About two weeks before time to leave China, we took a vacation to Australia. I was surprised that the flight from Beijing to Australia was just as long as the flight from Chicago to Beijing. We flew from Beijing to Sydney and spent the night. We arrived in Sydney early enough to get out and see the sights. Transportation in Sydney was a short walk to the train station then a quick ride downtown. The train was about U.S. $3 one way.
The following morning we flew to Cairnes then took a bus to the resort town of Port Douglas. Australia is beautiful and very clean. We were in awe of the nighttime sky on the bus trip to Port Douglas. I saw constellations I have only seen in science books. After having spent so much time in Beijing, Australia was quite literally a breath of fresh air.
We coughed incessantly for the first couple days. I’m sure it was because our lungs were so used to breathing the polluted air in Beijing – it was almost as though clean air was a foreign substance. Everything in Australia is expensive beginning with the $6 can of coke on the plane. We spent the first and last nights in Sydney and the days in between in Port Douglas. We stayed in a nice hotel in Sydney and would take the train into downtown to eat or see the sights. I don’t think we walked away from any meal for under about $60 – and this was just ordinary dining, nothing particularly special.
Our resort was advertised as being in the “middle of a rainforest.” Well that was close to the truth. It was indeed surrounded by lush vegetation and had a lagoon shaped swimming pool running through the property. However, I must admit it was not quite “in the rainforest” the way I imagined. We went on a diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Ken went scuba diving and I snorkeled. Diving is old hat for him but that was the first time I have been in that much water and it was a bit overwhelming. The beaches are beautiful and I took pictures of all kinds of flowers. We spent another day at a wildlife preserve in Sydney. The baby kangaroos walk up and eat right out of your hand.
Part of our trip to the rainforest included a tour by an Aboriginal guide. The history of the Australian Aboriginal people is in many ways similar to that of the Native Americans. They were the original inhabitants, got ripped off by Europeans and are currently scarcely seen in mainstream Australia. Anyway, he taught us about the way his ancestors lived in the rainforest. They used indigenous plants from the rainforest for health and beauty purposes, for religious and cultural rituals and of course for food. We saw Aboriginal cave paintings that were similar to those done by Native Americans. At the end of the tour we were treated to a musical serenade performed on the didgeridoo – a long, wooden flutelike instrument. The Aborigines listened to the sounds of nature in the rainforest and learned to imitate them on this amazing instrument. If you close your eyes and listen to the it, you can here the bird calls, water flowing and even thunder rolling. It is a deep, haunting sound.
