We’ve been basking in glorious winter sunshine for the last few weeks, but at days’ end temperatures plummet with the sun. Although I’ve been happily strolling around in a t-shirt and jeans during the day as I haven’t been feeling the cold, I have actually got one – I think it’s the typical, post-term, run down, tired and stressed sore throat and head cold with which many teachers are familiar – finally you stop, and then so, it seems, does your immune system. At 4 degrees, last night was the coldest June temperature in Sydney in 27 years. Now that I'm up here in Magnetic it's a different world - the temperature is over 20 degrees higher for starters.
As I took the ferry in to the city from Balmain in the crisp, bright and chilled morning I hoped that my flight northwards would enable me to leave the cold behind. I did, if only in part. After my 2.5 hour flight I boarded a minibus to head towards the ferry wharf, and the white haired, red nosed, semi-retired gentleman driver gave a little speech: “welcome to Townsville – it’s 28 degrees today, which is a normal winter’s day for us - the weather here is beautiful, except when it’s perfect!!”. The south-east Australian passengers were suitably grateful and enthused. I might have quibbled the semantics of his epithet, but I was happy to go along with the sentiment.
It’s been a couple of years since my last sojourn in to north Queensland and I had forgotten that it really is a different world up here. I’m staying in a quiet and underpopulated settlement on a quiet and underpopulated island, in a largely quiet and underpopulated State, in a largely quiet and underpopulated continent. So it’s fair to say it’s quiet here. And there's not many people about either.
I’ve been struck by how much of a city boy I’ve become – or an Inner West Sydneysider, to be specific. You can’t get a decent long black here. ‘Nata’ (Portugese tarts)? Forget it. Everyone here dresses like it’s 1984 and look like they’re on a diet of steak and chips (‘diet and grooming’, as was said by RHE, Croydon v Clapham Junction, circa 2002). Springsteen was blaring out in the main supermarket. The round trip of 5km, using the local bus service, took two hours. Just as well I’m not in a hurry.
'Upside down trees', Picnic Bay, Magnetic Island
I have booked some diving trips though – the best diving on the Barrier Reef is near here, as well as one of the world’s best shipwreck dives, which takes care of Friday and Saturday this week. Tomorrow I hope to explore some of the rainforest interior on the 52 sq km of this tropical paradise. And it's cane toad racing in the evening apparently. It can't be any worse than this evening's foray in to backpacker culture. Oh, the memories. There was some sort of tacky bingo competition in the bar administered by some excited 8 year old, who described everything he liked as 'sick'. I think it's a generational thing. This evening an orange, near-full moon rose, regally, over the Australian continental horizon to the west casting a shimmering light on the still waters. In the words of this evening's quiz host: "Hey everyone, check out the sick moon!!! Ok! And here we go.... another of my balls has dropped, whe-hey!!, and it's 31!!!" [sic].
stop quoting me.
ReplyDelete