Adrenaline Junkies Strike Again

Friday, January 16, 2015

Today was another early start, as we are the first sky divers of the day! We are jumping in Mission Beach, where you literally land on the beach. It is somewhat known as the best sky dive in Australia. We are picked up at 7am and headed off to the office to sign our lives away. We were then introduced to our tandem partners and harnessed up. Now, if there is one thing I’ve been looking forward to, it’s hot skydiving instructors. We haven’t seen an attractive man since Byron Bay, so we are due. But alas, they are all old.

And mine is a big lesbian. Why am I not surprised? Apparently even the good looking Aussies know not to come this far north in summer because its so damn hot.

We didn’t spring for the pictures because (1) I’m cheap, (2) It was a bit cloudy and (3) After your first time jumping out of a plane the novelty of spending $100 on pictures of yourself wears off. They packed about 8 jumpers + 8 guides in the plane. I was shocked by how calm I was.

I guess I got all the fear out of my system on my first jumped last summer when I tried to fire Pipi for talking me into it. We actually had to free fall through a cloud. Clouds are cold. There is one very important plus to having a Lesbian guide instead of a guy – she put on my harness in a way that did not hurt my lady parts when the parachute went up. Poor Stina won’t be walking straight for a week.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful as there is FUCKING NOTHING to do in Mission Beach. We hung by the pool for as long as possible in this heat, which was about two hours. Other than that, we just people watched the trashy kids staying in our hostel in complete disgust. About 90% of them are travelers that have run out of money and are now working on banana farms in unbearable heat and humidity so they can make some money to keep going. Personally, if I ran out of money, I would just call my dad crying until he bought me a plane ticket home. I would probably turn to prostitution before the thought of working on a farm even occurred to me. Apparently you if you work so many days on a farm in Australia, you get a year visa. So lets all be grateful we have Mexicans at home, because you definitely do not want this degenerate youth in charge of cultivating your food. In fact, you don’t even want them in your country. They are another breed. Here is an idea – just get a fucking job at home and save some damn money and then travel. Kill Bill came on TV at night, so that was a nice little treat. At 2am some belligerent fucks started drunkenly screaming about god knows what – they were probably fighting over farm equipment or something. Stina opened the door and politely asked them be quiet. Little do they know she saved their lives. Had I opened that door….

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Today is white water rafting the mighty Tully river!! The Tully river is generally supposed to be pretty bad ass, as the water level is controlled by a power station, so it is raftable year-round. Needless to say, I am fucking stoked. I have been waiting the entire trip for some white water. Once we are checked in, another bus of people arrive. A bus that strikes fear in the hearts of travelers everywhere. That’s right. The Chinese bus!! I actually think they were Korean. It doesn’t matter. They don’t speak English and I think we can all agree they would be dead weight in a rapid. I immediately started to freak out about getting stuck in a boat with these useless fucks and agonized over it to know end (you know me). We all scuttled on to a bus to drive up to the top of the river during which an adorable guide, Matt, gave us our safety briefing. I think we can all agree that a man’s hot factor increases exponentially when he is a white water rafting guide. They also all tend to have an absurdly dirty and politically incorrect sense of humor, which never hurts. Now Matt was in charge of putting everyone into groups for boats. Therefore I found it necessary to pull him aside and tell him to “put us on a good boat”. Translation: No non-english speaking meek Asians in my boat. I’m trying to get after it. Not take selfies all fucking day. Matt understood, and placed us with a group of white people with zero personality but the ability to follow instructions. That’ll do. He took fucking forever to organize the groups, so we thought he was slightly slow. He later told us he was just trying to figure out a way to group everyone to ensure that Stina and I were on his boat. Favorites, yet again.

With our group intact and our guide staring at our asses, we were off! The rapids were not exactly what I was hoping for, as the water levels were a bit low. Apparently they have had a pretty dry wet season and it shows. So no big crazy rapids, but a lot of maneuvering to get around rocks. Which means you need to follow instructions. Self explanatory, right? Wrong. At one point we were sitting around having a swim so Guide Matt could make sure all the other boats got down a rapid safely. Meaning we got a front row seat to pure, unadulterated stupidity. These were my favorites: (1) Asian boat – some of them actually did surprisingly well, but one boat in particular spent the entire time screaming any time water touched them. Not sure what they thought was going to happen. (2) German boat – these morons got stuck on a rock and then proceeded to have a conversation with each other while their guide was trying to instruct them what to do. The result was the most amazing display of pure hatred by any guide I have ever seen. His face got red and he was screaming at them “listen to me!!” while gesturing “look into my eyes!”. I was awesome. I really felt for the guy. That entire boat should have taken their money and spent it on my intro “how to be a loser” course. (3) Contiki Boat – as in the kids on a Contiki tour. These miserable fools were a hot fucking mess. They were all insanely hungover from the night before. One girl – who we called “bang” – was trying to keep her Friday night bang blow out in tact all day. One giant clump of bangs swept in her face the entire day.

