Chapter 1b. London proper

And so, about 24 hours after landing in Heathrow and our briefest of stays in the country, to London we went! Another 45 minutes in the train, 20 on the tube and another 20 or somewhat confusedly on foot, and we had made it to the next resting-spot for our enormous luggage: our host's beautiful inner-London flat.

We left our pile of possessions in an orderly pile and set out to explore the city. We stopped in at The Albert, a watering hole that Jamie knew, for a pint, then meandered along the Thames with only the vaguest of plans that vaguely involved food, we came upon an enormous pink circus tents of sorts--an eyesore from an incredible distance--in the shape of an upside-down cow: the Udderbelly Festival, a UK/Euro troupe from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival who had installed themselves in the heart of the City.

We decided that the Udderbelly Festival was our destination, so we saw a young French comedian named Marcel Lucont perform a somewhat crass, often insulting, but overall hilarious set.

Jamie with a flyer for Marcel Lucont and
what would be our dinner that night

After the show, we found all the food merchants in the festival closed for the night. We were able to get a beer and wander around the AstroTurf environment and I took some photos of the illuminated trees and miniature picket fences and us.

The walk home along the river was cool and sobering. (Especially sobering after we found an off-license that sold us some curry-pot-pies or some such colonial import, which now composes the crème de la crème of 'British' cuisine.) With cheap, starchy calories in our bellies, jetlag in our wings.

Westminster Abbey, from the street in front of the home
where we stayed in London

Chapter 1a. Heathrow to St. Albans

So much was happening all the time! Twenty-two days in Europe, four countries, eight(ish) cities, countless countryside villages and homes, pubs, restaurants, castles, palaces, abbeys, bridges, public bicycles, sidewalks, subways, parks, cobblestones, stairs, a comedy/performance festival on the bank of the Thames.

Our European adventure began in London's Heathrow Airport. Jamie's childhood friend Elena met us there and helped us navigate the public transport to her sister's house 'in the country', about 45 minutes from the heart of London. We followed Elena, bleary-eyed from the 12-hour flight from SFO (and Jamie didn't even have a handsome man's shoulder to sleep on; we were seated on opposite sides of the plane), through the two hours of public transit into London (for a grand total of four hours on London transport for Elena),

and back out to the small town of St. Albans, where we spent the first night of our trip.










When we arrived in St. Albans, we considered a nap; we had arrived in London at approximately 6am PST (~2pm GMT) after a less-than-adequate-night's sleep. We elected instead to sit in the backyard as the sun gradually dimmed and set, leaving wispy electric pink clouds against a deep blue background.

That night, Jamie and Elena spent some time catching up over glasses of wine. Then they convinced me to share their wine and their catch-up session, and sooner or later, or all of a sudden, in some time that was between times and above time zones, we had finished another bottle and it was 3am GMT.

The next day, we wasted no time sleeping in. Who knows what time we woke up, but the sun was up, and it was a warm, beautiful day. Leave it to the Californians to bring hot weather to dreary England.

Our hosts (and Elena) had left for work (and to return home to Madrid) before we were out of bed. We had the afternoon to wander St. Albans, admire the cathedral and take a light lunch in Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, two buildings of apocryphal origins,






the latter claiming the distinction of being the oldest pub in England; the former being rumored to have a secret passageway, employed by the Benedictine monks, to the oldest pub in England.

The pub's foundation dates from around the 8th century, when it was used as a pigeon house. Why someone would want to build a house for pigeons is beyond me, but a different aviary history lends the pub its name, a "reference to the sport of cock fighting which was popular [in the 19th Century] and which took place in the main bar area. It is known by locals as 'The Fighters' or 'The Cocks'," says Wikipedia.

We headed back to collect our enormous suitcases and head to the train station nearby. We had friends to meet in London!

Cast of Characters

Full disclosure: the photo below was taken at a particularly low point for me. Though I had tested and verified that my crampons fit my boots before we set out, I had not tested their ability to remain fast on my soles while bearing my entire weight. When I took a step to the side (which, given the pitch of the mountain, was almost all the time; we made switchbacks the whole way up), the front of my crampons would slide off to the side.

This was a nuisance, a frustration, and a real danger. Having logged 0 hours of sleep and 6 hours of climbing in the past 24, I thought that my day was soon over and the summit was out of my reach.

