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Through the dense understory of fan palms and fig vines, there, right there in front of us, was the unmistakable blue skin, red wattle and bright black eyes of Australia’s largest flightless bird: the cassowary. In Daintree National Park, Far North Queensland, we were visiting the ancient and sacred realm of Australia’s Wet Tropics. Here much of the flora and fauna are vestigial throwbacks to Gondwana, the 550 million year-old super-continent that once sutured together the landmasses of the entire southern hemisphere. The cassowary is such a primitive specie that its survival rate in the wild has sadly earned it a spot on the endangered species list, and conservationists insist that only 1,200 to 1,500 remain in the world. But there we were, Oliver, Ryan and I, winding our way slowly through the forest at dusk, and in our path was this incredible animal. Here in Jindalba, the “Place of the Spirits”.
[geolocation]And there were two of them! It was Ollie who first spied the chick fossicking about in the ferns near the adult bird’s enormous feet. I reached to give Ryan’s hand a squeeze; it is the father cassowary who raises the chicks on his own from the time they hatch until the moment they make there way into the forest alone. After a couple of attempts to take a photo in the near darkness, we slowly inched away from the little family, mindful of the cassowary’s blunt talons and powerful legs. I smiled later that night when the attendant at our campground gasped at our report. Only the very lucky few have ever glimpsed a cassowary in the wild.
We quickly learned that meeting nature head on was what Queensland was all about. There were vast sand islands where one could sleep alongside wild dingoes, waterfall-pocked gorges that spilled into crocodile-infested waterways, and eucalypt-fringed highways where koalas clustered overhead. Before long, we were on board a vessel that would ferry us out to one of the country’s most important national treasures (at least in terms of its implication to Australia‘s GDP): the Great Barrier Reef. Despite being jostled by the ship’s cargo of eager 19 to 25 year olds, even Ollie managed to sneak a peak at a family of “Nemos” sheltering in an anemone, and for several hours he paddled to and fro over the spectacular coral formations, trussed up in a protective stinger suit and a pee-wee sized life jacket.
Our first port of call in Eastern Australian was Cairns, where we briefly stewed in the pheromonal confines of the notorious backpacker hub. A multicultural influx of young travelers converged here in the city’s plethora of travel agencies and riotous bars, and for a moment we too were caught up in the flurry of the budget traveler’s mindset. In fact, we very nearly purchased a twenty year-old Camry with 200,000 miles from two German girls who had used the poor thing to circumnavigate the country twice.

Instead we discovered a small Australian company called Jucy that ran a backpacker-friendly business around kitting out their fleet of Toyota minivans with slide-out mattresses, portable DVD players, on-board propane stoves, battery-powered coolers and buckets of electric green paint. As we had learned in Perth, renting a full-scale motor home would prove to be prohibitively expensive, but we still needed an option that would allow us to tether a child’s car seat somewhere in the back. And we were strangely drawn to Jucy’s multi-passenger model, the Choppa, where in addition to the pull-out mattress inside the car, a pod-shaped device on the roof opened into a fully-enclosed tent that could easily sleep two. Painted across the pod in a saucy cursive were the words: “The Penthouse”.
Outside the rental office, I snapped together the small ladder that was included, rested it against the side of the car and prepared to head up top for an inspection. “I think at one point my parents thought about buying one of those clamshell things. To help the kids get all their gear up to college. Leave it to the Australians to attach some vinyl panels and market it as budget accommodation.”
As ridiculous as we looked in our purple and green monstrosity, we were back on the road, and miles of tropical coastline spread out in front of us. Twenty kilometers out of Cairns, our first stop was the rain forested town of Kuranda where we attempted to visit a hospital for injured flying foxes. The large bats are endemic to Australia’s tropics, where they alight in massive numbers in the boughs of native fruit trees, only to squawk and squeal the night away. Sadly, we were turned away at the door on account of our bad timing, so we ambled through the small town, purchased an ice cream for Ollie, and returned to our van…only to discover a flat tire the front passenger side.
