Journal of a Day in Cairns

We never know how precious a moment truly is before it has become the past.

Heading for the Daintree rainforest of Cairns, the hot and sticky somnolence from sitting on the window seat of a summer bus hit me. I was tempted to sleep, yet what kept me awake was the idea of me squandering the beautiful sight outside the window. I had known that it would be extraordinary before I even looked outside, as the bus driver emphasized that we were on one of the best drives in all of Australia.

Yet I did not realize how beautiful it would be.

Looking outside the window, the world was perfectly divided into three colors: gray, golden, and a gradient of dark into light blue. Gray at the bottom was the road I’d imagine to be scorching hot from the ceaseless baking of the lethal Queensland sun. There was no pavement; step off the road and take two steps and you would land on the second color: the cleanly gold beach. The pavement of the road is the beach, I thought to myself, which seemed to me quite a luxurious idea and justified just how spectacular of a sight this is.

The beach was purely golden. It was unmistakably golden, rather than the usual plain light-yellow color you would see on an ordinary beach. The golden color was finely tanned; it was the type of golden where the salty waves of the ocean have recently blanketed the sand, the sand in the liminal state between being wet and dry; or the type of golden you’d imagine when told to picture the desert of the most saturated, idyllic version of an oasis. From the window, I saw that the beach had creases. The beach was wrinkled, lightly, from little humps of sand, or perhaps remnants of a sandcastle.

Lastly, it was the gradient of blue. For me, the ocean always brings the most excitement. Perhaps because its motion, being dynamic, the waves overlapping each other. They submerge each other cyclically, yet they never became trite to spectate, as they have always left me in awe of nature’s beauty and has always served as some kind of appealing stimulus to the eye while my mind thinks of something else. However, after watching for a while, the ocean always leaves me in a peculiar state of gentle sadness. Maybe because of the rise and fall of the waves, the eternal nature of the movement compared to the transient state of beauty, or the ephemeral idea of life, I thought to myself.

The ocean is also exciting perhaps because of its splendor. The ocean always engenders a sense of revere within me for its size, extending forwards infinitely. The size also brings about the romantic prospect of someone you’re thinking about standing on the other side of the shore, or perhaps a stranger who you are looking observing from a very long distance.

The ocean is undeniably beautiful. It was a very fine day, the azure sky without any flaw of a cloud. From my view, the ocean seemed to extend infinitely upwards until at one unidentifiable, quiet point it meets with the sky, forming a gradient of blue so delightful to watch.

However, it is lamentable to note that I am writing this journal a little over a year later, and at that particular moment in that particular day, seeing the splendid tricolor world, I was most likely struck by the somnolence, or some other unpleasant feeling such the stickiness from a hot bus and the carsick it brings, that I did not give the sight the affection it deserved. Yet one year and a month later, I sit in front of my desk writing, and I think back to that day, a very fine day, without the ability to time travel and to achieve redemption with appreciation. I shall not know even if I would return to Cairns in my lifetime. And yet the human weakness of never knowing how precious a moment truly is before it has become the past is recurrent; in the future, I certainly will fritter away another special day like my day in Cairns.