Feature: City of Cairns (12-14 June 2005)
and the northeast Australian tropics

Cairns (pronounced "cans") is a mecca for international travellers, a town driven almost entirely by tourist money. It bills itself as the gateway to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, so we were a little surprised to discover that it had no actual beach. Where the beach seems like it should be, there is a short levy and a large damp sandy area between it and the sea. But, a tourist mecca in the Australian tropics has to have a place to swim-- so they built "the Lagoon," a salt-water swimming and park area between the Esplanade and the levy.

Our first night we stayed at one of the dozens of backpacker hostels on the Esplanade, where we got our first taste of how crazily tourist-driven the town actually is. We were planning to spend three days on a boat learning how to dive, but the hostel was going to charge us to keep our baggage while we were gone... unless we booked our trip through them, in which case they would store our baggage for free-- and give us a discount on our nightly rate, and a discount on the dive trip, and, and...

In fact, we quickly learned that every second shop or storefront in downtown Cairns offered "tourist information" and "bookings" and they obviously got commissions for doing so that were not unsubstantial. At first it was amusing, but the continuous hard sell became tiresome after a while.

So... when we learned that we would be spending an extra night or two more than we planned, we found a more relaxed place to stay. Our second hostel, Ryan's Rest, was a fifteen minute walk from the main area of town, was much quieter and homier, and it had a cat named Priscilla, who was an excellent model of tropical relaxation.

There were definite upsides to being in a tourist town, though. Most of the shops on the Esplanade and many on the blocks behind it were open past 6pm every night, which is a major switch from our experience in other Australian cities. There was even a night market with shops and a food court open to midnight. Plus, all of the restaurants served cocktails and other "foofy" drinks that D likes, which is also a switch from the typical experience here. But one of the special treats was that the seafood restaurants in Cairns were plentiful, concentrated, and really quite good. Our first night there we sat on the Esplanade, enjoying finally being on our tropical vacation, and D was brave and ate deep-fried bugs.

"Bugs," on Australia's east coast, means "Moreton Bay bugs," which is a type of small shellfish similar to lobster but richer and easier to get out of the shell. (Not that it was in the shell when it was deep-fried.) Just goes to show you that sometimes culinary bravery pays off!

Beneath the bright lights and the jaded hospitality staff, Cairns was a nice little city surrounded by a ring of green mountains shrouded in thick tropical fog that seemed to belong in Jurassic Park. And it was full of residents who really did love the water and the reef.

When we finally did get out of Cairns, a lot of the things we saw and the things we learned were quite new to us. For one thing, everywhere we went we were warned about the hideously dangerous animals that made the waters and the rainforests of far north Queensland their home. We had at least done our homework and planned our trip for winter (known there as "the dry"), so the main danger in the water was out of season. "Stingers" are blue-bottle jellyfish, the sting of which is extremely toxic and often fatal for humans. Along the beaches we saw numerous signs warning us of the stinger danger, with little cabinets beneath them that had bottles of vinegar-- the first line of treatment in case of a sting.

Then, of course, there were the crocodiles, who aren't ever out of season and who live in the brackish waters where rivers run out to sea. And we saw lots of signs warning us about cassowaries, which are a very endangered, large flightless bird capable of disemboweling a human being by jumping up, kicking out, and slashing with its clawed foot. We never did see a cassowary.

We did, however, see lots of odd plants that were all lined up looking vaguely familiar. They were obviously put there on purpose, so we figured they probably weren't dangerous. We kept seeing whole fields of a plant that grew as high as corn but had tall tassels at the top like wheat (shown here to the right).

Then, we saw plantations of trees that looked vaguely like palm trees, except they had dry cleaning hanging off of them. If you think that's a silly way to describe them, look at the photo below to the left and see for yourself.

So, we theorized as we drove along and tried desperately to catch a glimpse of whatever might be hidden beneath the dry cleaning covers on the funny-looking palm trees. Turns out the trees were banana trees, and if the one speeding glimpse we caught of an uncovered bunch as we sped by is to be trusted, they really do grow upside down! The tasselled crop we had to ask about, but we should have guessed: it was sugar cane.

As we continued to drive north from Cairns, we began to notice something peculiar around the sugar fields-- so odd, in fact, that we had to see it a couple of times before we believed what we were seeing. Alongside the highway ran tiny narrow gauge railway tracks, although we didn't see at first and couldn't imagine what kind of locomotive would fit on those tiny tracks. At first we guessed that the tracks were remnants of an old sugar-hauling system, but then we started to see road signs indicating a train crossing, with the words "Cane Railway" beneath. Plus, we saw more and more places where the rail line cut right through the middle of a cane field, and it seemed like if it was out of use it would have been torn up where it lay in farming fields.

Finally, in the town of Mossman, the tracks all turned away from the highway and led off to a large industrial site a little ways back. A little detective work and we learned that the tracks lead to sugar mills, that they are in consistent use even today because the highways are so small that the cost of transporting sugar by truck is prohibitive, and that the reason we hadn's seen any actual locomotives or cars was because the milling season didn't start until the following week.

By this point our curiousity was piqued, and we started to pay attention to what we could learn about the sugar industry. North of Cairns the milling season had not yet begun, but along the coast south of Cairns at the other end of our trip we passed a number of running mills, given away by the tomato-y smell of molasses thick in the air for miles around. We even saw a couple of cane trains on the move, though they were few and far between! Still, we were able to learn that sugar comes from just the stalk of the plant (the pretty tassel doesn't do much); how they harvest it by hand, by machinery, and by fire; that the harvesting period is extremely short and so the industry proceeds by rolling through the farms instead of doing one, then moving to the next; and that the fields only need to be planted once every three years.

Who knew that a tropical vacation could be so educational?