(I’m still finishing my series of posts about a trip my wife and I took to Australia last month. This is the second-to-last of the Australia posts.)

We made our way into downtown Cairns, returned our rental car, and hooked up with our live-aboard dive boat, the Spirit of Freedom. It’s nice and big, we have a room with a private bathroom, a double bed, and four portholes. Good stuff.

[Our boat.]

We tooled out about thirty miles to the Saxon Reef and did two dives. It turns out the Great Barrier Reef isn’t the one big monolithic thing, it’s more like a series of medium-sized reefs (like Saxon Reef) lined up along a curve that’s a couple of hundred miles long.

On Saxon Reef, we saw sharks, a turtle and some giant clams—I mean giant as in four feet across. I worship these creatures, they’re like yonic gods, embodiments of the female creative force, each of their cracks veiled by mantle bearing an elegant one-of-a-kind leopard-spot Turing pattern, and with fringed holes in the mantle displaying the clam-goddesses secret innards—disks and fringes of a creamy white.

And then we steamed all night to the vicinity of Ribbon Reef #10 (another feature of the Great Barrier Reef), maybe a hundred miles from Cairns. It was raining most of the time.

[More or less irrelevant picture of wash-up water running down a Sydney sidewalk.]

The rocking of the boat got to me over the evening, and when they set a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes in front of me for supper, I went up to our room and filled two sickbags with puke. They told us the bags are of rice-paper, which disintegrates quickly in the water, and what we should throw them overboard after filling them. “The fish all come. For them, it’s Christmas.”

I slept badly, waking every hour on the hour like a cuckoo clock. Outside the portholes, the clouds had cleared up, and the moon was laying down a wrinkled highway of light upon the waters. The boat wallowed along, rocking us, with my stomach empty it felt okay.

I’d been anxious about diving again, it had been over two years. Sylvia was just snorkeling, and for the few dives I buddied up with a guy named Mike, about my age, and with a comparable amount of dive experience—something like sixty dives—and it worked out fine. The only difficulties were that I’m slightly stopped up, so I had to work hard at clearing my ears by pinching my nose and blowing.

There are a variety of thoughts that I usually have while diving.

[Gull on a spar aboard the Spirit of Freedom.]

Often, at the start, I’ll be rushing, swimming fast, as if I was going to find something different around the next coral head. Really, everything is pretty much everywhere, the reefs and the undersea environment are a fractal, and if you look twice as hard at a given spot, you see three times as much.

Another common thought is, after about ten minutes, I’ll think, “Okay, I’ve seen it all, I’m done, can I get out now?” But really, you want to empty out your tank and stay in about forty minutes. So you relax and absorb more. It’s more like listening to a long symphony than like having sex. It’s not that you reach a peak and are done.

I always worry about my air supply a little bit, but over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good and stretching it out.

[Partioning the space of all possibilities.]

One of the really discombobulating things about diving is that you can’t just—stop. On land, if I really want to stare at something, I hunker down and stare for as long as I like. But in the water, I’m always drifting—propelled by currents, the motions of my limbs, and the varying buoyancy of my body as I breathe in and out. I can’t sit still. Sometimes, I do in fact make myself heavy and sit or kneel on the sandy bottom, just to have a moment of rest.

On the second morning at 7 a.m. we dived a so-called bommie, by the name of Pixie Peak. “Bommie” is from an Aboriginal word “bomara” that means underwater mountain. I’d thought I might not be up that early, but I was all too glad to leave my uneasy bed at 6:30 a.m. Pixie Peak is a ninety-foot high tower of coral, about thirty feet across, kind of a butte. We dropped down to the bottom, and wound our way up around it, our path like a barber-pole stripe.

[My 2001 painting “Under My Bed” of a cuttlefish. See my paintings page for more info.]

My dive buddy and I got down to ninety feet before the others, and the first very first thing I saw was a giant cuttlefish—be still my heart. He was easily two feet long, maybe three, just like one I painted in Under the Bed as a preliminary to imagining my space-cuttlefish character Professor Bumby in Frek and the Elixir.

