big red

Ayer's Rock, or Uluru, is the iconic image of Australia's outback, and possibly of the country as a whole.
You see pictures of it in every shop, in every travel book. I don't know when I first saw a picture of the Rock, but I'm sure it was when I was a kid in some book. The point is, just about everyone knows what it looks like, even those people who haven't thought about traveling to this side of the world.
But the thing is, they're wrong.
I was a bit worried seeing the Rock would be like seeing Mt. Rushmore. You see all the pictures of Mt. Rushmore, and then you get there, and it looks exactly like the pictures. So much so that the actual Mt. Rushmore is less impressive than a picture of Mt. Rushmore - the real thing has nothing extra to offer.
Uluru is nothing like that.
For one thing, when you see the pictures, you don't notice or can't see the texture of the thing, the ancient weathering scars and pockmarks. You don't realize how many different views there are, depending where you look from. You don't see just how it looms over the flat red desert. You don't have a sense of just how much texture the rock has, or how the color changes throughout the day with the sun's movement. You don't get to see how it appears more than anything to be a painted backdrop as you drive toward it, until the moment where it suddenly becomes very much three-dimensional.
You don't get to feel the heat and dust of the dry desert air and the sun's unceasing glare as you walk around the base of the rock, or the silence.
You don't realize how each curve, each protrusion, each cut, each indentation has it's own character. You don't realize how when you're close up to the Rock, each spot, each nook seems to have its own special character, at once separated and a part of the whole.
You don't get lost in the unreal contrast and edge where the deep, deep red meets the endless deep blue of the sky; you don't see the sharp edge where rock and sky push against each other, or the soft touch of green the trees provide. You don't feel how the colors, the texture, the silence, the massiveness of it all seem to give the Rock an ageless feeling.
You don't see the difference in the rock itself, how parts of it are curved and raked smooth by eons of wind and sand, or how other parts are jagged or just missing where boulders have fallen off. You don't see the place where the red stone seems to drip onto a grey exposed patch like candle wax.
Most of all, you don't get the sense of Uluru having been here for much longer than you can imagine, of how insignificant and out-of-place the tourists walking up one of its ridges look, of how it seems to exude a quiet presence.

I can now confirm....

...Kookaburra does sit in the old gum tree.

red back

It's the name of one of Australia's deadly spiders, but what I'm talking about today is the state of my own trailing side. After a day of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef (a full day - almost 5 hours in the water) and an under-application of sunscreen, I came out with a serious sunburn. It probably was inevitable, given the amount of time my bare back faced the sun, but it's been a while since I had a painful burn.

Looks like the pattern for now is a bunch of (mostly prewritten) posts at once when I get a connection (and time).

We are in Cairns today (got in yesterday on the overnight bus, and essentially spent the day catching up on sleep as well as walking around the city center for an hour or two). I did the snorkel trip - didn't think I'd had enough after just two short snorkel sessions on our sailing trip. The reef looks just like the nature documentaries make it out to be. Brightly colored fish, lots of crazy shapes of coral, all sorts of different things everywhere you look. Didn't see anything really big - no turtles, no sharks. Saw a lot of fish I'd seen in aquariums or pet shops, and some I'd never seen before (lots of different parrotfish). The colors of the coral itself weren't quite as bright as the TV shows might have led me to believe, but I hear part of the problem is the tourism itself tends to kill some of the coral.

It's been a week of water - two nights on a sailboat (saw whales, attended a beach party, did a little snorkeling, stayed up too late and woke with the sunrise) followed by the day of snorkeling. Now we're headed to the land of no water - we fly to Uluru/Ayer's Rock tomorrow morning.

timing

On this trip we're headed to some great places, but we're not heading there at a great time.
Australia is an exception. Any other time, I think northern Australia would likely be too hot. Right now, it's pretty good (although another 5-10 degrees would be welcome some days).
However, we're headed to SE Asia for Monsoon season, then northern China in October (could be cold), then the UK and Ireland in November (will be cold). We cap it all off with a short stint in Iceland on the way home in late November. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing we'll have about four hours of sun each day.

