Bruce the van
Beautiful Whitsunday Islands
Diesel and Curry
Right now I am sitting at a worn wooden picnic table trying to adjust my screen so the setting ‘winter’ sun doesn’t reflect too harshly in my eyes. It’s warm, but just cool enough so my toes are curled up under my feet in my flip flops. As the sun sets, breezy tropical Magnetic Island starts to become a symphony of exotic jungle sounds. That, plus drunk travelers at the hostel’s bar. It’s one of the only two bars on his island that stretches an undeveloped 16 km from tip to tip. The roads are half unpaved and climb up mountains at between 8 and 14% gradients (very steep). I’m used to driving on windy mountain roads, but these roads just go up and over again, and again. Bruce, our van with 313,000kms on him, usually likes to chug along in noisy 2nd gear with little interest in going much faster than 20mph up the hills. Anyways, back to my setting:
Just 100 yards down a dirt path is the backpacker’s kitchen hut. The painfully familiar smells of garlic, oregano, burnt toast, boiling sausages and pasta is starting to fill the air. Backpackers always seem to eat the same food no matter their nationality. I can see just through the noisy screen door of the kitchen a tan guy in his late 20’s cutting the core out of a pineapple with the serrated blade of his leatherman. He wipes it on his cut off jean shorts and folds the blade back into its handle. That is the most original thing I’ve seen anyone eat in a couple weeks. I got to talking to a guy named Christoph a few weeks ago who works as a biochemist in Germany in the ‘real world. But for the past 6 months, he and his wife have been picking pineapples to get by. They live in their car and have incredible German educations—they just wanted to get away. He still loves pineapple, get the ones with lots of yellow on the outside-- they are ready to eat.
Tara, Bruce and I have driven a bit over 1000kms since we left Brisbane. We have seen dingos, snakes, monitor lizards, ocipussies (?), kangaroos, wallabies and a probably 80% of the Finding Nemo cast. We tend to spend most of our time either in the dense jungle or on the most remote beaches we can come across. We took a sailing tour in the Whitsunday islands… wait I’m going to start a new paragraph for this one…
Whitsundays. The aboriginal word for this series of Islands translates perfectly to paradise. I agree with them. I got to see these islands on a 68’ sail boat. Our skipper was a wrinkly, jaded old sailor from Armenia with very little to say. He had, like, a dozen teeth. The boat had an old wooden and steel body, accented with cream with dark maroon paint covering what I assume to be shit tons of rust. The galley below the boat was three main rooms. One room was just beds, another was crew quarters with a messy cluster of radios, weathered maps, and broken dials that I was told “don’t really matter anyway.” Tara and I slept in the remaining section: the kitchen. Imagine a room about 12x15 with beds to sleep 7 + a sink, 3 huge burners and all the cabinetry to hold food for 26 people. (Our boat only had 10 for some awesome reason.)
The crimson carpets below were dank (heh) with sea water that never dries and matted from I’d say, um, 50 years of use. This is a three day, 2 night cruise. Every week the same 2 dinners are prepared: spaghetti with garlic bread (original, right?), and curry with jasmine rice. Well, as you can imagine, the pungent smell of curry gets trapped in the damp carpets, the sheets on the beds, and the weathered wooden timber supports in the cabin. I think the exhaust to the engine was also piped through my cabin. So throw diesel fumes in the mix. I got sick. Twice. Sea sickness is not remedied by eating awful curry. My bed was not the best part of the trip.
All of that aside, I saw the most incredible white sandy beaches of my life. The water has 70 shades of blue and green according to our deckhand, Hughie. Hughie tried to give Tara a sip of his drink, but Tara noticed there was a fly in it. Hughie took two massive gulps of the gin lemonade concoction and handed the drink back. The fly was gone. That’s all you need to know about this sailor. Oh, and he burned his apartment down one time by catching his couch on fire, with his friend on it. On purpose.
We snorkeled in the cold clean salt water for what felt like hours the first day. The chill of the ocean wind made the whole thing very intense. I wanted to stay underwater to remain warm, but I wanted to be out of the water to warm up for good. It was strange. We sailed to Whitehaven beach and spent much of the following day there. Whitehaven is the 4th most beautiful beach in the world as of 2007. It’s #1 for me though. White sand is produced by tectonic plates crushing quarts into silicone that tides carry to the islands. From mountaintops and planes, the waters look like swirling white clouds on a blue sky. It’s a strange abstract representation of the Australian sky. I found myself speechless more times than I can remember on this trip. Maybe I was just trying to keep the curry down.
The downtime on the ship was spent listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers mixed cds on repeat and reading on the deck of the ship. Apparently someone had stolen all the other music, and of course no one travels with cds, so we were stuck with Anthony Kedias and his take on 21st century California. I made friends from England, Katie and Jamie, they are badass. They are spending 5 months traveling around the world: Africa, Australia, NZ, and beautiful Los Angeles. I guess they have been Tara and my first real friends on this journey. Too bad we had to part ways.
This is too long. Im going to go make dinner with Tara. Pasta with cheap tomato sauce. Vegitarianism is hard here. They don’t have bocca or Morning Starr. Brandon Shore, Calvin: I think spring break style dining might be happening more and more often.
Click on this picture to enlarge-- that's me at the bottom of the fall. WOO!
Ben spinning some fire the other night.
There's Tara and myself being rocked by the water.
