Australia Week 4

Brianna and I had two days left of freedom in Australia after leaving the Myella Farmstay, and we were intent on exploiting every last second of “do whatever you want” time before meeting our parents at 12:45 PM sharp on June 21^st. After that, we would no longer accept various colored sheets from the receptionists at youth hostels to stretch over the shabby mattresses on our bunk beds, eat $10 meals in Chinatown, and throw our packs into the storage area of the Greyhound Australia buses. Instead, we would be cruelly confined to plush pillows in private rooms, five star quality, four course meals, and porters to transport our packs. Such a shame, right?

In all honesty, it was hard to let go of the lifestyle Brianna and I had grown so accustomed to the past four weeks. It was the first time I had felt homeless. There was a increasing satisfaction in that homelessness, that day after day I had yet another city, beachfront, farm or teepee to crawl through and feel their respective cracks in concrete, jagged shell remains, brittle grasses and coarse strands of dreadlocks on the pads of my fingers and toes. Every step, harmonized by a creak in my weary back, was another diversion from the routine of my life in the United States. I was intoxicated by that melody, and not sure if I was ready to fast forward to the next beat.

I figured if I had to (and there was no changing my parents plans), Brianna and I would leave on the highest note possible. To do so, we figured we had to actually plan for at least one of these two momentous days unlike acting spontaneously the morning of. With our track record, though, it was to be expected that our activity itinerary for one of these two days would be as last minute as possible. Our original plan before Cairns was to stay in Mission Beach for two nights. We lasted all of 24 hours, plagued by a cloudy drizzle and stunned by a 'town' consisting of a strip of four restaurants and six stores. Out of immovable boredom, we rescheduled our bus for a day earlier, leaving us with an extra day in Cairns before jumping out of a plane. So when the receptionist at the Cairns youth hostel asked if we needed help booking any activities in Cairns, what else would you expect us to answer but bungee jumping?

My dad had bungee jumped in the past, and when I was younger, I thought he was crazy. That was before I indulged in, rather than quelled, the sweet nectar of adrenaline. Now, I was equally crazy. I dared to climb 196 to the top of a 162 foot tall platform at AJ Hackett's Cairns Bungee Jump Center. As the employee on belay wrapped towels around my ankles and clipped the carabiner onto my harness, I stoked the fire burning in my blood to elevate the scale of the upcoming explosion. And when a bolt of fear electrocuted my brain as I looked below from the edge of the platform, I absorbed the shock with a deep inhale and, well, jumped. I expected to scream in excitement, but instead, I was completely calm. My body was so weightless that I couldn't feel the adrenaline pumping inside me but rather revolving around me in a color-shifting aura. I stretched my hands towards the top of the miniscule pond below that grew in size drastically disproportional to the two or three seconds I was actually free-falling. It expanded more like viscous molasses rather than thin cake batter. I could have free-fallen forever, never retracting the smile stretching across my face for miles and exposing every one of my teeth.

When the tips of my fingers finally did graze the surface and my body bounded back upwards like a rag dog, my squinty-eyed smile burst into a light-headed giggle. Even as the length of my rebound decreased and I reached for the raft paddle held upwards by the employee on the pond, I kept laughing with hopes that somehow its vibrations would lift me back to the top of the platform so I could jump again. Sadly, I was detached from the bungee cord too fast for my far-fetched fantasies to even begin to come to life. Instead, I relived my jump over and over in the five pictures I had paid $50 extra to receive and imagined jumping off the 200 METER (about 600 foot) tall platform AJ Hackett's company was building in China. Some day, I kept thinking. For now, though, we had yet another adrenaline-junky activity for which we had to prepare ourselves.

Day two, our final parent-free day, was actually planned three weeks prior when we were staying in Byron Bay. I had wanted to dive in Colorado for my eighteenth birthday, but with the start of my freshman year, free time was not really an expendable resource. Looking back, I'd say it was for the better. Now, I would sky dive over the Great Barrier Reef the day after arriving in Cairns three hours before meeting my parents at the pier.

The night before our jump, Brianna and I meticulously pried through our heaps of clothes we had poured out of our packs and onto the floor, ensuring our diving outfits were as perfect as a wedding dress. So, when my alarm screamed at 6:15 AM, I pulled on my signature shirt that I wear in at least half of the pictures I am tagged in on Facebook: my obnoxiously neon yellow, synthetic shirt with “SoccerPlus Goalkeeper School” written in bold black letters. Anyone in Friday morning traffic would look up at the sky and see me: the little, yellow dot hurdling towards the ground.

Unlike with bungee jumping, during which the threat of the ground is only a few feet away, during sky diving, you have almost 34,000 feet between you and the ground while free-falling. The reality of the consequences of part of the equipment faltering is so far away physically, that my mind could only comprehend the experience with blurred, unrecognizable lines like bleeding watercolor painting. While free-falling, I thought more about the beauty of the swelling ocean and the lush, dark green masses of rainforest below than the fact that I had just jumped out of a plane with a stranger on my back. After the parachute deployed, I calmly transitioned to my task, steering the chute and spinning wildly in circles, rather than regaining feeling in (what I assume was) my pounding chest. It wasn't until I slid smoothly across the grass on my butt upon landing that I had even the slightest sense of what I had just done. Even a now, a week later, after looking through my pictures time after time, I still can't really wrap my mind around it.
 

