The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (21 page)

I'm out the door by eight-thirty
A.M.
to explore Brisbane before catching a four
P.M.
bus. It feels like 100 degrees already. I've been in Sydney for three summer months, but the Brisbane heat is a new beast to be reckoned with. A few times I buckle against the nearest tree, swooning and fanning myself like a lady-in-waiting. I spend much of my day lazing through the botanic gardens, walking along the raised bridges where the mangrove roots disappear below brackish water. When I have longer stretches in places later on in my travels, I'll wander like this for many days, luxuriating in the little surprises around every corner. It won't be anything like our speedy family trip through Europe when I slept (slept!) through the Alps. It will be slow and meandering. It's so counterintuitive for me to absorb my surroundings instead of studying the regional culture, history, and exports as though preparing for an exam. In scorching Brisbane, I discover one of my favorite ways to see a new city even if it's not hot as Hades: walk without purpose, pausing every hour or so for an iced coffee or an inviting park bench to people-watch or strike up a conversation with some willing locals, but never entering any of the
myriad galleries, government buildings, or museums on offer. In Brisbane I'm my own tour guide.

The next day I land in Hervey Bay, a do-nothing town that occupies itself mainly with setting up tourists on trips to Fraser Island. Here I happily fork over ten dollars to patronize the gruesome, kitschy Vic Hislop's Great White Shark and Whale Expo. Vic, a strong-armed, sandy-haired shark hunter, is a self-proclaimed Australian icon. He perpetuates numerous conspiracy theories, like many shark-attack deaths are covered up as drownings, and whales who beach themselves are often shark-attack victims that, even after humans push them back in, will stubbornly rebeach, terrified of what awaits them in the water. The entrance is an open-jawed shark, and inside, three frozen great whites hold court over the crowds. “Call me Vic,” I say under my breath.

I've booked an eighteen-dollar-a-night hostel in the heart of the Hervey Bay backpacker action. I make friends with a perky Canadian girl, and we go out for a few drinks. She's a nurse who's come to Australia to travel for a few months, then find work somewhere in the country for a few more months. Her boyfriend was supposed to come with her, but they broke up two weeks before the trip, so she is here on her own.

“He still has his ticket,” she says. “I don't know if he's over here or what, but if I run into him, I'm cutting his balls off.” She mimes a snipping motion.

“Cheers to that!” I toast a little too loudly. We've known each other for a grand total of two hours, but I'm connecting at inexplicable speed with other lone backpackers. We have no past and most often no future together, so we let it all hang out—our body odor, our raw emotions. It's intoxicating to strip away the excess: it's just me, my backpack, and the world.

The next morning I'm back on a bus for a day tour of Fraser Island. While we're waiting to depart, I watch two picnicking families outside the window. Each has a little girl around five, and the two are eyeing each other from neighboring tables. As if in some silent accord, they hop off their benches in unison and approach each other. A flurry of animated conversation ensues, but soon one family has finished and packed up and is ready to push off. A distracted-looking mom turns to tell her daughter to say goodbye to her new friend, and she vigorously embraces her while the other girl pats her back motheringly, as though assuring her they will meet again, though it saddens her that it might not be for a very long time.

Fraser Island is one big sandbar created by thousands of years of long-shore drift. Our bus driver, George, tells us this and much more, his voice so even and low that I drift off to sleep several times. Though his monotone never reveals any hint of pleasure, he does end each sentence (in typical Aussie good-natured boasting fashion and also because it's usually true) with the phrase “in the world.” “This is the largest sand island in the world.” “These are the only trees of this kind in the world.” “The dingoes on this island are the purest breed in the world.” He also treats the tour like it's a spelling bee: “Those are coffee trees—C, O, double F, double E. Coffee trees.” Finally, every time we get off the bus, he specifies exactly how long we have within a five-minute time range. We'll be there for “fifty to fifty-five minutes” or “thirty to thirty-five,” but never the unforgivably vague ten to twenty minutes, say. He checks his watch while we reboard the bus, counting the seconds until someone is officially late and he can sigh disappointedly into his hairy wrist.

He invites passengers to sit up front with him for a stretch, and I, perpetual pleaser, dutifully make my way up there after lunch. He tells me how all the proceeds from the tourist camping tax are
supposed
to go toward the maintenance of the island. He raises an eyebrow and looks meaningfully at me for longer than
someone off-roading in a massive four-wheel-drive bus should. When I don't inquire further, he moves on to more benign subjects like the various reptiles found on the island: frogs, snakes, skinks, and my least favorite—the stout, crocodile-tailed way-too-freaking-big-to-be-a-lizard goanna with its old-woman-neck wattle. I nod with feigned enthusiasm.

We stop to swim at Eli Creek (no going out in the shark-infested ocean here). I plop down beside a British couple and their teenage daughter. “I do not want to hear about or see any spiders,” she's telling them.

“Right, love,” the mother says, then takes off in an all-spandex ensemble to run laps around the shallow creek. The husband warbles off to the knee-deep water in swimming trunks pulled up to his nipples.

At lunch I meet Sabrina and Rupert from Austria. They're off together on a one-year excursion: a month in New Zealand, two in Australia, and the rest of the time in Mexico. We have a little language barrier—their English is above average, and my Austrian is nonexistent—but we get on instantly. By the time Rupert's coffee slips through his suntan-lotioned fingers and splashes all over his knees, we are cackling away like old friends. When we separate later that evening, I want to hug them fiercely like those little girls I saw. Maybe this is what travel gives you—or gives you back, in most cases—that childlike sense of wonder, and with it a kidstyle openness where you want to finger-paint with anyone and everyone who shows up. Maybe it's because people are in such an open state, on the road ready to absorb all the experiences and strangers that come their way, like we did when we were little. Some are fleeting, like the Canadian girl in Hervey Bay, but some you hope to see again, even though you know you might not.

