I've been chatting using the magic of the Internet a bit to my mate (that's an Australianism) Liam, a sandgroper (Western Australian) living in Japan. He used to live in Queensland, in a place best depicted as "about 130 kilometres inland from Townsville" called Charters Towers. He played cricket there and agrees with me that Cairns is a hole, but fortunately he's teaching English at the moment (alongside his marvellously attractive girlfriend Maire) in Obama, north of Kyoto (that's in Japan). No surprises yesterday when myself and mum went into Cairns town centre and looked in souvenir shops and ate in a shopping centre food court and got our photos developed (except that my underwater photos weren't utter crap, just desperately mediocre) and ended up hot and sweaty and bought some yummy tuna on the way home to fry up and eat rare (if this has ruined canned tuna for me I'll be very annoyed).
So today marks possibly my first inebriated journal entry. To start at the beginning, this morning we got onto a Down Under Tours bus bound for the bottom of the purty railway route up into the rainforesty hills of Kurandura. The museum at the bottom talked about the hardship of building a railway in those days but at this stage I'm full up to here (indication of a reasonably high location) of such talk because frankly in the future people will be talking about the hardship I went through living in a mere contrete building while typing primary source records on a primitive QWERTY keyboard (man, I've always wanted to type that, and it was quite anticlimactic). It was raining hard as it has been in the past few days though (after a boring politics day the Cairns Post is back on track with MUDSLIDE telling the tale of the recent heavy rain bringing strife to a mansion on the ever-so-Australianly-entitled Yorkeys Knob) and the waterfalls on the way were in bloom, or what we could see of them through the mist, spray and fog was anyway. The town of Kurandura at the top was desperately touristy though - thirteen dollars each got us into the birdy exhibition, which is Australia's largest free-flying birdy thing apparently. Sure enough, a bird landed on my shoulder and tried to eat my ear, and there were black swans and rainbow laurikeets and lots of other stuff that I didn't recognise - and macaws from South America, like what are on my favourite shirt! Apart from that, the place was full of souvenir stands, some of which were okay but in general it was a "sophisticated money-making machine" as mum put it and it wasn't painful to get out of it.
The route downwards was a cable car very similar to the one I got down (I think it was down anyway) from Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain, in China. It was nice to swoosh between the rainforest treetops (and man was it ever raining all day), and we went for a tour with a half-caste Aboriginal ranger at one of the change-of-direction stops on the way down and he told us about interesting rainforesty stuff which was much different from the Aboriginal know-whats in the Centre because it wasn't deserty. At the bottom we went to an award-winning tourist centre with demos (I threw a boomerang, too low as it turned out, but not bad all told) and a dance which was good actually, in that it sort of gave me a strange taste of the pre-civilisation lifestyle and the priorities and perspectives of that time and way.
Mum has committed to some antihystamines because her stupid feet give her trouble whenever she tries to do anything interesting (which is not to imply that she's fond of interesting stuff) so she can't drink the casks of wine she bought a couple of days ago. The result of this is that right now I'm right full of Banrock Station Shiraz and decidedly wobbly. War is hell.
However, getting back to the original point, Liam yesterday told me that there's a certain chance of a job in Australia, totally illegal but once-a-week teaching English to some kids because the guy in his town who currently does that is off back to Australia. And with it goes not only money but a free apartment (or "hovel" as he calls it). Neato. So I'm going into a Qantas office tomorrow to ask for a go on the first plane to Osaka, please. Man, this is much better than working in Eircom Net.