Tyler Kieft

Well, I never got around to writing about the last part of my spring break in northern Queensland, having been distracted by the surf trip and the general sense of laziness that has washed over me the past few weeks. But with the next two weekends booked for Melbourne/The Great Ocean Road and Brisbane/The Gold Coast, I feel a renewed sense of purpose in my life. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed traveling until all of my planned trips were finished, so I’m glad that there are things in the works for the next few weekends.

I can hardly believe it, but I’m halfway done with school (just finished week 6 of 12) and halfway done with my time in Sydney. I’ve been here almost two months, and in another two I’ll be on my way back to Cairns with my family in tow, en route to Auckland, San Francisco, and finally Vermont. And I have a feeling my life is only going to get busier as I try to pack everything I haven’t seen or done yet into the next sixty days.

Getting back to the subject of this post, though, the last few days of our vacation were spent up in Cape Tribulation (map), a small town that is one of the gateways to the Daintree rainforest. The Daintree is not only the oldest surviving rainforest in the world, but it is also the only place in the world where rainforest runs right up to the coastline and the ocean. This made the drive up very scenic, like a cross between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the beaches of Australia.

Our time in the rainforest was no less packed than all of our other days. The first thing we did was “Jungle Surfing,” a ride through the canopy attached to zip lines. I call it a ride because we had to do nothing besides launch ourselves off the platform; there was no holding on or pulling ourselves up to worry about. It was quite relaxing. We wore harnesses which were attached to the lines by carabiners, and our speed was controlled by the attendants. In all, we made our way through a path consisting of 5 suspended platforms, and at one point we were 70 or 80 feet off the ground. For the last segment, they made us ride upside down! The best part was that we were in the shade the entire time; it was hot in northern Queensland, around 100 degrees some days!

Later that evening we went out on the ocean for a sunset kayak ride. I’ve never been kayaking on the ocean before, only on lakes, where you can stop and everything stops around you. The ocean is in perpetual motion. It’s not exactly as relaxing as freshwater kayaking, because the water is constantly slapping up against the side of the boat, but it is a neat experience. We were all allowed to take a swim in the deeper part of the ocean. The shallows harbored the most venemous creature in the world – the box jellyfish. Our instructor plucked one out of the water by its top (remember Finding Nemo?) and let me touch it! While we were rowing back in, the sun dropped slowly behind the mountains. It was a gorgeous sight.

At night, we had a bonfire at the beach. I cannot remember the last time I saw so many stars. Northern Queensland is sparsely populated, and most people that live there work in the tourism industry. So with a fire crackling on the beach, the ocean rolling in, countless stars illuminating every inch of sky, and beers in our hands, we enjoyed our last night on vacation taking in the natural beauty that is so abundant in Australia.

The next morning we were shuttled off to the rainforest in two groups for a “mild hike.” Mild turned out to be strenuous, as we were climbing large, wet rocks up a creek bed, but when we reached the waterfall at the end it was all worth it. Our guide told us about the plants we were encountering as we hiked, and to my surprise many of them packed a bite! These are plants that you would not want to rub against, lest they cut and ensnare you with their sharp edges. I guess the rainforest didn’t survive this long by luck! At the end of the hike, we drove to a freshwater pool and took a swim – so refreshing! Even so, I made sure to get a shower in before boarding the bus for the drive back to Cairns and the flight back to Sydney.

Stay tuned in a week for pictures of that other large Australian city and the famous landmarks of the Great Ocean Road!

I’ve always wanted to fly in a hot-air balloon. I trace this back to my experiences at the Champlain Valley Balloon Festival, which was held at the local fairgrounds every year when I was a kid. Thirty to forty balloons launched over the space of two or three days. I was always captivated by the way they smoothly sailed through the sky, held up by nothing more than hot air. I’d spot tons of them in the morning on the way to school, and I would wonder how much the passengers could see up there, with nothing between them and the scenery.

I finally got my chance last week. After we returned from the Great Barrier Reef, we had a free day, whereby “free” I mean pick any one or two expensive, death-defying activities such as skydiving, white-water rafting, hot-air ballooning, or bungee jumping. I took the safe route, going with a sunrise hot-air balloon ride and an afternoon white-water rafting trip.

It may have been the safe choice, but it certainly wasn’t the easy choice. Wake up call for the hot-air balloon trip was 4am. In fact, I woke up just as one of my roommates was coming in from a night of revelry in Cairns. It was a bit surreal. We did our best to sleep on the bus as it picked up tourists from other hotels and headed to Mareeba, where there is a lot of flat farmland and thus it is a good place for ballooning.

We didn’t quite make sunrise, because we had to wait for some fog to clear before we could launch. But as you can see by the pictures, it was still quite beautiful outside. To be honest, I was expecting this to be a pretty small affair, maybe four or five people packed into a tiny basket. In fact, our balloon took up 18 people, including the pilot! I think it was the company’s second-biggest balloon size. We stood around and watched and took pictures as the crew set the balloon up, then climbed in and handed our boarding passes to the pilot (I’m not joking about that part). After some last minute instruction about the proper landing position (more on that later) we were off the ground and climbing rapidly.

I thought that the ride would be completely relaxing. Indeed, the scenery was beautiful, and it was a quiet morning when the pilot wasn’t firing the burners. But there was definitely an element of weirdness to the whole experience. I kept asking myself what I was doing — three thousand feet off the ground, standing in a basket attached to a balloon, with nothing to keep me from falling out. The other strange thing about hot-air ballooning is that the pilot has very little control over where the balloon goes. He can only bring it up and down trying to find different wind currents. It was amazing how just moving up a few hundred feet would cause us to fly in a totally different direction. I reckon that this is the reason that they can’t fly nearer to the ocean; you wouldn’t really want to drift out to sea.

As soon as we got up there, it seemed like it was time to land. This is probably because I was standing right next to the pilot, and I listened to him make all of the preparations over the radio. It’s a lot to organize; he had to find a flat, clear spot where the wind would take him that wasn’t too close so we had time to get to it, and it needed to be accessible by the ground crew.

On the way down, we were nearing the ground, and the pilot said, “We’re going to hit a tree soon, don’t worry about it, I’m just using it to put on the brakes a bit.” The tail end of this sentence was delivered as we crashed through a tree, sending branches flying and leaving me gripping the handholds of the basket. Very soon after, another warning came: “Get in the landing position! We’re coming down pretty fast, so there’s going to be a big bump…” Landing position was crouched inside the basket, camera protected and weight braced against the back of the balloon. We hit the ground quite hard; it was definitely the most exciting part of the flight. But it wasn’t over yet. We were dragged across the ground because the balloon still had a lot of lift. Once we stopped again, the crew helped to tip the basket over backward so that the extra friction would keep it on the ground. Definitely an exhilarating ending!

Unfortunately, we all had to help pack up the balloon when we were done, but we were rewarded afterwards with champagne and breakfast, which tasted amazing after five hours with no food or drink. Later that afternoon, we went white-water rafting. I don’t have any pictures from the trip, for obvious reasons. I assure you, though, that it was a great time, even when I fell out of the boat and was dragged behind it for about ten seconds. It was a scorcher of a day, so the cold water felt so good, especially when they let us take a swim at the end of the rapids.

For more pictures of early morning ballooning, head over to Flickr!