Down Under (32 page)

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said and looked guilty, as if she had forgotten a secret with which she had been entrusted. ‘I haven’t been in the area very long,’ she added.

I nodded that it didn’t matter and asked her where she was from.

‘ACT.’ Seeing my mind whirring to little effect, she added: ‘Australian Capital Territory. Canberra.’

Of course. ‘So which is better,’ I asked, ‘Canberra or Surfers Paradise?’

‘Oh, Surfers by a mile.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s that good, is it?’

‘Oh
no,’
she said emphatically, amazed that I had misread her. ‘Canberra’s that bad.’

I smiled at her solemnity.

She nodded with conviction. ‘I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.’ I grinned and she grinned too. ‘Well, at least with a broken arm you know it’ll get better.’ She talked with the rising intonation common to young people in Australia, which turns every statement into a question. It drives older Australians crazy, but personally I find it endearing, and sometimes, as here, charmingly sexy.

A supervisor-type person came over to make sure we weren’t enjoying ourselves too much. ‘Cahn I be of assistahnce?’ she said in an odd accent that suggested long devotion to a book entitled
Elocution Self Taught.
She held her head at an odd angle too, tilted back slightly as if she were afraid that her eyeballs might fall out.

‘I was looking for the original Surfers Paradise Hotel.’

‘Ah, that was torn down some years ago.’ She flashed a satisfied smile – it reminded me exactly of William F. Buckley – though whether the smile indicated that she was happy that it had been torn down or merely pleased to be able to convey disappointing news I couldn’t say. She showed me on the map in my guidebook where it had stood.

I thanked them both and, clutching my directions, found my way to the site of the famous and now irretrievably lost Surfers Paradise Hotel. Today the spot is occupied by a shopping complex called the Paradise Centre, which was much more in keeping with the modern resort, in that it was ugly and filled with overpriced shit.

In the Surfers Paradise book I had consulted in Adelaide, a photograph from the late 1940s had shown a
delightfully ramshackle hotel – a place that looked as if it had been built in phases with whatever materials had come to hand – with a terrace bar on which sat many people soaking up sunshine and alcohol in careless volumes and looking awfully pleased to be there. I walked all the way around the block, then stood on the opposite corner and stared at the site for a long time, but it wasn’t possible to imagine it as it had been, any more than it was possible to imagine the Myall Creek massacre from its present peaceful situation. So I returned to the car and headed out of town through the dappled stripes of sun and shade created by the big hotels and lavish palm trees. At the edge of town I rejoined the Pacific Highway and headed south.

I had a long drive to Sydney ahead of me. For the moment, my trip was over. But I would be back, of course. I wasn’t anywhere near finished with this place yet.

‘I just want you to know,’ said a voice in my ear as Qantas flight 406 popped cork-like out of a tower of monsoonal cumulo-nimbus, presenting the window passengers with a sudden view of emerald mountains rising almost sheer from a pewter sea, ‘that if it comes to it you may have all my urine.’

I turned from the window to give this remark the attention it deserved and found myself staring at the solemn and rested countenance of Allan Sherwin, my friend and temporary travelling companion. It would be incorrect to say that I was surprised to find him sitting beside me because we had met in Sydney by design and boarded the flight together, but there was none the less a certain residual measure of unexpectedness – a kind of pinch-me quality – in finding him seated there. Ten days earlier in London, where I had stopped on my way back to
America from my hike in the Middle East, I had met Allan to discuss some project he had in mind. (He is a television producer by profession; we had become friends while working together on a series for British television the previous year.) There, in a pub on the Old Brompton Road, I had told him of my experiences in Australia so far and mentioned my plans on the next trip to tackle the formidable desert regions alone and at ground level. In order to deepen his admiration for me, I had told him some vivid stories of travellers who had come unstuck in the unforgiving interior. One of these had pertained to an expedition in the 1850s led by a surveyor named Robert Austin, which grew so lost and short of water in the arid wastes beyond Mount Magnet in Western Australia that the members were reduced to drinking their own and their horses’ urine. The story had affected him so powerfully that he had announced at once the intention to accompany me through the most perilous parts of the present trip, in the role of driver and scout. I had, of course, tried to dissuade him, if only for his own safety, but he would have none of it. Clearly the story was still much on his mind, judging by his kind offer to keep me in urine.

‘Thank you,’ I replied now, ‘that’s very generous of you.’

He gave me a nod that had a touch of the regal about it. ‘It’s what friends are for.’

‘And you may have as much of mine as I can spare.’

Another regal nod.

The plan, to which he was now resolutely attached, was to accompany me first to northern Queensland, where we would relax for a day amid the fertile shoals of the Great Barrier Reef before setting off in a suitably sturdy vehicle along a bumpy track for Cooktown, a semi-ghost town in
the jungle some way north of Cairns. This warm-up adventure completed, we would fly on to Darwin in the Northern Territory – the ‘Top End’ as it is fondly known to Australians – for the thousand-mile drive through the scorched red centre to Alice Springs and mighty Uluru. Having assisted me through the worst of the perils, the heroic Mr Sherwin would fly back to England from Alice, and leave me to continue on through the western deserts on my own. It wasn’t that he thought I would be ready for this by then – for he had no confidence whatever in my survival capabilities – but that ten days was all he had to spare. For my part, I had no greater confidence in him, but I was glad of the company.

‘You know,’ I added reassuringly, ‘I don’t suppose it will actually be necessary to drink urine on this trip. The infrastructure of the arid regions is much improved since the 1850s. I understand they have Coca-Cola now.’

‘Still, the offer is there.’

‘And much appreciated, too.’