Neither Ryan nor I had a clue what to do. Amidst the cookery and cutlery, the blankets and pillows and sheets and towels, the fold-out picnic tables and chairs and all the other crap that had been thrown in…where could the jack be found? And the spare? How could this possibly have happened TWENTY KILOMETERS away from the rental office? We traded frustrated glances; surely we could have walked all the way up to Kuranda with lesser incident. Needless to say, we managed to locate all the right tools, and Ryan and I was very nearly finished with the change when a gruff Aboriginal fellow passing by insisted that what I was doing could scarcely be considered “woman’s work”, and he finished off what had taken me three-quarters of an hour in no less than sixty seconds.
Once our campa’ was again roadworthy, we sped away from the coast, deep into the Atherton Tablelands where tropical dairy farmers grazed their stock alongside banana groves and rainforested ravines, from which gorgeous waterfalls tumbled over rainbows of spray. Ollie eagerly stripped down to his birthday suit to test the waters in the clear pool below the spectacular Millaa Millaa Falls, and, after donning his clothes again, escorted an elderly Chinese tourist around mud puddles so she could take in the sight from the viewing platform. I suppose he had the intuition that his good behavior would surely be rewarded at one of the many local cheeseries, where, every so often, one of the proprietors specialized in artisanal ice creams.
Further south we drove several miles to the foothills of the Misty Mountains outside of Tully, a small town that is famous for its record-setting annual rainfall (in 1950, it received nearly 24 feet). A fast-flowing river passed through the gorge near out campsite and was heavily signposted with no swimming advisories due to recent crocodile sightings. This probably should have been reason enough for us to set up camp elsewhere, but it wasn’t until dusk began to creep through the trees that I began to consider our situation. We had received words of warning about the “salties” ever since we’d set foot in this country, and truly, tales of their ferocity and penchant for taking wandering toddlers seemed to be on the tip of every Australian’s tongue. At a wildlife sanctuary we had visited along the way, Ryan had come away with a wealth of native animal trivia, including the ominous knowledge that crocs were capable of swimming hundreds of miles inland up freshwater rivers and streams (and incidentally, were immune to HIV). I began to grow uneasy. What if one of us had to run to the toilet in the dark? We were well off the grid out here…there was no electricity, nor had there been a sign of another human presence for miles. Then again, there was a creepy, abandoned hydroelectric plant just down the road…
And then the cane toads came out. Australia’s most infamous invasive specie was introduced in the early part of the 20th century by Queensland sugar cane farmers who had mistakenly put stock in the creature’s rumored ability to catch and consume the native beetles that were devouring their crops. Not only were the farmers dead wrong (the toads proved unable to leap into the cane where the beetles were found), but they were entirely responsible for setting into motion one of Australia’s most devastating ecological phenomena. Cane toads are deadly poisonous during every stage of their life cycle, and have decimated populations of indigenous animals that have figured them for part of the food chain. Since their introduction, they have proliferated throughout the country, and millions of dollars have been earmarked by the government to control their numbers, with every effort proving to be a failure to date. Here at our quiet, dark, Queensland Park Service campsite, there were thousands of these creatures; suddenly materializing in the grass all around us like little, warty apparitions.
Ollie darted out at one near my feet. “Frog! I catch him!” Ryan strong-armed Ollie in the nick of time, lifting him clear off the ground and back into the van. My eyes were as large as saucers in the darkness, and I might have been hyperventilating at that point. Then I started to hear strange noises emanating from the forest surrounding us. Curlews are a long-legged marsh bird whose cry sounds uncannily like a woman weeping, a fact which I was aware of that night in Tully, though it made no difference at the time. We needed to leave, and we needed to leave right then. Wordlessly, Ryan packed up the van, strapped Ollie into his seat, and in seconds we were off. We spent the remainder of that dreadful night forty miles away in a caravan park in Mission Beach.

In the massive Tyto wetlands outside Ingham, we came face to face with hundreds of grazing Agile Wallabies, and Oliver was equally intrigued by the joeys in their mothers’ pouches as they appeared to be by our toddler in a child-carrier backpack. At Wallaman Falls, the highest in Australia, we braved the humidity and slid down 900 feet via a winding path through the bush to the base of the falls. In Paluma Range National Park, we were so bewitched by the clear mineral pools that we skinny-dipped the afternoon away and kept an eye to the shallows for platypus foraging along the banks.
