I was signed up for 2 weeks with Cairns CVA. As oppossed to at Uluru where 2 weeks actually meant working for 10 days in a row and living entirely secluded with your team and team leader; 2 weeks with the Cairns CVA and I believe all other locations actually means 14 days, working Monday through Friday with weekends off to do as we liked. Each week long session goes from Friday to Friday with housing and meals provided even on the weekend before you have begun to work. So when I showed up at the CVA office/house at 11am on Friday August 29th just outside the city in a town called Marobool, I would be housed and fed by CVA starting that day but would have the weekend to do whatever I pleased... not bad.
On this particular Friday, I showed up at the house and found myself amongst a team of 7 Japanese college students and their "translator" (whose English was horrible). My initial fear was that this was about to be the loneliest and most confusing week of my life -- in addition to basic language barriers the japanese team for some reason believed I worked for CVA and I just could not seem to communicate to them that this was not the case.. They asked me for directions to places I'd never heard of and even the translator asked me if I would be cooking all the meals... uuuh no.
However, I was reassured that I would not be staying with this team at the CVA house, located above the CVA office. I would instead be staying at a hostel with another team who was on their way back from staying in Bramston Beach for the week. The hostel was the same one I'd already spent a night at -- The Serpent -- and Judith was still there one more night so this was excellent news.
My team returned to the house around 2 and out piled a rather large team of rather young and rather British--for lack of a better word--kids. Some were headed home that day but many were staying on for another week or two. I wasn't sure whether I'd prefer spending my week with 18 and 19 year olds with whom I could communicate but who were very much intent on being as drunk and high as possible every opportunity they could get; or with 18 and 19 year olds who were very polite and quiet but whom might be expecting me to cook them dinner. Hmm.
Anyway, I started to get to know my team and as I did they started to drop like flies. First, 18 year Nick, who is the spitting image of Ron Weasley, took a dare from a 10 year old at a skateboard park that resulted in a sprained left ankle and a torn ligament in his right wrist. The next day he decided to finish off his other wrist by getting it tattooed with a lightening bolt.
19 year old Jemma was planning to get her free weekend at the hostel and quit first thing on Monday... so she did just that.
19 year old Dan, had some sort of a mix up about medical forms and a medical card he had left in Sydney. This compiled with some other issues resulted in him being kicked out by about Thursday.
On Wednesday, 22 year old Vans decided she'd had enough of the work we were doing and she tried to quit but was guilted into staying.
And on Thursday, I succumbed to the strep throat I'd been fighting all week and announced I'd be going to the doctor and not on the project.
So my first week of CVA Cairns was a bit dramatic. Those of us who remained formed a rather small team that was also again highly female—and made up of many city dwellers--one of each from London, Paris, Milan, New York, and Seoul.
The work that we were at least supposed to be doing was assisting the Green Corridor Project. This is a 20-year long Queensland (the Australian state where Cairns is located) project whose goal is to reforest the banks of the Barron River with the tropical plants that are/were native to the area previous to the arrival of Europeans. Over the last 150 years the rainforest has been cut down to create farmland here. The farmers brought in fertilizers that as a result of rainfall have ended up in the barron river. The river flows out to the ocean, where the Great Barrier Reef is located and deposits the fertilizers at the reef. The fertilizers are like poision for the corals. So ultimately deforestation is killing the Great Barrier Reef. By planting trees along the river, the fertilizers and other chemicals are broken down and dilluted by the trees and plants so that they do not reach the ocean in such poisonous quantities. A second purpose of the Green Corridor Project is to create a "green corridor" of tropical forest so that animals, specifically a large bird called a cassowary, can move between the remaining areas of tropical rainforest and breed with one another, keeping the genetics of the species healthy. The cassowary is endangered but for reasons I don't understand, the bird is such a vital part of the tropical ecosystem that they say that if it were to go extinct, the rainforest in this area would also not be able to survive. The cassowary is one of the oldest surviving species still in existence in Australia. Hundreds of thousands of years ago there were all kinds of weird now extinct animals in this part of Australia... But the cassowary (and the crocodile) has made it through to today with little if any evolutionary change.
As we drive all around northern Queensland to our various sights along the Barron River, we frequently see cassowary crossing signs. The picture of the cassowary looks as though the sign is warning that a Muppet might cross the road here.