The worst part about cruising along in winter or fall for nearly a year isn't the weather. We're sitting in Australian winter now, and the weather's better than New Zealand's summer ever was.
No, the worst part is the daylight hours. Outside of maybe next month in SE Asia, I'm not going to see sunlight past 6:30 p.m. until the days lengthen back home next summer. We're on the wrong side of Daylight Savings for a year.
It makes it hard to squeeze in a long day's traveling, especially when you tend to sleep in slightly past dawn.

Daylight isn't the only thing we've missed perfect timing. The currency fluctuations haven't been in our favor, either. When we got to New Zealand the NZ dollar was at a several year high against the US dollar. At the time, of course, we were primarily spending our US savings. After a year of earning NZ dollars, the Kiwi has fallen from around 75 cents to the US$ to 61 cents.
It's kind of like buy high, sell low. At least our money should go farther once we get to Thailand.

it's big

After a year in New Zealand, you lose track of the scale of things elsewhere. Australia has pounded back into my brain a scope closer to my US experience.
There are real cities here, cities you can walk around in for 20 minutes and still be in the city. There are things a day's drive from each other, and there are roads wide and straight rather than twisting and narrow. There are also legal speed limits in excess of 100 kilometers an hour (I was giddy with joy the first time I saw a sign for 110 on a four-lane road outside of Melbourne. Finally, the chance to drive as people were meant to drive. Quickly.)

All that I'm enjoying. I'd forgotten how much I loved being in the middle of a large city, just feeling the bustle going on around me. Even in Auckland, the heart of the CBD was only about two blocks wide. In Wellington, I could walk from one end of the city to the other in about 30 minutes. Sydney is on a proper American scale - alone, it has more people than New Zealand.

There is a downside. New Zealand was a small enough market for some of the American consumerism to pass it over as not worth bothering with. Australia seems to have embraced American-style chains and consumerism. I feel a bit like I returned home, with all the American brands I'm seeing for the first time in a year.

In a lot of ways, Australia (especially the cities) may as well be the States. But the cities we've seen so far - Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane - all have a pleasant bit of character too many US cities lack. Mostly it's about water. Melbourne and Brisbane are built around rivers and Sydney has its harbor. The water softens the harshness of the city landscape.

marketing

I know the soundtrack here is slightly different. Not very different - the radio playlists are, I'm guessing, almost identical. However, there are a few songs I know are distinctly Kiwi and probably haven't been heard over there. Therefore, I'm assuming there are a few others I hear regularly and don't know are Kiwi, and don't realize no one else in the world is hearing as often as I am.
It's a self-evident fact, but it's not something I'd ever really thought about before. I've realized, however, Australians and New Zealanders think about it often.
The States is still the ultimate market. It's where the money is, and where the fame is. But at the same time, the Aussies and Kiwis have a bit of a fatalistic streak to them. Someone the other day was amazed I knew who AC/DC was. They didn't realize the band had ever had any sort of profile in the States. Of course, I imagine most Americans had no real idea AC/DC was Australian.
And sometimes the pessimism is warranted. Apparently, one of the biggest Australian rock bands of the late 80s/early 90s was some group called Cold Chisel. If I've ever heard one of their songs, I don't know it.

And another thing, while I'm on the subject of marketing. I haven't seen a Foster's over here at all. There is a lot of Australian beer, but Fosters isn't the common name.
(And one other point on beer: for some reason, the only major U.S. beers to be exported are Budweiser and Miller Genuine Draft. Who struck the deal putting those two together?)

missed opportunity

When we flew from New Zealand to Australia, first we flew from Christchurch to Auckland. I was looking forward to getting an aerial view of the country we had seen on the ground.

Unfortunately, the day was rainy and the entire country was covered in clouds. The day was horrible on the ground. It was a bit odd to rise above the clouds and see the sun shine and blue sky. Instead of the view of the NZ landscape, we got a blank canvas of white.

rapidly running out of time

Just got off a boat after three days of sailing. Just have a few minutes before catching an overnight bus north to Cairns. Spending two days there, then flying to Uluru/Ayers Rock on Monday. A few days in the outback, and then back to Sydney for our final days in Australia.