So much of Queensland’s warm, wet, rough and romantic appeal lay along its unsealed roads and random rainforest hikes, but there was also the more commercial pursuits one could indulge oneself in, and we figured, if we were going to follow the crowds for once, we would follow them out into the Whitsunday Islands. Airlie Beach smacked of the same hedonistic ambiance as Cairns, and signs throughout town advertised stand-by rates for two-day booze cruises that promised to take in all the sites. We opted for something more akin to a water taxi, and were genuinely impressed by Whitehaven Beach’s signature vanilla-sand swirls against an ultramarine tide. We passed a very awkward night in the gaudy grounds of the disneylandish Daydream Island, but the following morning spent at the helm of the resort’s rented Hobie catamaran made the entire experience worthwhile. Sailing the Whitsundays could be checked off the list.
The spectacular Carnarvon Gorge was the last remote leg of our travels in Queensland, and to reach it, we trekked far into the Great Dividing Range that cleaves Australia’s eastern coastal region from the vast expanse of bone-dry hinterlands. The 600 foot high gorge is famous for its centuries-old Aboriginal rock art, and all along the ten mile hike, various detours led us into water-sculpted canyons, mossy culverts, and crevasses that opened into ecological microcosms that had spent an eternity of time hidden behind curtains of stone.
We skipped through Brisbane’s balmy South Bank riverfront in the blink of an eye and paused for an evening over a plate of Shanghai soup dumplings on Little Stanley Street. In the first week of May, Ollie and I counted the Grey Nurse Sharks that resided at the Sunshine Coast’s Underwater World and doled out cracked corn to kangaroos at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo. Ryan was showing the first signs of a major gastrointestinal illness and was forced to sit out the fun for a day or so. A month later, and only after all three of us had cross-contaminated each other, we would learn he had picked up cryptosporidium from a contaminated water supply.

Queensland’s bright lights focused to a point on the Gold Coast, and by day, we took refuge from the crowds along the southern beaches. In the quiet hamlets of Burleigh Heads and Coolangatta, we watched surfers ride the legendary break at Snapper Rocks. As Ollie dug holes in the sand that he insisted would lead him back to China, I pondered the presence of an undertow beneath the whitewash of the receding waves. Beyond, north, back the way we had come, the silhouette of Surfer’s Paradise hung like a pendant on the horizon; the strange, dark buildings standing in relief against a waning day. Daintree’s Cape Tribulation beach was figuratively millions of miles away from where we stood, a month later, in the glow of Australia’s most ostentatious coastline. In the morning, we were gone.
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At long last, we emerge from the island continent of Australia. With some 5,096 road miles logged, it seemed fitting that we were rendered incommunicado for nearly all of two months. After all, with fewer than 21 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles, which equates to about 6 people per square mile (compared to the United States at 76:1 and New York City at 71,201:1), a wireless signal was often hard to come by.
Our original intentions of how to tackle such a massive country began as I suppose they all do: we wanted to see it all. Beginning in Perth, we planned to travel due north up the western Coral Coast and bank east through Broome, onward to the Top End and the mystical terra incognita of the Kimberly. Through the bush we might then dog-leg to the Red Center where we could take in Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and the MacDonnell Range that runs ram-rod through heart of the outback. Onward then to Southern Australia, loop through Adelaide and Melbourne, and curl up the east coast through New South Wales. The beaches of the south trickle up to rainforest of tropical Queensland, and there we would conclude our adventure, nine weeks later.
Cue a chorus of laughter. Having confessed our initial plans, I might as well inform you that our itinerary would prove to be as ambitious as attempting to drive from the UK clear to China, and then BACK, in the span of a school holiday. Needless to say, we were in for a rude awakening…one should NEVER underestimate the distances in Australia.
