Sex On The Beach

Okay, there’s no sex on this Northern Queensland beach but I got your attention, didn’t I, and that’s what counts.

I love Australia because Aussies must be a bit like me–mad about their email and internet connections because there are internet cafes everywhere. Even at the post office.

I can do so much at Australia post offices, too, which is really fantastic. I can buy minutes for my phone. I can type emails. I can book plane tickets (on the internet). I can mail things and purchase post cards and fun touristy tea towels. If the post office sold Cadbury chocolate, I wouldn’t even need to go anywhere else.

(I’m actually taking a furtive look around the Palm Cove post office now to make sure no chocolate is available.)

We’ve had a great time so far. The wind has been blowing the past few days which made our jaunt out to the Outer Great Barrier Reef extra exciting. The ship’s crew ran back and forth with white barf bags and the Japanese tourists around us were filling them up so rapidly that I wasn’t sure whether to be filled with pity or horror. Never have vomit bags been so needed, and never have huge rubbish bins been filled so fast and furiously, either. Fortunately I had my crew taking ginger pills and other pills before and during trip to ensure quieter stomachs. The only drawback was that I couldn’t shake the sleepies after taking the good little no-queasy pill and spent an hour at sea sound asleep, sprawled on a bench, looking very much like a couple dozen other Japanese tourists who weren’t recovering quickly from the morning sail.

Happily I did get in the water. Unhappily it was very cold in and out of the water. But I saw things. Lots of things. And the boys were all much hardier than me. They actually snorkeled for an hour or more. I drank tea. Loads of it. While busily snapping pics as the official photographer.

On the way back to Cairns the ship’s captain slowed down so we could watch the humpback whales and for fifteen minutes we were all riveted to the windows, and lining the deck, to get as good a view as possible. The whales swam under the boat at one point—very exciting–and the day was great before the whales but the whale encounters made all the fat poofed up barf bags even more acceptable.

Australians are great. They really are. Even the ones that work in tourist restaurants and don’t feel like being in the restaurant wait business. Because a surly Australian will always be a hundred times friendlier than a surly American and that, my friends, brings me back to the beach.

Sex on the beach.

Or not really because the beach in Queensland is fraught with all kinds of Crocodile Dundee like possibilities…snakes, crocs, jelly fish, sharks.

But isn’t that the charm of this unbelievable country? There are endless miles of gorgeous pristine beaches.

Beaches just waiting to eat you.