I'm loving this country. The weather helps - 75 every day and sunny in the middle of winter - along with the beaches and everything else. Not sure I want to be here in summer, though. Might be a bit hot.

better late than never

The posts I wrote last week but couldn't get off the laptop:


Aug. 20
Brisbane
A day of relaxation. It's an odd feature of traveling: you often need a break from the vacation. After two weeks traveling in Australia, combined with our travels the last month in New Zealand, it was time for a day off.
We ended up with a free place to stay for the first time in Australia. One of our former roommates from Wellington is from Brisbane, and we ended up staying here with his mom, who has served as a tour guide and host.
Today we took sight-seeing mostly off the agenda. Woke up and headed to a city park with barbecues for a brunch of lamb chops, eggs and grilled vegetables. Then a walk around the city botanic garden, mostly checking out local birds, and an afternoon of catching up on newspaper reading, TV watching, e-mail writing and blog postings.

Tomorrow, the travel gears up again. We catch a 7:45 a.m. bus north to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island and apparently one of the scenic highlights of Australia's East Coast.

Aug. 19
A day to see Brisbane. Starting in the late morning, we hopped on a CityCat, a catamaran plying the Brisbane River for public transport needs. Far cheaper than the average river cruise, and it comes with benefits - for $3.60 each we get an all-day pass to the city's ferries, buses and trains. We get the most out of our money. After a walk around the arts center (stopping in the requisite museum) we ride the CityCat up the river to the end of the line and back. That takes up the afternoon, then we head out (with our host) to eat and people-watch on the sidewalk of the nightlife district. Evening concludes with a show - a string quartet performing rock covers and a few originals. The bio says "we're an independent rock band that just happens to be a string quartet." The originals lean more toward lounge blues, but the rock covers produce the appropriate chaos of noise.

Aug. 18
Leave Surfer's Paradise at noon and bus two hours to Brisbane (morning taken up with napping on the beach after dropping the bags at the bus station).
We've phoned ahead - we're staying with the mother of one of our friends from Wellington. First, we have to kill the afternoon in Brisbane. I walk around downtown and end up in a small museum. Kirsten's time is spent talking to travel agents. She's contemplating returning home, as her dad has some health issues. (In the end she decides on Saturday to scrap the idea, for now).
Our host, Jane, fills the evening playing tour guide. She drives us to all the city sights, including a night view of the Brisbane lights from a mountain lookout. Cities always look good from a high night vantage point, and no exception here.

Aug. 17
Bryon Bay to Surfer's Paradise
Surfer's Paradise isn't. There's a long, gold-sand beach, but it's certainly not a special beach in this country of special beaches. There's also not a particularly good surf.
What there is, is property developers. Glass and steel high-rise condo and apartment buildings, loads of retail shops and restaurants. LIke the worst parts of Florida. Even ran across a run-down amusement park in the middle of it all, the kind of gaudy attraction the Mississippi beaches were littered with. A few amusement-park rides, a free-fall swing, mini-golf, all on a concrete lot sprinkled with dirty astroturf and signs screaming out about the thrills you'll have.

Aug. 16
Bryon Bay
A horrible winter's day.
Well, an Australian winter's day, anyway. Must be about 75 degrees, sunny, with a bright blue sky and we're hanging out on the beach.
It was a bit of a late start today. Met up with some Irish friends we'd met in New Zealand, and one thing led to another until it became early in the morning. So today didn't happen until sometime after lunch. When it did, it was quite nice.
A couple hours on the beach soaking in the winter sun, which feels more like summer than New Zealand ever did.
After the beach, we continued on the theme of being slightly late. Headed out to a nearby town we'd read had a spot to view platypus. The town wasn't quite as nearby as we'd thought, and the Lonely Planet guidebook's one-sentence description of the site wasn't as helpful as we'd expected. Asking around at gas stations got us to the pond, but not until the last of the twilight had disappeared.
We looked down into the black water anyway, glimpsed a darker shape and heard a splash. So I heard a platypus. And you can't prove otherwise.
We got back in the car and figured we were halfway to Nimbin, so we might as well see the town.
Nimbin is a bit of an oddity. It's a tiny place, with barely a block's worth of shops, and it's well off the main road. Yet every backpacking tourist takes a day trip to the place. Its appeal is based entirely on its reputation as a town where marijuana laws are unenforced and hippies roam the streets. Hard to tell if the reputation is deserved, by the time we get there (7 p.m., but after nightfall) the streets are deserted. Apparently it's a tourist destination only because of the amount of tourists.

