Three Coconuts

For the first two weeks of May, I explored the coast of Queensland from Cairns to Brisbane. Unless you have your own transport, independent travel is pretty limited in Australia. To get around I bought a Greyhound bus pass, and to explore each area I signed up for a number of 1-3 day package trips. The first of which was a 2 day trip north of Cairns to Cape Tribulation (so named after Captain Cook’s Endeavour smashed in to a nearby reef and lost most of the ships cattle to sharks and crocodiles). The bus journey there took us past a colony of child maiming wallabies, through acres of sugar cane fields, and in to the rainforest. The journey was broken for a short boat trip along a crocodile infested river. The skipper pointed out the dominant male, Scarface, who upon securing his position as alpha-male, celebrated by taking a cow from a local farm. I also saw a number of younger crocodiles which, I was told, would probably be eaten by Scarface before reaching maturity. When the bus stopped again, the driver gave a short guided walk through the rainforest. After his forewarnings of plants that would “cut you up like razor-wire”, I was ready to enter the Little Shop of Horrors, to take on man-sized Venus fly traps, and wrestle with giant creepers. I was a little disappointed that plants turned out to be no more than spiny monkey puzzlers. Though, when I thought about it, I figured a blackberry bush could be described to be pretty vicious too. True to form, and as I had left my waterproof camera and poncho in the bus, it rained in the rainforest; really hard. An hour later we arrived at a lodge near Cape Tribulation where I changed in to some dry clothes and set off for my own walk in the rainforest. It didn’t take me long to find myself somewhere looking and sounding like Star War’s Dagobah. Within five minutes of being there, and without provocation, a giant black wasp flew on to my leg and stung me on the calf. It sounds strange, but in a way I was quite relieved it stung me. The niggling pain served as a reminder not to do anything too stupid, and that I was only a guest so shouldn’t get too comfortable. When the foliage began to thin, and I found myself on a long sandy beach, the sound of the crashing waves made me realise how thirsty I had become. I had left my water bottle at the lodge, I didn’t want to track-back on myself, and I resented having to go to the café I saw on the road to pay for a drink. However all along the beach there were thousands of coconut palms full of coconuts. I walked up to a tree and tried to dislodge a coconut by kicking and shoving the tree. The solid trunk absorbed my efforts without moving a millimetre. Looking up the length of the trunk I discounted climbing it; to even try I would need a wide belt of fabric to peg myself up, not to mention the thighs of a jockey. And so I began to scour the forest floor for the perfect coconut. I wanted one with plenty of milk, yet with the flavour of an older coconut. The freshest ones were green, and the oldest ones were brown, so I found a yellow one. It didn’t have any holes in it, and sounded like it was full of milk, so I set to work stripping off the husk with my knife. Ten minutes later, when the blade sank in to the hollow centre, I took out the knife, picked up the coconut, put my mouth to the incision, and poured the liquid in to my mouth. Yuck! I spat out a mouthful of coconut vinegar. Now not only was I thirsty, but I also had a foul taste to get rid of. Undeterred, I found the freshest, greenest, least fermented-looking coconut I could find. Rather than stripping off the husk, I simply started carving out a small hole. In no time at all, and after I had given the contents a good sniff, I drank every drop of watery milk out of the green coconut. I still wanted that Bounty/piña colada taste, so now set to work on a brown coconut. Too hard for my knife, or to crack open against the ground, I took the coconut to some rocks at the end of the beach. On the third strike it cracked open and began to gush out its clear liquid. I can’t imagine a coconut had ever tasted so good.

As I walked back along the beach, I realised that for as far as I could see, nothing had been touched by man. I could see no other people, no footprints in the sand, no rubbish on the shoreline, and no buoys in the water. What I was seeing was no different to what had been discovered three centuries ago. I was in a place that hadn’t changed for millions of years. I was outside of time. Hard rain began to fall on my face, then seconds later it stopped to be replaced by sunlight, then rain again. I looked to the sky above the ocean to see if I could figure out what would happen next. Like theatre scenery, the tiny white clouds were sat on layers of sky; each one moving at a different speed. Shafts of golden sunlight found their way through the clouds and swept across the sea like searchlights with nothing to look for. Every now and then the light, rain and wind would combine to form fragments of rainbows. Like the clouds these rainbow pieces moved with the wind, but died when geometry could no longer sustain them for my eyes. In an instant I had been propelled from the feelings insignificance and humility, to witnessing something I believe no one ever else has. On top of the familiar feeling of weightless euphoria, something else was there. I felt more receptive, more open; more alive than ever. It was as if I wasn’t just experiencing the moment, but in some way capturing it in its entirety to be experienced again. Was I simply collecting a sample for some greater powers collection of everything? Was I recording a scene for my afterlife? Whatever happened, I have the feeling I will experience that time and place in some other way in my future.

Back at the lodge when my room mates (two English doctors my age working in Australia for a year) asked what I had been up to that afternoon, I only told them I had been for a walk on the beach. Putting myself in their shoes I figured that if a strange hairy man smelling of coconut started talking about flying rainbows and being momentarily possessed, I probably wouldn’t feel to comfortable sharing a room with him. Instead I stuck to the script and we ended up going to a local bar for the evening. Joining us from the lodge were a group of girls from the Isle of Man, who were all somehow related to each other. The bar, which had been described by our bus driver as “banging”, had three other customers that night. There was the drunk at the bar, and there was the couple on the dance floor. The drunk, when he was able to stand up, stared longingly and starry-eyed at the couple shuffling about to Dire Straits and Chris Rea. Occasionally he would approach one on the Manx girls, start stroking their anoraks, and ask what animal they were made from. On the dance floor, a middle-aged Aborigine woman was spilling out of her leopard-skin dress, wore a blonde wig and had a face so swollen she could barely see. Her partner wore steel-toecap boots, socks pulled up to his knees, tight shorts and a lumberjack shirt. I had the strangest feeling the bus driver wasn’t joking when he recommended the place.

The following morning I went for a dip in the local swimming hole. When I looked under the surface, naturally I as hoped, I was not alone. The river bed was crawling with catfish and freshwater turtles. Mid way between the bed an the surface was a shoal of a strange type of fish with massive eyes. The odd thing about them was that unless I got really close, they just hovered in the water in front of my face staring at me. In numbers, fish can be really intimidating.

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