Rafito el Varado Goes To New South Wales

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Rafito el Varado always said he would never leave the Rivera again. Britain had drained him—too much fog, too many mournful cliffs giving him unsolicited advice. But then, one afternoon at Playa de las Cavernas Errantes, while the sea murmured its cryptic footnotes, a kookaburra landed beside him.

It laughed. Not at him, but around him—like an oracle with indigestion.
Rafito froze. “Australia is calling,” he whispered.

And that’s how he ended up stepping through the arch-cave once more, vanishing into its shifting geometry and reappearing—so he claims—face-down on a warm, surreal shoreline in New South Wales, a place he described as “Mediterranean dreams wearing Pacific masks.”

He awoke in a cove shaped like an hourglass melted sideways, the cliffs glowing orange as if they’d overslept the sunrise, and the sea that impossible Australian turquoise that looks Photoshopped by God. Towering pines leaned over the rock arches like philosophers about to whisper advice they’d instantly forget.

The locals were friendly in the way only Australians can be: casually fearless. A surfer approached Rafito carrying a board painted with concentric circles.
“G’day mate. You lost?”
Rafito shook his head. “No, only misplaced.”
“Fair enough,” the surfer said, as if that were the most reasonable condition a man could be in.

Rafito spent his days wandering between coves that shifted subtly each morning, as if Australia wasn’t entirely sure about the arrangement of its own coastline. At dusk, the rocks sometimes rearranged themselves into crude amphitheaters. One night, Rafito watched a group of wallabies perform what he swore was an improvised Shakespeare adaptation. (“It was Macbeth, but with better hopping.”)

He became obsessed with the arch in the cliff—the one that led to a hidden lagoon where the water glowed faintly at night. He said the glow came from plankton, but the plankton whispered names he didn’t know. It unnerved him. He preferred mysteries that minded their own business.

His greatest misadventure involved an emu that tried to steal his journal. Rafito chased it for an hour along a beach that seemed to stretch into a mild hallucination. When he finally caught up, the emu dropped the notebook and bowed with what Rafito interpreted as ironic courtliness.

But the real reason he returned to the Rivera was more mundane.

“New South Wales is wonderful,” he admitted, watching the Rivera sunset with that familiar half-drifting look, “but the sun is too confident. It shines like it knows something I don’t. I felt… competitively illuminated.”

And so Rafito el Varado stepped back through the arch once more, emerging on Cavernas Errantes with a new tan, a boomerang he insists returns only when emotionally ready, and an absurd conviction that the Australian coastline sometimes dreams of him too.

“Lovely place,” he said. “But the animals negotiate differently.”