Circumspencing the Globe

“Nice weather.  If you’re a duck.”  He said this loudly so his voice would carry over the fierce patter of the rain.  The Queensland license plates on the cars parked behind him fibbed, “The Sunshine State.”

I sat outside under a restaurant awning eating a brekky wrap.  “I thought this was ‘Rainbow’ Beach,” I replied between mouthfuls.  “So where’s the ‘bow’?”

The friendly passerby told me he hadn’t seen this much rain here for at least nine years.  A couple I met on the 31st while looking over the beach from a wooden platform said this is the wettest summer here in 20 years.  Down at the beach, I came upon a family standing on exposed lava rocks, marveling at the water level.  “I married my daughter right here on the beach not four months ago,” the father said, shaking his head.  “The guests sat there,” he added, pointing to a spot now being hit by the surf break.  The girl up in the smoothie shop explained that the beach is normally very wide, wide enough for 4WD vehicle traffic, and the ocean is normally a glassy torquoise blue.  During my three days in Rainbow Beach, there’s been hardly any beach at all and the water has not been blue but a muddy gray-green.

But on January 1 the rain did stop long enough for me to hike up to the Carlo Sandblow, a great, ski-run-sized, Sahara-like saddle of sand between two tree-covered hills.  The “Blow,” as it’s called by locals, is the result of strong onshore winds causing the sand to incrementally swallow the foothill forest. Captain Cook’s expedition log makes reference to the dune, which is named after a member of the crew.  The sand is red and orange and yellow and white and gray, the variety of colors being responsible for the “rainbow” in Rainbow Beach.  When you hike up one of the steep edges of the dune, you find yourself face-to-face with the tall forest’s tree-top canopy.  One step too many and you’d tumble over the rounded precipice and roll all the way down and into one of the tree trunks below.  I was there at sunset and explored the eerie, windswept landscape without a soul around.  By the time I began the return hike through the damp forest, it was pitch black.  “Koalas and emus and snakes, oh my; koalas and emus and snakes, oh my,” I muttered to myself.  An interesting way to spend New Year’s Day.

Of course, the prior night was New Year’s Eve.  At this juncture, let me make a disclaimer, dear readers.  Some of you claim to be living vicariously through my haps and mishaps abroad.  Well, I’m afraid my–our–life on New Year’s Eve was a big dud.  But let’s keep a proper perspective.  Isn’t New Year’s Eve USUALLY a disappointment?  Somehow I always work myself up with expectations based on the same mental montage:  an evening of unbridled revelry and laughter, whirling around the dance floor with gorgeous women (plural) I’d just met, me looking dapper under a cardboard tophat, hopping in a conga line, regaling a small but growing crowd with witty insights while the gorgeous women hang on my arms and lose composure from giggling (so uncontrollably their celophane derbies almost fall off) but still beg me to tell another story.  Right.  And I wonder why I end up feeling a big let-down on January 1.  (But for the record, last year’s New Year’s Eve celebration was a blast–dancing and merry-making with my Beth Ariel friends at the castle-house of an acrobat family in the Hollywood Hills, complete with a Times Square-style dropping ball, and stumbling around the neighborhood with my buddy Adam until 4:00 a.m.  But that was exceptional.)

Anyway, this year was nothing like that.  I left the hostel’s computer room at about 8:00 p.m. and put on a blue, oriental pull-over shirt I’d bought from the Hmong people when I was in Vietnam.  Then I went to the bar to check out the advertised masquerade party.  It wasn’t really a “party” at all, just a handful of disconnected people lingering at the bar.  Some wore flimsy paper-and-rubberband eye masks.  At one point, a group of female hostel employees bounded into the bar area, laughing loudly and dressed to kill.  Things were looking up.  But just as quickly as they’d arrived, they left, and the left-over people resumed their near-silent vigil at the bar.