Aug. 15
The bus leaves Sydney at 7 a.m. and doesn't stop in Byron Bay until 8:30 p.m. We're on this bus because we're trying to meet some friends.
A long bus trip, like a long plane ride, places you in a bubble outside reality. Once you sit down your only responsibility, deciding on a destination, has already occurred. During the trip you can't do anything of consequence. You're disconnected from the world. I kind of like the feeling, as long as I've got a book to read or music to listen to or some sort of entertainment to keep me out of my own head and kill the time.

Aug. 14
Sydney - Bondi Beach and the coastline
We head out to the famous Bondi. It deserves the hype - the beach isn't huge, but is still a 15-20 minute walk from one end to the other in the sand. It definitely has the scenic bit down, with the bright sand and blue water curving into the fashionable houses and shops.
The part I can't get over, however, is the crowd. It's a Monday afternoon in what would be February in the rest of the world, and there are people everywhere. The sun is shining but a bit of the warmth is taken off by a breeze. There are some folks in jackets and long sleeves, but most in shorts and sandals or bikinis.
We walk for about two hours south along the coast, a route taking us from the beach along rocks and cliffs, then to another small beach, then the pattern repeats. We walk until the sun sets, then realize we don't know how to get back short of retracing our steps. There's not enough warmth or food for that option, but we end up stumbling on a bus line that works.

The evening is spent deciding whether to buy a bus pass or a train pass for the rest of the trip, since we want to leave Sydney tomorrow. This is a decision Kirsten feels should have been made earlier. It highlights a basic difference in our preferred modes of travel: I like a loose outline of destinations, with few actual details planned out in advance and just taking it as it goes. Kirsten would prefer having a slightly more detailed outline in advance. My approach generally wins out by default, which suits me fine but occasionally leads to frustration in my travel partner.

my jump

Here it is. The video from my death-defying bungy jump, if you want to see it.

missing a connection

I typed up entries for the last 10 days or so yesterday thinking I had a connection for the laptop, but in the end the connection didn't work. So the entries are locked away on a hard drive without a 'net connection.

They'll get up eventually, but for now:

We headed North from Sydney to Byron Bay, where we met up with some Irish friends we'd met in New Zealand. Hung out on the beach - winter weather here isn't bad. It's been 75 and sunny every day.

From Byron we've continued North - spent the weekend in Brisbane and today moved up the coast to Hervey Bay. Tomorrow we're booked for a day trip to see Fraser Island, apparently the world's largest sand island (complete with lakes and rainforest) and then further up the coast for a three-day sailing trip around the Great Barrier Reef.

From there we'll head further up to Cairns, then into the Outback to see Uluru (Ayer's Rock) before returning to Sydney and flying on to Bangkok.

sydney

We took the train from Melbourne to Sydney last night, after catching an Aussie Rules game in Melbourne. Sleeping in economy class seats on a train is not the optimal situation, so thankfully our hostel let us check in when we arrived at 7 a.m. and get in a nap (it's like two sleeps for the price of one!)
The rest of the day was spent wandering around seeing the obvious sights - the Opera House (it's not as white as the pictures would have you believe; there's actually a gold tinge to the coating), the harbor, parks, and the general city. Not enough time to form a real impression of the place, but the city is definitely pretty, especially on a sunny spring day with the harbor filled with sailboats.

----------------


On Aussie Rules Football:

It's the simplest incomprehensible game I know. The rules are simple: kick the ball between two posts in the ground to score. Other than that, the only real rule is if you catch a kicked ball in the air, no one can touch you while you kick. However, the game itself is chaos and often absolutely impossible to follow for a first-timer.

