Cairns isn’t just for the Great Barrier Reef. Just two hours north is a rainforest with deadly crocodiles, virginal beaches, refreshing creeks and at least one bat.

Two hours into the sailing trip, Dave, the divemaster, brought out the pedophile jokes.

He had already riled the Irish on board (“Your body is 80 percent water, except for the Irish, which are 30 percent alcohol”) but was still several hours from touching on race (“Why is Stevie Wonder always smiling? He doesn’t know he’s black”).

It was, to be sure, an alarming start to a three-day cruise around the Whitsunday Islands.

Anywhere you go in Australia – anywhere there’s money to be made from tourists – you’ll find a heap of travel agents competing for your wallet. It’s important to shop around and compare prices before settling on one.

Not every trip we took in Oz was satisfying. The Fraser Island self-drive tour and the canoe trip on the Noosa River left much to be desired. But this is partly our fault for not asking the right questions before booking them.

Everyone – and I mean everyone – who took the canoe trip up the Noosa River got it for free. Tribal Travel, an agency ubiquitous in Australia, is throwing it in when you book other classic tours like Fraser Island on a 4WD and sailing on the Whitsundays.

While they’re clearly trying to promote this lesser-known trip, it has two major problems: a) it’s not really free, and b) it totally acts like it’s free.

It doesn’t take long to see that the eastern Australian backpacking trail, which stretches form Sydney to Cairns, is geared for the sub-30 set. Hundreds of young’uns, mostly European, flock to the Gold an Sunshine Coasts chasing sunny beaches, bountiful alcohol, and beach-beautiful bodies.

Nothing wrong with this, but it’s not for everyone. Which is the reason that travellers 30 and above are a rare sight: it’s easy for them to feel they have outgrown this kind of budget-minded tripping.

Andrew Langford, a world-touring veteran of the didgeridoo, talks about his passion for the Aboriginal instrument and how anyone can learn it.

When they can’t be bothered with sound discipline, it’s customary for parents to scare their children with fantastic lies.

In Brazil, for example, children are told that if they play with fire they will wet their beds, or that cockroaches will lick their mouths at night if they neglect to brush their teeth.

And there’s the mammoth childhood lie, one that crosses many cultures and is so ridiculous that its survival is nothing less than a miracle: that a fat old man in the North Pole is monitoring every child and delivers obedience rewards on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

If failure is the best teacher, as any experienced business owner will tell you, then a certain hostel in Brisbane deserves the fast-track to tenure. Seldom does a place teach you so much about sound hospitality practices by doing everything wrong. Cloud 9 Backpackers on Upper Roma St. is such a place.

In a roadhouse deep in the central Australian outback, Dinky the Dingo has been entertaining travelers for years.

At an unremarkable corner of the Cultural Center of Uluru, there’s a binder holding hundreds of sorrows, regrets, and apologies.

Read enough of them and they start to sound the same:

I was so enchanted by Uluru that I wanted to take a piece of it home. I realize now that it was wrong. Please return this rock to its rightful place.