6

AUSTRALIA

It’s a strange phenomenon, listening to Bing Crosby croon about a white Christmas while driving in the summer on Highway 1 along the Queensland coastline. It’s Christmastime, but it’s not winter, and it’s anything but white. You’re stopping for ice cream on the way to the pool, or you’re letting your shorts dry on the clothesline while your kids jump on the backyard trampoline. But there’s also a Christmas tree inside, Santa-shaped cookies are baking in the oven, and Bing’s there, singing about his white Christmas.

We arrive in Australia from Singapore in early December on a cheap, region-specific airline with stellar ticket prices because they don’t serve water on the flight. Or rather, they do—for five dollars per bottle. Had I known we’d be unable to slake our thirst for an eight-hour flight, I would have snuck contraband water in our backpacks. Thankfully, this is an overnight trek, so the kids mostly sleep while I try to ignore my thirst. Five hours in, I cave and crack open a bottle of water.

Our first layover is Sydney, then Gold Coast (with the delightful airport name Coolangatta, named after a schooner that wrecked there in 1846); then we catch a northbound train to Brisbane, where we spend the night in a dingy, fluorescent-lit motel near the airport so we can catch an early-morning flight north to Cairns. This means that we fly almost four thousand miles south, then hop a train, and another plane, and trudge another fifteen hundred miles back north. It is the equivalent of flying from Los Angeles to New York in order to get to Dallas. Convoluted itineraries often save enough money to make voyages possible.

It is a jolt, landing in Cairns. The previous twenty-nine hours were spent moving our bodies through airport terminals and train stations, restlessly sleeping and refueling with foreign fast food with jet lag as a familiar friend. We traveled at night, so when we walk up to the car rental desk in Cairns on a bright Friday morning, the woman behind the desk is an alarm clock of cheer. I need coffee.

“Good morning! May I have your confirmation number?” she asks with a smile. Kyle reads her the combination of numbers and letters.

“Ooh, I see that you’re American. Whereabouts you coming from?”

“Well, we’re from Oregon, but we’ve been in Asia for several months now,” Kyle answers.

“You don’t say!” she says as her fingernails clack the keyboard. “I spent some time in Portland a few years back. Beautiful part of the world, that is.”

My ears perk, both at the name of a familiar place and at the opportunity for a breezy conversation in my native tongue. “What were you doing in Oregon?” I ask.

“Oh, some family lives there. Let’s see . . . We went to the big science museum, and drove to the coast and then the mountains. My goodness, was it spectacular.” She prints papers, shows us where to sign, hands us keys.

“Where are you staying in Cairns?” she asks. We tell her the name of our place, and she draws our route on a map. A yellow highlighter squeaks our itinerary to the other side of town. “All right, mates, seems you have all you need, but give me a ring if you need anything. Have a fab time in Queensland!”

The five of us walk through the parking lot to our sedan, arms heavy with backpacks dragging behind us like stubborn dogs, eyelids heavy from the glare of a happy sun. We buckle up in a black sedan, inhale the smell of new car, and fidget with the console buttons to connect the Bluetooth signal to my phone. Familiar bands start playing—Portugal. The Man and Lord Huron. Kyle and I look at each other, wide-eyed.

After three months in Asia, all this feels strangely close to home. Kyle pulls out of the parking lot and heads down the left side of the road, a habit already cultivated from Thailand.

For the first time in our lives, we will celebrate Advent, St. Nicholas Day, and Christmas at summer’s apex. It’s the heat of the yuletide, and we’re sweating to the carols. When we planned this portion of our trip in Oregon, we looked at the map and calculated our general whereabouts for December, realizing we’d be near a culture that recognized the Christian holiday. We have spent a fair number of Christmases in Muslim-majority cultures, and while it’s nice to escape the Western commercialism that’s taken over the season, it’s hard on the kids and conjures aching nostalgia in me. During those holidays abroad I missed “Jingle Bells” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” piping through the grocery store speakers and wishing a merry Christmas to the cashiers.

