More Travel Stories From the 80's

No one was harmed in the making of these stories

A couple weeks ago I detailed some truly horrific things that have happened to me. Then last week, some nicer stuff from the 80’s. I don’t do those boring “First we went here and posed in front of a monument. Then we went there and posed in front of a church” stories. These are Kodachrome slides I recently rescued from my closet, and I only digitized the interesting ones.

In September 1989 I had a sabbatical from 3Com (a corporate tradition which, according to a Wall Street Journal article), is actually coming back). I had nine weeks off with pay, so I went to Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. I’d been planning to see Singapore, but people told me it would be boring after Thailand, so I skipped it.

Australia

I flew into Cairns (pronounced “cans”) which is up in Queensland. The Great Barrier Reef is about an hour by sea (it gets closer to land the farther south you go), and I had a couple boat trips out there.

These are not my photos. I don’t own an underwater camera.

The Reef

The coral is only 10 or 20 feet below the surface where we went. I did “snuba”

where you breathe underwater from a scuba tank, but it’s on the surface. You don’t need scuba certification to do it. Of course, Australia and New Zealand are amazingly casual about letting you risk your life, compared to the US with its liability suits.

One of the fish you saw down there was “Humphrey” the wrasse. It weighed 300 pounds. Humphrey was not hostile, fortunately.

Besides seeing the reef, I did a two-day sea kayak trip out to Dunk Island. When we got there, they told us that the water had been amazingly calm for the last three weeks.

Does that sound familiar? “The weather was great, until you came!” We should have come then. It was not calm when we set out.

There were four two-person kayaks for the 2 1/2 mile trip out there. My partner and I got separated from the others, and the waves being three feet or so, we had a difficult time of it. She said, “Are we going to sink?” I took that as a big vote of confidence. We didn’t sink.

I don’t remember anything about what we did on Dunk, except that dinner the first night was about 11:30 pm, the staff being rather slow to get it going.

For some horrifying anecdotes about Cyclone Yasi (2011) on Dunk, check out the Wikipedia article.

The 69 Dunk Island Resort staff and the General Manager David Henry who were on the island at the time were forced into lockdown, four to a room, with rations that involved only a sandwich and an apple. Staff reported that they were not given the option to evacuate despite police asking the island's management to do so a week prior. Staff stated that the resort island's management told staff that they were required to stay and help with the clean-up, some were in fact required to return to work from the mainland as the cyclone approached including an employee who, reportedly, had sliced off part of their thumb in a boat accident. Staff reported that resort managers told them not to speak to the media. An unnamed Hideaway Resorts spokeswoman said, "They (staff) were given the choice to leave or stay and many chose to stay and bunker down".

Crocodiles

Cairns is the biggest city in Queensland:

but as you can see here, there’s a lot of Oz north of it. That’s the Cape York Peninsula to the north. If you really want to rough it in unspoiled jungle and risk getting eaten by a crocodile, this is your place. I wasn’t quite that adventurous. However, there are nature parks where you can see crocs up close, safely. I think it was Port Douglas where I did that.

Atherton Tablelands

Tourist info

I took another day tour of this. The only things I can remember are the Herberton Historic Village

the Curtain Fig Tree, and Cathedral Fig Tree.

(those two are not my photos)

I had my Chicago Cubs t-shirt on as a conversation opener, and it worked: I hooked up with a couple American tourists from the Bay Area!

They were planning on going to Darwin and then down the middle of the continent to Ayers Rock, while I was going the other way down the coast, so we arranged to try to meet up in Melbourne.

Brisbane

They were having a strike on domestic airline flights so I had to take the train to Brisbane.

There really isn’t much reason to visit Brizzy (every name gets abbreviated like that in Oz: breakfast is “brekkie”). Except for Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. Most zoos in Oz have 5-10 koalas at most. Lone Pine had 80 when I was there. Heaven:

.They have the Tourist Koala which lets you hold him (or her) and be photographed. Naturally I had to do that

Since I’m sure inquiring minds want to know: koalas only eat eucalyptus leaves, so they smell like Vicks VapoRub.

Sydney

I took a million shots just like this (this is a stock photo):

Why did I bother? You already know what it looks like.

I stayed in Bondi Beach, which is beautiful.

There are lots of zoos around Sydney where you can see the incredible animals that Oz boasts. There are tame kangaroos

you can walk right up to them and scratch their ears.

Melbourne

I took the train to Melbourne, which is the “Los Angeles” to Sydney’s “San Francisco.” Melbourne’s not nearly as scenic as Sydney. I met up again with the two guys I met in Cairns, and that was a lot harder to arrange before everyone carried cell phones. We communicated via paper letters at the American Express office.

I wrote about what happened in Melbourne in Travel Disasters (“A Disaster Back Home When You’re Away”): the Loma Prieta earthquake happened back home. So I missed out on all that. It looked a lot worse from 8,000 miles away than it actually was.

Fortunately, my house sitter let me know I didn’t have to cut the trip short and come home, so I continued on to Thailand.

Thailand

I was planning to go on a group trip with Explore (I don’t think it was any of their current trips), so I checked into a hotel in Bangkok the night before. The bellhop asked me if I wanted to have a girl sent up to my room (the answer was no, in case you’re wondering). Thailand is famous for sex tourism, but interestingly enough, this was the only time anyone solicited me.

The group was ten Brits, two Australians, two Irish, and me. It was actually fun to be the only American. We found out much later that the two Irish guys were actually Catholic priests, but they didn’t tell anyone.

My photos of Bangkok are the same ones that everyone takes: the temples, the Buddhas, the klongs (canals). It’s hot, crowded, and traffic-choked, and at one point on a bus I could actually see that walking would have been faster. At one breakfast there, I foolishly had some scrambled eggs, which I think must have upset my stomach, because I could hardly eat anything the rest of the trip. I survived on toast and those little Thai bananas, and I came home seven pounds lighter.

The Boat

We got on a boat going north up the Chao Praya river, the main river of Thailand.

There was a cooking crew of three Thai ladies who did nothing but cook our meals. As soon as they finished cleaning up from lunch, they’d start in on dinner.

Chiang Mai

We spent a couple days in Chiang Mai, a much smaller town than Bangkok, and everyone loved it, including me.

Hill Tribes

There are a number of non-Thai ethnic groups that live in the hills in the northern parts of Thailand. They were migratory tribes, some from China and Burma, and they originally practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, where they’d exhaust one area and then move on. Naturally, this practice was frowned upon and now they are more stationary, but they’re definitely still different from the rest of Thailand. Here are some pictures I took in the villages:

Before we went there, we were told to bring gifts for the tribe, and what specifically we should bring, since giving the wrong thing to the wrong person could be a serious faux pas. For women, a needle-and-thread sewing kit, and for the kids, wrapped candies. A lot of the kids would put the candy in their pocket instead of eating it.

No gifts for the men.

Tourism is actually a big part of the tribes’ income, and most of them have a tourist hut serving as a hotel, where all the tourists sleep on the floor. At one of them, we were shown to the tourist hut, and the village children were brought in and they sang a song to us.

Then we were informed that they expected us to sing to them! What song does everyone know? Well, ten of them were Brits, so we sang, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

After dinner, the women would bring out their handicrafts to sell to us.

Chiang Rai

We also went to Chiang Rai, at the northern border with Myanmar. That city became famous later with the Thai soccer team that got trapped in a cave.

Hong Kong

I spent five days in Hong Kong. I have no slides for that at all. I remember I stayed in one hotel room that had no windows.

Hong Kong is now a regular part of China, but then it was still quasi-independent.