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Cairns, Queensland, Australia
Somehow I wasn't expecting this
locale to be so tropical. When I think of Australia I think
of Sydney and the iron oxide red of the outback, I don't think
of palm trees, jungles, humidity and heat.
Our first night at the Angsana
Resort and Spa we eat dinner in the associated restaurant,
Far Horizons. We are seated outside on a wooden deck, kinda
like a big dance floor but without any band. Well, maybe there
was a band: A band of birds making lots of noise in the palm
trees that grew on the lawn between the deck and the beach.
Tiki torches lit the surroundings. A breeze was blowing. The
hot, sticky, environment of daytime morphed into a pleasant,
luscious, environment of night.
Our waitress was a vibrant, beautiful,
young woman named Tracy. We all fell in love with her. She
has a partner, a guy, and they go on very long holidays when
they aren't working the tourist trade. Good on ya, Tracy!
We schedule dinner for the same time, same place, tomorrow
night. It is amazing how different and better the tropics
feel here as compared to Bali. The breeze really makes a difference.
Pam and I rent a Toyota Camry
at the Tour Desk at the hotel the next morning so that we
have an easy way to get to and from the airport at Cairns,
where we need to be in trying to mend our wounded airplane.
We eat breakfast, again on the deck of Far Horizons Restaurant,
but now in the morning light. The car arrives and off we go
to Cairns, a distance of about 22 kilometers (about 13 miles).
We find our way to Australian Avionics and get connected with
Barry Smeaton, its manager. As luck would have it, their shop
is in a hangar that fronts the ramp where N982GA is parked,
so it is very convenient in getting to the airplane. Barry
is a knowledgeable and extremely helpful chap who really knows
the avionics business. However, our U.S. FAA has made his
job a nightmare in that the FAA will nail his fanny to the
wall if it finds him working on a US-registered airplane.
There are very few shops in Australia
that have approval for conducting maintenance on a US airplane.
One of them is Hawker-Pacific in Sydney. Hawker-Pacific(H-P)
has been the Beechcraft/Raytheon distributor for Australia
and the South Pacific region for eons and they have a branch
office in Cairns, but that branch office does not have the
necessary FAA paperwork. Barry calls them and hopes that they
might be able to arrange for a one-time exemption, but we
find later that it cannot be done. Meanwhile, Barry extends
himself for us in providing some good advice and lending me
an Ohmmeter so that I can check the status of our fuses. Pam
and I proceed out to 982GA and I start to work. Sure enough,
I find a bad 2-amp fuse and replace it with a spare, but as
soon as power is applied, the new fuse is also blown. Now
we have a start in troubleshooting our compass problem. The
Directional Gyro portion of our Sperry (Honeywell, now) Tarsyn
333 gyro platform has a problem that is blowing its power
supply fuse. The other part of the platform, the Vertical
Gyro that operates our Attitude Indicator, seems to be fine.
Sperry has an exchange program for their gyros and do not
provide repair service. Barry coordinates with Hawker-Pacific
in Sydney so that an exchange unit can be shipped to them.
We hope it will be in their hands on Friday; we get to Sydney
on Thursday. We spend lots of time out on the ramp doing what
analyses we can. We have concluded that our Avidyne problem
is probably unrelated to the Compass problem, even though
it is hard to accept that two different problems occurred
so close together. We arrange for Avidyne to ship a loaner
replacement unit to H-P in Sydney.
While on the ramp who should
appear, strolling over in his swimming suit, but Pat! He and
Ashley are preparing to board a helicopter that is based a
couple of hundred yards away for their flight out to the Great
Barrier Reef, and he has inquired about the airplane and us,
then finds us on the ramp. We provide a brief update before
he has to skadattle off to catch his flight. As the sun gets
higher in the sky, the ramp and the cockpit, especially the
cockpit, get hotter and hotter. It's not much fun to sit there.
A little after 1:00 p.m. we decide
that we have done as much as we can to for today, given the
inability for Australian Avionics to work on our plane. We
have an appointment with H-P for later in the week. We bid
Barry adieu, secure the plane, and head back toward Palm Cove.
On the way, we stop at a shopping center and make a run to
K-Mart and a grocery store to buy some needed cabin supplies,
including the Volt/Ammeter I wished that I had in Alice. We
stop at the Paradise Palms Golf Course, about 5 km south of
our hotel. This is the course we were scheduled to play yesterday,
but we got in a day late. The place looked beautiful and we
enjoyed both the barman who served us and the late lunch he
provided out on the patio overlooking the eighteenth green.
A couple of ladies at a nearby table were enjoying a lively
and lengthy game of backgammon, or something similar.
There are absolutely gorgeous
trees all over this golf course as well as liberally sprinkled
all over this far north Queensland area: Green trees with
crowns of stunning, vibrant, red, leaves. They tell us they
are called Ponsettia trees. Geez, they are beautiful!
Because of our need to work with
the airplane problems, we were very sorry that we had missed
our scheduled trip out to the Great Barrier Reef. However,
Quicksilver, the tour operator that Abercrombie & Kent had
contracted with, is a huge operator of all sorts of things
associated with the Reef, and rearranging the schedule to
fit us in a day later was "No Worries, Mate!" To top it off,
the helicopter that we were riding out in needed to take another
couple on a tour of another reef and of the rainforest before
carrying us to our Reef pontoon, and "Would you terribly mind
leaving a bit earlier and riding along whilst we conduct that
flight?" Oh no, we don't mind, I think we can manage that.