This is not essential, and grateful for the chance to travel, we were more than willing to forgo a familiar culture during Christmas. But when we first announced to the kids we really, truly would be traveling for a year, the idea was made more palatable to them knowing we could celebrate Christmas in a culture that felt like home, even if it was midsummer.

There’s something about this holiday that evokes a longing for home and belonging more than any other time of year. I am curious, however, if it’s our long-held familial traditions that make us wax nostalgic, or if it’s our customary calendar rhythms. Do we tend to ache for customs of hot cocoa by the fireplace because we’ve gone through the swelter of summer and the decline of fall? Or does Christmas itself imbue us with sentimentality? We will better understand our human longing to be home for the holidays in six weeks’ time, when we leave Down Under and trek back up the latitudinal ladder. Africa is looming.

Of course, a summertime Christmas is only strange to us because we hail from the Northern Hemisphere. In the past, Aussie friends have asked me if singing carols through the snow and curling up by the fireplace to watch Jimmy Stewart is a commercialized cliché, or if it’s a literal thing Americans do. In reply, I asked them why Australians don’t use local palm trees instead of fake evergreens for their holiday tree, or why they haven’t written summertime carols. Their answer: There are, indeed, Australian carols, and a few people do decorate alternative Christmas trees, but for the majority, Christmas is more about the magic, the dreaming, the pretending of a faraway winter wonderland. Santa’s from the cold, after all.

This is Christmas four days after a summer solstice: it’s home with cognitive dissonance. We wear swimsuits on St. Nicholas Day.

I had been to the northeastern state of Queensland, Australia, before, both times on work assignments. I knew the first time I stepped into Oz that my clan would soak up the flora and fauna; the Australians’ love of water; their casual, sunglasses approach to life. From their beer (lager) to their dress (casual), to how they embrace a laissez-faire take on time, most Queenslanders I had met before seemed—well, an awful lot like my people.

They prefer the great outdoors and wearing flip-flops (which here are called thongs), they’re proud of their beer and ice cream, and they employ an inordinately sizable amount of local vernacular in their verbal cadence. My swimsuit is a cozzie, a bather, or togs. Kyle wouldn’t be caught dead in a budgie smuggler, but I’m still not sure if he wears boardies. It takes me several weeks here to learn that my backpack wardrobe also contains a singlet, strides, a cardie, a flannie, a windcheater, sunnies, grunders, a frock, sandshoes, and of course, thongs for wearing in the arvo. A dag I wasn’t, nor was I a bogan.

Reed says a few days after our arrival here: “I like Australians. They almost speak English.”

We’re here for six weeks, and it’s Christmas, so we’re giving ourselves carte blanche to enjoy good things. Good things sometimes show up in life cloaked as guilty pleasures—dark chocolate, well-crafted mattresses, a forgotten show now on Netflix—and like this entire trip, being in Australia feels like luxury. Luxuries, even relished frugally, feel like an homage to an overabundant lifestyle after my decade-long inclination toward thrift.

Ten years after our start of global, nonprofit employment doing important work in hard places, we struggled with letting ourselves enjoy things. Several years ago, when we lived in Turkey, we spent one Thanksgiving in Paris because it was the cheapest international flight out of Izmir. We spent weeks agonizing before buying the tickets. What will people think? Should we overcompensate for going to a fancy place by staying in the sketchy part of town? Perhaps eat Thanksgiving dinner at a cheap café as penance? (Spoiler: there are no cheap cafés in Paris.)

This is still my default way of thinking about luxuries. After earmarking travel money for years, we no longer feel guilty about this round-the-world trip as a whole, but it is still mostly an exercise in frugality. And here we are now, in Australia, right after affordable Southeast Asia. It’s one of the world’s most expensive countries.

Part of our ability to enjoy Queensland our first week here is through a work assignment. I’ll be writing several pieces for the North American division of Queensland’s tourism board, which means our job as a family is to learn how to frugally enjoy northeast Oz, home to some of earth’s most stunning land and seascapes. We will experience some touristy sights and excursions, so guilt-free and in the name of work, we dive in.

