Touched by an Emu

The Great Barrier Reef is home to 1,500 species of fish and 400 types of coral. I'll say no more about it -- you simply have to add it to your list.

Clean Beaches and Loos

Make sure you turn on the radio while driving through Australia. The motion pictures the country produces -- movies like "The Dish," "Muriel's Wedding," "Gallipoli," "Babe" and "Strictly Ballroom" -- all suggest a kind of old-fashioned, sweet innocence that in some ways defines the Australian character. What you hear on the radio confirms that stereotype.

Regular radio stations in Australia are likely to play American songs from the '50s. Oh, some of the music is updated. I heard, for example, a Led Zeppelin song performed by a swing band.

On the hour's drive from Port Douglas to Cairns we hear a radio hostess named Briney announce that her topic of the day is the cleanest public toilets in Queensland. And people actually call in. One caller reports a location as having toilets that are always "spotless white. It's like someone gets on her knees to get every nook and cranny."

"Oh, lovely," says Briney. "You can never overestimate the importance of a clean toilet, can you?"

Someone else calls to say they think the cleanest public toilets are in Richmond.

"Oh, tell us about them," she says.

We pull over for a swim at a beach just outside Cairns, but sit in the car a while to wait until the show is over. We do use some restraint, though, and don't visit any of the recommended toilets to see for ourselves which are cleanest. Maybe another trip.

We can, however, report that the beaches are very clean and, during the late fall and winter stinging jellyfish season, they are protected by giant nets. The beaches on the stretch near the Great Barrier Reef, though, are disappointing. Fine, but nothing special, and not like the gold and blue beaches of your Australian dreams. Those, we later hear, we just left behind near Brisbane, on the Gold Coast. I'd fly back down there in a second if I weren't scheduled to leave tomorrow for an all-day connecting flight to Adelaide.

Flipper and Friends

It's dark and we're tired, grumpy and ready for bed when we arrive at our lodgings in Adelaide. We step inside the Buxton Apartments and immediately cheer up. Our quarter of a former mansion is huge, with two bedrooms and a giant living room filled with museum-quality Victorian antiques, including a velvet sofa and one of those elegant lounges that women of that era would slouch across to have their portraits painted.

In the morning we discover that much of the city has that elegantly old-fashioned, terribly British feel. In fact, Adelaide is the idealized English city that no longer exists in Great Britain, if it ever did. You half expect to see babies being strolled in big white wicker prams when you visit any of the 29 parks that cover 45 percent of the city's land.

But I've got to rush to the pier for my dolphin swim.