Mikhail’s All-Star World Tour 2006

Writing this from the Sydney airport, my flight to Israel but an hour away. Maiken had lunch with me here before going downtown; she’s staying in Australia for another week before heading to Tokyo via Shanghai. Our travels and other plans are taking us in different directions, and there’s no telling when we’ll end up in the same place. So we’re parting as friends, as we planned to do all along. It’s been a great year that ended with a fun trip. Maiken: good luck, have lots of fun around the world, and stay in touch!

We’ve been staying at Byron Bay with Maiken’s former host sister Monique - she was in Denmark for a year on exchange when they were both in high school, and she lived with Maiken’s family then. Now Monique runs a sweet backpacker bar/restaurant in Byron Bay called Cheeky Monkey’s.

It so happens that Maiken and I started dating a year from yesterday. For our anniversary, we got the VIP treatment at Cheeky’s: free meals, free drinks, and all the entertainment we wanted as the place filled in with a young, cheerfully boozing crowd. There were games like “best impersonation of an emu” and “which girl can take off her bra the fastest”, with a jug of beer for a prize. I didn’t win any games, but I did “win” free dessert - a big slice of Banoffee pie (that’s banana and toffee). Thanks Monique, and happy anniversary Maiken!

Turned in our Wicked van, “The Cowboys”, after driving down to Brisbane from Airlie Beach. Lots of driving: it took us about a day and a half, and we didn’t even have much time for stops along the way. For example, there was a 2-hour detour we could’ve taken to see the platypus in the wild, but we were there at the wrong time - even if we went, we probably would’ve missed feeding time and not seen any of them. So we passed it by, and the platypus might as well be a mythical beast as far as I’m concerned. What we did see: lots of subtropical scenery, ever beautiful, countless middle-of-nowhere little towns with baby-talk names like wooloomooloo and bungilla (Maiken thinks it’s aboriginal names, I suspect drunk pioneers), a few beaches, sugarcane and olive trees, and, approaching Brisbane, disturbingly large billboards of the Crocodile Man from TV saying “Crikey”.

We stopped at the Bundaberg rum distillery along the way. The rum distillery was fine, and they had some damn fine rum-raisin ice cream, but what really left an impression on me was the “Bundaberg Brewed Drinks” division. Besides their standard ginger beer, a chocolate-tasting “premium” cola, and the “sarsparilla” root beer, they also had a peach beer, lemon-lime bitters, and my favorite: horehound beer. Awoooo! We got a sampler six-pack and mixed it with Bundy rum on the bus from Brisbane to Byron Bay.

Just a quick shout-out to the other passengers we met on the Condor: Charles and Charlotte (a French couple doing work/travel in Australia), Charles’ parents Bruno (a former professional diver for oil companies) and Veronique, his brother Nicolas. All from Marseilles, I think. Also Scott from Toronto (with an IT background and a taste for Toohey’s beer, which he brought and generously shared), Amy from London (radio background, travelling the world), Heather from Ireland, Charlotte from Holland (gave me tips on where to go for a cheese trip from Amsterdam), J and Joshua from “a small town near Shanghai” that’s probably bigger than Seattle though I’ve never heard of it, and Jane from Laguna Niguel in California (small world!) who moved there from Vegas and is planning her saltwater aquarium.

If any of you come across this post: sorry if I butchered your name, and please leave a post to tell us what you’re up to. It was great meeting you all!

I kept hearing Sublime lyrics in my head as we sailed around the Whitsundays, taking breaks to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. So what if the song is really about something else - it’s the only reef song I know and I’ve got singing on my mind. A list of encounters: endless schools of colorful fish, unimaginably diverse coral - from huge pale brains to forests of undulating orange tentacles and spiky alien trees, a squid (later several squid in a bucket on the deck, caught with a line, spraying ink at their captors), a fast-swimming sea turtle, a huge Maori wrasse named Elvis that swam close and let me pet it, and five reef sharks that swam next to the boat for several hours on the first night, using its floodlights to hunt for smaller fish. Amazing!