I've never been scuba diving, and Carly has assured me that there is no better place (“in the world!”) to give it a go than the Great
Barrier Reef. Lindsay, our guide, helps us put on our gear: flippers, mask, and oxygen tank. We practice equalizing and clearing our masks. Then he tells us to drop beneath the water's surface and breathe in and out through our mouths. I flail about and hold my breath because I cannot wrap my brain around the counterintuitive notion that inhaling will not end in lungs full of salt water. Lindsay parks himself directly in my eye line. He nods encouragingly, his underwater ringlets bobbing in slow motion.

Down the five of us go, along the sweeping reef that stretches farther than any other in the world. It is the largest structure made by living organisms, minute polyps that pile themselves atop one another, some dead and some living. I float along like a ghost, pausing to examine a brilliant blue starfish or to let a school of zebra fish pass. I often fall behind, distracted and wide-eyed, and at one point Lindsay simply grips my belt and pulls me alongside him like a lollygagging child.

Despite how awkward breathing underwater feels, I am at home, as I always have been in the water. I was one of those infants you see parents tossing back and forth in the lake long before they can swim, then one of those little girls her mother calls a fish and has to bribe out of the neighbor's pool. But I have never been down this deep or seen what lives this far below the surface, where the sun and the sounds of people eating their shrimp lunches back on the boat are a million miles away. I can feel myself getting bolder and braver.

I'm staying the night at a hostel on Magnetic Island, one of the oldest island resorts in Australia. It must have been lively once, but the recent move of the terminal to Nelly Bay has slowed the place down. Though everything is neat and tidy, the rooms have an air of neglect. The bathroom tiles are gaudy and mismatched; the striped rug in the lobby is fraying. On the walk to my dorm
room, a turkey waddles after me, its skinny neck weaving back and forth.

“What's with the turkey?” I ask the girl in skintight short shorts leading the way. It is a testament to Australia's kooky wildlife that I now regard this familiar yet totally out of place bird with nonchalance.

“He lives here.” She shrugs her bony shoulders and glares menacingly back at the turkey until he hobbles away.

My new roommate is brushing her wet golden hair in front of a round mirror. “Hey,” she greets me. “I'm Stephanie. Don't let that fucking turkey anywhere near this room, okay? He already ate another girl's toothbrush.”

Stephanie is from Calgary, Canada. She recently finished high school and is on a one-year working holiday before figuring out if she wants to go to college. “It's not for everyone, you know?”

“Of course not,” I agree, not quite believing myself. Increasingly, I'm stranded between the Byron Bay–esque, laid-back traveler me and the old me who still thinks things like higher education are as necessary as breathing.

Stephanie and I stir-fry chicken and broccoli for dinner. Georgette, another Canadian roommate, joins us. She doesn't look a minute over twenty-five, and my eyebrows jump when she reveals she's forty. She beams. “Travel keeps me fit.” She's here to dive the reef for six weeks.

“How can you take so much time off work?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” she says. “It's my vacation time.”

“You must have been at your company for a long time.”

“No, not really, two years.”

“Then how do you have so much time?” I'm suspicious now. My friends back home have ten days of vacation, tops, which they're all afraid to use.

“It's what we're given. We need this time to recuperate, don't you think?”

Actually, I do think, though I've never considered it before. Another reason Americans don't travel for long periods, I suspect.

I had intended to stay on Maggie Island for another day but it's so sweltering the next morning that I decide to return to Townsville, a little city port, and spend the day at the beach with Stephanie. She's booked a room above the transit center, and I can leave my pack with her until my twelve-thirty
A.M.
overnight bus departs for Cairns.

It's a sauna back on the mainland. One might stand the 90-plus-degree temperature if the humidity didn't hover between 70 and 90 percent. We're constantly soaked in sweat, every pore dripping. Even when we stop for ice cream, the relief lasts only as long as it takes to sloppily consume the melting mess. At the beach, Stephanie sets herself up in the shade while I mad-dash across the burning sand to the disappointingly warm water. I float on my back, still perspiring. Even so, a rush of gratitude overwhelms me: not just that I am lucky enough to come from a country where enough money can be saved up waitressing to traverse the globe, but I'm also palpably thankful to be alive, to feel the water and sun and wind. I have always been a person who volleys between the past and the future, never able to fully partake of the pleasures of the present. Until now.

I go a little bit crazy in Cairns, an adventurer's paradise in the far north. First I jump out of a tiny green plane holding steady at ten thousand feet. Rod, my instructor, takes me through the steps on the ground. He instructs me to cross my arms against my chest and keep my head back until he taps me on the shoulder, the signal to let my arms fly loose at my sides. I'm supposed to keep my knees tucked up when we land so I don't trip him.

“It's about twenty seconds of free fall,” he tells me. “Get
ready.” How does one prepare for such a thing? I think back to that moment on the plane in Dublin, when I was so terrified of the figurative free fall I was facing after graduation. Now here I am, literally throwing myself into it.

All of Rod's directions exit my brain as he scoots me toward the open door of the plane. He's strapped behind me. As one body, we tip over the edge, out into the clouds.

“Ahhhhhh!” My jaw seems to unhinge as I scream through the first few seconds; after that it's a silent Munch scream. We're plummeting so fast it feels like the earth should bash into us at any moment, but for the longest time, it's only specks of white rooftops and the faraway rain forest. As we tumble through space, more space is created for us, like when Alice drops down the rabbit hole. Then Rod pulls the parachute, and we're jerked briefly upward. We drift down like a feather after that.