Australia is home to Uluru, the world’s largest monolith and named by white settlers as Ayers Rock, planted squarely in the continent’s center, where 35 percent of all the land is effectively desert. Alice Springs, the closest town, is almost three hundred miles away and a five-hour drive through the Outback, where the second most common fatality to drivers, after heat exhaustion, is a collision with a kangaroo or a camel. The continent-cum-country is largely sparse and uninhabited by people, but is home to 5,700 different animal species, 80 percent found nowhere else in the world. Scientists aren’t sure whether there are 100,000 different insect species, or twice that number, but odds are good that many are fatal, because Australia has more things that will kill you than anywhere else on the planet. Ten of the world’s deadliest snakes live here, and five of the most lethal creatures in the world—the inland taipan (the most venomous land snake on the planet), the Belcher’s sea snake (one hundred times more toxic than the taipan), the cone snail, the box jellyfish, and the blue-ringed octopus—reside in the northeast state of Queensland, where we begin our visit.

There are two significant natural wonders to see in this corner of Australia, and a man named John will show us one of them this morning. He is a local Aboriginal guide in the Daintree Rainforest, the world’s oldest at some 135 million years.

“My childhood home is just down the street here,” he says after we walk through the entrance to the national park. “I went to school a few kilometers away with all my cousins and siblings, and my grandparents’ grandparents lived in the same village where I still live.”

John is about fifty years old, stocky, with thick hair; he is wearing khaki shorts, a polo shirt, and hiking boots. I’m mildly disappointed he’s wearing Western clothes instead of native Aboriginal attire, then kick myself for even having that thought.

Our kids are entranced by him and his cheerful disposition. “Kids, kids, come over here, and we’ll first walk around the campfire three times before entering the forest. This place is sacred territory to my people.” He is as excited as a giddy child on Christmas to introduce us to his homeland. We walk in a bungling line around the smoky fire; I cough and feel an extra trickle of sweat trace down my back. The smoke smells sweet, like earthy tea, and wafts into the trees, disappears.

John asks the kids to choose walking sticks from a nearby cluster of trees; then we gather around him for a short homily to the woods. “As we enter the forest, stay silent and listen to the trees. They have stories. They knew the dinosaurs now buried in the dirt by name.” I look to my children, and Reed, the literal one, raises a perplexed eyebrow.

“That means these trees are really old,” I whisper in his ear.

“The Daintree tells us the story of the world,” John continues. “Well, the part of the story that doesn’t involve us humans. Nowhere else in the world can you see still-living examples of all eight major stages in evolutionary history, all right next to each other. This forest, my friends, is the ultimate natural history textbook.” He closes his eyes and we watch as his antennae perk, listening to his native soil. The kids are quiet and find John mysterious, like an eccentric uncle. I bow my head, offer a quick prayer of thanks to be here.

Later, I read UNESCO’s description of the crowning of the Daintree as a World Heritage Site, verifying John’s assertion. Indeed, the age of the pteridophytes, the age of the conifers and cycads, the age of the angiosperms, the conclusion of Gondwana (the ancient supercontinent before it split into today’s continents), the origin of songbirds, the mixing of continental biota between Australian and Asian plates, the extreme effects of the Pleistocene glacial periods on tropical rain forest vegetation, and the most important living record of the history of marsupials and terrestrial vegetation—all are on display here, inhaling and exhaling together, its scent of sweet decay wafting in the air.

The land is special here; a dance of God’s divinity with dirt. We are here to witness it.

As we start our walk with John, I recognize the good fortune that I’m a lax, germs-won’t-kill-you sort of parent. Even with this child-rearing tenet, it takes all my strength here in the Daintree to resist strapping a child or two to my body with duct tape. We’re a family of hikers, of natural-water swimmers, a tribe that romps in the dirt—a walk in the woods should be innocuous enough. But this is the Daintree. It is boundless and wild.

We bend around a curve of a well-trodden path, and John points to an innocent-looking fern and says with cheer, “See that? Don’t touch it—it’ll paralyze you from the neck down.”

There are prehistoric leaves that mimic paper accordion fans; idiot fruit, the seeds of which produce a poison similar to strychnine; and six types of wild ginger, some of which provide water for desperate vagabonds while the rest contain poison. There is an innocent-looking willowy shoot waving through the breeze, about four feet out of the ground, with transparent cilia along its body.

