Australia — The Journey Continues
Part 2 of our unforgettable 2016 journey to New Zealand and Australia
Marina and I took a short flight from Christchurch to Sydney and fell in love with the harbor as soon as we saw it from the air. Only a photo describes the blue water. Only a photo describes the opera house.
We spent the first day basking in the warm sun and harbor breezes. We took a ferry to the zoo and liked the ferry so much we rode it around for hours. We went to the botanical gardens and took puctures of birds and roses. We learned that Circular Quay is pronounced “key”. We took a dinner cruise where were serenaded by an Eastern European singer mouthing the English words and pretending to get the inner meaning of the Carpenters’ “Close to You”. We officially toasted our 25th wedding anniversary over a glass of champagne as we looked out at the evening lights of an amusement pier. It was — fun.
The next morning I was up early and took in the sights with a local birder: a dozen Long-billed Corellas patrolling the fields of a cemetary in the Sydney suburbs, their white crests and big blue eye rings shimmering in the morning sun. Superb Fairy-Wrens flicking their tails high in the grasses. A Powerful Owl hidden high in the thicket of a local park.
I’m all for names like “Splendid” and “Powerful” when describing birds. But I got a little confused between the Splendid Fairy-Wren and the Superb Fairy Wren (the splendid one is bluer). And while it’s great that we have a Powerful Owl, I can only wonder if there’s a weak one out there somewhere.
Sydney was home base for a dozen adventures. After a day of birding we fed kangaroos and koalas at a nature center and drank Shiraz and Semillon in the Hunter Valley with four British healthcare workers who left their husbands on a golf course for the day. After each glass they got funnier. One reminded us more and more of Rebel Wilson as the day went on. In case you’re wondering, good Shiraz pairs well with Black Forest Cake, chocolate mousse and a vanilla-caramel ice cream.
Well-fed and watered, we went back to Sydney to rest up for an early flight west to Uluru (otherwise known as Ayers Rock), the massive sandstone monument to Aboloriginal culture visited by half a million tourists a year. Jutting out of miles of near-desert scrubland, the rock appears a different shade of red each time you look its way. Some felt the heavy presence of generations of Anangu spirits. I got distracted by a Tawny Frogmouth (another great bird name) tending her young in a tree overhead, a big Perentie lizard and a pair of backpackers separated from their tour group and badly in need of water.
On a clear night at Ayers Rock you can see the Milky Way and lose yourself in the immensity of nature. It was not a clear night, but the world around us was big and dark and full of mystery all the same.
We went back to Sydney for a while, shopped for uggs and ate by the harbor before flying north to the Coral Sea resort town of Cairns, pronounced “cans” by the locals. For many, Cairns is a brief stop on the way to the Great Barrier Reef, but we fell in love with the town and decided to stay put. We had been away from home for three weeks and were getting tired.
It didn’t hurt that the country’s finest shorebird destination is on the Cairnes Esplanade. Shorebirding is generally all about iffy views of distant birds viewed through a scope, but not in Cairns. Take a seat on the esplanade, get your camera ready and when the tide is low, the birds will come to you.
One morning as the sun came up Black-fronted Dotterels, Whimbrels and Great Knots ate from the mud flats, with a Far-eastern Curlew sprinkled in for good measure. Chinese girls with iPhones pursued big lumbering pelicans past the signs that warned of salt crocodiles and nasty jellyfish. They posed for selfies while the birds crept backwards in awkward retreat. A Little Egret fished in the shallows. A Masked Lapwing marched like a comical general from an long-ago war. Silver Gulls watched from overhead or perched from railings along the esplanade, indifferent as to whether their next meal came from the water or the restaurants nearby.
In the late afternoon the scene on the Esplanade played out again while in the center of town another scene was unfolding — quiet at first, then steadily gaining volume like nails running down a chalkboard. Bats.
We knew about the Cairns fruit bats, but we didn’t know we would see thousands of them hanging from the dense trees outside the city’s library. Or that their sunset flight over to Fitzroy and Green Island would literally darken the skies outside our hotel room. I am not a fan of bats but this was something special. Marina couldn’t get enough of it.
After Cairns, we took a quick trip to Brisbane where we learned that “bugs” weren’t always insects but sometimes more like what my Louisiana friends call mud bugs. Like a little mini-lobster, the Morton Bay bug is a little bit crawfish, a little bit shrimp, but however you describe it, it’s best consumed with garlic, lemon and a little beer.
A month away from home, hundreds of miles of Australia and New Zealand and a feeling like we could stay here forever. But there was one more place to go.
When we were planning our trip, I asked a local birder where we’d get the best photos. O’Reilly’s — as in O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat — was all he said.
At this point in our travels we had mastered driving on the left. We had mastered driving on windy roads. But no one prepared us for miles of twisty one-lane adventures up Lamington National Park Road while tourist buses were hurtling down on us from hidden turns above.
A place like this needed to be epic if it warranted putting your life on the line. Well, it was.
You get the idea of epic when you arrive at a tidy compound high in the woods and as you check in there are pictures of the owner with David Attenborough on the walls. You get the idea when King Parrots and Crimson Rosellas literally land on your head or on your camera lens begging you to feed them. You get it when their idea of a yard bird is a Regent Bowerbird. You get the idea when you order the lamb shank for dinner and you get a hoof of fall-off-the-bone tenderness, or when the owner greets you by name at breakfast.
I walk the tails and rickety bridges with fellow birders and count Yellow Robins and Golden Whistlers among my favorites. The smack of Eastern Whipbirds echoes in the woods. Logrunners rustle through wet leaves below.
We inspect the lair of an industrious Satin Bowerbird, who speeds much of his life arranging and rearranging blue things like feathers and bottlecaps and plastic spoons to woo females into his carefully thatched bedroom. Scrub Wrens dart around us. Green Catbirds mew from above.
We didn’t have much time here, but we were glad for ever moment spent. Then it was down the mountain, back to Sydney and the long flight home.
I’ll end the story here, but some journeys don’t have an end. We flew home, but Australia is a vast country and we have have only had a glimpse. There’s so much more to see.