Every time we went in the water, we had to wear stinger suits that covered us head to toe. In the summer, the waters here are full of jellyfish, including lots of harmless floaters, the painfully poisonous Chironex and the excruciatingly lethal Irukandji. And by the way, the dangerous ones are invisible - if you see a jellyfish, then it’s OK. Going in the water without a suit is called the Irukandji challenge - you probably won’t get stung but if you do…a few days ago a skipper from another boat got stung and spent 4 days in a coma after the helicopter brought him to the hospital. Apparently it’s so painful that people’s hearts stop. Pretty convincing; I wore my suit most of the time.

Sailing is outrageously chill: the ocean is all around, the crew is fun, the other passengers are just as relaxed as you are, sunbathing everywhere in the breeze. The only distractions are walks on empty white beaches, snorkeling, meals, and fun sailing tasks like helping to put up sails (now I know what a spinnaker is, thought spelling it is still a challenge).

We went sailing for three days and two nights on the Condor. It’s a “maxi” yacht (keep your associations to yourself), and apparently it’s in the Guiness Book of Records for winning every major ocean race twice.

The crew was awesome, Australian, and sitcom-ready: skipper Kirk looks like Russel Crowe straight out of Master and Commander, but without the frilly uniform. Deck hands Judd (Orlando Bloom type with local accent) and Willow (no actor comparison, but very Scottish-looking). And Peaches, the girl in charge of the cabooze and the most important person on the ship when you’re hungry (always for me).

We get on board, the crew assembles all 14 passengers and the first thing they tell us is: bring more booze. We had brought 10 cans of mixed vodka drinks - an idea admirably perfected down here, you can get any mixed drink in a can, even prepackaged shots with names like Cowboy and Chocolate Eclair. But after the skipper’s warning, we ordered another sixpack for this last-minute liquor run, just in case, and Peaches brought us back six cans of Red Bear Vodka Pineapple. The last two cans were finished on the last hour of our last day of sailing - we planned it just right.

Not many people can say that they learned to drive stick in a rainforest. That’s what I’ve been doing with our van - a Mazda “Zum zum” e-series, the Wicked “deluxe” package with AC and power steering. Only the finest.

Driving stick isn’t that bad, except for all those cars waiting behind me while I try to accelerate, or just flat out stall. Shifting into reverse from fifth gear isn’t the zum-zum’s favorite trick either. But on long straight stretches of road, I am king. And thus I passed the time as we drove down from the Daintree to Airlie Beach for the last two days. Tomorrow morning we board the Condor for a 3-day sail tripo.

Tonight we’re camping in Daintree with our Wicked camper van. Daintree is the oldest rainforest on earth (100 million years old, they say), and it’s full of insects, birds, and all kinds of other night sounds. Falling asleep was a challenge, since it’s about 30 Celsius and as humid as Iowa in July, but once I fell asleep I was out for good. It was raining all night, too - guess that’s why they call it the rainforest.

On Saturday we woke up early, picked up our van and took the SkyRail gondola to Kuranda, a small village in the rainforest. Originally, Kuranda was founded for mining (I forget what they were mining maybe gold), but now it’s all for tourists too. It was really fun to ride the gondola (and the historic railroad on the way back), but the best part was the koala gardens. I got my picture taken cuddling a koala, fed a wallaby from my hand, and saw crocodiles pretty close. It was a bit disturbing when we walked to the python area but couldn’t find the python, maybe it escaped.

We spent Friday in Cairns - it’s a resort town pretty far north up Australia’s east coast. Even though we’re here in the “low season” - the crowds arrive June-September - it still seemed really touristy: lots of pubs, eateries, and souvenir shops. They do have a decent esplanade - nice view of the lagoon in high tide. In low tide it looks like a brown swamp. The cool thing about the esplanade are the playgrounds and the huge, crazy-shaped public pool. Pictures will come…

Funny story: we’re staying at the Caravella hostel and we stopped by the front desk to get advice on tomorrow’s trip to Kuranda. The woman there was hilarious: she was the most negative person I’ve met on this trip. She told us that all our plans were wrong, tried to sell us a more expensive trip with a “champagne breakfast” because it’s “more appropriate for our age group” (wtf?) and, by the way, told us that our van rental company is horrible, overpriced, and we’ll have a really uncomfortable time. I walked out of there laughing because it reminded me of someone I talked to on my last trip to Moscow. Of course, upon looking more closely we saw that our choices were actually better (price and quality), and she was just trying to make money because she’s also a travel agent (in addition to operating the hostel).