Some Like It Hot

Time to move on. Like The Littlest Hobo, every stop we make, we make a new friend, but can't stay for long, just turn around and we're gone again. Except he was, essentially, just a stray dog and we is people. Mind you, it's times like these that you appreciate his nomadic lifestlye and, to an extent, his ability to wash his balls with his tongue. But I digress.

Mrs V had done her usual, sterling job of packing our numerous, voluminous cases and after one last breakfast up in the Club Lounge it was time to meet our taxi to the airport (which, incidentally, was about a third of the price of the car that picked us up from there earlier in the week). We'd really enjoyed Sydney; the Intercontinental was a very pleasant hotel and the city itself had a good feel to it. But it was time to head north, to Cairns and the heat and humidity of the tropics!

The domestic terminal at Sydney Airport was refreshingly quiet, check-in and security were a breeze and we were at the gate, sipping coffee, with only 40 minutes or so to kill. However, my relaxed exterior belied the internal disquiet I was experiencing at the prospect of being transported to our destination in Cattle Class.

It was going to be a two and half hour flight up to Cairns and I felt I could just about handle that long in economy. Even a Business Class junky like me couldn't justify the price of an upgrade on this one - it was working out something like eight times more than an economy ticket, which is plain crazy (or should that be plane crazy - geddit?) , especially when you see what Qantas domestic Business Class is actually like. We were in the first row of Cattle Class, so got a good vantage point to see what delights the ambrosia sipping, quail's egg scoffing types get up front (cripes, listen to me, it's like I fly economy all the time - up the workers, down with the bourgeoisie!).

Excuse my while I pause here to enlighten you with interesting Oz fact No. 2 (No. 1 was the one about the echinda laying eggs. Remember?). Qantas - note the lack of a 'U' after the 'Q'? - is an acronym for Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service. There you go, that's another one for the pub quiz.

Anyhoo, Qantas Business Class takes up the first three rows of a standard 737 with four seats across rather than six in Cattle. Passengers got a glass of sparkling stuff when they boarded, free headphones (oh, the luxury!), a decent enough looking lunch - kind of Premium Economy style, for those of you who know what that means - and complimentary wine throughout. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have been up there then where we were, but I didn't see much that to justify the astronomical cost of the upgrade, which was reassuring in its own little way.

Qantas crew are a queer bunch, by the way (in more ways than one, might I suggest). Generally pleasant, but much older than, say, Virgin crew. Often the way on domestic routes I think. Lunch (the first economy in-flight meal I've had in the best part of a decade) was some kind of lamb stew and couscous concoction which was vaguely palatable and filled a gap. Can't remember what Mrs V had, but I do remember she hated it.

Anyway, I got my Mac out - once the aging and vaguely camp steward finally cleared my greasy little metal tray from in front of me - and started a bit of this 'ere post. Then in no time at all we were coming in to land in Cairns. It all looked terribly tropical and rainforested out of the window, which is probably just a well, this was tropical Queensland after all. We landed, the doors opened and we got that wonderful warm 'n' wet smell so redolent of these climes. I love it; I'm a loud shirt, shorts and flip-flops kind of guy and a temperature set somewhere in the high 80s, predominantly sunny with the occasional downpour to keep the palm trees green is just ideal for me.

We picked up our luggage, got temprorarily lost on the way to collect the hire car, but were soon on the road (Mrs V driving, me map-reading - do you think I'd let a woman loose with a map?) and heading north through some stunning countryside. We were driving up the Cook Highway, lined by trees full of bright red and yellow blossoms, with the blue coral sea being revealed intermittantly to our right and lush, forest covered mountains rising to our left. Our destination was the Thala Beach Lodge, a hotel a few miles south of Port Douglas, which is a little town based around a marina from where various trips to the Great Barrier Reef depart. The hotel is slap bang in the middle of rainforest, with wooden bungalows on stilts scattered up the hillside.

We arrived, stepped from the air-conditioned car and realised that every pore on our bodies was instantly and profusely leaking. Boy, it was hot, not that you'll hear me complain; all I have to do is imagine people back home scraping ice from their windscreens and suddenly everything seems just fine. A very nice chap called Daryl transfered our luggage onto a groovy little golf cart and whisked us off through the forest to our bungalow. He even came back ten minutes later with a bottle of champagne after learning it was our honeymoon.

The bungalow is great; bags of space with a huge balcony looking out over the treetops to the sea. Mrs V's being a bit iffy with the bugs, however, which can't be helped, phobias being what they are. We've got some bloody huge green ants on the balcony which - so Daryl informs us - can give you a nasty bite, but other than them, the mossies (for which we're dowsing ourselves liberally in repellent) and the truly massive cane toads, I'm not too sure what she's stressing about. Oh, and Tizer's decided that she doesn't like sleeping anymore, which meant she sat and winged at us all the way through dinner last night - and this was at nearly 10 o' clock when she'd normally be well away in her buggy. It's pretty much out of character for her and I can only assume that it's the travelling and heat that's got to a her a bit. She'll adjust, or we'll give her away to gypsies. One or the other.

Say Taronga, Be Happy

Time to take to the water today and catch the ferry from Circular Quay over to Taronga Zoo. It's years since I've been to a zoo; the last time must have been as a kid on one of our holidays to Newquay. This was the 70s, you understand, so my memories are of chimps in small cages throwing poo at each other and tatty polar bears going slowly mental in concrete pits. Not that we let that detract from our fun, as I say, it was the 70s...