Fortunately, Phil (above) and Brian (below), encouraged me to go on. I heeded their advice, tightened my crampons as tight as possible, shouldered my pack once more and plodded ahead.

The beginning

My friend and fellow liftie, Phil Pedry, Brian, and I assembled at my house to prepare for the climb. None of us had been up Mt Hood before, so we agreed to take the easiest, most straightforward route, climbing from Timberline lodge.

We left my house around 12:30 am, registered at the trailhead, and began our ascent, Brian and me on skis with climbing skins, Phil in mountaineering boots. We followed a groomed trail along the ski area boundary and Palmer chairlift to an elevation of about 8500 feet.

A view to the southwest of the treeline below the Palmer Glacier




Crater Rock, seeming a slight bump on the flank of Mt Hood

At the top of the Palmer chairlift, the groom ended. By this time, the sun had started to rise, and we could make out Crater Rock, the Pearly Gates, the spiny summit ridgeline and other features of the massive volcano in the gloaming.

Mt Hood climb

Having successfully climbed Mt Rainier to the highest point in Washington almost two years ago, Brian and I were ready for another mountaineering adventure. I live in Hood River, Oregon and worked at Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort; the next logical destination is the highest point in the state of Oregon: the majestic Mt Hood!

Cairns Botanic Gardens

Despite the lack of sleep (see my blog post on Tim Thinks for an explanation), I managed to check out of the fully ludicrous Gilligan’s Backpackers hostel on time and set out for the Botanic Gardens along the road my friends and I had taken the day before. Sure enough, my footpath route proved longer than I had anticipated before it joined the bus route. By the time the two routes met and I was able to climb on the next bus, I had had more than my share of walking. (Fortunately, I was able to take the bus all the way back, where I learned that the hub was about two blocks from Gilligan’s hostel.) Had I been better informed, I would have woken up a bit later and arrived at the Botanic Gardens in time for the guided tour at 11.

Instead, I had to settle for the much less instructive self-guided walk. Aided by a fold-out brochure highlighting and describing the more interesting and important plants in their collection, this walk proved well interesting. The Cairns Botanic Gardens is a truly impressive collection of exotic plants native to Northern QLD and tropical rainforests across the world, and I wonder how much more the guided tour would have elucidated.

What better place to reflect on life and tropical plants than the Botanic Gardens café? I stopped for breakfast there, where floral scents mingled with baking smells from the kitchen and the tropical breeze, as ever, danced lightly upon my skin. Just to fully maximize my sensory-load, I put my headphones on and listened to the new Thievery Corporation as I wrote in my journal. Of note from the gardens were the stupendous variety of orchids and massive pitcher plants in the Orchid House, the bright red crown shafts of the lipstick palm, large, colorful buds of the ginger (Alpinia) plants. Friendly retirees, families, couples, and other solo travelers ambled peaceably through the lush, colorful gardens, took photos and admired the flora.

Random images from MB

Left to right (Nat.): Nicolas (B), Alex (D), Yours truly, Talitha (NL), Max (D)













Brudda Ben and I decided to wade into the ocean for an earnest discussion of the beauty of a starlit beach and the sanctity of this place. Talitha joined us to document the occasion.

Some of the illustrious, much-lauded Absolute Backpackers staff.

22 July 2010

The abrupt end to the music that’s been pumping at Gilligan’s night club brings the inevitable shouts for more music infallibly falling on deaf ears, followed shortly after by the raucous clamor on the streets, below my single-paned sliding-glass door-window, followed shortly after by laughing, joking, flirting voices in the hallways of Gilligan’s adjacent hostel, and an earnest and intimate conversation (whose hilarity merits analysis in the next paragraph) directly outside the door-window to my room, where I have abandoned the notion of sleep for the next few hours. Unfortunately, I took no pictures of the idiosyncratic Gilligan’s Backpacker during my whole stay.

I have re-emerged to write in my journal at a table in the filthy kitchen-dining area of the first (second) floor; on the way, I encountered for a third time the earnest couple. The first time, when I left my room for the dance floor at around 9 or 10, they were standing close to each other, not touching but with desire burning like a flare between them. The second time was when I retired to my room for the first time, probably around 1 or 1:30; they had started kissing and I was happy for them as I thought, ‘get a room,’ at which point I didn’t reason that they didn’t have a room, a fact which was all too apparent around 2:30 when I chanced upon them once again—looking much soberer and more frustrated than the two previous times. I dwelt a bit on the irony of my 4-person room (about $6 more expensive per night than the huge dorm rooms that are the norm among backpackers) which I shared with exactly 0 people during my whole 4-night stay, a mere 20 feet from the table over which the couple was standing.