Another exchange of regal nods, and then I returned my gaze to the exotic verdure below our waggling wingtip. If you needed convincing that Australia is an exceptional part of the world, then tropical Queensland would be the place to come. Of the 500 or so sites on the planet that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four – almost a third – are to be found in Australia. Moreover, two of these, the Great Barrier Reef and the wet tropics of Queensland, were right here. It is the only place in the world, I believe, where two such consummate environments adjoin.

We were lucky to be there at all. They were having a terrible wet season in the north. Cyclone Rona had
recently buzzsawed along the coast, causing $300 million of havoc, and lesser storms had been teasing the region for weeks, disrupting travel. Only the day before all flights had been cancelled. It was evident from the dips and wobbles of our approach into Cairns that a lot of assertive weather was still about. The view as we came in was of palm trees, golf courses, seaside marinas, some big beachside hotels and lots and lots of red-roofed houses poking out of abundant foliage. Weather apart, it all looked very promising.

It is remarkable now, when over two million people a year come to the Great Barrier Reef and it is universally esteemed as a treasure, how long it took the tourism industry to discover it. In
Rum Jungle
, an account of a tour through northern Australia in the 1950s, the historian Alan Moorehead made venturing into northern Queensland sound like a journey to the headwaters of the Orinoco. Then, Cairns was a small, muggy coastal outpost hundreds of miles up a jungle road and occupied mostly by eccentric dropouts of a fugitive disposition. Today it is a bustling mini-metropolis of 60,000 inhabitants, indistinguishable from any community of similar size in Australia except for the humidity that falls over you like a hot towel when you emerge from the airport terminal and a certain hale devotion to the tourist dollar. It has become a hugely popular stopoff point for backpackers and other young travellers for whom it has a certain reputation for tropical liveliness. On this day the whole was pressed under an oppressive weight of low grey skies of the sort that threatened rain in volume at any moment. We took a cab into town through a long, unbecoming sprawl of motels, petrol stations and fast food establishments. Central Cairns was somewhat snugger, but it had the feel
of a place that had been built only recently, in haste. Every second business offered reef cruises or snorkelling expeditions, and most of the rest sold T-shirts and postcards.

We went first to pick up our hire car. Because I had been hiking in the Middle East, I had left the arrangements to a travel agent, and I was mildly surprised to find that the agent had plumped for an obscure local firm – Crocodile Car Hire or something similarly improbable and unpromising – whose office was little more than a bare counter on a side street. The young man in charge had a certain chirpy cockiness that was ineffably irritating, but he dealt with the paperwork in a brisk and efficient manner, chattering throughout about the weather. It was the worst wet in thirty years, he told us proudly. Then he led us out to the pavement and presented us with our vehicle – an aged Commodore Holden estate car that seemed to have a decided sag about the axles.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

He leaned towards me and said as you might to a dementia sufferer: ‘It’s your car.’

‘But I asked for a four-wheel drive.’

He sifted through his paperwork and carefully extracted a fax from the travel agent, which he passed to me. It showed a request for a large, standard, high-polluting car with automatic transmission – an American car, in other words, or the nearest local equivalent. I sighed and handed back the paper. ‘Well, do you have a four-wheel drive I can take instead?’ I asked.

‘Nope, sorry. We only do town cars.’

‘But we were going to drive up towards Cape York.’

‘Oh, you won’t get up there in the wet. Not even in a four-wheel drive. Not at this time of year. They had a
hundred centimetres of rain at Cape Tribulation last week.’ I had no very clear idea what a hundred centimetres was, but it was evident from his tone that it was considerable. ‘You won’t get beyond Daintree in anything less than a helicopter.’

I sighed again.

‘The road to Townsville’s been cut off for three days,’ he added with yet more pride.

I looked at him again. Townsville is south of Cairns – in the opposite direction from Cape York. It appeared we were boxed in. ‘So where
can
we go?’ I asked.

He spread his hands in cheerful irony. ‘Anywhere you like in greater Cairns.’

Allan looked at me in the happily brainless way of someone who doesn’t realize disaster is afoot, irritating me further. I sighed and hefted my bags. ‘Well, can you point us the way to the Palm Cove Hotel?’ I asked.

‘Certainly. You go back out past the airport to the Cook Highway and take the road north. It’s about twenty kilometres up the coast.’

‘Twenty kilometres?’ I sputtered. ‘I asked for a hotel in Cairns.’

He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Well, it’s sure not in Cairns.’

‘But the road is open?’

‘So far.’

‘You mean it might flood?’

‘Always a possibility.’

‘And if it floods we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere?’

He looked at me with a touch of pity. ‘Mister, you’re already in the middle of nowhere.’ The point was inarguable. Cairns was 1,100 miles from Brisbane, its own state capital, and there was nothing in the other directions
but ocean, jungle and desert. ‘But Palm Cove’s real nice,’ he added. ‘You’ll like it.’

And he was right. Palm Cove was lovely – really quite astonishingly so. It was a purpose-built village inserted with some care into a stretch of tropical luxuriance beside a curving bay. On one side of a beachside road stood low-rise hotels and apartments, a few cottages and a scattering of bars, restaurants and shops, all discreetly obscured by palms, spreading fronds and flowering vines, and on the other was a palm-lined walk overlooking a smooth, golden beach and the sea.

Our hotel was, in everything but name, setting and price, a motel, but it was friendly and overlooked the sea. We claimed our rooms, then went for a walk along the beach. A few other people were strolling over the sand, but no one was in the water and for a very good reason. It was the height of the season for box jellyfish, also known in Queensland as marine stingers, or just stingers. By whatever name they go, these little bubbles of woe are not to be trifled with. From October to May, when the jellyfish come inshore to breed, they render the beaches of the tropics useless to humans. It is quite an extraordinary thought when you are standing there looking at it. Before us stood a sweep of bay as serene and inviting as you would find anywhere, and yet there was no environment on earth more likely to offer instant death.