The First World Isn’t Funny
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007After almost 10 months in Asia, our arrival in Australia was a bit surreal. All the white people…all of the big, fat white people…it was a real shock to the system. We’ve grown accustomed to not really understanding what anyone says, eating weird food, and generally being the largest humans within a 1km radius. We found comfort in our minority status, usually in the form of freely making comments in English that no one else could understand. JR has shushed me about 12 times here in “Oz”.
We landed in Cairns, on the coast of Northeast Australia. Cairns is like the average touristy beach town in Florida, aka my worst nightmare. We quickly booked a snorkel trip on the Great Barrier Reef for 2 days and 1 night. Shortly after we boarded Reef Encounter, we found out that we could stay on the boat for free, in exchange for some light labor. So, we spent 4 days on the boat, snorkeling and diving 2-3 times per day at different areas of the Reef, in exchange for about 4 hours/day of work. We served the paying passengers, did laundry and made beds. Cleaning the bathrooms grossed me out (um, other people’s pubes? Sick. And you’d be amazed at the people who leave turds in the toilet. The nerve.) but other than that it was a piece of cake.
Neither JR or I had ever gone scuba diving before. We went on an introductory dive with another beginner and an instructor. JR was fine, but I had an underwater anxiety attack and didn’t make it. I felt like a loser, [read on]
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