talk on the USCG's missions and abilities in the Pacific.



The conference was put on by the Kokoda Foundation, an Australian defence strategic think tank. WARNING--BORING SCHOLARLY RANT AHEAD What gives Australia a big advantage over the US, in terms of a Whole-of-Government approach to security challenges, is the comparatively tiny size of their defence department. It’s pretty incestuous—once you know one or two of the more important players, you have links to most of the rest of them. (Example…one of the speakers was an important member of Noetic, a consulting firm that gives billion-dollar advice to streamline government agencies; I had already met his wife at the US Embassy in Canberra for that Fulbright thing last month, when Mom and Dad were here!) The theory behind the conference is to get the best and brightest members of many Australian government agencies together and get them to exchange business cards. Yes, we had some intellectual discussion of current problems facing the agencies, but the most vital part of the conference was networking. What a brilliant idea.

BORING SPIEL OVER

Also, it was a lot of fun. Met a lot of cool people, my age and a little older, with really cool jobs. We all brought our own linen and slept in bunk beds, three to six to a room, which was a little weird (also significantly different from, say, the US Cantigny defence conference I went to in 2007, where they met every delegation at the airport with a limo…) And we basically had camping-out food: we grabbed paper plates and went down the line, where ANU’s campus cook and his three underlings, hired just for the weekend, served us pasta or wraps or key lime pie. Actually, the food was excellent; the curry Saturday night was to die for, and there was plenty of it. Still, there was a camping-out feel, especially because every night we finished around 11 and then sat around a campfire before going to our freezing cabins and braving the lukewarm showers.



Also, I accidentally swallowed my first Australian fly. The flies were UNBELIEVABLE. The campus smelled strongly of cow and every person walked in his own cloud of twenty or so flies. At one point, I almost reached for my camera because my toes were black and writhing with flies—I couldn’t even see half of each foot—but since it was in the middle of a lecture, I thought it would be rude. Anyway, the flies made it hard to concentrate, which was unfortunate because most of the speakers were excellent. At night—(we were packed for lectures on plastic folding chairs in a teensy cabin) there were big beetles, like June bugs but light brown and bigger, scratching and tapping in hordes on the screens. (The lecture cabin had screens. Our sleeping cabins, and the cafeteria cabin, did not.) The lintels of the entrances were thick with scattered beetle carcasses.

Apparently we were in Funnel Web Spider central, but the Aussies were quick to assure me that funnel web spiders live in their little holes in the ground and rarely come out to bother people. There were possums, and there were kangaroos. Some of the Aussies—“what? You’ve never seen a kangaroo up close?”—drove me down the road to a kid’s playground near the beach. I snapped dozens of photos of the mob of gray coastal kangaroos, consisting of a dozen or so smaller females, three with joeys, and one or two male kangaroos, taller than me, with immensely powerful legs. The joeys were funny, sometimes leaning out of their mothers’ pouches to nibble at the ground, sometimes just letting one leg hang out and burying themselves inside, so the mom looked like she had a strange horizontal growth, bouncing when she moved. Also, on the beach were endangered plover chicks. There are less than three hundred left in Australia, and three chicks had been born on this beach in the spring, but one of them got stepped on…so there were only two. We were cautioned, before heading out, not to step on one of them. I was especially careful. I didn’t want to start some sort of international incident by negligently crushing a baby plover.



We had about three hours off on Saturday afternoon, and most of us laid out towels on the beach, watching the lovely parent plovers running back and forth and foraging in the surf. We didn’t see either of the chicks. But that night, after a few beers around the campfire, four or five of us went out down the pitch-black road and through the woods. Kangaroos looked at us curiously in the dark, so that what you thought was a big tree stump would suddenly hop away as you approached. The moon rose orange and waning, but still huge. Despite its bright light, I thought I could see almost every star in the heavens: the band of the Milky Way, the Pleiads, upside-down Orion, the Southern Cross, and the Saucepan, which a member of the Federal Police pointed out to me. Yeah, sure, Australia. “The Saucepan.”