For its shortcomings, Cairns played host to the highlight of my trip and one of the true marvels of the Earth. My short day of scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef was an explosion of color, form, and spectacle. Not having an underwater camera, I only have photos of myself above the reef, but check out my blog post for the Great Barrier Reef on Tim Thinks for a description of the marvels to which I bore witness.

19 July 2010

My departure from Mission Beach was indeed bittersweet. I spent most of the day on Dunk Island, a $30 ferry ride out into the Pacific Ocean (snorkeling gear included, though visibility was close to nil). On the Island, I met a pair of Norwegian sisters and their Dutch travelling companion who played Frisbee with my on the beach, saw a bunch of ugly “bush turkeys”, and lazed on the beach in the sun. While the underwater views proved almost nonexistent, I was nonetheless greeted by some pleasant land fauna: a friendly butterfly that landed on the strap of my snorkeling bag and stayed long enough for me to take out my camera and snap it (see bottom left corner of the photo of me). As I walked from the ferry landing to the beach via a strip of large rocks that had been baking in the sun, I saw dozens of small lizards squirming away from me. Dunk Island was sunny and pleasant but forgettable. (I saw with some incredulity an enormous billboard outside of Melbourne’s largest rail station, Flinders Street, promoting the insignificant island.)

Returning with my new Northern-European friends to Absolute Backpackers, I packed up my suitcase, chopped my last piece of Rusty’s Market fruit: a succulent (dollar!) pineapple to share, and made arrangements to get a ride to the bus station 50 meters away. I then bade a fond farewell to Ben, David, Talitha, Sweden, Carlotta (whom I would fortunately see the next day at Gilligan’s dance club in Cairns), Max, Nico, Gregory, Massimo et al, before getting on the 6 o’clock Greyhound bound for Cairns where the Great Barrier Reef and the rest of my travel adventures awaited me.

A few days later in Cairns, with the hours dwindling to an end on my time in tropical northern Queensland and indeed my time in Australia, I would pause to reflect on the past several days. (The unexamined vacation isn’t worth taking.) Overall, I’ve spent too much time in Cairns—similarly, I spent too much of my time in Australia in Melbourne. Very good to see Ben again and to chill on the decidedly un-British vibe he copped in paradisiacal northern QLD. This enchanted place has a way of chilling people out: of slowing them down to appreciate the scenery and the ecstatic, palpable beauty of every moment. The Aussie expression, ‘chilled out’ applies aptly to it.

18 July, 2010 part I

I awoke fresh and rested at the crack of 11 to get my second day in paradise (or third, depending on how you count) started right: Avocadoes on buttered toast! Ben accompanied me and we split the (dollar!) rockmelon (cantaloupe), eating and giving away one half while saving the other half for the next day. The weather was not great, so Sweden and I played a game of cards, then two games of chess and mulled around the hostel, checking email and sharing photos of the previous days while Ben did his 2-5 (what a way to make a living) shift.

The weather still failed to cooperate as I wrote post cards (somewhat uninspired post cards, having yet to live the dramatic portion of my trip—as dramatic as beach shadow puppets are and as beautiful as the stars from the beach, they still lack the visceral elation of the Great Barrier Reef) and waited patiently. Finally, I decided to come out of my shell and went down to the beach with a Frisbee and Nico. On a whim, I invited a young couple from the hostel, who had mostly been keeping to themselves, to join us at the beach. They said they’d come later, which they did! They arrived just as Nico and I had begun to tire of throwing a wet, sandy Frisbee in the rain and wind.

The four of us continued playing, with lots of encouragement for the lady whose name I don’t remember). Finally, tired of the flying disk, the man (whose name I also don’t remember) and I went for a swim in order to get out of the rain, which had picked up a bit. We swam and body-surfed for a while before the four of us walked back to the hostel, somewhat soggy but happy.

The staff at Absolute Backpackers had organized a social excursion for the evening to “the local” (Aus-speak for the local watering hole)—which was not actually 'local' to Wongaling Beach (the true name of the village we’d been calling Mission Beach) but a 15- or 20-minute van ride away. Arriving at the hostel a mere 20 minutes before the van was to depart, I decided to (give it a) pass in favor of a shower and a little relaxation (at wast!), despite the offer of a free drink and snacks upon arrival. No use rushing when your vacation is already so short.

