Day 1

When you play adventure games they are always structured like this: In order to get enough money to buy a spade you must wait till the chef leaves the kitchen of Scum Bar so that you can steal the fish, to give it to the troll, to let you over the bridge so that you can go to the circus and get paid to practice the cannon trick.

Ignoring the troll real life is exactly like this. For me, freshly arrived at Cairns airport I had two missions:

Mission 1. Find where the bus was to the town centre.
Mission 2. Phone Yang.

In order to phone Yang I had to find a shop, buy something to get change for a payphone, find a phone and work out how to use it.

So with a Bounty bar in one hand and some coins in the other I called Yang. The phone rang and he answered but then it cut off immediately. I didn’t understand why so I called him a few more times only for the same thing to happen. I figured out that I only had enough money to text him and not call him, so I sent him a text to say that I had arrived and then got on the bus.

It was about 7am. Yang and me had arranged to meet at the Central Shopping Area in Cairns which is next to the train station. The bus dropped me off at the station where it was painfully obvious that there was no one around. I tried to reassure the bus driver that I was meeting a friend and knew exactly what I was doing but he drove away looking a bit concerned about me. Alone in the car park to the station it was unnervingly quiet. The bus ride had shown me that the central shopping area was rather large and was going to be closed until 9am, meeting anyone in such a vague area was not going to be easy.

As I wondered what to do a man in a uniform of some kind appeared out of the station and looked surprised to see me. I told him that I was meeting a friend and he showed the same kind of concern as the bus driver, “I think you had better call your friend and make sure he is coming.” I asked him where the nearest phone was, fully aware that I didn’t have enough change to actually use one, and he pointed inside the station. Not wanting to appear completely helpless I went over to the phone and looked in my wallet. I was considering pretending to make a call but the man disappeared somewhere and I made my escape onto the main street, taking a tourist map of Cairns with me as I did so.

It was really hot, especially since I was still wearing jeans and lots of other clothes. The streets were empty except for a few people walking slowly and seemingly without purpose up the road. I made my way towards where I thought the front of the shopping centre was. In the heat and not knowing what I was doing it seemed like a long way but I found the big entrance to the mall. Still nothing was open for me to get change to call Yang again. I walked down the side of the Mall for about five minutes and found a coffee shop with an illuminated sign saying, “Open.” Enthusiastically I walked up to the shop and opened the door.

Inside it was cool and humbling but there was no one behind the counter. I eyed the cold water in the fridge cabinet and a man appeared saying, “It’s early” like I had somehow put him out. I wondered for a moment whether the practice in Cairns was for shops to not lock their doors or turn their signs off and people just politely wait outside until 9AM. “I can serve you but my boss hasn’t come in yet so I can’t give you any change,” he said, making me weep a little inside.

So I left that shop and went back out into the heat and people walking aimlessly. I found a row of taxis and decided to ask one of the drivers for change, it went like this:
“Excuse me…”
“It’s early.”
“Yes…but I don’t need a taxi, I was just wondering if you could change a note for some coins.”

I showed him a five-dollar note and he thought about my proposition. He accepted and a minute later I was calling Yang, “Today is a holiday so there are no buses yet,” he told me. Since I had a map and he lived about 40 minutes walk from the centre we agreed to start walking towards each other and meet sort of half way. I couldn’t believe that the phone needed 5 dollars, like £2.50, just to make a call but the call did seem to last for a while.

With this new plan in mind I needed to work out which road I was on. The roads were so long, however, that even finding a road sign takes some effort, and it wasn’t on my map anyway. I walked down another street looking for signs and then asked a large man for directions. He thought carefully about which way I should go. He thought so carefully that he concluded I shouldn’t go there, “You might get lost yourself, better for you to stay here if your friend knows where he’s going.” This was not the advice I was expecting. “There’s a McDonalds open down this road and lots of young people are there.” I thanked him and we parted.