Our adventure began auspiciously enough. We arrived in Perth off a red-eye from Denpasar, Bali at approximately 5:00am, slap-happy and exhausted after a four hour flight that had somehow managed to cheat us out of a night of rest. Sunburned and startled by the first temperate breezes we had experienced in more than seven months of traveling, we realized that we had landed squarely in the start of Australia’s autumn. 50 minutes later when we pulled up at the ramshackle pub/nightclub/hotel that was wedged right up against the Indian Ocean, we were sadly informed that our room was occupied for the night, and that we would have to wait at least until dawn for the first guest to check out. Oliver was already comatose and sprawled out (un)comfortably over our backpacks, so Ryan and I scuttled off to the breakfast room where we cursed our lack of common sense and set up in dark corner to wait.
Over the course of the next several days, we did what we do best, which is casing a city. We rode the bus from Scarborough Beach downtown, navigated rail links and perused travel brochures over Styrofoam cartons heaped high with fish and chips. We replenished our supplies, got haircuts and contemplated purchasing a vehicle from the local backpacker‘s auto market. Oliver attempted to take up kite surfing from a fellow who had tethered his to a rail and turned his back, and in the nick of time we intervened before he was carried off to Papua New Guinea. Everywhere we went, we paid through the nose in Australia’s most expensive city, and when we complained, we were constantly reminded of exactly how far away we were from the rest of civilization.
On the third day, we were robbed us of nearly $400 USD by an unassuming guy working at a travel agency. He seemed honest enough at the time, and we took his word when he told us that we would surely perish if we attempted to see as much of Australia as we intended to in the time we had allotted. On the spot, we agreed to rent a Toyota HiAce (essentially a miniature motor home) for sixteen days in Western Australia, and subsequent 35 days on the East Coast. Given that the Northern Territory was still experiencing The Wet, its “suicide season”, it was implausible to consider driving through the center; we would fly instead to Cairns and book our tickets onward to New Zealand out of Melbourne after completing our road trip.
The following day, we were ready to begin! Perth’s glorious sunsets were permanently emblazoned in our minds, but the superfluous tattoos, Sunday Sessions and bums passed out in the drive-thru lanes of the alcoholic retail outlets were indeed more than we had reckoned for. We yearned for the road.
But our camper, with its onboard gas cooker and twin berths, its pull-out couches and cute campervan-ish cabinetry, never materialized. In a terrible oversight, our travel agent had neglected to inform us that these vehicles lacked an extra seatbelt required to strap in a toddler, so the game was off. We were devastated. Images of us boarding Grayhound buses every day for the next two months terrified us, and the idea of joining a backpacker tour group alongside seventy nineteen year-olds whose soul aim was to drink the country dry was out of the question. Naturally, when a small husband-and-wife outfit contacted us about their kitted out minivans, we jumped at the opportunity. We never ended up seeing the refund for our cancelled 35 day rental on the East Coast. A nice score for that creep in Perth.

This is how we found ourselves traveling nearly 3,000 miles through some of Australia’s most unforgiving and isolated terrain: in a van, with a cooler full of ice, and a tent. First stop was Nambung National Park, home of the eerie Pinnacles rock formations.The origin of these standing structures continue to be shrouded in mystery; most scientific sources allege that the limestone jutting from the desert floor was formed when compacted seashells calcified into craggy columns with help from the elements.
The following morning, I awoke with a start in the pre-dawn darkness. Ryan must have been gnashing his teeth in a dream, or perhaps it was Ollie to my left, smacking his lips while still sound asleep. I peered down at both of them, the light from the waning ¾ moon illuminating our tent in the otherwise total darkness characteristic of this remote part of Western Australia. Both were sleeping soundly, Ollie trailing a thin sliver of moonlit drool across his camp mat. Just then I turned to look out the window toward the Murchison River that flowed past our campsite to where it met the Indian Ocean at a small estuary. There, beyond our pair of flattened camping chairs stood a enormous red kangaroo, his wooly coat the precise hue of the red clay that formed his home. He dialed his ears forward and blinked out of the darkness at me, contemplating the level of threat I warranted, there in my tent. In a moment he hobbled forward and resumed clipping back the grass that grew up in vulnerable tufts around our tent pins.