Taronga Zoo is a zillion miles from this, with a guiding policy of conservation, education and animal welfare and, more importantly - a really cool cable car to the top of the zoo. Avid readers of this blog (at least those who haven't allowed the tedium to drive them to the verge of dementia) may recall our aborted attempt at visiting a mountain-top Buddhist monastery in Hong Kong, only to be usurped by a suspended cable car service (pun unintended), so we were hoping this might make up for things, if only in a small way.

We breakfasted once more in the Club Lounge on top of the Intercontinental. As I've mentioned before, the views are just stunning from up here, with the harbour bridge, opera house and all of Sydney laid out in front of you and I would, under normal circumstances, claim that I couldn't think of a better spot to partake of breakfast. Then I realise just how spoilt rotten we are this month, as I recall thinking much the same thing only a few days ago whilst tucking into my Shreddies and toast, gazing out over Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong from the comfort of the Four Seasons Executive Lounge. Tough call. Let's just say that this is the kind of life which could be very, very easy get used to.

So after breakfast we headed down to Circular Quay, from where the majority of ferries depart for both commuter and tourist trips across and around Sydney Harbour. Being such a hive of tourist activity it's deemed the perfect spot to get together with your Aborigine mates and showcase your latest CD of didgeridoo related music.

"This is track 3 - 'Forest Illoowaloo'", they'd announce before treating us to a dose of didgeridoo accompanied by a tinny backbeat on their stereo. "You can buy the CD here, today," they'd tell us to intermittent applause, "for only 12 dollars - that's half the price you'd pay for it in the stores". They sell this stuff in the shops? The mind boggles. They'd also invite members of the public to "Come down and sit on the kangaroo skins with us, have your photo taken", but people weren't exactly elbowing each other out of the way to take them up on the offer.

Still, a man's got to make a living, so I take nothing away from them. My only real bug-bear is that each time we passed by they'd be announcing another track from their CD: "This is track 7 - Narabagga Desert Sunset", or "This is track 4 - Canyon Warralongoo". But you know what? They all sounded just like Forest Illoowaloo to me... Maybe didgeridoo music is an acquired taste which I've yet to tune my ear to. I'm in no rush to start tuning, to be honest.

So, we bought our tickets for the ferry and the zoo (you can do both at the booth on Circular Quay) and filed onto the boat. Intriguing colour scheme that they've gone for with the ferries; beige and green - kind of post-modernist public toilet. Although it was bit grey and windy it was still pleasantly warm and as the ferry set out across Sydney Harbour we got - yet another -cracking view of the opera house, then of the city as a whole as we made away towards Taronga, some 20 minutes over the water.

The zoo is sited on the side of a hill overlooking Sydney Harbour, and the feted cable car takes you all the way to the top so that you can saunter back down on foot past the mightily impressive array of animals. We started with the kangaroos (well, we're in Australia, it seemed like the right thing to do), then discovered a fascinating 'little fella' called an echidna. Looks like a porcupine. Walks like a porcupine. Hell, it even tasted like a porcupine (I jest). But, no relation whatsoever to a porcupine. Although a mammal, it's one of only two types of mammal that lay eggs - the other, of course, being the duck billed platypus, pub quiz fans. So, take that Creationists.

Post lunch the weather started to hot-up, our first real taste so far on this trip of some conventional Aussie heat. And yes, this time I gave myself two coats of factor 30, so no more sunburnt-Pommie-bastard-tourist impressions. We then hit the chimps, giraffes, elephants, a strangely bashful orangutan, a couple of crocodiles and a pretty decent selection of big cats (sleeping) before finally succumbing to complete animal overload. We were done; animaled out; you could have taken me to the dodo enclosure and I don't think I'd even have taken the cap off my camera lens. We still had a taste for cable cars though, so we hiked - unnecessarily - up the hill just so we could take the sky-rail back down. Just a pair of big kids (and one small one).

The ferry back to the city was wonderful. The weather had improved in leaps and bounds and the view of the harbour with the sun glinting off the waves and bouncing off the arcs of the opera house was as if it had been cut-and-pasted straight out of the Australia Tourist Board brochure. It's at moments like this that you realise why everyone goes on about Sydney as much as they do, and I was almost glad that it'd taken a day and a half for the weather to come out in style. Plowing our way over the water in the late afternoon sunshine and seeing the city laid our around the harbour in all its splendour was one great big Aussie smack in the gob. Marvellous stuff.

Back at the hotel, and after a few restorative glasses of Bimbadgen Shiraz in the Club Lounge (it's an outstanding wine - get some), we remembered we'd booked ourselves a (poor, unsuspecting) babysitter for the night so hurried off to change and get Tizer ready for bed.

We had a pleasant night out, marred only by the fact that we'd not reserved a table anywhere. The waiter in the lounge tried his best to get us into a fish restaurant in The Rocks district, but to no avail, so we ended up in an 'Italian' joint on Circular Quay. You remember Circular Quay, don't you? The place where the didgeridoo players play samples of their wares for the tourists. Well, guess what: this is not the place to eat if you like - well - food, really. Calamari that was, in texture, more like fish-flavoured rubber and a tough old piece of veal that I think had been beaten to death with a didgeridoo. Awful.

The evening was saved by an after-dinner saunter up to the Shangri-la Hotel to try out their cocktail bar. The music was a bit 'doof-doof' but the view was good and the girl who made our cocktails was delightful and clearly as mad as a bag of wasps. We went for the Bollywood - a combination of ginger vodka, lychee liqueur, muddled lime and chili. With a lychee on a stick to garnish. Sounds vicious, and it is, but very, very tasty. Two was enough to sedate a rhino, and it has to be said put a pleasant enough smile on this old soak's face. Rest assured, we slept well, and woke with slightly thick heads and ginger and lychee burps in the morning.