I knew he was giving good advice so I decided to follow it, but only after I had tried not following it for a while. After a few more roads I worked out where I was and started to make my way along a short looking road on my map that would take me to the really long road that Yang must have been walking down. I was feeling pretty exhausted and frustrated at that time. In order to work out where I was I had to keep changing directions and comparing road signs and this meant walking passed people who were idly sitting there watching me. Also it takes ages for the pedestrian crossings to let you cross the road and standing in the blazing sunshine with my heavy backpack was pretty tiring. After walking for about twenty minutes I decided it was time to start following the man’s advice. The map I had was clearly not very good and even the road that I was so certain must be the right one was refusing to have the right name.

I walked back into town, passed the same people who had seen me a dozen times before. I needed to call Yang again but I didn’t have any change left. I went back to the coffee shop, the “open” sign was still blazing but this time the door was locked. The taxi driver I had spoken to before was watching me from his cab, which hadn’t moved at all. I soldiered on and found a little café serving food and drinks. Exhaustedly I bought the only water they had which was nasty tonic stuff that exploded on opening. With the change I called Yang again and realised that I had completely misunderstood Australian money.

I think I just assume that the bigger the coin the more expensive it is. I know that in sterling the 50p is bigger than the pound but the pound is at least thicker. In Australia the two dollar coin is tiny, the 50 and 20-cent coins are enormous and a dollar coin looks much the same as the pound. The phone box did not need 5 dollars like I had thought, it actually just needed 50 cents. I had been making life much much harder for myself. I called Yang and asked him to meet me in the train station, “I’m there,” he said.

I dragged myself back to the station, which was another 10 minutes walk from where I was. He wasn’t there. The station person I had met before saw me and came over:
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah, I’m waiting for my friend.”
“You said that an hour ago.”

He suggested that Yang might be on the other platform so I crossed the bridge and looked for him. Predictably he wasn’t there and so I called him again. There was an obvious communication problem going on; he thought he was where I was, but he definitely wasn’t. “I can see a clock,” he said. I asked the station man who was listening where the clock was, he shrugged at me. “Ok,” said Yang, “just wait.”

I sat down in the station and closed my eyes, it was 9:15AM. “Where you from?” said a voice outside of my head. “The UK,” I replied to the owner of the voice, an old but childlike man who was standing to my left. “Where abouts?” he asked. The old man also turned out to be English but told me that he had been living in Australia for a long time, he had come over on the last boat in 1977. He told me how much he loved Australia, where he had lived and how the sun was good for his skin. I asked him what the holiday was for today and he said, “It’s Easter Monday.” I felt like such an idiot.

“I used to do ballroom dancing till my knee packed in,” he told me with a little jig, “I got lots of medals from it, two gold, one silver, three bronze.” He told me about his professions too, “I do plumbing, acting, builder, electrician, ballroom dancing teacher, car mechanic.”
“You must be busy,” I said.
“No. My son went to Japan.”
“Oh really, what he did do there?”
“He got a scholarship but he went to Canada. He got eight scholarships, two from America, one from Japan and the rest from London. He’s a qualified lawyer now, he’s only twenty three.”

The station person appeared again and asked me if I wanted to lock my bag away while I waited, I nodded enthusiastically. He led me down the platform saying; “I saw that crazy old man was bothering you so I just wondered how to get rid of him. But you can leave your bag in here if you want to.” I hadn’t believed everything the old man had said but I was still quite taken aback but the description of him as, “crazy.” I left my bag in the room and asked the guy for his name in case I needed to find him again. He had a name badge but it was hidden in his pocket because he didn’t, “want the local nuts” knowing his name.

More time passed, more phone calls were made, the old man disappeared and eventually Yang came to rescue me. He had been in the central shopping area, not the central station.

As we walked away Cairns woke up into a normal town that finally made sense to me. Once the doors to the mall slid open from the station I realised that in the light of the working day it is not a ten-minute walk between the mall and the train station, they are actually right next to each other. Outside there were now newsagents, restaurants and shops with open doors and air conditioning. The streets were occupied by cars, buses and taxis driving up and down expectantly. People were walking purposefully now: carrying baskets, pushing trolleys, with their hands swinging idly or resting in each other’s palms.

Welcome to Cairns.