Clean, relaxed, and once again itchy to get out of the hostel, I slightly regretted missing the van. Fortunately, a critical mass of new friends and other AB guests had also missed the first van and still wanted a free drink, so around 7:30, we loaded up the van again and headed up to North Mission Beach and the Shrubbery Taverna (a nod to Monty Python? Most likely).

At the door, we were greeted by door-openers extraordinaire Talitha and Carlotta. Queste due carine were “paid” (in food and drink) to “open and close the door for servers and patrons” and keep the music of the Alabaman bluesman playing inside from disturbing the neighbors. The food was quite good, if overpriced (par for the course in Australia, really), and Talitha managed to sneak me a free beer or two while I danced to the music and socialized with my new hostel friends and a group of retirees from Victoria and NZ who were caravanning together.

Clean, relaxed, and once again itchy to get out of the hostel, I slightly regretted missing the van. Fortunately, a critical mass of new friends and other AB guests had also missed the first van and still wanted a free drink, so around 7:30, we loaded up the van again and headed up to North Mission Beach and the Shrubbery Taverna (a nod to Monty Python? Most likely).

At the door, we were greeted by door-openers extraordinaire Talitha and Carlotta. Queste due carine were “paid” (in food and drink) to greet customers, “open and close the door for servers and patrons,” and keep the music of the Alabaman bluesman playing inside from disturbing the neighbors. The food was quite good, if overpriced (par for the course in Australia, really), and Talitha managed to sneak me a free beer or two while I danced to the music and socialized with my new hostel friends and a group of retirees from Victoria and NZ who were caravanning together.

The photo below shows me and Carlotta, who is hard at work.

Well lubricated and reluctant to pay for more booze after the music had stopped, we hopped in a cab and sped back down to Absolute for tomfoolery by the pool, a few games of cards, the acquaintance of un grande di nome di Massimo, a pancake feast cooked up by Chef Ben, and a movie. It was then that my proffered veggie burgers paid off; while Chef Ben was hard at work over a hot stove, serving up pancakes for my new hostel friends and me, my new Kiwi veg-o (Aus-slang for vegetarian) friend Tim invited me to play cards with him and his new hostel friends. I sat down and they offered me goon and explained the rules of the game they were playing.

At this point, I feel that a brief explication of the backpacking phenomenon that is goon, is now in order. I had come across the term once before while reading profile pages of potential hosts in Cairns on couchsurfing.com and it registered only puzzlement. According to Urban Dictionary’s third entry, goon is “the cheapest possible cask wine.” In Australian backpacking circles, it is truly the stuff of legend; it provides a counterfeit touch of class to that hostel-favorite meal of pasta or rice with ketchup and fuels the handful of diehard party-makers who prefer dark hostel debauchery to early-morning (early-afternoon even) sightseeing. I passed on the offer; I would only succumb to that temptation once on my trip, a few days later in the hostel in Cairns, but I enjoyed the game, whose name is too coarse to repeat on this respectable blog, and the company.

Thus ended my second day in Wongaling.

18 July, 2010 part II

After the spectacle of the marsupial and the monster invertebrates, I checked in to room A1 of the hostel. Ben was working his shift when I arrived, and I took the opportunity to hit the town's Woolworths an hour before it closed for the day (not to reopen the following day, it being Sunday in a small town). To accompany my avocadoes, I bought a loaf of bread and a stick of butter. For three of my holiday breakies, I would have one avocado spread onto four slices of buttered toast with a bit of salt. For the free hostel-wide barbecue that evening, I bought a pack of veggie burgers which earned me not only inclusion in the feast, but the friendship of a young Kiwi veg-o by the name of Tim.

The barbecue was nice and a good ice-breaker for the 30-some backpackers at Absolute. Tim traded me a beer for two veggie burgers, and I had bought some wine at the second of the town's two bottle shops. I was glad to have found my wine for $7.50 a bottle; cheap by Australian standards. I sat with Ben, David, and several of their coworkers: Max from Munich, Sweden from Sweden (his real name is Joacim, which is much tougher to remember than Sweden), Talitha from Holland, Carlotta from Milan.