This weekend really taught me a lot about Aussie attitudes and the vast culture difference between our countries. I learned about the Lebanese race riots and the Aboriginal "problem," and heard federal investigators talking about the Labor and Liberal party and defence strategists discussing the streamlining of government agencies. I acquired enough business cards to fill a book, and soon I will start emailing people asking for interviews. This weekend really fired up my desire to work in international multilateral strategizing and information-sharing, and also, re-inspired my work for the USCG. Not to mention the key lime pie.

An American Thanksgiving in Melbourne

I flew into Melbourne the day before Thanksgiving, for less than two hundred dollars round trip—it’s great to have a holiday that no one else knows about. I was staying with Kate, a Fulbrighter in the US Forest Service who married Mike three weeks before hauling him along to Australia. Kate and Mike live in an apartment complex with a big courtyard, and across the courtyard live Kyle, another Fulbrighter and a math professor, and his wife Melissa; and Susan, a Fulbrighter from Texas. Within half an hour’s bus or tram ride live Fulbrighters Karl (who’s from Enfield, CT), Jessica and her husband, and Justin, who’s actually in university housing. Justin is known as the partyer. Karl lives with Brian, an American friend of his who graduated from college, took one look at the economy, and decided he would be more likely to get a job in Australia…so here he is. I was stoked to be surrounded by Americans.

My kind hostess was out to dinner when I arrived, but she left me the keys. I ran out before the stores closed to walk the streets, see downtown, wander the parks, and head back to bed before eleven…I was still recovering from a sore throat, and pretty exhausted. Melbourne looks a lot like Sydney but it has a totally different vibe: almost West Coast—not beachy, but extremely fashion-oriented, stuffed with windy streets full of vegan cafes and gluten-free bakeries. They have a well-organized tram system and, like Sydney, lots of green parks with huge, possum-infested trees.



I planned to make a pecan pie for Thanksgiving, and so the Monday before, when my buddy Craig invited me to “Aussie Thanksgiving turkey barbecue dinner,” I decided it was an opportunity to practice. Interestingly, no one else present knew that we were celebrating Thanksgiving, but luckily this also meant that they were unused to pecan pie. And, since Aussie barbecue means grilling…they do not believe in barbecue sauce, my practice Thanksgiving was a sort of grilled turkey with a pumpkin salad. That morning, though, I was in a panic because I could find neither a pie crust nor a pie pan. I ended up buying shortcrust pastry and I looked and looked online but couldn't find any helpful hints, so I just sort of slapped a sheet of pastry into a cake pan and crimped up the edges. Looked terrible, tasted worse! But the filling was great—so we all sort of scraped it off and just had that, although Craig gallantly ate his crust.

On Thursday morning, we rented a car and five of us piled in and journeyed to a store just outside the city, called USA Foods. The first thing we noticed was the giant American flag painted in the window. Next we met a jolly platinum-blond, high-heeled lady in the Escalade who handed us all cards for Misty’s Diner (“an authentic American experience”, said the card, listing menu items like chimichangas and buffalo wings and cheese fries). We walked into the store and stormed the shelves with cries of delight, buying all those things that you probably would never even eat at home, and you didn’t know you missed…like Ranch flavored Doritos (Aussies eat Doritos, but in strange, foreign flavors), Kraft marshmallows, Velveeta cheese, tinned pumpkin pie filling, Hershey syrup, Louisiana hot sauce, Crystal Lite, Cap’n Crunch… Susan found those little shoestring Durkey onions for her green bean casserole, and I found a Betty Crocker ready-made pie crust mix, to my relief.




Then we came home, went to a regular supermarket and did massive amounts of cooking, before setting off to walk a precarious mile in spitting rain to our hostess Jessica’s place. Jess had managed to find a whole bird to roast and was fussing over the turkey when we got there, and as more people showed up with food to reheat, we all fought for oven space for a few hours. Everyone brought something different so it was a big Thanksgiving potluck with turkey, mashed potatos and gravy, sweet potatos and marshmallows (which Kate and I made), two kinds of cranberry relish (I made Setto’s and Melissa made a citrusy one), lots of rolls and butter, cornbread stuffing, green bean casserole and to top it all off, a big dish of macaroni and cheese that was seriously the best I have ever had. And for dessert, my pecan pie was the first to disappear! Having learned from my experience, I had added less sugar and more chocolate and, of course, the crust was actually good this time, thank you Betty Crocker. There was also pumpkin pie, banana carrot cake, and apple tart. It was all good. We topped off the evening with five or six hours of dancing at the local gay bars. Melbourne’s nightlife can beat Sydney’s with a stick!



