Slow ride

Wednesday, 05/09/2012 - 82 A.D. 

We awoke in Airlie Beach to discover that we had both dreamt of crocodiles in the night. How bizarre, especially as we haven’t come across any snappers so far. Maybe this synchronised dreaming was brought about by Tim’s ascension to angelic status the night before…

Ha, ha, you can already tell that I’m stuck for things to write for today, no??? You have to be gentle with me because I’m writing this a day late due to an overnight bus ride and a laissez-faire approach to the afternoon. We had an 8 hour day to kill in Airlie Beach until moving on. I think being here really hit home just how many English people there are in these resorts. The American and New Zealand legs of the journey were virtually devoid of Brits, but here it sometimes feels more English than Aussie!

We spent the first hour in a nearby travel agents because they had free internet on for the day (nice surprise!) and Tim wanted to book his upcoming Fraser Island tour for when we got to Hervey Bay (our next stop along the route). Then we went for a walk along the coast and checked out the ominous clouds in the sky, which fortunately only managed about three drops of rain the whole time they threatened us. Throughout the day we would run into Anni, the German girl from the previous night, who was praying her tour of the Whitsundays wouldn’t be cancelled due to bad weather. The fact we kept running into her was testament to the small size of Airlie Beach.

Cometh the luncheon hour, we decided it was time to hit our fortnightly fish quota and we went down the chippy. I got chips with calarmari (big, battered and beautiful-tasting), whereas Tim went for chips with “fish flake” (we still don’t know what it is, he still doesn’t know why he chose it). Hoping to enjoy our feast on a picnic table by the lagoon, we were immediately accosted by a hundred seagulls, 99 of them constantly hissed at and chased away by one partiuclar big, hard bastard of a bird. As if it wasn’t tough enough enjoying lunch with all these scavengers lurking by our feet, Tim received a foecal gift from a perikeet in the branches above (on his arm, not on his flake, though it might not have made much difference to the taste!) I couldn’t fnish my chips, so I threw a few of them at my brother…you can guess what happened next.

There were a couple more interesting incidents involving wildlife that took place in the afternoon. First up, while wandering through a hill-based estate on the edge of “town”, we came to a grassy track at the end of the tarmac road. Before we knew it, a three foot long iguana had darted out of the bush, seen us, sh*t itself, and run deeper into the bush. Tim managed to snap the big lizard in flight, but it’s difficult to make out the shape, whereas I was still exclaiming, “What the bloody hell is that?”, let alone reaching for my camera. We had no chance of catching up with it in the tall grass for a better shot…nor were we inclined to pursue, given what else could be lurking in there!

The second incident occurred at Macdonalds where Tim went to grab a quick evening “meal”. A guy was sitting at a table outside and unwrapped his hamburger, then held it up before taking a bite and a bird swooped down, grab the entire thing in its claws and carried it away for its own dining. The guy was shellshocked and just sat there with his hand held in the same position, uncertain as to what happened. It was one of those You’ve Been Framed moments when you oh so wish that the camera had been rolling! I’m sure everyone has seen this happen at some point, but like I said earlier, it was a slow day.

Greyhound Australia is a joy. Leaving aside the first bus we took from Cairns, none of them have been busy. This was to be an overnight trip in which both Tim and I got two seats to ourselves – a completely unheard of phenomenon in America. It’s strange how, once the sun goes down and the bus pulls away, your body gets sleepy as if you’re about to doze off, at which point you start to feel your eyes closing in response…until you realise it’s still only 7.30 in the evening! The problem with this journey was that when we did want to go to sleep we kept trying to stretch out across our two seats, but we weren’t used to kipping in those positions and the land of Sleepy-Byes-Byes only arrived when we sat up and closed our eyes as if we were only in the one seat.

The second problem with this journey was that we sat far too close to the driver. In America you did not sit near the back on account of that being where the weirdest of the weirdos went, and also those toilets stank like the sewers of hell. Come 2 a.m. and the driver changeover, I was caught a couple of seats back as Darwin Dave handed over to Rockhampton Ron and they discussed everything from why the microphone on the bus cut out at random moments to who had the best ute (all in that uniquely amusing Aussie way, which is best enjoyed in the waking moments). Ron also refused to let some guy (who Dave later referred to as a “redneck”) off the bus because he was in his bare feet and if he trod on glass at the truck stop he’d sue the company. The redneck couldn’t stop laughing at this, but Ron was ultra serious. Me? I couldn’t get to sleep through all of it, and was especially amused to learn that the Australian bus drivers refer to their passengers as “freight”, e.g. “I picked that freight up in Airlie Beach and it’s going to Hervey Bay”.

And Hervey Bay was exactly where this piece of freight was going…eventually...if I could just get back to sleep and stop trying to stretch my legs over that second seat...