I woke up once last night not too long after I had gone to sleep and noticed that all of my roommates had arrived back and were either sleeping, or in the process of getting ready for bed. I “slept in” this morning until 8:00am, and by that time all of my roommates were already gone! Most of the beds were devoid of sheets, indicating that most had packed up and moved on to their next travel destinations.
I had peanut butter and jelly for breakfast, then went out and wandered around Cairns. The Esplanade is the name of a street, but also the area along the ocean where there’s a boardwalk and a grassy area next to it. I wandered up the 3km boardwalk almost to the end. All along there were vast mudflats that were created by the receding tide. There were a few new birds on the mudflats, and I got to see some neat blue and orange crabs feeding on the drying out mud. The weather was gorgeous today, very sunny and with highs in the lower 80s -- weather can’t get much more perfect!
After I got tired of walking around, I went back down to the main grassy area of the Esplanade where, since the city of Cairns lacks beaches, some people had gathered to sunbathe (“sunbake” as they say in Australia). I decided since I’m in the sunny tropics of Australia, I might as well enjoy the sun and get a little bit of tan. I’ll need a little color to keep me from burning later on in the spring anyway. My strategy was to lie on my stomach and my back for 20 minutes on each side, figuring that might be enough to get slightly pink, and then put sunscreen on after that. Well, I followed the plan, but later in the day I found out that it’s true what they warned me about the sun in A
ustralia being very strong! Apparently because of a big ozone hole in our atmosphere there is less ozone over much of Australia and the sun’s rays are much more intense. I managed to get a pretty bright pink-red color from just those twenty minutes of exposure! It was only mildly sore/uncomfortable though, and didn’t really bother me most of the time. I guess in the future I’ll put sunscreen before I try sunbaking in pure, unfiltered UV rays. :-P
This afternoon I went back to the hostel and ate lunch, wandered around the area where the hostel was located, and just lounged around in my room and being lazy. Later in the afternoon I took my USB drive down to a one-hour photo store and printed up a couple dozen photos, some to keep with me, and some to send to Rachel as a surprise. My hope is that they’ll get to her and surprise her before I get a chance to put them online when I’m back in Canberra. J I went back to the boardwalk later in the afternoon and found most of the mudflats submerged by the rising tide, and lots of shorebirds being pushed progressively closer and closer to the boardwalk by the waters. Apparently this is a really famous spot with the birders, because I saw at least a dozen or so birders walking around with binoculars, and I chatted with a couple of them. I saw a few new types of sandpipers tonight, which was pretty cool. The tide came in quite rapidly across the mudflats, and only 30 minutes or so after I arrived they were completely covered with water, forcing all of the birds that had been there to fly off in search for somewhere else to perch
along the shore. When I was getting ready to leave the boardwalk I spotted a few pied imperial pigeons (a big white and black pigeon) fly over, which was really neat, and then I saw a huge bat, one that turned out to be a spectacled flying fox, fly across and land in a tree nearby. Since it was getting close to dusk, there wasn’t enough light to get a photograph through my binoculars, but I was able to watch it from a fairly short distance away as it clung upside down to a branch and munched away at the tender emerging leaves and buds at the tips of the twigs. (Flying foxes are vegetarians). It was really amazing watching this big bat, which looks like a miniature dog, chow down at such close range. Huge flying foxes are so much cooler than the tiny little bats we have back home!
I ate supper tonight at the Woodshed bar and restaurant again, using up my handy free meal voucher that I got from the hostel. The hostel meals are rather small in portion (compared to what it takes to fill my stomach to capacity, at least), but it was still a free meal, and probably carried a $5-10 value. I had spaghetti with a vegetable alfredo-type sauce tonight, one of the five options for my free meal.
Back at the hostel after my meal, I watched some TV in the TV room, went on the internet to check my e-mail, and hung out in the common areas where people liked to be. At one point I was standing just inside the door to the garage-like hangout area when a little bird flew in and was trying to fly through the walls (without much success, I might add). The bird ended up falling behind a table on the floor, so I reached back and picked it up to discover that it was a fledgling Willie Wagtail. I’m not quite sure what this little bugger was doing up so late at night (it was completely dark outside except for street lights and flood lights in peoples’ backyards). When I took him back outside, sitting in the nearest tree to the door I found a parent Willie Wagtail chirping away and eagerly looking for his/her lost child. I set the baby on a tree branch and a moment later it flew to the next small tree over, about 10 feet awa
y, where its mother/father joined him. I think that little wagtail better learn how to listen to its parents and start going to bed on time! :)
Tonight when I was in my room getting ready to go to bed, Eyal came back. All of the other beds were completely empty this evening, so Eyal and I were the only people spending the night in the room. We talked a little bit about Israel, Jews, Arabs, Hezbollah, education, traveling, and scuba diving, etc. before going to bed. Apparently in Israel it is compulsory to be in the army for a couple of years after you complete high school. As for the war with Hezbollah (which is now in cease-fire), Eyal said that nobody in Israel wants to be in that war right now, and that unfortunately, it was a poorly-run operation. He said part of the reason for this was that the top 2 or 3 people in charge of the army and its decisions are new leaders, and he seemed to think they didn’t completely know what they were doing as far as exercising wise judgement and making sure the war had clear objectives and an effective strategy, etc. It was interesting to hear an Israeli’s perspective of the war. As I continued chatting with Eyal, we got to discussing traveling, and languages, etc. Although he knows English well enough to communicate effectively, he said he doesn’t know English as well as he wishes. I told him about how I only knew English, so he was a step ahead of me in the bilingualism department. I also mentioned how I thought it would be cool to know Hebrew (I only know a few words, numbers, and letters), but how I would probably learn Spanish if I ever got around to learning a second language, since so many other people in the U.S. speak Spanish anymore. He said that he actually really wishes he knew Arabic, and said he wants to learn some day. I never thought about it before, but in Israel there are a lot of Arabs in addition to the Jews, and the Jews and Arabs go to separate schools, and he said in school they (the Jews) only learn Hebrew. He said it’s frustrating not being able to even communicate with many of the people in his own country, people that he shares the streets with every day. He said that he thinks tha
t if they taught Arabic in school that it would help out tremendously with the relationship between the Arabs and Jews if they were able to understand each other, because kids would be able to interact and learn about each others’ cultural differences first-hand. Instead, the current education system, he feels, is actually reinforcing the internal division of the peoples living within the borders of Israel. Interesting.