The next morning, we went for a late brunch and then had a great dinner at D.O.C., where I had the best pizza I’ve had since leaving Little Italy New England…even better than Cairns, although the service was wretched. We finished with sweets from the bakery across the street and then spent an hour or so sitting on the roof, gazing over the twinkling city lights and solving the world’s problems.



On Saturday morning, I made pancakes for Kate and Mike, and Kate took me sightseeing to the Shrine (WWI) and through the botanical gardens. We had a beautiful walk and then visited the Victoria Markets, where I bought a few kitchen implements for home (including a can opener, Dad), and thought about buying some live chickens for pets, but resisted. My flight home was that evening, and I returned to Sydney ready for a week of rest and research. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

Parents Day 24

Sunday

Dad stayed home all morning. Mom helped me grease my bike chain, then she and I had an okay lunch at fancy little deli just up the street from me. This place is overpriced, and I wonder why they are always so packed. Perhaps I am just ordering the wrong thing. They do have a nice gourmet shop, though, with cheeses and olives and meats.

At last, we hopped the taxi, got to the airport, and said goodbye. I didn’t want to go back to a sad, empty house so I walked and walked, eventually managed to find a grocery store at Central Station, and finally went home. Early to bed.

Parents Day 23

Saturday

Dad hopped the bus to Borders for a few hours…Mom and I hit the beach. We took our snorkel stuff down to Clovelly Bay. The water was a little choppy, and we quickly realized that our snorkels—which we purchased years ago, from a Wal-mart in Hawaii—were not as good as the ones they gave us on the boats in Cairns. Also, the water was full of people. So we packed up our stuff and crossed the parking lot to Gordon’s Bay, which was listed in Mom’s tour guide book, but also was much more dangerous—very few people, no lifeguards, and we had to launch ourselves from some rocks and swim away fast enough that the waves did not bash us back against them. But once out in the bay, we saw lots of coldwater fish, including some bottomfeeders. Not as beautiful as Cairns, of course, but Mom did see one of the famous huge blue gropers, so that was all right. We fought our way through messy surf and seaweed onto the tiny ratty beach at the far end of the Bay, hiked back, and went home.

If I have any regrets about this whole trip, it’s that I didn’t take Mom to more beaches.

We went to Arthur’s Pizza for dinner—not nearly as good as that strange Greek place up in Cairns. Then Mom and Dad packed. Early to bed. We were all a little mopey.

Parents Day 22

Friday

Craig and I piled into the car early. Our first stop was at the local cheese and bread shop. Breakfast, eaten in the car, consisted of Gorgonzola for me, Roquefort for him, and a fancy French brie-like cheese—Epoisses—smeared on a huge country loaf. Second stop was for coffee, where we took photos of the giant ram by the highway.

Third stop was after following a little maze of signs, off one of the highway exits, which led us to a man in a cart selling cherries which, he assured me, his dad grows on a farm, forty kilometers to the east. We feasted like kings.

I was home by noon, and Mom and Dad and I went to the Bronte Bistro, where Dad finally got a good steak. Mom and Dad had been kind enough to do the laundry while I was gone, and we had a quiet evening in.

Parents Day 21

Thursday

Today was the Fulbright end-of-year reception at the US Embassy, so while Mom and Dad took off for some museums, my buddy and former-Fulbrighter Craig rolled up in his awful little Volvo and I climbed in with my uniform bag and a change of socks and we headed out on our merry three-hour road trip. We stopped at petrol stations as necessary, Craig consuming some of my Starbursts for the first time ever (he didn’t like them) and me consuming a Cadbury cherry bar for the first time ever (I didn’t like it).

