Travel: Global Nomad: The dice of God

There are travelers who return to the same place year after year, and there are many who cannot take leave of a beautiful sight without resolving to come back soon again. These may be good people, but good wanderers they are not. – Herman Hesse

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself. – Buddha 

If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. – Will Kommen

By Marc Ethier, Travel Correspondent

We look worse than our passport photos (see image). But we're sticking in there. 

Queensland, Australia. In Cairns in the twilight huge fruit bats – the largest we’ve ever seen – flock from the forests on the outlying hills and swoop down the main streets in screeching squadrons. They fly to the ocean with open mouths, veering in arcs over the neon-fronted stores and the lighted concrete swimming lagoon bordered by mango trees that abuts the harbor.

Families and gangs of teenagers frolic there. Out on the water as the sky darkens you can see the profile of white pelicans floating on the black water, occasionally stabbing at fish. Wader birds and crabs patrol the waterline.

We get out of town and head for Daintree, about an hour north. Stay in a place called Crocodylus, which is for sale. Meet a Swiss named Martin, a customs agent whose understanding of several languages is confined to phrases like “Passport, please,” and “Do you have anything to declare?” We manage to communicate and learn that Martin gets five weeks’ vacation every year. In two years he will get seven.

Martin is an amateur photographer and he shows us some striking pictures of snakes. Lisa, our Official Trip Photographer, is envious. Martin has a very expensive digital camera with which she can’t compete. And yet Lisa has taken many photos on this trip that rival anything in Martin’s memory card.

I am reading a biography of Sam Peckinpah and learn that his first feature was originally titled The Dice of God. Later by a process of Hollywoodization it became The Deadly Companions. A good book on him if admiring. Good books are sometimes available here in book exchanges, one for one: but usually it’s utter rubbish by “entertainment” peddlers like Hammond Innes, Wilbur Smith, Alistair MacLean. Or books in German. Or Chinese.

Also reading a book of quotations by Hesse (got at a bookstore): many are especially pertinent to our situation: “The overvaluation of the minute, hurry as the essence of our form of life – these are undoubtedly the most dangerous enemies of joy. As much as possible as quickly as possible – that is the watchword. The consequence is more and more amusement and less and less joy.”

Hesse spent the last years of his life in exile in Switzerland. I try to bring this up in conversation with Martin but the language barrier will not be vaulted.

We are in the jungle and overnight we hear the rustling of unidentified beasts outside our screen walls – frogs? cassowary? snakes? or the mice we’ve been warned of? Or some other mysterious nocturnal marauder? The dreaded possum again?

Next day, enjoying the cooler microclimate, we take a couple hikes in the profusion of shifting green shapes that is Jindalba. We go to an exotic fruit tasting and sample dragonfruit, star apple, jakfruit, black sapote, Davidson plum, white sapote, soursop. Jakfruit is my favorite; Lisa likes soursop and buys some jam made from the juicy, fibrous, pineapple-like fruit.

Back at Crocodylus we meet Max, from Seattle, who is bicycling up the coast. His arms are a deep auburn color, the deepest tan I’ve seen. He is happy and talkative and drinks two glasses of red wine with dinner. Doing what he’s doing, you don’t meet many people, probably. Don’t meet many Americans, especially. Max gets excited when the conversation turns to work. He is a teacher taking an indefinite sabbatical. “Responsibility” in particular seems to be a word that offends him. Animatedly, cheerfully, defiantly he rejects the notion, and we happily agree.

In the jungle the cicadas give the effect of one great organism inhaling and exhaling, closer now and a moment later far away. An earthy plant smell permeates everything down to the fibers of our clothes.

We search without success for the cassowary, Australia’s largest animal, an emu-like bird with a large brownish horn that looks like a slab of petrified wood pasted onto its skull. Near the deserted beaches – no one is around because stingers, jellyfish, make swimming impossible for the next few months – the earthy smell mingles with saltwater and the sound of surf joins the interrogative purl of birdsong.

We head south again. Back in Cairns for a night: standing on a corner we watch the bats zigzag down the main drag of town, their open mouths silhouetted against the purple sky. Nobody else seems to notice, or care. They swoop not five feet over our heads and careen away to gather dinner. We learn later they are considered pests.

On Shield Street, one of the town’s main malls, the lorikeets – more pests – nest for the night in the palms. They prefer one big palm standing on a busy corner: their squawks are deafening, enough to hear across town. Enough to draw a crowd: enough anyway to draw us.

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Marc and his wife, Lisa, sold their home outside Washington, D.C., quit their jobs and embarked on a yearlong world trip in September. They have visited Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia and will continue to India and Europe through September 2007. You can find all of the Global Nomad articles at www.twoheadedturtle.gather.com. Read more about their adventures at www.2headedturtle.com.

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