It was going to be so sweet. After
eight long months of laborious, urban drudgery we were finally
heading toward the rich and dazzling adventure that brought
us Down Under. We sailed out of Sydney as crew on a private
yacht and tacked north up the coast. Sitting astern, our eyes
watched the city bob further and further behind us.
Six weeks later, rich
and dazzling adventure was nowhere to be found. Jen and I were
sitting in a cheesy strip mall in far north Queensland, broke and
broken, desperately debating our options. And the prospects weren't
good.
After a few weeks on the sailboat, our buoyant hopes had
been riddled with unpleasant holes: violent weather; toothsome
seas; an incompetent, sexist captain; as well as an unfortunate
tidal stranding. What was more, it was expensive. Our 
captain
refused to rely on the cheap availability of wind power and
instead insisted upon running the twin diesel engines 24 hours
a day. He claimed the winds were blowing wrong, but after
a few beers he would admit he was trying to make better time
to get back to his 19-year-old bride-to-be in Papua New Guinea.
We had agreed, he reminded us, to share in all fuel costs,
which turned out to be over $100 a day.
He woke us early one
morning while at port in Airlie Beach, deriding us for our
insufferable laziness (after we had cooked his meals, swabbed his
decks, and quietly borne his humors and near-death experiences). We
held a short meeting in our cabin, nodded our heads and packed our
things. As he rowed us reluctantly to shore, whining about how we
were abandoning him, we were able to smile and let his pleadings
equalize the pain, degradation and fear we had been suffering under
him for the last few weeks.
We were free again.
Free, but desperately in need of an infusion of cash. So we combed
Airlie Beach for work. Airlie Beach is a backpacker's haven
situated optimally in the Queensland sunbelt and south of the
stagnant beach waters of the Great Barrier Reef. It is a place
everyone wants to be. As such, there is little profitable work,
especially for those without visas. I was one of the few North
Americans who had a wide-open working visa. Jen had made that a
condition of employment before accepting the job offered to her by
the World Wildlife Fund. Now that we were off and traveling,
however, her visa was useless, and any work she found had to be
under the table.
What we found in our
short job search was a wake-up call. We could get the job taking
snapshots of tourists for $2 a photo, but if immigration came
through, which it did every few months, we were on our own. For a
couple whose visions of the future were consumed by world travel,
we knew that being deported, an unsightly blemish on your permanent
record, was too high a price to pay.
In the hostels, we heard
word of a place a few hundred miles up the coast never raided by
immigration, where one could make pretty good money picking
bananas. It was this that led us to our Australian crossroads, in
the wettest town on the continent, Tully.
Tully is a place of
almost interminable gloom, where hordes of strapped travelers come
in hopes of staving off bankruptcy. Many young Australians come to
collect the dole, sell drugs, and generally profit from and
terrorize those who are stuck there. They are all largely confined
to the inhospitable accommodations of the Tully Backpackers Hostel,
whose sign cruelly displays a smiling banana wearing a backpack and
giving the thumb up. Here we were piled onto cramped bunk slabs,
where normally buoyant backpackers shivered with desperation. It
was a refugee camp, a place of little hope.
What you did, we
learned, was rise before the sun, then stand out in the early
morning rain and wait for the Torres Strait Islanders, who ran the
labor gangs. They would pull up in their pickups, peruse the new
arrivals for men of ample strength or women of significant
salaciousness, then signal them into the backs of the trucks for
the ride out to the groves. Those who weren't picked trod glumly
back to the hostel where they would wait another 23 hours before
trying again. Some people had been trying for days, and if they
weren't picked soon were going to have to leave the country, or,
God forbid, accumulate some credit card debt.
The lucky chosen, on the
other hand, faced long days of hauling banana satchels through the
mud, dodging snakes, spiders and angry bosses, only to be paid 10
cents a pound. We were told that eventually everyone works
barefoot, because shoes won't last two days, and the payout doesn't
come close to covering the cost of footwear.
It was amid this situation that Jen and I reconvened in a
bar for an executive meeting. It was unanimously agreed that
Tully was no place for two university-educated Americans holding
lucrative English degrees. We decided it was best to seek
our fortunes in the fabulous resort town of Cairns. We were
off again. Cairns, at least, had some degree of urban respectability:
coffee houses, nice restaurants, comfy hotels. It was a breath
of fresh air after weeks of difficulty, but this feeling was
short lived.
We decided that I would
seek employment and we would evaluate our income level in a week or
two. I applied at the coffee houses, the hotels and the
restaurants, and received no encouragement. Soon, I was desperate
enough to answer an ad calling for people to dress up in koala bear
suits for the Wilderness Society and beg for donations. I would
receive up to 25 percent of my haul. So on a mild, 103-degree day,
I donned a heavy, velvet bear suit and attempted to guilt people
out of their money. I was a complete failure and told that no one
had ever done as poorly as I had.
So sitting at our cheesy strip mall food court table, Jen
and I racked our brains over the cheapest pitcher of beer
in town. Then, she had an idea.
"What about Hawaii?
"What about it?" I asked.
"Let's move there," she replied. "Sun, sand, Mai Tais, no
need for work visas... "
A lifetime of cliched Hawaiian images scrolled through my mind surfing, volcanoes,
Magnum P.I. and I began to nod involuntarily.
"Yes," I said.
"Definitely. Let's do it."
We toasted, "Aloha."
Bryan Fryklund
