...and some other stuff happened

This is Part Five and the final installment of my thematic recap of my trip to Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef.

So yeah, I did a road trip from Brisbane up through the Great Barrier Reef to Cairns, and this, this, this and this happened. And in a perfect world, I would have also already written about everything else we encountered: the deadly stingers (as if the cassowaries didn't freak me out enough), how a bar in Cairns actually managed to allow the potential excitement of girls dancing on the bar get boring, the breathtaking drive between Cairns and Port Douglas or my newfound love for premixed bourbon and coke or the Aussie Breakfast. I may find time for an ode to the premixed bourbon and cokes in a future post, but for the others, they weren't meant to be.

In what's (mercifully) my last post on my trip, I leave you with two special encounters that John and I had with some, ummmmm, interesting Aussies. Which, of course, won't sound nearly as interesting as they would have if I had written this four weeks ago when the details were fresh in my head.

First up is Airlie Beach. It's Christmas Day, we had just finished an epic drive throughout the night and nothing is open. A town full of backpackers and no one knew what to do with themselves. After some exploring, we find what seemed like the one caravan park that actually has someone in the office. So we pay our fee and get settled. Shortly, a bald-headed Aussie, armed with a XXXX Gold (the standard white trash beer in Queensland), comes over to us to inquire about our ridiculously-painted van. He's quite bemused. We start talking, he introduces himself as Mike and is thrilled to hear that John is in law school and I'm in banking. (The latter of which, of course, isn't true. But Mike couldn't seem to wrap his head around the fact that I work for an advertising agency whose client is a bank. So I gave up correcting him, and for the rest of the night, I was "the banker".) Armed with this knowledge about our careers, Mike goes off on a ten-minute diatribe about law, his children and property investments, often contradicting himself. John and I are, of course, bewildered.

Mike invites us over to his camp area, where he and his friend Paul have assembled a menagerie of characters: another Aussie girl, an English girl and her French boyfriend, two German girls and a group of Brazilian dudes. They all seem friendly, so what the hell, right? We grab the very few beers that we had the foresight of buying the day before and sit down with them. Meanwhile, Mike and Paul start to work on straight rum and are clearly on the fast track towards shitcannery. (Yes, a technical term.) Paul, who's missing his right ring finger and has some sort of form of Tourrette's that makes him yell out prick! dude! every other minute, is playing the guitar with one of the Brazilian guys. Which attracts over another Aussie and his guitar. And this new guy is far too eager to play for us. So he starts getting at it, and he's pretty good. But absolutely ridiculous. Imagine a caricature of Bruce Springstein, with the raspy voice and scrunched up face. Then multiply that by ten. That was this guy. And he would not shut up. So whatever, we let him play and continued to drink.

It all began to devolve right about when Mike disappeared (which, of course, went unnoticed by the group at the time) and it came to light that the Springstein wannabe had just been released from a Japanese prison. For what, we don't know. Paul tried to find out, believe me, but Springstein wouldn't oblige. So Paul pressed. And Springstein got testy. And a bit confrontational. So Paul, in one of his few rational moves of the night, backed off. Shortly after, Mike announced his location as he began heaving onto the ground a hundred feet away from us. And with that, we called it a night. Except for Springstein, who continued to wail away for a few more hours as we somehow forced ourselves to sleep.

We met our second ridiculous Aussie in a gas station outside of Ayr, on our drive from Airlie Beach to Mission Beach. As we're pumping, this piece of shit van pulls up across from us on the opposite side of the pump. And out walks this quite hefty man in a shirt two sizes too small, some short shorts and no shoes. Fine, whatever. But of course, the dude wants to talk to us. Because, yes, we are driving a ridiculously-painted van. (I feel like this refrain is turning into a Matt Foley-esque "Van down by the river!" shtick.)

We begin talking and it very quickly turns out that this guy is a millionaire several times over. That's right: crap van, crap wardrobe, millionaire. Many, many times over. How, you ask? China, of course! I wish I could remember what the profession was, but basically, this guy moved to some random city in China (I'd never heard of it, but of course the population is apparently like 8 million people), started up a business and boom!, he's a millionaire. So he's bragging about how he's sooooo important in China, he's buddy buddy with local governors, and John and I are just looking at this guy, absolutely bewildered. Yet again.

Five minutes into this conversation -- strike that, there was no back-and-forth here -- five minutes into this monologue, John and I are itching for a way out. And that's when I notice that the guy is still pumping his gas. Not because he has a massive tank or anything; instead, he's filled his tank up to the absolute brim, to the point where gas was leaking back out of the van. But every time the pump automatically stops, he turns it back on, as if he can somehow squeeze just that much more in there. Even if it all just trickled right back out of the van. But really, even if that gas somehow did make it's way in there, do you really need that extra little bit? Is it even worth it? How much further will that get you? Ten kilometers? It's at this point that I decide that I don't want to go the way of the Zoolander gas fight crew, so we wrap up that conversation in a hurry, hop in our van (have I mentioned that it was ridiculously-painted?) and we peaced out of there.

Done and done.