KEY POINTS:
Well, this isn't very scary at all. Ha! Don't know what sort of wimps they breed in Cairns. I'm fine, looking at the horizon, just like the man said. Don't look down; not looking down. The rainforest looks very pretty from up here, I muse.
I am rigged up in a complicated harness, being slowly hoisted 55m in the air above the AJ Hackett bungy-jumping site in far north Queensland. This is the Minjin Jungle Swing, a ride that sits next to the real tourist attraction of this site, the bungy tower. The Jungle Swing is an effort to diversify the site's attractions - after all, there are only so many times you can fling yourself off a tower.
I have been carefully coached by the swing operator, a fellow named Woody, who, I can't help noticing, has bright white hair with black stripes, zebra-style. Once, "ride operator" meant a pimply youth with tight jeans, fag dangling from one lip, resting his hand nonchalantly on the levers of a rusting ferris wheel. Now, "jumpmaster" is a legitimate profession and adventure tourism is a multi-billion dollar international industry.
These days, those pimply youths have been replaced by tattooed millionaires running their own extreme-sports empires - and Woody, I'm sure, is well on his way to joining them. For now, though, he's got my life in his hands.
"I'm going to hoist you up to the top of the swing. When you get to the top, pull the cord hanging over your left shoulder," Woody said before I left the ground. "Don't pull it before that, or you will definitely die," he added. I laughed. It occurs to me, thinking about it as I gradually ascend, Woody did not laugh.
Clank. The hoist stops. I'm at the top, the same height as the bungy platform, which makes me feel seriously brave. Now I'm supposed to pull the cord, which should release me to swing back and forth at speeds of up to 100km an hour. Sounds quite soothing, and a nice way to build up to a bungy jump later this afternoon, I think.
"OK, when you're ready!" Woody shouts from far below. I pull hard on the cord, expecting to swing gracefully towards the Great Barrier Reef gleaming before me - but instead, I go down. Straight down. This wasn't supposed to haaaaaaa ... aaaaaaargh! As I plummet towards the forest floor, my terror is tinged with outrage - he didn't say anything about freefalling!
For some reason I am still gripping the rip-cord as I shriek towards the ground. Why? It's not going to save me. Later, looking at the photos, I appear to be grinning. It's not joy so much as astonishment at Woody's neglect to mention anything about a death-plunge when he strapped me in. At first, I think the whole contraption has broken and I'm doomed to go crashing through the fern canopy, but just before I reach the undergrowth, the swing snaps into action and zooms me up and out again, towards the horizon. Below, I can see Woody video-recording me for a souvenir DVD. As I whizz past, his face is totally deadpan. I try to shout something rude in his direction but the velocity undermines any attempt at righteous indignation.
To my right, sitting on a balcony above the swing with his bank manager, is AJ Hackett, the owner of the site. Hackett, the New Zealander who has made a fortune from encouraging tourists to plunge towards death in various expensive ways, is the original adventure entrepreneur with his own global chain of tourism ventures. I have spent the afternoon interviewing him for a canvas feature story. He's been encouraging me to do my first ever bungy-jump. Sure, sure, I've been saying - I'll do the swing first, then I'll be straight up the tower.
Now, I'm having second thoughts about that plan. As I swing helplessly back and forth, Hackett doesn't seem to notice my lily-livered screaming. I guess after 19 years in bungy, he has developed the ability to tune out all manner of noises. As an endless trance soundtrack vibrates across the jump-site, assorted Scandinavian and Japanese backpackers drop from the sky, wailing in terror. Hackett just keeps poring over the account books.
By the time I get back on to the ground, I've decided my courage is all used up for today. No bungy tower for me, thanks. I feel like a bit of a coward (ok, a big coward), especially in front of Hackett, who displays the scars and wonky joints of a lifetime's professional daredevilling, but I console myself with the decision that bungy is no longer as cool as it was back in the 80s, when every man worth his mullet was queuing up to throw himself off high places.
In the 10 minutes since my freefall, I have decided bungy is totally last century. Young hard-cases like me are far too edgy for that sort of outmoded tourism. I've got other thrills to seek, different dares to devil.