The other experience of note was the stadium itself. Australians are some of the world's biggest gamblers. In the stadium concourse, along with the windows to buy undercooked hotdogs, meatpies and beer, was a sports book. You could walk about 200 feet from your seat and put a bet down on the game you were watching, or any other game you could think of.
What truly amazed me, however, was the sheer number of people sitting there watching and betting on horse races around Australia. There are sports betting facilities in nearly every pub in the country. You certainly don't need to buy a ticket to a football game to bet on horse racing. And yet, that's what people were doing.

melbourne

This is going to be a crazy whirlwind tour of Australia, with just a few days in any given stop. Impressions of the first stop, Melbourne, was of a really nice city. Especially at night, the downtown is beautiful, with the lights of the buildings reflecting off the river running through the center. It has a ton of public transport options, including a large tram network and free city center tourist trains and buses. It also has several different neighborhoods with different feels, good nightlife, a ton of museums and cultural options. A good city to visit.

It also feels more like the States than anything has since I left.
Perhaps it's just that I've forgotten exactly what an American city is like after a year in New Zealand, but Melbourne is big enough (about 3 million people) to compare with a fair-size US city, and it looks just like one as well.
No where in New Zealand felt like a big US city. A lot of NZ felt like the States - the same fast-food chains, the same type of stores - but a lot of it didn't. Everything was on the wrong scale - even the big cities just weren't really big. Sydney has more people than the whole of NZ. Perhaps that's why in Melbourne, and even Sydney, what I've seen of it, I feel more like I'm back in the States. It's the first time I've been in areas of similar scale.

koalas and whales and roos... oh my!

After a couple days checking out Melbourne (mostly walking around the city, as well as stopping by a museum or two and catching a film festival showing - it wasn't all hanging out in dive bars) we rented a car for a two-day trip west along the Great Ocean Road.

The draw of the road is the scenery - for most of its length, the road follows a heavily eroded cliff coastline. The water has eaten away into the cliffs, leaving all sorts of odd formations such as arches and rock stacks in the water a few hundred feet from the rest of the land.
All that was well and good and dramatic. But after a year in New Zealand, you get a bit spoiled with scenery. (About an hour outside Melbourne, Kirsten was reading a brochure on the route. She looked up, saying "This says the views are spectacular. I don't think it's that spectacular." It was at this point we realized just how spoiled NZ had left us).

What was of real interest was the wildlife. We saw kangaroo crossing signs from the beginning of the trip, although the animals themselves were nowhere to be seen as we started the trip. Instead, we scored a sighting of something we hadn't expected. We stopped at a lookout above a surf beach a little after noon, and saw something poking out of the water just off shore. At first I thought it was a bunch of kelp floating along, until it started moving. Pulling out the binoculars, we could see bits and pieces of a whale (whatever it decided to have above the water at any given time), one of the few things we hadn't seen in New Zealand.

A little further along the road was a koala sitting in a tree just off the roadside, looking mostly like a ball of grey fur. And just before nightfall, we passed a kangaroo sitting contendedly at the side of the road, completing a decent trio of sightings for our first day of traveling Australia.
Even got a repeat the next day, when we stopped at another lookout and caught two whales playing in the surf.

Watching a whale, especially from shore, is an odd experience. There were no dramatic leaps out of the water, and precious few flips of the tail. Mostly it was views of the back, which looks for all the world like a rock which happens to be somehow bobbing up and down in the water. Every now and again the black back would disappear, and a flipper would slip above the surface. The most recognizable part of a whale isn't a part at all - it's the spray of water it makes when it breathes. That's the only way I was able to conclusively tell what I was watching was a whale at all the first day.
It's an interesting experience, watching one of the world's largest creatures, but watching just a piece here and there, occasionally having it slip out of view completely.

another stamp in the passport

Landed in Melbourne tonight, making it into Australia with no troubles.

