TheBanyanTree: Across the north

[JMoney]

At this time of year a 6am flight from Darwin airport takes off in darkness.
Not a glimmer of the coming day is to be seen at ground level.  But from
flying altitude an interested traveller who is blessed with the luxury of a
window seat can see a stripe across the eastern horizon, a band of deep
vermillion surmounted with just the merest hint of blue.

We were flying to Cairns, en route to Townsville for my eldest son's
graduation ceremony and I had the window seat.  I love looking out at
whatever is there to see whereas my husband prefers to read or watch the
in-flight entertainment program.  Cloud forms and colours can be deeply
engrossing if there's nothing else to see.  Even large bodies of water can
be absorbing with the pattern of their waves, the frolic of whitecaps,
occasional shallow areas with interesting colour changes and the even more
occasional passing vessel.  A streak of dawn is definitely watchable.

So I watched as the strip grew wider and its colours ever more muted.  I
watched the cloud tops turn from pink with violet shadows to yellowish-white
with blue.  Beneath us the ground had turned from black to an
undifferentiated, misty-looking, very dark green.  It was so formless that
we could have been over the Gulf for all I knew.  But then I looked north
and was astonished.  Laid out before me was a big slab of the Northern
Territory coastline and beyond it the blue of the Arafura Sea.

A build up of clouds soon hid that view but below me the green was starting
to show some lighter patches, suggesting a landscape.  I looked east and saw
the great, scalloped crescent of Blue Myal Bay approaching and, beyond it,
Groote Eylandt.

People here just call it Groote.  I remember Groote Eylandt from when I was
a little girl living in the suburbs of Sydney.  That was where the
missionaries were working whose stories, with film strip pictures to
illustrate, we were told in Sunday School.  The fellow whose difficulties
got me started making the CD came from Groote and my husband met many of the
islanders when he was working at the prison.  So I feel a sort of tenuous
connection with the place and started looking for the big town, Alyangula,
or the smaller one close by, Angurugu.  I didn't see them which is not
surprising.  Even Alice Springs, a far bigger place, is invisible to those
sitting on the wrong side of the plane at approach.

Then we were over the Gulf.  The sun was properly up and the waters ahead
were glistening with shards of light too piercing to look at for long.  But
underneath there were submarine islands of aquamarine and khaki in the blue.
How shallow water can be that is still deep enough for drowning!

About the time that I was beginning to feel rather bored by water, water
everywhere I looked ahead and saw another north-south coastline in the
distance.  Aha!  Cape York Peninsula.

Being able to put a name to a geographical feature always makes me feel
comfortable, as though I know something about it even if that's only where
it is.  There are some wonderfully intriguing rock formations somewhere
south of Alice Springs that I've seen while flying overhead, beautiful
things that would be good to see at ground level, but I don't know precisely
where they are so I can't find out what they're called.  It's disappointing
and frustrating.  It would be even more frustrating if I could bear the
thought of travelling into that dry, static-electricity charged environment
enough to actually want to go there again.  But I had enough of it 10 years
ago when, for about a week, touching anything, even kissing my husband good
morning, was sufficient to result in a painful shock.  If I have to spend
money to travel I'd rather go somewhere humid.

The western side of Cape York is flat for miles and miles and miles.  There
are sinuous rivers bordered in green and green arcs of billabongs where the
rivers used to run.  In between it's all varying shades of dun.  Then,
suddenly, lumps appear in the flatness.  A few curved strips of hills stand
out from the plain and then it's all wrinkles, like paper that's been first
thoroughly crushed into a ball and then smoothed out.  Soon, within the
wrinkles, some increasingly large protuberances jut out until there is
nothing below but large, jutting protuberances.  We can consider ourselves
as flying above mountains, or as near to mountains as we have in this
country.

And then we were over water again.  This time it was the Pacific Ocean.
There were coral reefs down there and we were banking to make the approach
into Cairns airport.

My advice to anyone travelling through Cairns airport is to wear comfortable
shoes.  The hike from the plane to the terminal building was quite a long
one and from the terminal building to the plane to Townsville turned out to
be even longer.  I wouldn't want to have to do all that walking on a rainy
day since there are large gaps in the available shelter.  What genius, I
wondered, thought up this arrangement?  But Cairns is an international
airport.   Maybe only domestic passengers have to traipse so far.

Janice