We arrived full of sugar. Craig’s parents’ house is beautiful, buried in one of the long back avenues of leafy Canberra. His dad, who is restoring a few old Melbourne cable cars in the back yard, fed us Jaffles: cheese and tomato sandwiches grilled in little pockets of bread.

Craig dropped me at the Embassy, and the security guys, who were bored, watched his little Volvo narrowly until he drove away. Then they marched me through security no less than four times (“it must be the shoes,” they concluded eventually, but didn’t ask me to take them off). I got my new military ID made without a hitch, and Craig retrieved me—took me back to his place—I changed into uniform and he into a suit—and we were back at the Embassy.

This time the security guards knew me and waved me through (“You came back! Nice uniform!”) but they halted Craig and made him go through the security check a few times. They were still bored.

Anyway we mingled at the Ambassador’s place, and had tasty little snacks and wine for a few hours. Craig and I had been looking forward to nightlife, afterward, but we noted with disappointment that most of the attendees were, unexpectedly, over forty. So we went out, just the two of us, had some delicious lamb and extremely fancy cocktails at a julep bar. Walking home, we were staring up at the sky and trying to name the constellations. I took off my shoes, which had been hurting me, and while we stood in the grass, I felt something run up my leg. Then I felt something else run up my leg. Then several more, and then all the ants starting biting. The smell of formic acid filled the air. I ran, shedding bits of clothing and screaming, all the way back to Craig’s, hurling myself into the shower as the entire ant colony wreaked merciless havoc on my poor delicate skin. One of the ants bit me on the back of the hand, and it turned purple and swelled up. I am writing this three weeks later. I have a permanent scar.

Parents Day 20

Wednesday

We had planned to hike the Blue Mountains, but we were too tired to get up early and do all the necessary travel to get there, so instead, today was an errand-day. Mom and I went to the travel agent for a refund on Dad’s missed tour in Cairns, then we wandered slowly home, hitting the shops on Bronte Road—mom-and-pop grocery stores, florists, bakeries, bike shops, hardware stores, and fashion shops. In one of these, we found…The Jacket. For months, I have been searching for a little black jacket to wear over my formal evening dresses. Mom found it, and called it a Lauren Bacall, and helped me pay for it. Thank you Mom! Then I went to Pilates. Early bed.

Parents Day 19

Tuesday

Taking our time, we hopped buses into the City and rode the ferry into Manly, across the Harbour. Arriving around lunchtime, we walked down the Curso, which runs south to north and belts off the Manly peninsula: the ferries dock at the south side, Manly Beach runs along the north side, North Sydney resides to the west and to the east, little forest reserves and historical forts and the old buildings of Manly stretch toward the open ocean. We dined in one of the many little pavilions along the Curso—nothing to write home about—and then walked up around the headland. Mom had marked a certain 3-hour historic walk in her tour book, and we started exploring the route, lizards, seabirds, clifftop views, beaches, bandicoot-crossing signs. Adventuring on a trail into the wilderness turned out to be a bad idea, as Dad hit his head on a protruding branch and swore violently in the face of a shocked French tourist. So Dad went back to the Curso, and Mom and I continued along the charted route, starting at the old cathedral which is now a School of International Hospitality, and continuing into the forest.

Frank and Alice drove me to this forest, on my first day in Sydney, and Frank and I saw whales, out at sea.

Mom and I didn’t see any whales, but we did find a sign that said that we were now entering a protected area for Little Penguins. We didn’t see any Little Penguins either. But we did follow the trails through dense jungle, turned a corner, descended a slope and emerged into a tiny cove called Collin’s Bay. There were no more than ten people scattered across the perfect sand of the perfectly calm, tiny bay, which was edged by cliffs and a freshwater waterfall. Mom and I looked at each other and looked at our watches and changed into our swimsuits and hit the water.