As we ate and drank, clouds rose, fell, slid slowly across the sky, gathered above us and dispersed, re-gathered, and dropped occasional sprinkles of warm drizzle on those backpackers not eating under the veranda roof. Alternately, they obscured and revealed windows to the cosmos. As Ben told me about a previous evening spent stargazing on the ocean shore, I reflected that the last time I’d properly stargazed had probably been on Orcas Island in Puget Sound. While the stars seen from Mt Rainier were brilliant when not blocked from view by wind-blown fog, the sub-zero conditions at night were less than conducive to "gazing." We pocketed a couple of beers, a deck of cards, and a small but powerful flashlight, and headed down to the beach.

There we spread beach towels and two bed sheets smuggled from the hostel linen closet on the sand, and the seven or eight of us sat in a circle. The loud wind and persistent surf obscured our conversations and fractured the group into twos and threes before Ben hit on the idea of lying in a circle with our heads close together. We did so forthwith.

Not only was the group reunited as a single unit, but we all became (quite vocal—bordering on obstreperous) witnesses to the dance of the stellar windows and shooting stars that occasionally featured therein. We talked, joked, and laughed. I conducted an informal survey regarding the longevity of the acquaintances among the eight of us. To my credit, I knew all their names after hearing them just once (though I admittedly had trouble remembering the order of the consonants in Talitha’s name). Elisabeth Carr would be so proud!

Participants in the survey were asked to raise their hand if they had known the majority of the rest of the group within the time frame specified. I began with 6 hours and we all raised our hands. Lengthening to 12 hours, Nico, a Belgian I’d met earlier that day and I put our hands down. Eventually, by the time I got to about two weeks, we had all put our hands down, and yet, here we were: heads together in a circle, chatting merrily while scanning the skies, which at this point had cleared considerably, revealing countless Southern Hemisphere constellations.

The wind howled above us. We put our hands in the sky to cut dark forms in the dimly luminous sky and played the flashlight against nearby palm trees swaying in the breeze to play shadow puppets. I tried to photograph the shadow puppet show, but, unsurprisingly, was unable to hold my hand steady, even braced against Max’s shoulder. Tiring of the shadow puppets, but too exhilarated yet to return to the hostel, we sang songs and made Nico embarrass himself by striking poses in front of a wind-blown bed sheet as Talitha snapped away.

I decided that the water on my skin was too agreeable to leave the beach without at least wading knee-high. Ben joined me, and the two of us obliged Talitha’s happy shutter finger.

Mission Beach is truly a beautiful place and Absolute Backpackers a haven filled with beautiful people; it merited more than the three short days and two memorable nights I spent there. Fortunately, I reflected, after we had reluctantly returned to the hostel and I lay restlessly in bed while my two roommates slumbered, there was still 19 July, 2010 ahead of us.

Arrival in Mission Beach

18 July, 2010

Sitting at the picnic table with Carlotta and Nico, Swee joins us. We're listening to the soft, steady patter of rain on the veranda roof of Absolute Backpacker’s front porch and talking about travels: plans for travelling in Aus, travels so far in Aus (of which I've had shamefully few), around Aus, and elsewhere. We're recounting shared experiences; namely, the previous day (having known each other for 12-18 hours at this point).

It has certainly been an eventful 12-18 hours:

17 July, 2010 (the previous day)

With a few hours of alone time and a page in my journal under my belt, I arrived in Mission Beach around 3pm Saturday and was met by my new friend David. Ben had told me that David would be driving a van between the Greyhound stop and the hostel and was awarded a free beer for every two backpackers without bookings he brought back to Absolute. Our first interaction was approximately as follows:

“Hey, mate, have you got accommodation in Mission Beach?”

“Hey, you must be David.”

“And you must be Tim! Ben told me you were coming.”

We waited for the van for about 10 minutes under the 10-foot Cassowary statue near the gas station, grocery store, and two Thirsty Camel bottle shops--the entirety of the town. It arrived to let people off in “town,” and we piled in. The van took about as long to turn around as it did to then drive to Absolute Backpackers. We unloaded, I saw Ben across the kitchen, the two of us reunited with a hug, and I scampered off to get a photo of the wallaby I’d seen on the other side of the pool area (success! See photo of wallaby).

“That’s nothing, mate,” he told me. “I’ll show you some animals!”

But for me it was something: my first proper marsupial in eleven months in Australia! Still no wombats, no platypuses, no koalas, no kangaroos. For shame! (A quick farewell trip to the Melbourne zoo should hopefully rectify that).