The cuttlefish had his facial squid-bunch of tentacles demurely gathered into a cone pointing my way. His (or her) eyes had an unfathomable expression, due to the pupils being shaped like the letter W. The hula-skirt frill-fin that circles the bulk of his body was in constant motion, easing him backwards away from me, his eldritch eyes tracking my movements. I noticed that his skin flickered very rapidly, changing its shade as rapidly as jump-cuts in a video.

Looking at some of the bright little damsel fish along the wall of the bommie, I was stuck by how really awkward they are. Their only tools for delicate maneuvers are these two little paddle fins on their sides by their gills. And at any time, random tendrils of current are canting them to one side or the other. I feel an affinity for the damsel fish—I imagine that I’m in control of my life, but really all I have are a pair of awkward paddle fins, flailing away at the sea of reality, which is so richly braided with intricate currents I can neither anticipate nor control.

I skipped the second SCUBA dive that day, at Challenger Bay (still part of the Great Barrier Reef), and took Sylvia snorkeling instead. This was in fact a really good spot for it, as the reef rose up to acres of shallows. We swam along in waters ten feet deep, feasting our eyes on the wack corals: staghorn heads filled with clans of damsel fish, shelf corals with flowery cod hiding in their shade, dozens of giant clams, thick pimply sea hares—like sea cucumbers, but bigger and creamy white with brown spots. Since Sylvia and I were doing most of our swimming with our big flipper fins, we held hands or linked arms, it was nice to be together with her, flying over this alien, jumbled paradise.

In the evening I went for a night dive—this was the first really good night dive I ever had. We came back to the same relatively shallow reef where Sylvia and I had snorkeled. Each diver had a flashlight in hand and a glowstick mounted on his or her tank. The guides had mentioned that the coral might be spawning—they usually do it a few days after the full moon in November or December, and we’d just had a full moon the other day. We did indeed find some spawning coral.

[Two of my dive buddies, Mark (left) and Mike (right).]

Keep in mind that a coral reef is a colony of individual polyps, each in its own little stony niche. When they spawn, some of the polyps send out clouds of sperm, and others push out little pink eggs the size of a BB, or a bit smaller. Worms, fairy shrimp, small fry, and sea lice crowd around the spawning reef, eating as much of the bounty as the can. Each little spot on the reef becomes a scene of great activity, reminding me of Times Square at New Years Eve, albeit on a very small scale. Some of the sea lice were nipping my scalp and my hands.

There were dozens of big trevalley fish around us, each of them two or three feet long, maybe twenty pounds—they were fascinated by our flashlight beams, and hoping to eat any smaller fish that we highlighted.

In the coral I saw bright red beads shining in the light, looking close I could see these were the eyes of tiny little red shrimp nestled in nooks. Some large purple nudibranchs (or sea slugs) were on the crawl, out to mate with each other. They were like big velvety washrags or dishtowels, with a soft pair of feelers at one end. A night of sex on the reef.

[After our dive, a nurse shark came up to the back of the boat wanting food. That’s my third dive buddy, Daniel from Italy, there. He did the night dive with me.]

After the night dive we got brownies with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. There’s a sense that you can eat any amount of food if your diving. This said, I didn’t sleep very well. I got with insomnia and did yoga on the deck for awhile. It feels extraterrestrial to have all different constellations in the sky. I think I saw the Southern Cross.

We dived another cylindrical bommie-tower the next day. A great sea turtle perched on a ledge of this bommie, like an eagle in his aerie. But, unlike an eagle, he was unperturbed by seeing a dozen divers wallow by.

The last dive was kind of exciting, as we were trying to complete a fairly long route around three or four bommies—and we swam rather deep. I was kicking overly hard, and I ran out of air before we could finish our plan. I surfaced with my current dive buddy, a young guy called Marc, and we saw we were a couple of hundred yards from the ship. Marc still had plenty of air, so we wallowed along just under the surface. But the closer we got to the ship, the stronger the currents got. I didn’t have the strength for the last fifty yards. An inflatable lighter from the ship was buzzing around, and I got him to pick us up, which was exciting. By now the surf was so high that the lighter couldn’t really dock to the ship, we had to jump out as the waves sent the little boat hurtling by.

[Rescued from the current by a lighter.]