Here in the Kalbarri, some 430 miles away from Perth , we were guests in the big red’s country. At sunset on the day of our arrival, we entered town via the coastal cliffs that rose up from the sea 300 feet or more, and gave the appearance that they spared all of Australia from the wrath of the ocean with their embattled, wave-lashed rocks. The following day we undertook our first “bushwalk”, a five mile loop through sandstone gorges that cut through the interior. We passed “Nature’s Window”, a fantastic layered rock formation that seemed to hint at the sublime decorating instincts of a Higher Power, as it perfectly framed the river below. Heading north via the Brand, an endless, two-laned road that carried us up the coast, strange, scrubby banksia growing alongside resembled bushes covered in bottlebrushes. Ryan pointed out one that appeared as if it had sprouted a crop of corndogs and I noticed a haystack-looking thing that was crowned with an enormous phallic-looking stamen.Truly the most well-hung plant I have ever seen.

On the Coral Coast, so named for the location of the stunning Ningaloo Marine Park, a barrier reef that could give its East Coast alternate a true run for its money, we started to feel the heat. While Ryan and I set off to investigate the stromatolites of Hamelin Pool (ancient organisms believed to have played a critical role in the formation of the earth’s atmosphere), Oliver made like the kangaroos do in the middle of the day and scuttled under a cluster of mulga brush to escape the UV. We made it up to him by traversing the entire length of World Heritage-listed Shark Bay to visit the famous wild dolphins of Monkey Mia. Like clockwork, a small pod of females swam to the beach every morning at 9am for a twice-daily fish feed. Ollie was lucky enough to be selected out of a sea of onlookers on both visits, and on the second go-round, he was slightly less terrified so as to be able to drop the fish from five feet above the ground where he was holding fast to my neck.
The final 100 mile coastal stretch brought us all the way to the remote northern tip of the continent, where a small town called Exmouth had achieved notoriety over the years due to the arrival of one very special visitor: the whale shark. Shortly after the first coral spawning of the year (May to July), the enormous filter-feeders regularly ply the waters surrounding Ningaloo to feed on plankton and other small fish unfortunate enough to swim within the trajectory of their enormous mouths. For an exorbitant amount of cash and confirmation that this would be the ONLY Mother‘s Day gift I should expect to receive, Saint Ryan procured me a spot on one of the local shark‘n‘dive boats, and kindly ferried Oliver off to one of the quiet, turquoise beaches in Cape Range National Park so that I might have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to swim alongside the largest fish in the sea.

For the next six hours, twenty lucky participants rotated in and out of the water with snorkel and fins at the ready.I summoned every muscle in my body to keep pace with the giant, forever mindful of the sweep-radius of its enormous tail and the creature’s curious inclination to every so often turn its head toward the swimmers fanning out from its flanks. On one such dive, my heart leapt into my throat as a nearly 30 foot long whale shark surfaced between the group of eight of us. The phrase “once-in-a-lifetime” is one I tend to find far to fatalistic for my taste, but when that animal rose from a distant speck deep in the fathomless azure depths below to swim beside us, its vast form a dappled mirror to the sky, I could have held my breath forever.
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All of the sudden, it seemed perfectly fitting that we would end our seven month tour throughout Asia right where we were, in Bali. I tried not to tell myself that it was because we were exhausted. That after barreling through China, India, the Himalayas, Southeast Asia and part of the Indonesian archipelago, the somnolent beaches of the far eastern coast and the graceful greenery of the interior were successfully lulling us into a deep, enervated state that tended to affect most long-term travelers at some point in their journey. This fact was becoming all too apparent to Ryan and I, and when it came time to decide whether or not to renew our Indonesian visas for another thirty days, it seemed the decision had already been made for us. Sulawesi was just too many boat rides away…as was Kalimantan, Sumatra, and the rest of Nusa Tenggara. And never mind the fact that the entire island was redolent of the gorgeous frangipani that magically managed to bloom outside the windows of nearly every hotel and losmen.
