Port Douglass: Leftist Tendencies

Our flight from Darwin landed in Cairns and made our way to the tiny temporary-under-construction-pardon-our-dust baggage claim as I tried to prepare my mind for driving on the left side of the road. I played it out in my head like a video game.

Isabelle, our new favorite Frenchwoman, was standing next to the Hertz counter contemplating renting a car or snagging a cab. We were headed her way and solved her decision by offering to give a lift. Sweet Lincoln’s mullet! Now my left-side skills were going to be responsible for the health and safety of someone not legally family nor emotionally bound til’ death do us part- I was certainly hoping it wouldn’t come to the later for the three of us. Toyota Camry’s are five star safety rated right? Right? No, left? Shit!

I hadn’t gone 14 feet before I announced to the greater Queensland area that I was an outsider by flipping the wipers into action instead of the turn single. I did this approximately 37 additional times on our trip. If brushing flies from your face is the Royal Australian wave, then accidental windshield wipers are most definitely the Royal American wave. Countless times we each walked to the car and entered the wrong side. In one case I went so far as to think someone had thieved our pedals because when I sat down and extended my legs my feet stabbed at thin air and the seat was disturbingly reclined.

Right or wrong?

In all reality the left-side thing caused nary a problem the rest of our trip. It felt perfectly natural within 10 miles and I never had an once of nervousness beyond the airport parking lot (excluding nervousness over inconspicuously stalking crocs the size of single-engine Cessnas).

After dropping the French contingent at a B&B near Holloways Beach we cruised 30 more minutes north along an amazing, yet common, ocean-side highway. Stopping periodically to take in the vistas. There are literally thousands of these circumventing the Red Center and I’m not sure you can pick a bad one. Imagine taking the most beautiful single mile of coastal highway in California and then wrapping an entire continent with it. Copy, Paste, Copy, Paste. (Ctrl C, Ctrl V… for you PC users). That is the view when driving on the edges of Australia. And to make it even more interesting, the grade of the land sloping out into the ocean is so low that that each time the tide changes these vistas become stunningly different. You can go from water colliding with lava rocks at lunch to sheer salt flats as far as the eye can see at dinner in the same exact location.

From the road