The Backpackers

I cross paths with only a handful of backpackers on my journey up the east coast and my evenings are generally spent parked amongst a troop of Grey Nomads in campers. That is until I hit Airlie Beach. Now this is a town built for (and possibly by) backpackers and they are here in force. With only one main street, Airlie's not a big town but every inch of that street is jammed packed with cheap food joints, hostels, internet cafes and tour agents.

Rob meets me in Airlie. He's got a week off work and has decided to join me for the trip between Airlie and Cairns. The car's not going to sleep the two us (not in any way that either of us would be happy with anyway) so we make use of the cheap hostels. In fact for this week, and this week only, the two of us become true backpackers again. We stay in dodgy dorms; we drink at cheesy backpacker bars; we go on backpacker tours; and we do our best to hit on backpacker women.

The last proves somewhat difficult at first, since it turns out the Airlie backpacker crowd is a young one. Most of the travellers are barely twenty years old and with Rob's 30th only a few weeks away and mine not far over the horizon we're not even in the same generation as these young punks.

Still we decide to make the most of a difficult situation and do what any guy would do in our shoes: we lie. By the end of the week we've established ourselves as 26 year olds who have just graduated from uni (we failed a few courses, which is why it took us so long).

We sign up on a cruise ship to take us around the Whitsunday Islands and out to the Barrier Reef. We spend three nights on the boat, a 65-foot catamaran, with nineteen other guests on board. Our first night is spent anchored just off the reef and after breakfast we try our hands at a little SCUBA diving.

I've dived once before, in Thailand. It was a pleasant enough experience but I never really saw what all the fuss was about. I'd always assumed my apathy towards diving was due to an uninteresting location in Thailand. The Barrier Reef however, is one of the seven natural wonders of the world and based on Finding Nemo, there's enough psychedelic colours and patterns down there to put a Brazilian rave to shame.

Though I risk eternal scorn from diving enthusiasts across the globe I'm forced to admit that my dives on the Barrier Reef have only cemented my apathy. The corals are, on the whole, quite plain and mostly an uninspiring grey colour. A few soft blues and pinks are revealed from time to time but rarely with any contrast or enthusiasm.

The sensation of breathing underwater and floating weightlessly through space does have some appeal but for me this is short lived. Numerous schools of sufficiently colourful fish swim by, but fish would have to be the least entertaining animal on the planet. Hideously ugly, devoid of any semblance of intelligence and with the sole talent of being able to swim fast – for such company I could have stayed in Sydney and joined Glover's Surf Life Saving crew.

After two uneventful dives I swap my SCUBA tank for snorkel gear and find this less constrained approach to be more rewarding. A couple of sea turtles drift by, tranquil as ever, paying me little notice. Occasionally I catch the distant song of whales on their migration north, a hauntingly beautiful, underwater tune.

Each night we watch the sun slide below the horizon, staining the sky with orange and red. As the sun disappears the stars appear and fill the night sky. We lie out on the deck watching shooting stars flare and then die. One night we hear a splash nearby and the spotlight reveals three whales surfacing only a short distance away. We watch as they spout for air, their slick, black bodies silhouetted by the spotlight before they dive once more into the depths of the black ocean.

We end our trip with a relaxing stop at Whitehaven beach. This beach lives up to the postcard. The water is a soft turquoise and the sand is like flour, in both texture and colour. As we wade through the shallows around the mouth of the small inlet, sting-rays and small sharks dart away beneath our feet.

After the cruise there’s a drinking session in one of the many bars with the crew and the other passengers. After our customary afternoon nap, Rob and I decide to go along. It's like Schoolies all over again. Two twenty-year-old guys from Alaska, excited about being able to legally buy drinks, buy round after round of nasty shot, the like I've not tasted since my school days.

Dawn the next day has me wishing for my simple life back with the Grey Nomads. Rob and I leave town as planned but we get only as far as Bowen before our hangovers get the better of us. We pull up near a park and fall asleep under a tree using the pillows from the car. It's a tougher life than most realise, being a backpacker.