Will Around the World

I managed seven hours of sleep on the bus, but it was a rough, interrupted slumber. When I arrived in Cairns I was dead tired. I planned to spend five days in Cairns. The first four were with a certified dive course. On the last day I would be free to explore the forests around this tropical port city.

After checking in at the Tropic Days hostel outside of the center, I walked a good twenty minutes to the heart of town to Cairns Dive Centre. The first two days of the four-day course take place in the classroom and pool; the last two days would be spent on a "live-aboard" dive boat, where we complete our certification dives on the Great Barrier Reef. There were eight people in the class, including myself: two people from England, one Hong Kong Dutch guy (who naturally looked like he could play forward in the NBA), a girl from Hong Kong, another from Finland, and another couple from Finland who were the cheeriest people I met in Australia. The instructor, a short woman named Nikki, was a no-nonsense sort with a biting sense of humor.

The first day went as could be expected. I sat in the classroom half the time, watching videos, doing exercises in the textbook and trying not to fall asleep. In the pool I did well after the swim test, for which I had to cheat to pass.

After class I went back to the hostel. The people here are friendlier than in the other hostels I had stayed in—being far away from the action in the center of town helps. One of my roommates, an Israeli named Michael, was especially chatty. He had spent the first three days in Cairns walking around the city, recovering from jetlag. I hope he had bundles of money, because there isn't a whole lot to within the city except go shopping. At night I went with two others from the hostel to a bar in the center called the Woolshed. Their featured attraction is free dinner—consequently, a swarm of impoverished backpackers fills the bar every night. It wasn't until now that I realized how intricately designed the Australian tourist industry is. Bars and restaurants promote their specials in hostels, and run shuttles to pick up customers. You can book tours from pretty much any hostel in town. During class, our instruction was interrupted by a man who was permitted to promote his business, a multimedia presentation about the reef. For all the referrals that take place, I'm sure kickbacks play a big role. Cairns' economy is a thriving, complex ecosystem, much like the reef that it is built upon.

The next day a German girl joined our class. She was already certified but hadn't dived in years, so she needed a refresher. I sat with her in the back of the classroom. One thing she said about patriotism cracked me up. "I see American sports broadcasts and I hear 'God Bless America' every time. That makes me sick. If I sang 'God Bless Germany', you'd call me a Nazi!" After the class ended and we passed our final exam, Nikki the instructor shepherded us into the dive shop. Since the dive boat would provide equipment, I was not planning on buying anything here, but Nikki persuaded me into buying an overpriced mask and snorkel. To be sure, this mask was much clearer than the training device I used in the pool, but I felt bullied. I felt like a mark, too, because she let two students get away without buying anything. She knew well that I worked for a living. Of course, she gets commission on sales. I chose Cairns Dive Centre because it was $100 less than its competitor, but now it didn't seem so cheap anymore.

Sporting the world's worst sunburn

The next day my class started the live-aboard training. We traveled by catamaran 90 minutes out to sea to rendezvous with the live-aboard boat. We had lunch, then quickly got into the water for our first training dive. I had a tough time staying level—I would drift up a few meters away from my classmates, earning a nasty look from Nikki.

The next two days went like this: a dive, eating and relaxing on the sundeck, another dive. I spent most of my free time talking to my cabinmates. One is a graduate student originally from China named Bruce. He spent a couple of years in New Zealand and is now finishing his studies in Melbourne. The other is an American Marine stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Wellington, New Zealand. This soldier, named Aaron, has a relatively easy job (he's never been deployed to Iraq), although providing security—namely, ensuring the daily protests at the embassy against American foreign policy don't get out of hand—does take a toll. When Aaron described his military career he sounded earnest. He hopes to get technical training that will prepare him for civilian life. At the same time, he was sensible about being an American soldier far away from home. When he met other people on the boat, I never heard him introduce himself as a soldier. I guess he knows better than to trigger a tirade against the American president. I have tremendous respect for this man, who is just trying to make a living the best way he can.

With cabinmates Aaron and Bruce

On the second dive I figured out why I couldn't stay level: I wasn't keeping my legs and kicking above my head. My dives got much more enjoyable after I corrected this. I went on one more dive today, which was at night. The dive staff touted the night dive to no end. I didn't see anything extraordinary, though. When I got back to the boat a bout of seasickness hit me all of a sudden. I tried to relieve myself off the side of the boat, but it didn't make me feel better. I felt so bad I had to go to sleep at 9PM.

As bad as I had it, there was one person in my class who had it much worse. The Finnish girl, Miruna, couldn't adjust the pressure in her ears as she dove. That means her inner ears felt like they were going to get crushed if she didn't go back to the surface. As a result, she wasn't allowed to dive on the whole trip. Instead she had to snorkel. This was still really neat, she told me—and based on my own snorkelling experience in the Whitsunday Islands, I believed her.

To be honest, the dives were somewhat of a letdown. I saw more or less the same sealife on these dives as I did in the Whitsundays. To be sure, I did see a sea cucumber eviscerate itself, and I did get to touch the back of a giant turtle. But I didn't see any manta rays or even half the creatures that were hyped in the multimedia presentation I attended. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, because the pro divers on the boat said they saw something cool on every dive. These pro divers talk about dives like scratch golfers talks about their game. Because they always claim to have a good dive, you start to wonder if their boasts are empty.

On the second day of the live-aboard I dove three more times. Now that I had competed my certification dives, the class was over. As a reward, I had to watch a tedious video that was shot during our dives and was now being sold to us. It was bad enough I bought the mask and snorkel, so at $70 for this I drew the line here.

Hoping my contacts won't fall out

At 2PM the dive trip was over. A boat took me and two dozen others back to shore. On the 90-minute ride I talked to an American girl named Nina. She was the third American I had met in Australia (in thirteen days). We got along instantly. We were glad to make each other's company because, at the risk of sounding like an ugly American, we found it hard to relate to the Europeans we were meeting in Australia. I think this difficulty comes from a culture clash; Europeans are reserved and Americans are generally outgoing, even confrontational. Nina carped about an incident on the dive boat. She spotted a German pop the lid off a Gatorade cooler and dip her arm in it to scoop water. Nina, a little repulsed by this hygienic transgression, did not hesitate to admonish the European to use the spout. For her effort, Nina was met by a cold glare. On the flip side, Nina had a friendlier encounter with another German on the boat, a handsome dive instructor. Things went so swimmingly (no pun intended) that she was going on a date with him tonight. This prospect made her nervous, so I gave her a good ribbing to make her feel at ease. But I also felt a little envious—I wish it was me who made the connection (and not even a romantic one).

Nina, the third American I met in Australia

While Nina was getting ready for destiny, I spent an hour at a hotel bar on the waterfront with some people from the boat. Tonight at my hostel was the world-famous Croc BBQ. I tried to get back before it ended but the crocodile was all gone and there were only two morsels of kangaroo meat left. Deflated, I went back to my room, only to have an insufferable conversation with a British girl who had just checked in. At one point she asked me if Americans don't backpack because they are arrogant (America is so wonderful there is no reason to venture abroad). This comment struck me as a genuinely arrogant thing to say. This girl told a story about picking fruit at some nearby orchard—she was proud of the callouses and bruises she got. If she thinks she's "discovering Australia" or, even better, "discovering herself" through a few hours of menial labor, she's kidding herself. I smirked at the idea of her calling Mum at the end of that day, having a laugh over her toil, while hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the States do the same work, day in, day out, just to survive. I should have invited her to "discover America"—risk her life crossing the Mexican border and trudge as a maid in a hotel for minimum wage.

# posted by billklee @ 21:59