Yessssss!
So we enjoyed a lot of helicopter
flightseeing in a Bell Jet Ranger, and the pilot, Darren O'Brien,
happened to be the company's Chief Pilot. He was a young,
handsome, guy who not only flew well but provided good commentaries
about what we were seeing. After landing in Port Douglas,
about 35 miles north of Palm Cove, to discharge the other
passengers and to refuel, we were joined on the flight to
the pontoon by an adventuress woman, Patricia, from Scotland,
now residing in Belgium.
Quicksilver has a large metal
structure moored adjacent to one of the reefs as a semi-permanent
installation. It has showers, tables and chairs, places for
boats to dock, snorkeling gear and a platform providing easy
entrance to the water, scuba-diving instructors and facilities,
etc. Most of the people there during the day arrive via a
huge motorized twin-hulled ship, but some of us favored few
do the helicopter one way and take the ship the other. Patricia
did the helicopter both ways. The copter lands on a separate
raft that is moored a few hundred yards away from the main
pontoon and then it remains there to conduct short hops over
the reef for those who wish to pay extra. Smaller boats ply
back and forth between the raft and the main structure. Also,
you can ride in a semi-submersible boat and get that type
of reed view, but we weren't too keen to take the time for
that while the snorkeling was so good.
So what is the Great Barrier
Reef? Over 1,200 miles of shallow bottom and coral formations
that lie offshore of the northeast coast of Australia, providing
a natural barrier and making the seas along the shore very
calm. The ocean swells hit the reef and are dissipated there.
The mooring sight was at a depth of about 30 feet, but by
flippering your way along a hundred yards or so, remaining
inside some roped-off guidelines, the coral formations were
now so close you could touch them. Although I have seen more
dense schools of fish in Hawaii and in Baja, I have never
seen so much and so varied coral and so many forms of sea
life.
I had read about giant clams
but suddenly as I swam along, there was one! Then another,
even larger! I called to Pam and we marveled at the sight.
Maybe three feet long, open about six or eight inches, with
bright green dots attracting unwary fish to its gaping maw.
Inside was the meat with intake and outtake vents allowing
you to look well into the guts of the thing. I had heard that
divers had been trapped when they put an arm or leg into the
tempting opening to feel the inside, the clam clamped down,
and they couldn't get free. I saw a foot-long loose piece
of coral lying on the sand, surface-dived to get it, then
dropped it toward the clam's opening, trying to keep it cross-wise
so that it wouldn't actually go in. Wow! The scalloped edges
slammed together to form a tight seal like the doors of a
bank vault. I gingerly removed the loose piece that had stayed
out of the hole, now lying on top of the closed shell. After
a while, realizing there was nothing tasty to eat, the clam
opened back up. Amazing! In Bali I had seen some huge clam
shells on display in gardens with smooth mother-of-pearl insides
and very rough outsides. Here they were, living creatures.
We rode the catamaran back to
Port Douglas. It was packed and for a while we had to sit
apart from each other. The ride takes about an hour and forty-five
minutes. The big boat is very smooth and very fast. Three
passenger decks with both inside and outside accommodations,
toilets, food buffet, bar, etc. This is where lunch had been
served as it was tied up alongside the pontoon throughout
the day. We enjoyed talking with a precocious, darling, girl
and her mother. The talkative young lady, in perfect English,
told us of how her parents. both doctors, came from India
but now resided in England. We laughed with the mother about
the Indian roads and how our life spans have probably been
shortened a bit by experiencing them.
After docking, large buses were
standing by to deposit all of the tourists back at their respective
hotels. We drove about forty minutes to Palm Cove and both
of us fell fast asleep in the comfy seats. Dinner was again
at the Far Horizons, with Pat & Ashley.
I had gone back to the airport
later on after our first full day here, Monday, because Pat
& Ashley had not had the good reef experience that we had
and we were thinking about playing some golf after all. Wednesday,
while Pam and Ashley went ahead with the scheduled train ride
to Kuranda and than an Aboriginal show, Pat and I got in eighteen
holes at Paradise Palms. Although very hot and humid, the
breeze made it bearable. Pat was hitting his drives with laser-like
accuracy and managed to beat me like a drum on the front nine.
Although I recovered a bit on the back, he still was the day's
overall winner. We ate lunch in the clubhouse following the
round. After returning to the hotel, I took the car back down
to the Cairns airport to oversee the refueling operation and
to return the golf clubs so that we wouldn't have so much
baggage the next day, as we were all sharing one minivan for
the airport ride.
The ladies returned from their
fun day and that evening the four of us used the car to make
a pizza run to a restaurant in a small town a few miles away
that Tracy had recommended. Nope, didn't look too appetizing,
so we reversed course and tried one on the small main street
of Palm Cove. Not bad at all. We ate at an outside table and
eavesdropped on the Italian being spoken at an adjacent table.
Of all the languages we have encountered on the trip, I think
Italian is my favorite.
In my previous trip to Australia
in 1985 I never made it to the far northeast corner or Queensland
and never saw the Reef. I am so glad that I did this time!
It is a wonderful vacation destination. Put it on your list!
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