“When I was about—oh, this guy’s age,” John said, pointing to Reed, then back to the plant, “I touched this. Nightmares and shakes every night for years. Strange ones too. To this day, about once or twice a year, that part-a my body’ll go numb for no apparent reason. Or it’ll tingle this way and that. And then that night, sure enough—psychotic dreams. Yeah. So kids—don’t go touching it.”

I glance at my six-year-old, who wouldn’t have been tempted to touch the plant ten seconds ago. John says, “Onward—this next tree’s a doozy that’ll put hair on yer back.”

I pull the three kids to me. “You guys, do not go ten feet near that plant, do you hear me? Or you will not go to college because of the inevitable medical bills and psychiatric care for which you will be forever indebted to your father and me.” This is the whispered voice I reserve for waiting in unpredictable passport control lines or visiting their great-grandma’s house-of-breakable-tchotchkes.

“But Mom,” Tate says, “the path is only a foot wide. Kinda impossible.”

“You’ll figure out a way,” I reply.

John points to plants and trees used as combat weapons during World War II and in ancient Aboriginal homeopathic remedies and beverages. More than twelve thousand species of insects dwell among this dirt and trees, symbiotic with the white-lipped tree frog, colossal blue Ulysses butterfly, and cassowary. There are stories about every single tree we pass, myths about trees inhabited by ancestral spirits or childhood tales passed down from John’s great-grandfather.

As our hike ends, he gathers the five of us around a cluster of rocks. Here, he explains, are the mothers of the artistic tools used in indigenous artwork; paints concocted through years of sediment infused with iron oxide; clay and ochres in shades of brown, red, yellow, white. John’s ancestors have dabbled in this medium for thirty thousand years. He taps the rocks on a flat boulder, crushes bits into rock powder, dips his fingers in a nearby stream, mixes the powder and water with his fingers into varicolored paste, and swathes our arms with dots of burnt sienna and white.

“It’s a blessing and honor that the rain forest welcomes us here,” John says reverently, holding his palms upward. “Let us remember to tread lightly on her and all her family, and to go forth in peace.”

He is a friar in hiking boots, a deacon of the forest.

We come to a picnic table under a thatched-roof awning, where a friend of John’s is percolating traditional bush tea over a campfire.

“Come, sit down for a bit of tea and damper!” his friend says.

“What’s a damper?” Tate asks.

John and his friend look at each other. “Well . . . it’s a damper. You know, like a biscuit.”

The kids look at me.

“Cookie,” I say.

Their eyes brighten and they run to the table, then stop at the rounded mounds of baked flour. Tate picks one up, takes a timid bite, gives a polite smile and nod.

“Well,” says John’s friend, “it’s more like bread.”

“I’m okay for now,” Reed says, not touching his damper. Finn devours his and eats Reed’s. I take a few dutiful sips of tea and swallow the taste of steeped twigs and leaves, breathe in its smoky aroma. Kyle chugs his tea and takes seconds.

I have just taken my children on a walk in the forest, an outing we partake in weekly in the Pacific Northwest. There, we brush past ponderosa pines. Here, we plod through prehistoric plants. The Oregon soil we cross is ripe with our familial ancestry, yet here the rain forest dirt percolates with our cradle, our origin. These roots spread wide and deep. I watch as the leaves swirl humbly in my cup.

We say thanks and good-bye to John, then head back to the park entrance and hop on a bus for a five-minute ride to a more modern path through the rain forest: a suspension bridge through trees to a swimming hole called Mossman Gorge. We dip our bodies and float in bone-chilling freshwater, buried in the veins of the world’s oldest patch of creation. Underwater stones scrape John’s painted dots off our arms, flecks of rock powder dissolving into the gentle waves that make room for us this afternoon.

I glide on the water’s surface and watch goose bumps rise on my legs, then submerge my ears and hear the gurgling life underneath. I listen to my kids squeal at the thrill of the gentle current pulling them where it wants. I gaze at the sheer splendor of the leaves above me, leaves seen nowhere else on this planet.