Changing into our swimsuits probably wasn’t necessary, as probably thirty percent of the patrons were wearing less-than-sufficient swimwear, but we decided, as Americans, to set a good example. Mom took photos of me swimming, but she wouldn’t come in past her knees due to the cold (we were spoiled by the warm waters of Cairns). Cool and refreshed, we returned to Manly, met Dad, and took the ferry home.

Parents Day 18

Monday

By Monday, we had recovered our mojo. We headed into the City to see the Botanical Gardens. We walked among historic marble fountains and avenues of roses, under canopying trees. The Gardens, really just a big park to the east of Circular Quay, are lovely year-round. Businessmen come to eat their lunches, young lovers stroll arm-in-arm, and schoolgirls in blue skirts and black Oxfords and knee socks chatter on the lawns.

The sun was strong overhead, and we headed around the quay to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, a big rock formation where Governor Macquarie’s wife allegedly used to sit and watch the boats on the harbour. It was very windy around the eastern side of the cliffs, and you can see the Navy base and, riding at the pier, the big gray warlike Navy ships which the Aussies choose to decorate with paintings of little red unwarlike kangaroos. Maybe that was Mrs. Macquarie’s idea, too.

Anyway, summer is obviously here, and the sun was still bright in the evening when we hopped a bus home, walked down to the beach, and dined at the Clovelly Hotel (Mom: lamb, me: chicken schnitzel, Dad: steak). This hotel, extremely popular with sports fans, is infamous for the ruggers’ fights that occur in the bar area. We didn’t see one, though, and we headed back up the hill to do our crosswords (Dad) and play on the DS (Mom) and mess around on Facebook (me) until bedtime.

Parents Day 17

Sunday November 8

A quiet recovery day. I can’t seem to remember what we did. Aren't you glad I posted? Here's a nice photo of Mom on the coastal walk.

Parents Day 16

Saturday

We woke up sad, not ready to leave our little tropical paradise. We went for another long walk, cleaned all our stuff, took advantage of the hotel’s laundry facilities, checked out, took the bus back into Cairns and—we must have had lunch, but I don’t remember it.

I do remember, though, walking around the Cairns Library to see the flying foxes. Thousands of them were in the trees above, screeching and skittering and flexing their webby brown wings with the little claws on the end, and there was even a sad little dead bundle of baby flying fox on the pavement. We were back in time to catch our bus to the airport.

Parents Day 15

Friday

Dad rode the bus into Cairns with us, but he opted to spend the day in the city. So Mom and I hurried through a squall of rain into the sleek powerboat which sped us for a good hour out over the swells, in and out of rain patches, once briefly surrounded by a pod of dolphins, popping out at last into a sunlit spot on the outer reef. We donned our snorkel stuff, skipping merrily past the scuba divers in their cumbersome outfits, but I hovered nervously at the back of the boat looking into the water. The swells knocked against the back of the steps, which dropped into nothingness and a big green ocean. Still jittery from yesterday’s crocs, I was convinced that the first thing I’d see upon launch was a Great White, perhaps waiting a hundred feet below me with his mouth open, just like in Jaws, so that I would have a good three seconds to scream out bubbles before the water churned an angry red.

Of course, that didn’t happen. I plopped into the water and sixty feet below me, there was some sand and murkiness—but just behind me, circling the boat’s props, were big schools of fish as long as my arm, and a few feet in front was an incredible Pixar-bright world: sea turtles; giant clams as long as my BODY in neon green or purple or pink, photo-sensitive so that if you dove down and waved your hand in front of them, they slammed their shell shut; and schools and schools and schools of Nemos and big slow blue groupers and Nemo’s friend Gill, the angelfish, although they were really shy; and green parrotfish with nasty-looking beaks, and blue-spotted manta rays and long yellow trumpetfish and every other fish you have ever seen photos of, real and live and right there in front of us, darting in and out of the coral. I had one or two lifetime experiences: slowly flanking a sea turtle, who merely glanced at me once sideways and then kept swimming along on his graceful, gradual way; diving down into a deep trench and coming face-to-face with a shy fish almost exactly as big as me, camouflaged brown with long waving tendrils of fins, who as soon as I saw him ducked down further into the trench where I couldn’t follow; coming to the edge of the shallow piece of reef and seeing, maybe sixty feet across the fading blue, a brain coral about two stories high (Mom and I didn’t quite dare swim out to it). I was incredibly relieved to have not seen any sharks, not even the allegedly harmless small reef sharks.