But then, while in a salty beachside café near the off-shore wreck of the USAT Liberty, I saw my justification for it all. In the 18th century, a British naturalist (and a contemporary of Darwin) by the name of Sir Alfred Russell Wallace determined that there existed an (imaginary) zoological boundary that divided the eco-zones of Asia and Australia. The “Wallace Line” cut neatly down the Lombok Strait, thus demarcating Bali to the east (Asia) and Lombok to the west (Australia). Despite the relatively short distance between the two islands (35 kilometers), Wallace observed that the deep channel between the two formed a natural water barrier that existed even when sea levels were lower during the Ice Age, and prevented the local flora and fauna from commingling or cross-pollinating for more than 50 million years. Anyone who’s ever visited both islands can agree that Bali, with its million shades of green, and Lombok, with its dusty moonscapes, are horses of vastly different colors. This was reason enough to me. After all my fretting about our inadequacies as travelers, we unanimously agreed that Bali was it: the official boundary marking the end of Asia.
Despite it all, we quite capably filled 20 days on Bali with equal measures of adventure and time spent unconscious in a pool chair. After several days in the somewhat self-important artist’s enclave of Ubud, we fled the humidity for the higher ground of Gunung Batur, one of Bali’s three active volcanoes. Along the way, women wrapped in batik balancing towering offerings of rice, fruit and smoldering sticks of incense on their heads, outnumbered the passing motorbikes. Rice terraces in shades of electric green formed vast geometrical compositions that took our breath away as we sped past on our motorbike, and coconut palms caught the waning sunlight, which, with streaks of gold, fused the dark, lustrous green of their outer fronds with the silver-blue-gray of the stormy late afternoon sky. Near Penelokan, whose name means “beautiful view”, we savored fresh-from-the-tree passion fruits, rambutan, mangosteen, sakan (snake fruit), and sharply acidic tangerines at a small road-side stand with the specter of Batur just around the bend.
Arcing around the Northern Coast, we stopped along the black, volcanic sands of Lovina, and from the edge of our hotel’s infinity pool, we watched each evening as the sun slipped gracefully into the glassy stillness of the Savu Sea. One day, we ventured further afield by motorbike, in search of durian, lovingly nicknamed the “Ass Fruit” by many western travelers. We found a woman selling it by the outskirts of town, and for the equivalent of a dollar, we were soon sinking our teeth into the infamously putrid-smelling flesh. This was an experience I had been looking forward to ever since I arrived in South East Asia, and I was intrigued by descriptions I had read of the fruit, including British novelist Anthony Burgess, who likened the experience to “consuming vanilla custard while sitting on a latrine”. Sure enough, the durian was indeed creamy with a consistency roughly akin to a ripe avocado, and there was a subtle sweetness there as well. But for some reason (perhaps our durian was past its prime), the thing went down with an odd curry-like aftertaste that foreshadowed the horror to come.
Back on our bike, Ryan turned up a steep track that led up a ridge we guessed would make for a brilliant vista over the black coast. From where we were, the long, unbroken ridge rose darkly and resembled the crest of a wave before it broke and crumbled into the verdant wash of rice paddy that appeared to eddy before the hills all the way down to the coast. Small, thatched huts where villagers took respite from the sun during harvest became scraps of tidal spindrift amidst a sea of green. When the sun began to list at an angle to the earth, we decided to pluck our way gingerly back down the hillside, Ryan struggling to balance the bike around hairpin bends without turning us all out in the volcanic gravel that dusted the sides of the narrow road. A fellow from the hillside village caught up with us and gave us a characteristic Balinese grin.
“You from Australia, yes?”
The durian was performing elaborate flip-flops along my digestive track now, unsure of whether or not it would continue along its trajectory or instead reverse its direction entirely.
“U…U…U.S.A. We’re from the U.S.A.” I stammered.
From the back of his motorbike, the fellow introduced himself as Nyoman (in Bali, all people named Nyoman are the third child born in a family), and proceeded to tell us that he had an older brother working on a cruise ship in the United States. Had we heard of Carnival Cruise Lines? We learned that Nyoman himself lived with his parents in the village of Tigawasa (although he had ambitions to work in a hotel in Lovina), and was off to visit his other older brother in Amlapura where everyone was celebrating his niece’s birthday, who may or may not be Oliver’s age. My face was a picture of earnestness and terror as I endeavored to answer his question, and I couldn‘t help but wonder whether this fellow‘s curiosity was piqued enough for him to stick around assuming the three of us plummeted off the side of the road and into the ravine below.