I did eight dives in three days, and one snorkel session. Actually I would have liked to snorkel more—I tend to see more when I’m snorkeling, and there’s less time pressure, and less of a need to stay close to your buddy.

The Great Barrier Reef is certainly better than any of the sites I’ve visited in Mexico, Hawaii, or the Turks and Caicos Islands. In general, South Pacific sites like the Great Barrier Reef have, I think, brighter fish and more interesting coral—including the so-called soft coral, which is floppy and leathery.

[A land tree with a strangler-fig growing down it.]

In terms of the South Pacific sites, I think Fiji, Tonga, Micronesia, and Palau are certainly as good or maybe even a little better than the Great Barrier Reef. I’d still have to say Palau has the best boat dives, and more awesome walls. And Fiji, Tonga, and Pohnpei have the virtue of having good snorkeling areas that you can swim to right off shore—it really takes a boat to get out to the Great Barrier Reef from the mainland of Australia.

But it was totally worth going to see the Barrier Reef, and good to be in the water again. Diving’s really pretty easy, I remembered—as I always do.

Merry Christmas to all! And Season’s Greetings. And a great 2010. I’ll be taking a week or two off from posting now.

Unreal that we’ve already polished off the first decade of the 21st Century.

We flew to Cairns in Queensland on the northeast part of Australia. Keep in mind that in Australia “north” means warmer, as in “closer to the equator.” So Queensalnd’s winter is like summer in, like, Mississippi or Louisiana or even Florida in the US.

It was weird to see the (plastic) Christmas tree in Cairns, where it’s over a hundred degrees. The town’s slogan this time of year is “SumMerry Christmas!”

We spent two nights in a resorty spot north of town called Palm Cove. Palm Cove is a lovely spot, a little like Fiji, with palm trees, weird birds, gnarled little grape-leaf trees, islands, ibis birds yodeling in trees, and a whole different set of stars in the sky.

There’s these things called box jellyfish in northern Australia, the size of your head, and with twenty-foot long stinger-laden tendrils. If you get stung you might actually die. Ordinarily there aren’t many of them out in the open ocean—they spawn in the rivers and drift out from there.

Thanks to the danger of box jellies nobody swims on the beaches in Queensland between October and May—which is box jellyfish season. This is a bit awkward as it’s so hot there, totally humid, and very tropical,

We stayed in a nice clean motel-like place, right on the beach, and they do have a tiny area of the beach fenced in with underwater nets to keep out the box jellyfish—which they just call stingers for short. But the pen is very so small, and the water’s a bit muddy right at the shore, and the in any case the water’s full of tourists wearing huge floppy-brim anti-sun hats, so—eccch, naw. In any case, the motel has a nice pool. And we took a swim in the Mossman River.

The town of Mossman is about an hour’s drive north of Palm Cove, it’s at the southern edge of the Daintree tropical rain forest. We had a rental car and we drove up there and went to the Mossman Gorge.

It was a little crowded with locals—it being Sunday—but we found a spot along the Mossman River that was pretty empty, with a twenty-foot deep pool, and a jumble of giant automobile-sized smooth granite boulders. And jungle on either side. And a feral “scrub chicken” wandering around.

I’m talking true jungle, with vines up and down the gnarled, alien trees. Wads of fern growing in the crotches of the branches. A green parrot feather on the ground. It was great to be there and we spent a half hour in the river.

Later we stopped in at this classic outback-style Australian pub in Mossman proper, which is sugar-cane town. The pub had three people in its cavernous interior, watching a cricket game on TV. They were drunk, and excited about the cricket. The bartender, a skinny guy with a frightening stare, started telling us about the crocodiles in the Mossman River.

“Not that they’d be up where you were swimming,” said the bartender. “They don’t crawl up past the rocks, but here in town there’s some spots where the river’s very deep, with dark holes—you’d be making a mistake to swim down here. Last year a croc ate a boy and his dog.” He pressed his hands against his lean stomach, his eyes haunted.

“I ate crocodile for dinner last night,” I told him. “Getting the jump on them.”

“How was it prepared?”

“In a Malaysian curry. It was good. Firmer than I’d expected.”

“Lovely.”