Apparently cassowary are somewhat dangerous. They are about 4 feet tall and can run fast. They have been known to kick and even kill a few people by using a claw on their foot to slice you right up the back. Fortunately, I didn't yet know this little tidbit the day the Germans and I encountered a cassowary on one of our wild hiking expeditions. I don't have any pictures of the beast though, so I guess we did know enough to just keep moving.
So now you know all the reason why we do this work in cairns. Now here is a bit of how we did it.
The first week we spent several days fertilizing (with organic fertilizer) and watering plants that had been planted over the last several months. Sometimes this was along the river at the side of the road, sometimes it required climbing down a cliff, and sometimes it was on somebodys private property (usually a farm) who had donated a section of their land to be part of the corridor.
The second week we dug holes, planted trees, fertilized them, and put mulch around the trees. Depending on the day we did just some or all of these activities and everyday we visited different sights in Cairns, Kuranda, the Atherton Tablelands, and Brampton Beach. Although it is still technically the dry season, we never needed to water these trees because it rained ALL week. This was good because the normal temperature would have been damn hot in the sun (we experienced that the week before and over the weekend) but bad because we were just always wet. On Thursday we planted trees along the river bank on a cattle farm. The holes had been dug the day before and were filled with water. It continued to rain Thursday and so planting trees was equivalent to playing in the mud -- red clay mud. The cows wanted in on the action too and stuck their heads through the barbed wire to eat the trees we were trying to plant.
Here's James Bond's spy cow checking up on us.
During week 2 we lost a few people and gained a few more. And we moved into the CVA house. It was quite nice to get out of the hostel and have a place to stay that had a TV (gasp) and a real kitchen and bathroom. Our team was again almost all female (gasp... no wait that is not surprising) and again mostly European. Guilia from Milan, Camille from Paris, Maxine from London, Rita from Italy, Victoria from Madrid, Melanie from France, Yong from Seoul and me.
ABOVE: My team and another CVA team in Kuranda.
Workdays are generally split into 3 shifts -- two in the morning and one in the afternoon. But this week, due mostly to rain, we frequently only did 2 shifts and then would spend the afternoon visiting waterfalls and parks and beaches. Of course it is still raining at the waterfalls, parks and beaches, but it was nice to have the opportunity to go to many of these places that had I been just a regular tourist I wouldn't have the means to get to, nor the inside knowledge to find. We did go one day to the centenary park, which is an area within Cairns of protected rainforest with a 400meter walkway through it and the botanical gardens with all kinds of crazy tropical plants. I am not usually one to get all impressed by plants but this was really really awesome. Unfortunately I have no pictures because I didn't want to take my camera out into the rain.
Today was the last day of Cairns CVA and we spent it digging holes and planting trees on a super steep creek bank in Kuranda on some private property. The people who owned the land had a barbeque for us at the house and I had a chat with the woman and found out all kinds of interesting things. For instance the woman is Canadian, and the man is American (from New York City) but they met in Guatamala and then lived in Indian for many years. But when their children were about 7 they decided they needed to go somewhere that their kids could get a decent education. So they made a list of all the places they thought they might like since neither of them wanted to return to the north american continent. One of their requirements was that they wanted to live someplace tropical. They had never been to Australia before so they came to Brisbane, bought a campervan and just north until they reached the rainforest. The next problem was finding work in such a remote place in their field that would also make them eligible for visas that would allow them to make Australia their home long term. They were artists... mostly theater but the woman also used to design a line of clothing. So they started Tjapukai -- a park and theater that presents Aboriginal dance and ancient stories. And they've been living in Kuranda and Cairns for over 20 years.
I went to Tjapukai the weekend before but the park was closed because they were hosting a huge Reggae festival. So Maxine and I went to the Reggae festival instead. Which was equally if not more awesome. So many hippies... like real ones with dreads arriving in hippie vans. Awesome.
Well anyway, I'm back on my own now. I will be volunteering in Brisbane at the same time as Maxine so I'll meet up with her again. And Guilia insists she is coming to the US in November 2009 because she really wants to check out this thing we call Thanksgiving. But other than this I'm back to being a loner. But as the Australians would say "No worries", I'm at a new hostel in the city called Bohemia Central that I really like and I am going out to the reef to snorkel tomorrow and heading off down the coast on Sunday; so there is still plenty of adventure to go.
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