It was incredible. The boat dropped us at two other sites, and by the end of the day, we were so gloriously happy. We felt we had seen everything. We returned to Cairns and met Dad, who had also had a great day exploring the museums of Cairns and checking out the wildlife, and we had dinner at the same Greek pizza place.

Parents Day 14

Thursday

Weary from yesterday, we woke up slowly and mooched around the house. The sun was poking in and out of clouds and there was a bit of a cool breeze. Mom and I went for a swim in the pool, and then sat outside and read while Dad napped, inside. Then we all went for a walk up the beach towards the estuary. Sounds innocent, right?

WRONG. At this point Mom finally decided to inform us, rather smugly, that she had seen a big “Danger: crocodiles” sign on the beach (“you two didn’t see it? It was huge…”). Dad then observed that most crocodiles live around estuaries or the mouths of rivers. Suddenly I was alone on the beach. Mom and Dad were sprinting in what I considered entirely the wrong direction—TOWARD the estuary. I immediately deduced that they were planning to use their bodies, or perhaps mine, as bait to lure the crocs out far enough to take photos. Needless to say, I followed a very far distance behind.

I managed to get Mom to stand with me (thanks Mom) in the middle of the beach, in a little triangle of safety, surrounded by water on three sides. A hundred metres ahead of us, Dad had the binoculars up to his eyes, cursing with excitement as he took a dozen photos of the massive crocodile on the far bank. Actually, it was a log. Then we saw an utterly clueless girl, listening to her headphones, wandering aimlessly along the beach WITHIN TEN FEET OF TOOTHY DEATH. We braced nervously for her to be taken. I trained my camera on her.

Obviously, nothing happened and it was with a tiny sense of disappointment that we wandered back. We were all hungry, so we hopped a bus up to the beach north of us, called Yorkey’s Knob. Aussies and their sense of humor.

At the Knob we enjoyed perhaps the best scenery we’ve seen yet.

It was a very tiny town, with one or two vacation beach houses and a few permanent resident homes, set in among the biggest strangler figs and mangroves and Spanish moss and palm trees and, gosh, mom and dad can tell you all the names of the dozens of ferns we saw, but all in all it was just amazingly beautiful. We went for late lunch at the Yacht Club. Unfortunately, it being a yacht club, it was on the water and so Mom and Dad tempted fate FOR THE SECOND TIME, walking with glazed eyes closer and closer and obviously yearning to see that tiny ripple of movement that means you are going to meet your Maker in the stomach of a fifteen-foot dinosaur. I stood in the middle of the road about twenty feet behind them and shouted dire warnings about how bad they were going to feel if I got eaten by a crocodile. Seriously, in all the stories, or according to Bill Bryson anyway, the victim is just carelessly walking along the water's edge picking up pretty shells when suddenly she’s gone, and the witnesses see her maybe pop up a second later looking confused (probably because her legs just got bitten off at the waist) and then she vanishes again in the churning water and next day the locals have to organize a search party to find the crocodile, cut it open, extract the person for a proper burial, and then...they send the crocodile to live on a farm with the other bad crocodiles. Yes, that's correct. They don't kill the crocodiles, they send them to some sort of convent for reformed people-eaters

Anyway, somehow, we all cheated death again. Early bed. Here is a log we were convinced was a croc.

Parents Day 13

Wednesday

Our snorkeling day at the Low Isles! We hopped a bus for the hour-long ride north to Port Douglas, pressing our faces to the glass, rattling over windy mountain roads with just a few rocks between us and the cliff dropping down to the sea. We saw termite mounds as high as your waist and burned-out areas of scrubby tangled trees, long untouched stretches of yellow sand, the haze of rain far out on the ocean. We saw a horse farm with a big open field that looked like it was growing a crop of WALLABIES. There must have been hundreds of them, little brown and bent-over with their noses to the ground, grazing or whatever it is Wallabies do.