Needless to say, Ryan managed to bring us down intact. The durian was coming up on me in baleful bursts of gas that surely had the power to rouse Lovina’s ancestral spirits, but we were alive, and ready to move on to our next destination along the coast, Amed.
Beautiful Amed is one of Bali’s sleepiest touristed coastal towns. When we arrived squarely in the middle of the off-season, we were able to secure a room in the swishest hotel in town which overlooked the sea, had satellite TV, air-conditioning, free breakfast and the softest beds we had enjoyed in months; all to the tune of a little more than $50 USD a night. In other words, for less than the price of the grimiest hostel in Australia, we took every opportunity to indulge our weary souls for the next several days, right down to the $10 USD Balinese massages we suffered through on the gazebo overlooking the beach at sunset.
Our time in Amed was our saltwater pearl; precious, hard to come by, and more beautiful than words can describe. From our outdoor shower set within a private garden, the intoxicating perfume of night jasmine drifted in on the salt air while the Southern Cross glimmered distantly from a swathe of stars above. Directly behind us, a volcanic mountainscape rose up violet at dusk and emerald during the day; at its southeastern horizon, Mount Agung tumbled sharply down to the sea and formed smooth black pebbled beaches that hissed like rain on a roof as they were carried back and forth by the tide. Near a WWII wreck, we swam headfirst into a juvenile barracuda and spiraled in a vortex of giant trevally as they schooled around the wreck of the USAT Liberty. We rode our motorbike every day up and down the tiny coastal road that plied the surrounding cliffs where below us, fishermen’s junkung (trimeran sailboats) lined the beaches that opened to spectacular coral terraces glittering in the late afternoon sunlight. By the limpid sea, Ollie tried to futilely to skip rocks with Ryan, and hurled enormous handfuls of hot, black pumice into the sea. Our son’s hair had again grown into the flaxen tendrils that I am so averse to cut away, and Ryan was brown and lean and sharp from the sun and a diet of rice and fresh fish. Here we simply escaped time; we became as much a part of our surroundings as the man who drove his ox in his fields, or as the small peeper frogs that called to one another from the little saltwater inlets that ran deep into the countryside.

Several days later, we rustled ourselves along to Sanur, a popular strand of beach in the South East nearing Kuta and the hordes of other travelers. Here we planned to sit tight through Nyepi, the “Day of Silence” that marks Bali’s Lunar New Year. For a period of twenty-four hours, every individual taking refuge on Bali’s shores was expected to observe strict rules in accordance with holiday, which included no working, no entertainment or pleasure, no traveling, and limited use of electricity.
The night before was a sort of Balinese Halloween, where villagers marched out their “ogoh-ogoh“, massive papier-mâché statues of demons engaged in various malicious activities. The sculptures are meant to represent the subversive and wicked tendencies of humankind, and it is the very essence of Nyepi that these effigies be burnt or otherwise destroyed at the stoke of midnight on the New Year. The parade of creatures made for fantastic theater, although Oliver might have disagreed. From his perch on top of Ryan’s shoulders, he could see the ogoh-ogoh advancing through the crowds, and his shrieks hit such an octave that they startled the German tour group all the way on the other side of the street.
The following day for more than seven hours, Ollie frolicked in the pool and scrambled like a monkey on fire all over the hotel compound, accompanied by his sweethearts, a ten-year-old Dutch girl named Yanu and two-year-old Aussie, Grace. When the lights started to flicker off at six, Yanu could barely keep her head up through dinner, and Grace had long since gone to bed. Ollie was, once again, the last man standing.
We whiled away our last three nights in Asia on Nusa Lembongan, a tiny island to the southeast. From the cliffs overlooking a rollicking, wave tossed, turquoise bay, it seemed suitable to end here on this corner of the earth where we could slip out of our walking shoes for a time and stare at the sea. There, beyond the strait that separated this land from another; one vastly different, forever a world away.
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Oliver is a good kid. When he laughs, his eyes are like Ryan’s, twisting up into happy crescents. His nose crinkles in his sunburned face as did my sister’s during the long, humid New England summers of our childhood, and his hair has long since grown back into the fine, sandy fringe that he wore around San Clemente. We frequently find him following German families on holiday around the beaches; for all intents and purposes resembling one of their own; the last little duckling at the end of a squawking, scattered brood.