After the outback bar, we went into Port Douglas, a hip-seeming town. We saw a bunch of local freaks with dreadlocks having a picnic and playing Frisbee. And we got supper in a cafe at the wharf, the tip-ass end of nowhere, the edge of the world.

All through the meal we heard the squawking of a flock of maybe a thousand lorikeets—large birds like parrots—settling down for the evening in a grove of palms nearby.

May the the inflatable surfing Santa lead you safely into the new decade!

Sydney is all inside a harbor, with a mouth like the Golden Gate with steep cliffs on either side (but no bridge), and the beaches are on the outside. We took the ferry to Manly Beach to the north one day, landing on the harbor side and walking across the little isthmus to the ocean side.

[Swells rolling in from the open sea make the ferries rock and splash.]

Quite a few surfers on a beach break at Manly, and on a point break a little further out. Really big waves, coming off the Tasman Sea. Odd that the ocean has a different name here.

[Surfer at Manly Beach.]

I went swimming, and had to keep ducking under the huge breakers. We walked along the beach to a cute neighborhood called, get this, Fairy Bower. So British-sounding. Great tidepools there, and a “tide pool” of saltwater by the ocean, refilled daily by the sea, with a ladder and a little walk around it.

[Pool by the harbor. Note the ships nearby.]

Another day I swam in an outdoor heated saltwater pool right by the harbor in downtown Sidney, it’s beside the botanical gardens.

[Flying foxes dozing in the Sydney Botanical Gardens.]

After the swim, I saw giant fruit bats with five foot wingspans hanging in a lot of the botanical garden’s trees, a few of them flapping around. They’re called flying foxes. At dusk you see them circling over the harbor, on their way to go out and forage for fruit—they may fly up to twenty kilometers out from their nesting trees. The farmers don’t like the flying foxes, but they’re a protected species. They actually do a lot of good, by pollinating the trees where they feed.

[A Moreton Bay fig tree, a wonderful, huge Australian tree you see pretty often. Moreton Bay (near Brisbane) also features a tasty crustacean called a “bug,” which is kind of like a short, wide lobster.]

On our second-to-last day in Sydney we made it to Bondi Beach, took the bus there. It has lovely sugar-fine sand, a crescent, with quite a large village bordering it, bigger than Cruz, almost like Berkeley, with quaint cottages with flowers and vines. Surfers on the waves.

[Wild parrots and lorakeets can be found nibbling the vegetation downtown.]

The wind was very, very strong, so we didn’t stay right on the beach that long, we went over to a bluff on one side and sat by another saltwater pool, this one just a few inches higher that the ocean, built on the rocks, with waves splashing in. We saw an exceedingly tan man who was even fatter than me—I’m eating sweets every chance I get, gelato, almond croissant, profiteroles, you name it. We saw two cute young woman hop down to the beach with their boards and go in—reminding us of our daughter Isabel in her high school years.

We walked along the bluff, which was weirdly sculpted by wind and surf.

[Luna Park in Sydney.]

On our last night in Sydney, we rode the ferry around another part of the harbor, passing the funky “Luna Park” amusement park. We got some paella at a street festival, walking around very slowly on our weary legs. Right after we laid down in our room, a fireworks show started over the water. I ran back outside to see it. It’s a good life.

[Carollers at the Friday Night Market in the Rocks district of Sydney.]

There’s a pub downstairs called “the oldest pub in Sydney” and it’s constantly full of beefy Australians. Sometimes you even see guys wearing kilts. After we went to bed—this being Friday—they kicked out the jams, they had a guitarist and they sang, in massive beefy tearful unison, songs until midnight. Not that it kept us awake. Resting our weary trotters.

The people in Melbourne kept trying to express the difference between Melbourne and Sydney. Maybe it’s like the difference between Philadelphia and New York or between San Jose and San Francisco. Not that either of these comparisions really does justice to the urban charm of Melbourne. Each city is unique.

It’s nice that Melbourne is on a slanting slope, and that it has so many old buildings—in that sense it’s a bit like Seattle, only minus the all-important factor of the ocean. In any case, I’d say that Sydney feels a little more sophisticated and happening than Melbourne—and, like San Francisco or Seattle, Sydney is on the ocean instead of on a muddy river or bay.

