Swooping Magpies Attack

Cairns Australia is a beautiful little city on the north coast of Australia. It's heavily supported by tourism, and is loaded with businesses that cater to them, but it's still retained its charm.

On our last evening in Cairns, we took a walk around and looked at some stuff and searched out something for dinner.

This idyllic walkway was great until the birds attacked. Goddamn swooping Magpies!

There's a picturesque walkway through an archway of beautiful trees leading across the edge of the park adjacent to the Shangri-la hotel where we stayed. We strolled through there and noticed the birds were very 'active'.

They were flapping and chirping and squawking and fowling.

We stopped to take a couple of pictures of the park, and that's when then they started swooping. And then we both got hit from above by 'stuff'.

Great. I traveled12,000 miles from home just to get shit on by some stupid fucking birds.

We made the appropriate shouts of disgust, and did the magical levitation dance of the flailing arms, accompanied by frantic wiping.



Fortunately... it wasn't your typical bird shit. In fact, it may not have been shit at all - it was dry. Sort of like little bits of peat moss.

I think a bird had a major flap in the tree and knocked some tree material down. Anyway, no harm done but we got our asses out of there in a clucking fury before the bird grove went all Alfred Hitchcock on our asses. Or eyes.

There's a fantastic wading pool on the water front. The water around the Cairns shore is usually brown, which isn't particularly inviting. They say it's mud. So they built this thing for kids right on the shore, and it's huge!

There's a 'market' in the park and I have to say I got kind of annoyed. There were so many stalls selling what is basically lying delusional ass snatch bullshit products that will supposedly cure anything and give you the dick of death.

Not everyone was having it though.

"I'm telling you, my dick is no more deadly after using your bullshit Magnesium spray."

Henna tattoos. Pretty cool!

We wandered around and took some pics of various things like wood fibers, geometrically applied petroleum derivative products decorated with linear embellishments, and some Sheilas.

We ate at a place called Rattle & Hum, which was rockin'. It's next to a thing called the Night Market. The Night Market is a bunch of indoor stalls selling tourist junk, food, and massages.

This is the place to go for a cheap meal, such as "steam table production line chinese on a foam plate".

But I did wonder about the ridic number of massage places. There's no way getting a shoulder rub is so popular that they'd need 10 places within happy ending spitting distance of one another, but there are. They had one of those 'creepy fish eat the even creepier stuff off your feet' places. Poor fuckin' fish!

I've mentioned that things are expensive in Australia. For this Canuck, the Oz dollar was about even. So $28 fish'n is pretty outrageous (unless the fish first cleans the creepy stuff off your feet, and then does a backflip into the fryer).

By US standards as of this writing, the Oz dollar is worth about 3/4 of a US buck. So your fish'n would be three quarters of $28. Which is. Ummm.

Still a lot.

A real lot.

Okay, $21.02. Big city prices. Vegas strip prices.

On the way back to the hotel I noticed this kitted out truck. There are some way serious trucks here, and it's not just little-dick show-off self esteem booster stuff. They need that shit out here - massive tires, brush grills, snorkels, and winches. They probably winch shit every fucking day. When was the last time you winched anything from your fake Hummer?

What I couldn't figure out was what the four tubes above the headlight are for. Launching flares? Holding fishing rods? Mortars? Horns?

I'm still baffled. If you know, drop me a line.

Next up - return to Sydney, where dingoes ate my baby.