Wednesday, 20 April 2005

Got up at the unGodly hour of 4 o'clock in the morning. My neighbour Ian drove me to the bus-stop at Batemans Bay. A five-hour bus trip is not the greatest way to start off a journey to the very top of Australia. And the three hours in the air from Sydney to Cairns gave me plenty of time to reflect on the crew's safety demonstrations. I actually watched and may have been the only one in the world who did and let me tell you they are pretty scary. The first clue they are only kidding about the safety equipment has to be the safety belt. It worries me that my car which travels at a fraction the speed of the plane has a far better safety belt system. Surely it can't be there to save you - it's got to be just for keeping you from panicking and clogging the aisles. 'In the event of an emergency, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling, place them over your nose and mouth and breathe normally.' If the wings come off at 30,000 feet, hands up those who think they will breathe 'normally'. Personally I'm going to be screaming and hyperventilating and I consider it to be a last pleasure to do so. And then there is the life vest drill. Picture the scene - wings off over water. No problem: reach under your seat and as the plane starts to dive pop the life vest over your head, pass the ties around the back, cross them over, tie them off at the front. Then pull one tag to half inflate the vest, duck down behind the seat, wait for impact. Hit the water, think to yourself, 'Wow, that was a bit of a bump. Lucky I had my seat-belt done up,' stand, wait your turn, head for nearest exit, go down the slide, bob in the water, pull remaining tag to fully inflate life jacket. You're now in the middle of the Pacific Ocean ... but everything's fine because attached to your jacket the airline has provided a whistle and a light. Twenty minutes of whistling and blinking and you're starting to get angry. 'Where the hell is the rescue plane - it's been almost half-an-hour!' Well, it's my theory that the whistle and light are just to keep you occupied until the sharks get you. For all the good it does, the airline may as well have given you a light and a Rubik's cube.

The wings did not come off and by 8 o'clock that night I was sitting with Cairns resident Fritz Herscheid and his wife in Kuranda's "Bottom Pub". Fritz had had a chequered career in the island and was now a real estate agent and business broker in Cairns but still entertained his dreams of a less prosaic lifestyle back in the islands.

I enjoyed our conversation over a meal of freshly-caught - and reasonably priced - burramundi which made a pleasant change from the mad prices of food and drinks at Australian airports: e.g., imagine paying $4 for a bottle of EVIAN bottled water! Its marketers must have had their customers in mind when they named it - try reading EVIAN semordnilapally! (Anyway, why does mineral water that has trickled through mountains for centuries have a 'use by' date?)