Sometimes, even when I’m standing on a remarkable slice of terra firma, I’m besotted with wanderlust, my heart thumping for the next unknown place and my mind wondering what’s next. But right now, in this rain forest, floating in crystal waters after a walk on ancient, sacred soil with my flesh and blood, I want to be nowhere else. Nowhere. This, right now, is home. I can hear God through the rustling of the prehistoric fan-shaped leaves, the scurry of alien insects on the bark, the familiar laughter of my children slipping on stones in the water. Everything here is unfamiliar, but it’s familiar. We are transient, vagabonds, and yet we’re tethered.

About Australia, travel writer Bill Bryson says, “This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained.” The Daintree Rainforest has one more unique quality: it’s the only natural UNESCO Heritage Site that bleeds seamlessly right into another one next door. Packed with stuff, indeed.

Today, we will snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef next door. The kids have been eagerly waiting for this day since before we left for China, and while they’re passable swimmers, they’ve never snorkeled. I’m confident they’ll love the boat ride out to the reef, but I’m curious how they’ll fare with the wet suits, unwieldy fins, suffocating masks, and tiresome snorkels.

A wet suit is the most unattractive, unflattering garb ever invented, which I’m reminded of because the kids roll with laughter at Kyle and me when we hand them their assigned suits. A few minutes ago we arrived at a platform out in Agincourt Reef, one of the 2,900 complex systems that make up the entire 1,400-mile reef. As soon as the boat parked, there was a mad rush to get in line for wet suits, so Kyle and I ran to the line while the kids waited at a picnic table on the platform.

We demonstrate the process of squeezing our adult bodies into still-damp wet suits, and I feel like I’m stuffing a watermelon into a pair of girl’s panty hose. The kids find this uproarious.

“We look like spies!” Finn says when we’re all dressed.

“Yeah! Let’s go look for a hidden jewel and plan a heist!” Tate replies.

Kyle takes a photo of them with devilish spy glares, finger guns poised. They continue their imagined life as spies while I gather our handful of masks and fins and look out into the rippling aquamarine waves. The sky and water are monochromatic. It is a canvas of blue, textured by shadowy-small waves.

An expert snorkeler I am not, but I know enough to show the kids how to spit in their masks to keep them from fogging, to violently puff when water splashes into their snorkels, and to walk backward in the water so as not to trip on their fins. I check that their life vests are tightly secured, and that the younger two have pool noodles to keep them floating on the surface. Our platform has a floating fence around the permissible snorkeling area, and there are lifeguards at every corner. Still, it feels daunting to release my four- and six-year-olds out into the Great Barrier Reef. This is the constant parental challenge, to push our fledglings out the tree, into the liminal void, a maturing exercise that’s exacerbated during travel, when everything is new and nothing is predictable.

I ease into the water with Tate, while Kyle swims in with Reed and Finn. It amazes me that no matter how exotic the location, how one-of-a-kind the experience, the act of swimming always remains the same. During my childhood summers, I woke at the crack of dawn and met my friend who lived on my block for a sunrise bike ride to the neighborhood pool; that early-morning dip involved the same stroke, stroke, stroke as it does now, on the largest reef on the planet. The percussive pulse from submerging my ears into water echoes back the same muffled sounds as my childhood trips to lakes and rivers in Texas. The earth’s surface is over 70 percent covered in water, and sometimes I wonder about a drop of water resting on my shoulder, whether it’s been to Antarctica or the South China Sea, or perhaps, miraculously, even out my childhood kitchen sink.

This water is cold and clear as glass, and the current allows for simple breaststrokes as I dip my head into another planet. Above the water’s surface, it is sun’s reflection and waves. Two inches underneath, and I am floating above a kingdom of coral, some four hundred different types in shades of orange, yellow, green, purple. There are staghorn coral, resembling a deer’s antlers, clustered in bouquets and offering protection from prey to the smaller fishes. Brain coral, with its folded ridges and grooves. Thousands of minuscule fish swim in a thousand different directions, an aquatic rush hour of scurried dancing. An eggplant-purple giant clam, four feet in diameter, has taken his place on the shallow sea floor, resting vertically, his upward-facing mouth opening and closing with the current. He is the old man of this particular reef, sitting in his favorite recliner, retelling a slow story. I find Nemo scampering through sea lettuce algae.