She looked like every guy on the Contiki bus had already had their way with her by this point. And they probably have. She was trash-tastic. The other doe-eyed little bitch on the boat had her hair perfectly quaffed around her helmut and seemed determine not to get it wet. On a rafting trip. Stina and I took care of that with our paddles in about 4 seconds. Oh, and on the boat ride up to the river Matt asked everyone who lives in the Northern Hemisphere to raise their hands, and one of the Contiki guys had to ask for clarification because he wasn’t sure what hemisphere he was from. He was Australian. I wish I was making this up, I really do.

After a few hours we stopped for lunch, and I got my finger bitten by a rabid river turtle. One of the guides said it was because it looked like a sausage. I can’t argue with this. My fingers are not my best feature. Then I was stung by a wasp. It was a rough 10 minutes. Then we were back on the river for a few more hours of rafting.

At one point when we all jumped out to swim Stina and I overheard one of the guides of an Asian raft trying to explain to someone how to swim. I shit you not. I thought I was imagining it, but no. That happened. I can’t decide if that beats the bike tour I did in Germany with Steph where people literally didn’t know how to ride a bike. Seriously, the more people I come across in this world, the more I am convinced that (1) Humanity is doomed unless we can find a politically correct way to institute mass sterilization, and (2) Ignorance is bliss – these morons are so content in their stupidity it’s scary. Matt made comments about our asses a few too many times. He later told us he spent the entire day staring at them. Thank god we wore shorts.

Some girls were not so lucky and a few suffered from very extreme cases of hungry ass, where their ass eats their bathing suit and there is nothing they can do until the opportunity to pick it out presents itself.

After rafting we were taken back to the office – which is a bar by day – and had a few beers. The Asian tour group of unknown origin spent the entire time staring at the pictures that were taken of them spending absurd amounts of money on the photos. Before we left Matt gave us his number so that we could meet up with him that night in Cairns to party. We were contemplating whether or not we would be normal people and go out on Saturday night, but let’s be honest, we were leaning towards having the lights out by 10pm, per usual. However when your rafting guide says “let’s party”, you party. I have been known to make out with a rafting guide (or two) in my day, so I do have a reputation to uphold here. Thus, Stina and I devised a plan for the night. The worst plan in the history of going out plans…

First, we were bused up to Cairns, which is our base for the next few nights. Now remember when I surprised Stina by booking a room at the Double Tree? This is the place. We checked in and were given warm cookies. All our questions were answered. It was seamless. Then once we saw our room – an actual hotel room – we almost started crying. Words cannot describe the euphoria we felt at this moment. Oh, and the beds. Omg the beds felt like a cloud. We could almost just fall…right to…..NO! Follow the plan!! No sleeping!! Step 1 – Food. Now, those that have traveled with me know that (1) I love carbonara pasta, (2) I only eat it when I’m on vacation, and (3) I always eat it when I go on vacation. Once. Every trip. I have not had it yet on this trip, and so that is the plan. We find an Italian place, order ourselves two heaping bowls of creamy heaven (plus a bottle of wine), and put it down. Problem #1 – Carbonara makes you want to climb into bed and rub your belly until you fall asleep. And you all know my penchant for a belly rub. Problem #2 – Carbonara is not exactly a great drinking base. Shit. We must party, but I feel like I’m going to puke. Just make yourself a drink, Rory. It’ll be fine. It actually was fine, because after I took one sip of my vodka soda I puked my dinner up. So that solves that problem. Bring on the vodka! By the time we got ourselves showered, puked and into a drinking ready state we were running a bit late, so we took shots. Of vodka. In our hotel room. I’m 25 in Australia, remember?

We met up with Matt and a few of the other guides at a bar. And wouldn’t you guess our luck – one of the guides was the angry guy who screamed at the Germans! And he is 6’9″. We spent most of the night shit talking about all the fucking morons on our trip today. We hated all the same people. Matt explained to us that once he saw our lululemon shorts he knew he wanted us on our boat, and that he spent the entire day just staring at our asses (which we knew). And all the other guides were pissed at him for not putting us on their boat. Oh, and that we generally just kicked major ass at rafting. Tell us something we don’t know. Before we knew it, it was 2am and I was getting a foot rub in a bar from my rafting guide.

Not bad, old gal. We took Angry/Tall guide and Guide Matt back to the Double Tree for an after party and drank the four beers we had left. Then it was off to bed around 3 or 4am, just in time for our 7:30am pickup for tomorrow’s tour. That one is gonna hurt…