And I just don't feel like it today, okay? I'm not scared, honestly. "It'd be really beneficial for the story if you did jump," Hackett says later, as we sip beers. "You could give readers the full experience, you know." He describes the life-changing impact of confronting one's fears to jump: personal epiphany, never look back, amazing sense of achievement
I become very interested in a leaf on the ground by my foot and mumble something about maybe coming back for a jump later this afternoon. Or tomorrow ... Hackett is too polite to openly call me a big girly sook, but later he loudly praises the bravery of Italian backpacker Valentina Amerighi, 21, who is preparing for her first leap.
"Pff, not scary," says Amerighi, shrugging in a very Italian way. I'm quite pleased when she finally leaps off the tower and stops showing me up. Obviously she hasn't heard how uncool bungy is these days.
OK, maybe that's not fair - actually, the Jungle Swing is a great rush, and Woody is a very competent chap. And I guess he was right not to tell me about the freefall - if his pre-swing briefing was too scary-sounding, nobody would actually do it. Well, nobody as chicken as me, anyway.
Cairns is a classic Queensland town - wide, melting streets; goannas shuffling in the dry leaves under the trees; foam stubby-holders to keep your beer bottle cold (even when it is posh Spanish beer, which does look odd encased in a slightly grubby insulation sleeve).
And the locals are special; despite their sedative drawl and liking for tinned pineapple, some of Australia's most stylish and dynamic people come from up here.
I know Queenslanders hate the hick stereotype - which is why I was slyly delighted when the first person I saw after clearing customs was a man wearing short shorts and long socks. Oh yes. With dress shoes.
After the excitement of the swing, I decided to get a gentler look at nature at the Cairns Rainforest Dome, a huge glass-and-steel structure atop the Reef Hotel Casino in the centre of town. It's wildlife-spotting for the impatient; these clever tourism operators have worked out today's visitors don't have the time nor inclination to wait hours in a remote field for the shy chestnut-breasted mannikin finch or white-lipped tree frog to shuffle into the range of binoculars, or to spend hours trundling around a zoo.
Far more efficient to enclose healthy examples of all the glorious local fauna in one spot, where they can't get away. It's a pleasant hour's diversion, and a rare chance to get a decent look at owls and kookaburras and lizards, usually just half-seen flashes in the scrub.
A giant estuarine crocodile slumbers on a warm concrete bank, a white-headed pigeon, lovely and tubby, perches atop his fence. A pair of black cockatoos, their crests swept up in punk-like feathery mohawks, squabble over some fruit.
I'm reminded of the cockatoos the next morning as I laze on the sand of Green Island, a coral nature reserve, with resort, cafes, souvenir shops, snorkelling and diving, a 45-minute boat trip north-east of Cairns.
This time, the squawking comes from a group of Japanese-American girls in bikinis. They have flown in from Tokyo that morning.
"Oh. My. God. I am so fat," one declares, to the shocked twittering of all the others.
I'm trying to work out why they keep parading up and down the sand at full volume, squealing, squabbling and splashing into the surf to photograph one another until I notice a burly lifesaver, perched on his watchtower, and he is not even pretending to watch the horizon.
Within a few minutes he has hopped down and agreed to photograph the girls in yet another group portrait. Can you blame him? All this glorious exotic fauna in one spot - and he doesn't even need binoculars.
Checklist
AJ Hackett Bungy and Minjin Jungle Swing: McGregor Rd, Smithfield, Cairns (15 minutes' drive north of the city). Swing prices start at A$45 ($51), Bungy A$99.
Cairns Wildlife Dome, corner Wharf and Abbott streets, Cairns. Adults A$22, children A$11.
Big Cat Reef Cruises, Reef Fleet Terminal, 1 Spence St, Cairns, www.bigcat-cruises.com.au. Half-day Green Island excursion: Adults A$62 children A$35.
* Claire Harvey made her own way to Cairns and was a guest of AJ Hackett Bungy, the Cairns Wildlife Dome and Big Cat Reef Cruises.