Today he is adrift in the Andaman Sea. In the center of a cluster of islands not far from Trang town in Southern Thailand and nearer still to the border of Eastern Malaysia, we have found the garden isle of Koh Kradan. The reef-studded waters surrounding the island alternate between four different shades, one of which is a limpid mineral blue that matches Ollie’s irises when he’s been in the salt water for the better part of the day. The Hat Chao Mai National Park begins at the shoreline with centuries-old long needled pines and stretches the length of the island. Swallows flit between the spare bamboo huts tucked here there along the beach and remind me of home and the mission in San Juan Capistrano where the birds’ springtime migration has been celebrated for hundreds of years. All through the night, fruit bats with three-foot wingspans chatter and squeal in the trees.
Twenty yards from where Oliver chases after minnows in waist-deep water, a corl reef plays host to angelfish, giant clams, damselfish, wrasse, parrotfish, squirrelfish, moray eel and juvenile barracuda. Each day in the late afternoon, lavender-blue cumulus clouds roll south towards us, the atmosphere becomes charged, a light rain falls and a distant thunder is heard. In an hour, the “storm” moves on and is replaced with a rainbow that spans the length of the channel between Kradan and its neighboring island, Ko Muk.
Ryan and I can scarcely believe that Oliver is the same little boy we left home with eleven weeks ago. He fearlessly bounds into the sea at any opportunity, furiously paddling, kicking and inhaling mouthfuls of water at a time. Though he hasn’t yet gotten his hands around that mysterious business of maintaining buoyancy and still positions himself far too vertically to actually float, he has learned to love the sea. Understandably so, as the waters of the Andaman are like a temperate bath and far more gentle than the surf we left in California.
Earlier, we motored to Morakot (Emerald) Cave on Muk Island, where an intricate network of sea tunnels lead deep into the karst and finally end at an enclosed lagoon. A perfect microcosm, the lagoon opens to the sky above and therefore supports all manner of life. Lush greenery growing up the sides of the rock gives shelter to snakes, fishing eagles and the odd macaque, while a sliver of white-sand beach recalls Robinson Crusoe. Despite being a popular stop for tours, the journey calls for a daunting 250 foot swim through the pitch dark and is not for the faint of heart.
But Ollie still managed it. Wearing a lifejacket upside down like an enormous diaper, he was able to keep his head out of the water while kicking and paddling. Eyes wide and shining like stars, he soundlessly swam into the darkness with Ryan and I solidly clutching a strap here, an arm there. Echoes and shrieks carried out over the water and the low ceiling as the swimmers ahead of us bumped up against each other, and the noises gave me a start. But as the first glimmer of light pointed the way to the lagoon, I looked over at Ollie’s face, and there was a grin from ear to ear!
But anyone who knows our family also knows that Oliver has tested the limits of his abilities long since before he could walk. It comes as no surprise to us that he should want to leap from a boat deck into the open sea, snorkel and mask in hand. Nor are we jilted when he grasps a stick the length of his little body and sets off into the forest in search of cobras.
What does tend to catch me off guard is the passage of time while we are out in the world. Perhaps it’s the Buddhist influence throughout the region, or our utter lack of timepieces and calendars. Whatever the cause, here and there I am taken aback by the total transience of this experience and of Oliver’s own growth. Amidst piles of sand, he babbles his ABCs and provides an accurate count of the number of long tail boats on the horizon each morning. Unabashedly he introduces himself to every friendly face, gives an account of the highlights of his day (“eat ice cream for breakfast”), and concludes with a big round-the-neck hug. His legs are now nearly half as long as my own and his face has begun to sharpen and take on greater depth compared to the round chubbiness of his infancy.
But in another instant, our gregarious, outspoken little boy retreats back into the netherworld of the two-year old, and Ryan and I run and duck for cover. Certain days are far tougher on the spirits than others, but in those moments, it helps to think again that all things pass. Indeed, all things, if not accepted and treasured for the moments in time that they occupy, are lost.
The post Learning to Swim first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
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