I resurface every couple of minutes, a mother hen counting her chicks. Tate sometimes comes up to clean out her mask at the same time, grin wide and eyes gaping. She looks at me knowingly, as if we share the secret to the unseen world below us.

“Mom, did you see Nemo? I saw Dory too,” she says.

“Did you see the brain coral?” I ask.

“Yeah, that was weird. It looks like a dozen brains were emptied out here from a science lab.”

The five of us reconvene for lunch on the platform, plastic plates piled high with shrimp and fish. We are exhausted and exhilarated, cheeks pink and hair matted to our foreheads.

“Mom, did you see the purple and blue and yellow fish?” Finn asks in his high-pitched preschool voice.

“Yes! What did you think?”

Finn shrugs. “Cool.”

“This is the best day ever!” Reed says.

“Oh yeah? Why is that?” Kyle asks.

“Because I’ve never, never, never seen this before. Well, except on TV,” he answers.

I think of my childhood: hardly leaving central Texas, content to swim in my neighborhood pool and cruise suburban lanes on my bike. I’m grateful and in awe my children have now seen the Great Barrier Reef. I whisper a prayer that they will still be gleeful over Slip’N Slides and sno-cones.

Hours later, on the boat ride back to land, Finn sleeps on the seat next to me, wiped out from happy exertion. Reed scrolls through the day’s photos on Kyle’s phone, and Tate reads on her Kindle. I stare out the window. This water holds magic, gives birth to creation where most days nary a human eye is witness. Water is familiar; it is front-yard sprinklers and nearby creeks. And it is exotic, unknown, bearing secrets to worlds beneath worlds.

Our remaining days in Queensland are this: we board a plodding train from World War II upward to an arts village, high in the ancient rain forest; we watch locals hang out laundry and take children to school under the Daintree fan-palm leaves; we examine tiny, chalky Anglican churches nestled in a canopy of rain forest vines next to ice cream stands.

We camp in the countryside near the small town of Port Douglas and swim under stars in a rock-encrusted pool. We hold koalas, pet kangaroos, touch dingoes through fences, ogle wombats, cassowaries, crocodiles. We cross a street, and the tree in the crosswalk’s center screeches with rainbow lorikeets, and we watch them darken the sky as they leave in a synchronized dance, a flurry of green, blue, and red feathers. They are Australia’s pigeon, and they are breathtaking.

We drive for hours along the Queensland coastline, and the kids call out their holiday wish lists from the back seat. Bing Crosby joins us through speakers. We pull over to a roadside stand for mangoes and a picnic at a beachside rest stop, and Kyle and the kids scurry on boulders along the rocky beach, mindful of the deadly box jellyfish. Tate chats with a young girl about the pet rainbow lorikeet on her shoulder, a nonchalant redhead who might as well have been walking a mutt on a leash. We float on a military-issue duck boat through crocodile-ridden swamps.

Quite surprisingly, we find a Target, and buy new flip-flops for the boys, a new swimsuit for Tate, a few chocolates for St. Nicholas Day. I spot artwork from an Oregon friend splayed on a book’s cover in a bookshop in the middle of nowhere. We eat more ice cream and sip flat whites, Australia’s contribution to coffee. On the evening before St. Nicholas Day, we toss Kinder Eggs into the kids’ sweaty flip-flops at our rustic campsite.

One final afternoon, I unfold a cheap plastic chair under the awning of the campsite’s general store, tap into their spotty Wi-Fi, and cross my fingers that a Skype call to our American travel agent won’t disconnect halfway through a major credit card transaction. A chorus of kookaburras laugh in the nearby trees, serenading as my hold music. I book our second chunk of flights, to Casablanca, Nairobi, Nice. I recall those vaguely familiar place-names, but they feel a lifetime away.

As I power down my laptop, Kyle pulls up with the rental car, kids in the back seat. “Are you done? We want to drive into town and walk around.”