Speaking of my fair home city of San Jose, in a Sydney department store I saw a Chinese-made T-shirt saying, meaninglessly, “Western Conference. California. Ten Years. San Hose, Calif.” With an “H” instead of with a “J.” San Ho, yes.

We stayed in the Russell Hotel, a relatively inexpensive B&B in the Rocks district of Sydney, near a bunch of ferry slips along what’s called the Circular Quay, with the famous Sydney Opera House just a short walk along the waterfront from our room.

The Opera House is one of those rare buildings that lives up to one’s expectations. I never quite understood how it was shaped until I got to be here and walk around it. It’s roof is made of a bunch of cusps or horns or pairs of sphere-sectors. They look a little like sails or claws. Although cast from cement, the roofs are covered with white and beige tiles, so they’re pleasant to the touch—you can walk all around the outside of the building, and in many spots the roofs come down to the ground.

We had dinner—roast jewfish(!)—in a restaurant near the Opera House with a full moon rising over those Mohawk white roofs, the Sydney Bridge all lit up, tall buildings reflected in the water, and the lights of the Luna Park amusement park in the distance, it’s entrance a huge face with an open mouth. You can take a ferry to Luna Park!

[Great view of Sydney from the quay near the Opera House.]

I’d like to see a show at the Opera House—but the big halls are sold out, and the shows in the small halls aren’t so inviting, like, a one-man show of a British guy lamenting about losing his apartment of twenty years (seriously), and a show of drag queens singing Christmas carols. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…but instead we went to see Les Claypool at the Enmore Theatre, also getting to mingle with hipster Sydneysiders (they really call the natives that).

[Squirting turtle in the lovely Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park. (Thanks for the ID, Paula)]

The Enmore is an old movie theater in the Valencia-Street-like neighborhood of Newtown. A quartet: an eclectic cello, a drummer, a vibes player, and Les on various kinds of bass guitars or bass-guitar-like instruments. The musicians wore tuxedos and masks.

Les rocked, at one point the vibes player switched to drums and did a dual drum solo with the main drummer, incredible, like a conversation, and near the end, Les came back onstage, dressed up in an ape suit and playing a one-string instrument by whacking it. The lights were beautiful colored cones, filled with stage fog.

[Random scraps of ornamental stone from an old building, arranged at the edge of the botanical gardgen in Sydney.]

It was good to see the grungers at the concert and in the neighborhood. We overheard a woman on six-inch platform boots telling a friend, “I’m angry at everyone all the time.” I saw a guy in a T-shirt saying “Dag Nasty” with a picture of a sheep’s butt (remember that a “dag” is a sheep’s dingleberry).

[Lots of didgireedoo players on the Circular Quay, a great sound all day.]

In the train back from Newtown we sat near a weathered Aussie couple, drinking a half-pint of gin, the woman maundering on and on, the two of them somewhat fitter-looking than their US counterparts. Looking out the train window I saw an excavating machine at work beneath an underpass, one of those jointed arms with claws, and had the sudden feeling of being on another planet.

[The Sydney Tower.]

The next day I happened to start talking to another American in downtown Sydney, a guy called Mike, with tattoos on both arms. He said he came from New Orleans, and that he was in Australia as a musician, with some gigs, moving from town to town. “You’re playing with Les?” I said, as a long-shot.

And, yes, he turned out to be the vibes player for Les Claypool’s band. He was a little surprised that I’d seen him playing the night before, but maybe not as surprised as I was. For me, it felt like meeting a mythic shaman or a cartoon character. He seemed glad to talk to me. They’re playing the Fillmore in San Francisco on New Years Eve, as they’ve often done before.

[An artist who’s currently calling himself Tatuz Nishi made a site-specific work by building little houses around two large sculptures of men on horses in front of the Gallery of New South Wales.]

I’m feeling some literary inspiration for my writing from the input here. The platypus beak, the fake-autobiographical novel True History of Ned Kelly, the Les Claypool band concert, and the Aboriginal art.

[Okay, I took a LOT of pictures of the opera. The ferries are cool, we rode them a lot.]