Finally we arrived and hopped aboard our cool 100-foot Cat. There weren’t more than one hundred people onboard, far below full capacity, and the sail to the island was only forty minutes. Mom and I rented lycra suits for five dollars each, to protect against jellyfish—bluebottle season typically doesn’t start til mid-November, but it was close enough that we didn’t want to take chances. So we looked like Catwoman and Catgirl as we kicked off in our snorkel gear.

Our somewhat sleazy “marine biologist” was giving a tour to the group, but Catwoman kept turning left when everyone else was turning right, and at last I decided to follow her as she obliviously forged her own trail around the reefs. She certainly had the right idea, as it turned out: she was the only one in the group to see a starfish. But she did miss the first turtle sighting, and moments later, as she kicked her way farther out into open ocean, Jean the Lifeguard drove his little boat over to ask if she was okay. Jean wore a tight little red wetsuit and a big floppy straw hat and had a big white patch of zinc on his nose. We kept swimming, but closer to the tour group, and we saw Nemo—a pack of cute little clownfish darting in and out of their anemones and looking at us—and I discovered a turtle hiding in a cave about fifteen feet below us, and Mom found a snail. Meanwhile, Dad enjoyed a glass bottom boat tour and lunched on prawns, and later, went on a tour of the island.

Exhausted and sunbaked by the end of the day, we cleaned off and went for dinner at the only restaurant in town, a little tiny BYO Greek place (we BYO’d beer and cider) that played Spanish mariachi music and served the best pizza I’ve had so far in Australia.

Parents Day 12

Tuesday November 3

Cairns! Surely this was the real Australia: a warm, windy jungle of buzzing insects, singing birds, and vivaciously flowering trees. By ten o’clock Tuesday morning, we were packed into our “resort” at Holloway’s Beach, twenty minutes north of the city centre. Mom had asked the man at the front desk, hopefully, whether there was an ocean view from our room. He hedged. “Well, you can see the ocean from the balcony,” he said, vaguely, without meeting our eyes. And sure enough, you COULD see the ocean from the balcony, if you extended a mirror on a five-foot elbow-shaped pole and tilted it to reflect around the corner of the building. Still, the courtyard below our window was quite a jungle in itself, tall palm trees and thick flowering bushes nearly hiding the swimming pool, surrounded by lawn chairs. Actually the thick foliage made us all a little nervous, at night. Walking through the courtyard in the dark, we sort of shied away from the thick leaves, which might easily conceal a snake or crocodile. The resort was, in other words, heavenly. It was so hot at night that I slept sheetless, the balcony door propped open for a bit of air, listening to the faint chatter and splash of our neighbors in the pool.

Having packed in, Mom and I ran outside to check out the beach, but all we saw was some gray, rough water crashing onto a narrow strip of sand. Mom was sad. “Isn’t this the Coral Sea?” she demanded. Dad said yes, it sure was. He had a glazed look, thinking of all the sunken American and Australian and Japanese ships and planes out there, waiting for him. We went for breakfast at the resort’s little restaurant, facing out onto the beach. I ordered a banana smoothie, which was huge and delicious, and crumpets, which were just like english muffins and pretty boring. Mom and dad had scones with coconut-orange butter. The wind knocked over our plastic cups.

Around noon we took the bus in to Cairns, like the more touristy strips of Florida, but at the same time less commercial, much smaller, and still with that faint Australian sense that you could walk around a corner at any minute and be in the Outback eye to eye with something deadly. Mom got very excited and seized the touristing opportunity. We spent hours on a few small cross streets examining sunscreen, flip-flops, sarongs, shot glasses, beach towels, posters, beach bags, and t-shirts, all adorned with koalas, wombats, kangaroos or just a big map of Australia. We finally collapsed sunburned at one of the hundreds of pubs, and had drinks til 5 o’clock rolled around, earning the dubious right to be the first customers in an Indian restaurant. After a so-so dinner, we continued back to our resort, picking up a few groceries in the corner store, thirty seconds’ walk from our front door. Early bed.