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 shou
ld 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.
Back on the ground, a series of bodily sensations that were suspended in the sky return: blood pumps in my ears, my arms tingle from the harness, my jaw aches a little from screaming bloody murder.
Rod smiles calmly, just another day at the office for him. “How was that?”
“Whoa,” I breathe.
“Bloody oath,” he agrees.
Some molecular shift occurs in Cairns. I’m certain of it. Otherwise, why would I decide that the best way to top off this particular day is to bungee jump? Bungee jumping is even more terrifying and satisfying than skydiving because I have to jump myself. No one is attached to me, making the decision. It’s just me on a fifty-meter platform in the dense rain forest I saw from a surreal distance while skydiving. A glorified piece of rubber binds my ankles like cuffs. I need to give my weight in order to calibrate the rope, and I wonder if the five pounds I instinctively fudged off mine is going to make a fatal difference. The rubber device feels flimsy, as if I’m being lowered down the edge of a cliff with floss around my waist, not anything that will prevent me from smashing into the lake and rocks below.
Two slinky New Zealanders are running the show. One of them keeps rattling on about losing my “bunginity.” The other creeps right up behind me and whispers, “Just let go. It’s going to be so good.”
In order to jump, I do have to let go. I know that—of my fears, my anxieties, my ego. To fling yourself out into the abyss requires shutting off the analytic part of your brain, which wants to discuss the few pros and many cons in paralyzing detail—otherwise, you can’t jump. If you’re doing any talking to yourself up there, it’s talking yourself out of it. Besides, I’m tired of playing it safe.
So I let go. I curl my toes around the edge of the platform and fall forward. My stomach lurches. The water reaches out for me, and I brush it with my fingertips. Then I’m back up, down, up, down, slower and slower until I’m suspended inert upside down. A question appears before me as the adrenaline drains from my body: Have I ever been truly present at any moment in my life before now?
Back at the hostel, I meet two friendly Japanese girls who are here studying English. They’re headed down to the restaurant next door for dinner, and I join them. They introduce me to our fourth roommate, half-German and half-Thai Jasmin. She’s aloof and keeps her eyes on her food. The next night I run into her again, and after a few quiet drinks, she explains her current depressed state. She came to Australia with a good friend who for some reason ended up renting a car with a mutual friend. Jasmin and her buddy originally had plans to tour the Outback, but her friends changed their minds without consulting Jasmin. She spent a miserable, blistering week in the unair-conditioned car with the two of them, pulling over on the side of the road every night to sleep in order to save money on accommodations. Eventually, the lack of showering and annoyance at her friend’s completely changing a month’s worth of plans was too much, and she had them drop her in Cairns.
“I wasn’t supposed to be here alone,” she says. “I can’t get used to it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going home ten days early. I already changed my flight. But first I am seeing that big red rock. That’s why I am here.”
“Good for you!” I say enthusiastically, reminding myself of jubilant Pedro back in Dublin. Usually, I have the tendency to absorb the energy of whomever I’m around, but I am determinedly keeping her depressing vacuum at a distance. “You know what you should do? You should go bungee jumping.”
She frowns. “Definitely no.”
I shrug understandingly, happy anyway to have a temporary friend after a long day alone. We order another beer. Tomorrow Jasmin is off to Uluru, and I fly to Darwin, a city that looms large in my imagination because of Muriel’s stories.
It rains hard my entire first day in Darwin, so I take the owner up on his offer to let me stay a free night in exchange for helping him paint the common room blue. He offers me thirty dollars to put some stickers on promotional pamphlets, so I do that, too. A number of backpackers are performing odd jobs around the place, including cleaning, which probably explains why the bed-sheets are always slightly askew and why a girl claimed she saw a cockroach in the kitchen this morning. But I don’t care because the place has infinite free pancakes for breakfast and a large pool I plan to swim in as soon as the lightning stops.
Try as I might, I cannot get a good feel for Darwin. The Darwin of Muriel’s youth was flattened by Cyclone Tracy, and now it’s mostly modern buildings with trendy restaurants unaffordable on my backpacker’s budget. I walk the stone remnants of the Old Town Hall many times, trying to imagine the force of winds capable of uprooting the sturdy Victorian structure. I visit the art museum, where you can hear an eerie recording from the cyclone and see pictures of the devastation. But the city itself seems to have moved on, and I feel like I’m looking for something that has been lost.