Ben took me around the side of the patio area, back behind the staff quarters to where a broad-leafed tree overhung the concrete. To the bottom of one leaf-stem clung a 4-inch long praying mantis. The second and final of the animals on Ben's impromptu tour was sitting implacably on its meter-wide web near the entrance to the parking lot, the largest spider I’d ever seen. None of my helpful new friends knew what type of spider it is; any ideas, dear reader?*

*This just in: the spider appears to have been identified correctly as a Golden Orb Spider by Rachel Dutton. Golden orb spiders have been documented, on more than one occasion, preying on birds that have flown into their webs.

Cairns to Mission Beach

17 July 2010

Inspired and oppressed by greenery rolling past my Greyhound window, QLD palm trees, banana trees, billboards blowing in the wind. Lost along the middle-of-nowhere tropical highway. It’s the balmily bleak midwinter and sugar cane fields are tall enough, vast enough to eat a grown man alive.

I arrived in Cairns last night, gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and beacon city of Tropical North Queensland, checked bags into hostel: 12 m² for $45 a night, complete with lumpy mattress, metal bed frame, and all-hours shrieking of the antiquated plumbing from the adjacent bathroom, not to mention a free veggie burger and a beer with the purchase of one $5 beer from the oh-so-classy Rhino Bar (open till 5, reinforced tables and bars for dancing upon, ‘THE place to B after 3!’ Repairing early to my hostel room after just the two beers and veggie burger, I was unable to verify this pithy couplet).

The walk back along the waterfront Esplanade with its tangled strangler-fig trees and tiled saltwater lagoon was quite agreeable. The strangler figs are actually other large hardwood trees upon which birds have dispersed seeds of the Ficus. The seed then sends down intertwining tendrils that snake along the trunk and hang from the branches; when they reach the ground below, the tendrils harden and grow into thick roots that eventually choke and kill their host tree.

A warm breeze came off the tepid salt marsh at high tide. I basked in the exhilaration of the air against my skin, the palpable quality of life’s beauty in the tropics; I smelled the slight salt air, swiped sweat off my forehead with a smile. I’m not in Melbourne anymore!

As it turns out, there isn’t much in the way of natural aesthetic beauty in Cairns’ beach, such as it is. Mostly devoid of appeal in the evening, it’s unspectacular in the daytime. People sunbathe on the grassy banks of the man-made lagoon rather than the uneven, rocky, soggy sand that is all but completely submerged at high tide. To Mission Beach, then! I woke up this morning in time for an unassuming free breakfast of toast, cereal, and fresh, local tropical fruit: rockmelon (cantaloupe), honeydew, pineapple, papaya, paw paw (I’ve been unable to determine whether this silly-named fruit is at all different from papaya or just a different name for the same thing), pineapple, and coffee whose redeeming virtue was its slight drinkability. I packed my bags, bade farewell to my room, left bags in another one, and wandered in-land to Rusty’s Market for another tropical fruit experience before picking back up my personal effects and jumping on the bus for Mission Beach.

Shorts, t-shirts, wife-beaters, flip-flops in the coldest month of the year, 50¢ avocados, dollar cantaloupes and pineapples? I could get used to this. I could get used to the flow of the Heyerdahl gyre, bringing warm ocean currents and accompanying sea breezes from the equator to caress my skin and thaw the cold in my heart. I could get used to the humidity of the air, salt on my skin and in my hair. In all likelihood, though, I won’t. This paradise fiction will remain a lovely escapist dream, a modicum of respite from the real world of work, struggle, hardship, heating, and layering. In my heart of hearts, I know that this is the dry season in QLD, the season where tourists don’t get eaten by insects or crocodiles. Where they (we) can swim outside the stinger nets without fear of being maimed by lethal jellyfish. Pretty soon I’ll have to own up to the evanescence of my vacation and head back down to Victoria, my job, and the city.

But for now, I don’t have to think about any of that. It’s only day two (and the first whole day) of my trip, and I’m in an air-conditioned bus, sugar cane fields stretching to the east as far as the foot of the distant mountains, punctuated by banana trees with protective bags over their abundance like so many crude, silver loincloths. Somewhere beyond those mist-shrouded hills lies a thin strip of off-white, overhung by palms and mangrove trees, buttressing the South Pacific Ocean.