We headed back to our hotel, dazed partially from the drastic altitude gradient we had just experienced and partially from lack of sleep, and grabbed our packs, backpacks and two overstuffed bags of yogurts, cheeses, eggs, bacon, and Tim Tams. After two 30-day backpacking expeditions and countless multi-day ones, I'm obviously used to a heavy load. But this, this was unbearable especially for a 25 minute walk from one side of downtown Cairns to the other. Every two minutes or so, either Brianna or I would have to stop and rearrange the positioning of our hands to regain some sort of circulation. Ten minutes into our trek only seconds before both of us would have collapsed, some heavenly angel cast its blessing and granted us with the greatest gift even a higher being could ever give: a shopping cart. There it was, resting on the edge of the sidewalk just to the left us, waiting to be claimed. There was no hesitation, no self-conscious fear of judgment. That cart was ours.

We plopped our backpacks and grocery bags inside the cart and strided forward towards the pier with overwhelming relief and a new-found vitality. There's no denying it: we looked like hobos. We were the happiest hobos, though, with the most swag of anyone glaring inquisitively at us. As we sat on the pier leaning against the back of the shopping cart, our parents, who had just landed in Cairns, walked towards us asking each other who the hell those two girls at the end of the pier could possibly be. "Maybe that's Brianna and Elizabeth." "No, it can't be." "Wait, it definitely is. That's Elizabeth's neon yellow goalkeeper shirt!" Brianna and I galloped like crazy monkeys towards them, and embraced them for the first time in almost a month. The Forster-Maglozzi clan reunited at last.

We climbed on the ferry to Fitzroy Island, an island composed almost entirely of a national park about an hour off the coast of Cairns. Until arriving in Cairns, nobody Brianna nor I had talked to had ever heard of Fitzroy which could have been either a cause for concern or a greatly appreciated relief from the populated cities. Thankfully, the coral-lined shores and undulating inland hills of the island proved to be the perfect secret hideway for the first leg our of family journey. We started first with the hills, hiking up painfully steep but short sections of crumbling stone alternating with short downhills. The island has in fact the highest summit elevation of any of the surrounding islands reaching a monstrous 882.5 feet. Watch out Colorado 14ers, you've got some competition. 

The trail ended at the island's lighthouse, from which we could see the various shades of blue blending into one another as the depth of the ocean increased and decreased. The next day, we would snorkel throughout similar areas forty-five minutes away from the island. I would get to see the pearl white coral brutally massaging the bottoms of my feet on the beach bloom into vibrant shades of peach, plum, kelp-green, and sunset pink from the polyps living inside. I would float silently over schools of metallic fish flickering their tails, propelling them towards the algae and kelp. And I would be nearly paralyzed by the sight of the dull-grey reef shark flashing its needle-point teeth. I saw this and so much more, yet I had still only seen a miniscule fraction of the largest coral reef in the world, spanning 344,000 square kilometers of the waters off the coast of Australia.

Could you imagine if that entire area, or even a portion, bursting with an infinite color wheel of environmentally productive organisms and ecosystems essential to the health of our planet was gone? Although not on such a large scale, such degradation is ongoing due to an increase in sea surface temperatures and consequently, an imbalance in the calcium carbonate levels. The majority of the damage to the Great Barrier Reef since the end of the 20th century was caused by tropical cyclones, whose power is proportional with sea surface temperatures. The coral polyps that give the coral its color and its nutrients also die with the acidification of sea water caused by this chemical imbalance and oxygen starvation primarily. When the coral dies, the organisms that use the coral as a shelter or a source of food die, thus leaving their respective predators without prey on which to feed. I would never wish for the Great Barrier Reef to disappear, but if for the most unfortunate reason it ever did, I'm eternal grateful that I was able to experience its vibrantly, bio-diverse wonder now before it may be too late.

Fitzroy Island is also home to a turtle sanctuary and rehabilitation center run by the Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre, a non-profit organization formed in 2000 by Paul Barnes and Jennie Gilbert. The turtles residing in the Fitzroy Island location are in the second stage of rehabilitation after spending an average of eighteen months in intensive care at a veterinarian facility. Many suffer from floater's syndrome which occurs when a turtle ingests a substance that they cannot digest. Unlike in the human body, which would manage to break down the substance despite its consequences, the substance would cause the turtle's other essential bodily systems to falter or even fail. Their muscles begin to break down and weaken substantially, causing them to float. They no longer can dive to find food, avoid predators and weather patterns, and continue maturing. If not rescued, floater's syndrome can lead to death.

The Fitzroy Island Resort, the only place of accommodation on the island, pays for the rehabilitation centre's lease and offers to its guests a tour of the turtle sanctuary (during which I learned all the information above). On the tour, you also get to meet two of the turtles, Barney and Bettie, who have had some of the most miraculous recoveries of any of the turtles currently at the sanctuary. In learning about their stories and those of the other turtles, the effects of pollution and the rising sea temperatures on the severity of storms (most recently Cyclone Yasi in 2011) in particular are evident on a peaceful, graceful species. And with the recent world-wide call for immediate action to curb the rate of climate change after the release of some dismal climate change reports, including one from the International Panel on Climate Change, the medical disorders plaguing these turtles are all too relevant to the drastic consequences climate change scientists are predicting if we don't change our engrained habits.

So, I left Fitzroy Island with an appreciation for two staple components of Australia's and the world's ecosystems that are currently at risk for eventual extinction, both of which suffer greatly from the increase in sea surface temperature and associated climate changes. With my equally environmental-hippie-dippie book, "Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution" by Caroline Fraser, in my hand, I was ready to venture into another ecosystem with ample endemic species and essential resources: the rainforest.