I’ve made a mistake by choosing to stay in Darwin for eight days. Muriel warned me—“you’ll see it all and then some in four or five hours”—but I wanted to plant myself in this distant city at the top end of a distant country, as Muriel did two decades before. I wanted to inhabit her life somehow, from when she was my age, as though this would offer some great insight. But all I get is long hours wandering back and forth along the esplanade. From the vantage point of Survivors’ Lookout, at the southeast end of the city, I read about the 1942 bombings on Darwin by the Japanese. These were the worst wartime attacks in Australia, and large portions of the city, as after the cyclone, needed to be rebuilt. It’s a strange thing, cities like this that recover over and over after tragedies, phoenixes rising from the ashes, some choosing to replicate what was lost while others using the opportunity to reinvent.
I am reinventing myself, too.
I book a three-day Kakadu National Park four-wheel-drive excursion to break up the endless afternoons in Darwin. Our guide, James, is twenty-five. In sunglasses, he’s an attractive, tanned guy, but when he removes his shades, I notice that his eyebrows are situated below the brow bone in a way that throws off the whole symmetry of his face. James brags about never acquiescing to the pretty girls who try to pick him up on the tours, then makes sure I understand that heaps of pretty girls do try.
James first takes us on a jumping-crocodile cruise. Our group boards a catamaran on which a lanky, bush-hardened guide dangles bloody meat tied to a pole over the water, then yanks it up while the deadly saltwater crocodiles jump for it in vain. The “salties” personify stealth, coasting partially beneath the water for long, slow stretches before seizing their prey with a burst of energy. Often they drag the doomed animal (or human) back underneath the water, where it drowns, if the croc’s powerful jaws haven’t killed it already. This particular breed of crocodiles is the largest in the world; they are thick, lumbering things, with square scaly ridges all along their back. Compared to the massive torso, the crocodile’s feet look shrunken and mismatched. When the jaw opens, two rows of uneven teeth reveal themselves like an ancient torture device. Their dark, scheming eyes terrify me.
The guide knows all the crocodiles along this stretch of water. Some of them have been gliding out to greet him for over a decade, yet even the most familiar, seemingly agreeable croc is not to be trusted—ever. “Give her a chance,” he says about a female circling the boat, “and she’ll rip you limb from limb.” With that, he rewards the croc with a piece of raw steak. She sinks like a submarine with her prize, beady eyes the last to disappear.
I recently read about a group of three guys racing around on motorcycles in a flooded area somewhere nearby when one was picked off by a scheming crocodile. The croc quickly buried the body, then came back fo
r the other two guys, who were by then hiding up in a tree. The croc stalked them for three days, menacingly circling the trunk, though they eventually escaped. The fear of being ambushed by a crocodile haunts me our entire three days in Kakadu. I think about it as we walk through the cathedrals of Aboriginal rock art, where we witness the pelicans and storks bowlegged on the rocks and point out to one another the silver barramundis whirling the water around like it’s being flushed. Water holes that are baked land in the dry season abound now that it’s the wet season, though many of them are off limits because of lurking crocs. The only stream James offers to let us swim in is surprisingly fast-moving. On one side is a flat bank where we strip off our sticky hiking gear, on the other is a rock cave big enough for five or six bodies to climb up into.
“Are there crocodiles here?” I ask nervously.
“Shouldn’t be,” James says. “But you can never be one hundred percent positive.” The real worry, he tells us, is the current. In order to reach the rock cave, we’ll have to swim upstream against the water at a pretty quick clip. Otherwise, we risk being washed away to some unknown destination. James makes it clear it is not in his job description to go after us. “So who’s keen?” he wants to know.
The two Irish girls who choose to pair miniskirts with chunky boots to hike each day are. So is Eva, the German girl who, while we’re washing dishes one night after dinner, can’t think of the English word for “pruney” so points to her hand and announces poetically, “I get old.” One of the boys will cross, but the other two won’t. James jumps in first, then the others heave themselves in one at a time to his outstretched hand. When it appears no one else is crossing, James makes a move to follow the others up into the rock cave.
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 16