I asked the bartender for a mask.  The ones he had left weren’t cool–a polka-dotted giraffe face and a plain gray strip that didn’t even have eyeholes.  (Note:  I mean no offense to the polka-dotted giraffe community or to the plain gray strip community.)  Bored, I took one of each and fashioned a custom-made mask using scissors and paste the bartender happened to have behind the counter.  It didn’t work as a chick magnet (shocking), but it did help me conceal my identity from anyone wondering who the guy is in the weird shirt.

The bartender told me the hostel girls went to the big party at the sports club.  “Everyone is going there,” he said.  I asked him, “What about the masquerade party here?”  He just shrugged his shoulders.

So I headed for the sports club.  It was raining hard and I and my Hmong shirt got drenched.  A bouncer at the door wouldn’t let me in because, he said, it was just too crowded and he could only admit members at this point.  I comiserated outside with a few other non-members.  One couple suggested I might get in if I dressed up like a woman.  “I AM a woman,” I told them, “dressed up like a man.”  We shared a laugh, but our bonding ended when the bouncer let the couple in.  After a while, he evidently felt sorry for me and let me in, too.

The entire adult population of Rainbow Beach must have been inside, it was so packed.  People swarmed the bar like bees to a hive, pressed up against the counter five people thick, like soccer hooligans against the field fence.  Bartenders mixed drinks furiously, like I mix metaphors.  I walked around and spotted a table with the hostel girls and some guys.  I went over and said “hi,” but they were caught up carousing with one another and didn’t seem eager to open up the group.  Plus they were preoccupied creating close-up images with their cell phone cameras, taking turns shooting the fleshy parts of their elbow-bent arms and then lapsing into hysteria at how much the images resembled cleavage and bare buttocks.

I walked to the DJ zone and watched the dancing people for a while.  Drunk folks look so foolish when you’re not drunk.  I did another lap around the interior but didn’t see any chatting opportunities.  Also, it seemed people were looking at me funny.  What, like they’d never seen a tourist in the local sports club on New Year’s Eve before?  C’mon!  Like they’d never seen a guy with rain-drenched hair before?  Right!  Like they’d never seen a guy in a Hmong shirt before?  Okay, maybe not that one.  But this wasn’t Sweden–they weren’t that perfect looking themselves.  Anyway, I stopped my futile attempt to circulate, leaned against a wall and realized just how tired I was.  I’d ridden the overnight bus into town that morning and had had maybe three hours sleep tops, and I’d neglected to take a nap.  Nothing was going to happen here at the sports club anyway, I concluded, so I went outside to walk in the momentarily rainless night air.  After a stroll around the neighborhood and down to the beach, I returned to the hostel bar, had another conversation with the bartender and semi-conversations with some of the lonely souls at the bar.  Then I pulled the ripcord and went to my room.  This would be the first New Year’s Eve of my adult life that I wasn’t awake and poised to ring in the new year.

I stepped into the bathroom to perform my nightly ablutions.  In the mirror, I noticed something unsightly:  a big blue stain all over my neck.  Apparently, in the rain, the fabric dye in my oriental shirt had run.  This was not a good look.  Not for 2007.  Not for 2008.  Not for any year.  Not even in an era of rampant tattooing.  It just isn’t hip to look like a smurf.  It occurred to me that the hostel girls at the sports club probably deliberately avoided me in order to save face in this small town, where cavorting with a blue-necked stranger could ruin one’s reputation for years to come.

My reflection stared back at me with a disgusted expression, let out a sigh and then shook his head condescendingly.  I turned and shook my fist in the approximate direction of the Hmong village.  Then I ripped the ridiculous shirt off my back, brushed my teeth and crawled into bed.  (The neck stayed blue until morning, when I violated the hostel’s four-minute shower rule and indulged myself with a full 6.5 minutes.)  Once in bed, I put on my headlamp (uncool looking in its own right), clicked it on and read my book (“Dracula” by Bram Stoker–concededly a more suitable read for Romania).  When I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, I closed the book, clicked off the light and plunged my head into the pillow.  My watch read “11:59.”  Before sleep completely engulfed me, I heard through my upright ear a burst of woohooing fanfare in the distance.  And so ended 2007.

Tags: Travel

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