First impression of Melbourne is of a beautiful city - we're staying right downtown next to an urban river lined with skyscrapers, green strips of park and walkways. Each downtown building seems to enhance its presence with colored lights, and the blues and greens reflect off the river. Also we're staying in a hostel affiliated with one of the best dive bars I've seen since leaving New Orleans. (I hadn't realized until now, but New Zealand just didn't have many dive bars. It had rough, rural local pubs and seedy pubs in town. It didn't have any real urban dive bars of the kind New Orleans excels in.) Didn't actually have too much time to explore, since we got in after dark. The weather is already better than what we left, so hopefully we'll get a good day tomorrow to see what the city has to offer.

changing points

This is it - tomorrow we leave New Zealand after more than 11 months and fly to Australia (at least in a week or two I will once again see a beach in beach weather).

I haven't really had a chance to get nostalgic about the whole thing, since I'm still thinking more about the next four months of travel than I am about the past year of living in New Zealand. I suppose the nostalgia will be crippling when I return to the States around the first of December.

Below are a few more posts I wrote over the past couple weeks. Just cleaning out the New Zealand notebook. Hopefully I'll have the chance to post semi-regularly during our travels; I'll at least try to update once every week or two.

excess baggage

One of the things I didn't realize when we came here, and the main reason it's so hard to pack now, is the airlines treat you differently when you're American.
Actually, to be exact, they treat you differently when you're traveling to or from the US. When we came here, we were each allowed to check two bags. They could weigh a total of something like 75 kilograms, or a number almost as large.
Now that we're leaving, and we're not flying directly to the States, the numbers change. We're allowed to check one bag each. It can't weigh more than 20 kilograms.
We came over with one large backpack, one suitcase and some carry-on bags. Each. Now we have to sort all that stuff, along with everything we've acquired in the past year, into the one bag of 20 kilos for the next four months; what's worth paying a hefty fee to ship home; and what we're willing to get rid of.
It's a pain for us at this point in time. It's a perk I'm going to use happily in the future, I'm sure. But it also makes me curious as to how the discrepancy came about: I don't think we pay any more in airfares for the privilege of carrying more luggage. Is it just the airlines are more worried about upsetting Americans who can't carry every worldly possession than they are about upsetting any other nationality? Do we rate more highly on the airlines' service list since we spend more money? Is it a grand social experiment? Or are the airlines just giving into the reality that Americans have more crap, are more attached to it and put up more of a fuss if they can't have it? That's probably it - we get to carry more luggage so the airlines avoid having to deal with our tantrums.

money

New Zealand is small and technologically it's generally behind - its Internet connections are slower and more expensive than most developed countries, its power grid can barely keep up with demand, its electronic goods are more expensive.
However, its small size also allows it to implement national changes quickly if it wants. This week, the country not only phased out the 5-cent coin (they got rid of the penny some years ago), it's also changing the size of all it's other coins (right now, New Zealand has some of the biggest coins in the world. I came across some US change the other day, and was struck by how small and thin it seemed in comparison). For the last week, the new coins and old coins have both been used, a situation that will continue for three months, at which time the old coins won't be accepted anywhere. Almost no one seems to care or even notice, except the vending machine owners.

The banking system also has a few features I wish we had back home. For instance, you can transfer money between any bank accounts, regardless of which banks they are with, with just the account number you want to transfer money into and a few other small details.
This is very handy when you want to pay people or bills. It's instant, you don't have to pay the postage to mail a check, and it's free.
You can also use your ATM card to pay anywhere, with a PIN. I know we have the debit cards back home, but at least when I left, I was generally using a check card and still signing for most things. Here, every business has a key pad by the register so you can enter your PIN. It's literally everywhere, and apparently has been for many years, far more than debit cards have been widespread back home.

a tip

Two notes about restaurants in New Zealand:
1. You don't tip. I haven't tipped anyone in a year. I haven't missed it.
2. They never bring a bill to your table. Every restaurant I've been in has a register by the door. When you're ready to leave, you get up, go to the register, and they find your bill. This threw me a couple time. Also, if you're dividing the bill, sometimes it's nice to have it at the table. But they're always willing to do it at the register, ringing it up person by person.

posting

A few posts I wrote over the past couple of days below...