Gunrunners
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
144
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Cairns,
Australia
Saturday, March 22, 2008
After a long succession of countries in which Customs was a process of breezing through a green-signed automatic door, we have arrived in Australia, where Customs is very serious indeed. Perhaps the experience of having introduced a long list of alien organisms with disastrous consequences to the local economy has made the Aussies wary. (For example, the unhappy experience of imported rabbits, who reproduced wildly without natural predators and stripped the plains bare of vegetation. Or the ongoing results of providing the descendants of criminal Englishmen with ready access to the by-products of barley-fermenting microbes, which causes otherwise intelligent persons to believe that Australian Rules Football actually has, well, rules.)
We did not clear customs in Brisbane on arrival in Australia, so we needed to do so in Cairns
Goodbye to all that
. On the flight from Brisbane to Cairns, Amy made friends with our flight attendant, who lives here. He gave her lots of ideas for what to do during our brief visit, and arranged a surprise for the kids as we deplaned. We were the last persons off the plane, and the flight crew offered the kids a chance to see the flight deck. This was not just a glance in the door, but an actual opportunity to sit in the pilot's and co-pilot's chairs and look out the front windows. (I wonder if the kids realized what a rare treat this really was. I remember doing this in a prop-driven DC-3 when I was a kid, but I'm pretty sure it never happens in the U. S. anymore, in these post-9/11 days of armored cockpit doors.)
Unfortunately, this made us even later through Immigration and on to Customs. When we arrived at baggage claim, our five green bags were making a lonely circuit around and around the baggage carousel in an empty arrivals hall.
We operate on a full disclosure basis in our world travels, sort of like the Obama campaign, and unlike that mean woman from New York. So we took the questions on the Customs form seriously, and declared medicines, wooden articles and a visit to a rural area. After a few questions, they decided they were OK with my meds, and after further review concluded that the mud encrusted on Amy's sandals was not a clear and present danger.
Jack's two blowguns, however, were another matter. Last week I bought Jack two small but entirely functional blowguns from the natives during a visit to a Betak village in the Malaysian rain forest. These two blowguns were two and three-feet long respectively, and each came with a small quiver of genuine, wickedly-pointed darts. Not toys in any sense.
It appears the U. S. Consumer Products Safety Commission has allies in Australian Customs. After a brief consultation, we were told that the blowguns were machina non grata in Oz, and would be seized. (They also seemed quite interested in the identity of the shredded green leaf in the quivers, which is used as a wad to help propel the darts. Wouldn't it be just my luck if it turned out to be wild Malaysian cannabis?)
Jack was desolate. This is, after all, the most nostalgic 11-year-old on the planet, an intelligent and sensitive young man who refuses to discard a pair of broken flip-flops because they remind him of good times on the beach in South Africa with his friend Graeme.
Jack tried all possible means to avoid being separated from his weapons. He asked if he could go straight home without entering Australia, and stay at a friend's house with his blowguns. He was confident that arriving with two genuine blowguns in hand would guarantee a warm welcome from any of his 11-year-old male friends. That might be so, but I suspect that their parents would be considerably less happy to see a moody pre-teen boy arrive complete with deadly weapons from the equatorial jungles.
So now we have an Australian Seizure Notice to go with our French medical bill and my citation by the British anti-terrorist police squad. And our progress around the world continues.
