Mission Beach
“I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”
— Angus Young, AC/DC
I picked up the rental car in Cairns, loaded it with camping supplies and headed south along the coast to Mission Beach. My plan was simple: spend the next two months travelling down the Queensland coast, alternating between caravan parks and hostels. Since Cairns had been a hostel stay, Mission Beach would be camping. Naturally, it was pouring rain when I arrived. I sat in the car waiting for it to ease up, but darkness was approaching, so I eventually pitched the tent and jumped inside.
There I was in a tiny two-man tent, listening to the various sounds of animals in the Australian rainforest. I was so petrified I barely slept a wink, with my trusty Swiss Army knife beside me for protection against whatever enormous Australian creature I imagined was lurking outside. Around five or six the next morning, I discovered one source of all that noise: kookaburras. They were some of the loudest birds I’d ever heard, and their unmistakable calls would become my unofficial 6:00 a.m. alarm clock for much of the trip.
I was practically alone on the beach for almost two days and felt a little like Tom Hanks in Cast Away — although I had a ton of food. I spent my days wandering the beach, drinking beer and eating coconuts. There were coconut-cracking stations along the beach, which sounded simple enough until I actually tried using one. The pictures don’t show how unbelievably difficult those damn things were to open. I’ve never used so many swear words in my life. The coconut became a F@#@in coconut, and it will always be. Off in the distance I could see Dunk Island, and naturally I decided a trip over there was in order. That’s another page.
Mission Beach was also the scene of one of my closest encounters with Australia’s more dangerous wildlife. I was unloading newspapers into a recycling pile when I looked down just in time to see a snake make a partial strike toward my ankle. The caravan park owner, who was standing nearby, yelled, “That’s a brownie — watch out!” From my pre-trip reading, I knew he meant an eastern brown snake, one of Australia’s most dangerously venomous snakes. My Australian adventure — and potentially a whole lot more — had nearly ended just as the road trip was beginning. Thankfully, the remaining hazards of the journey would be considerably less dramatic: a surfboard bump on the head and some particularly bad Thai food.
