Drive on the left in Australia

I'm thinking about not shaving my legs until I get home in 6 weeks. My leg hair grows at the speed of light anyway, so I'd have to shave everyday to truly be hairless. Plus it’s torture on the skin since I’m continually slicing off the mosquito or bed bug bite of the day. When I'm tan it's not tooo noticable anyway... I think.

Anyway, where I am now there won't be so much judgment regarding upkeep of this social convention anyway -- I've arrived in Bangkok, Thailand.

Considering I left you last as I was departing Tasmania to return to Melbourne, over a month ago, perhaps I should provide an update as to how I came to be on another continent.

Immediately upon checking into the Melbourne hostel called Cooee, I met Alex (27 from England). We soon started to plan a road trip together to Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road. (More on Great Ocean Road) We wanted to include a 3rd person to reduce the cost of the car rental and petrol so we put a posting on the Global Gossip website and within 3 hours had found Andreas (29 from Germany). We booked ourselves a Ford Focus for 7 days through Britz (best rental deals in Australia by the way) and headed for Torque on March 22.

Andreas and I had both just spent a good amount of time camping in Tasmania but neither of us had a tent or other equipment. Andreas had sold his to other backpackers in Tasmania since he couldn’t take that much weight on the plane, and all the equipment I'd used went home with Dan. So we had to buy another tent and cooking supplies at Anaconda before we headed out. These things still only cost us about $30 each -- therefore making camping a more affordable option than hostels.

Two thirds of the way along the Great Ocean Road are The Twelve Apostles -- tall island of land sticking out of the ocean. The apostles were formed when the ocean carved tunnels into the soft cliffs along the coast. Eventually the tunnels collapse, leaving just the former outer piece of the coastline standing in the water. When this location was named there were 12 formations, but now there are only 9. The alterations along the coast happen so rapidly here, that in another 15 years there could any number of them as new ones are formed and others are lost.

We went inland a bit to visit the Grampians -- a mountain range -- where we camped for 2 nights in the national park amongst the kangaroos and strange rocky mountains. Since there’d been no showers at the campground in the Grampians, none of us had showered in 72 hours. I drove the 4 hours from the Grampians to our next stop, Mt Gambier, and although both the guys offered to take over driving, I refused to stop. I needed the distraction of driving towards the showers that lay ahead to keep from barfing up my lunch from the smell of armpits filling the car.


Above: Kangaroos eating breakfast outside the tent in the Grampians

Mt. Gambier is known for its 2 crater lakes, formed from former sites of volcanos, and its several sinkholes, formed by collapsed caves, that are right in the middle of town and have been converted into gardens and public spaces.

Our final destination was Adelaide, where we parted ways -- Andreas and Alex to one of the cheapest hostels in town, and me to one costing about 3 dollars more, but where I expected a cleaner space and a better atmosphere. Two days later I checked out -- bringing 55 bed bugs bites with me.

I moved into the YHA in Adelaide, which resembled a hotel, along with Maddie who I'd met in Byron Bay and bumped into at the beg bug filled hostel in Adelaide; and Raphael from Germany who I'd also met amongst the bed bugs and who had just completed a session as a participant in a 12 day sleep study. Raphael considered this sleep study a "job" and had signed up for it because he would be paid $1400 in 12 days -- pretty good for a backpacker. He was locked up in a hospital ward with no windows or clocks with about 15 others. They were only allowed to sleep when the researchers announced bedtime and had to get up on the researchers signal as well. The rest of the time they could watch movies or play games. When they left, the researchers told them that they had been kept awake for 24 hours and then given 5 hours of sleep so they’d only actually slept something like 9 times in 12 days.

Adelaide is also known as the city of Churches. It quite clean and small but seems to have mostly offices and restaurants, but not very much in the way of housing. People must commute in from the suburbs. This makes it a place that probably would have a great quality of life, but is not so interesting for travelers. To give an exmaple of it's size there is just one tram line running through Adelaide -- from the beaches at Glenelg, through the city center and out again to some suburbs.

One of my goals for my time in Adelaide was to visit Kangaroo Island, a place that had frequently been recommended. I answered an ad posted in the YHA by two girls from Hong Kong who were looking for another person to share a car. I met with them to discuss plans but we soon realized that the trip would be equally expensive to do with a rented car, as with a tour guide and that if we joined a tour we would eliminate the work of planning, preparing and researching. So the 3 of us joined a 2 day Groovy Grape tour. The island was pretty, the tour was well run, and our guide was great; but I didn't feel as though it was quite worth the money. An idea that had first beem presented to me by Alex as we sat around the campfire in the Grampians, was growing on me -- leave Australia and go to Asia.

More and more I was realizing that I was not as enthusiastic about the things I was doing in Australia because many of them were repeats of things I'd already done or seen. The Kangaroo island trip would have been phenomenal had it been among the first places I’d visited in Australia. But I'd already encountered in the wild plenty of kangaroos, wallabees, echidnas, possums, cookaburras, cockatoos, bush turkeys, emus, camels and even a few fairy penguins; i'd sand boarded, snorkeled and surfed; I'd seen so many beautiful beaches, interesting rocks and small towns. The novelty of those things "Australia" was wearing off. I even knew the language and so it’s quirks no longer surprised and amused me -- I sometimes even spoke it! If I was going to continue to travel I need to spend my money in ways that felt worthwhile -- and my original plan of traveling north along the west coast up to Darwin -- which would have cost about $3000 Australian dollars -- just didn't enthuse me enough to feel worthy of this amount of money.

Why not just go home you might ask? I have to admit, I did consider this option. The comfort of familiarity and not living out of a bag (and real pizza) was enticing. However, 7 weeks is an impossible amount of time to ever get off of work -- which makes 7 remaining weeks with no commitments a very valuable piece of time. And to experience a place properly I think you need a least a month -- so unless I was going to come home and get a job for a year and then just quit again to go to Asia, I wasn't going to have the opportunity to experience it for the length of time that I wanted, while I'm still young enough to enjoy traveling like a bum. Plus, my backpack was already packed and plane tickets are so much cheaper from Australia than America! Even in my early Australia planning days I'd checked out Southeast Asia as an option, but at the time I was a bit too uneducated and therefore scared. But a quarter of the people I met in Australia had either just come from there or were going next, so I'd learned a great deal about the ease with which one can backpack this part of the world. The answer to my boredom problem was becoming quite clear.

I did however, still want to see a bit of the west coast of Australia, and already had a train ticket booked for the Indian Pacific. So at 6 pm on Sunday, April 5th I boarded the train in my red class seat ($190 cheap seat) for a 41 hour journey across the remainder of the state of South Australia, through the Nullarbor (pronounced "NULL-uh-bore", a treeless plain that covers 77,200 square miles and is 745 miles from east to west) and across the entire state of Western Australia, to the west coast city of Perth.

The Indian Pacific stopped 3 times on this journey. The first time was on the morning of the 2nd day when we stopped to refill our water tanks at the town of Cook, population 4, and the ONLY town we passed for over 24 hours. We were allowed off the train here for a half hour to check out the buildings that make up this ghost town that once held a population of 1000. The second time we stopped was in the late afternoon of the 2nd day, to let a 19 year old girl from New Zealand who was sitting across the isle from me, get off the train and get into a pickup truck that had come to meet her and take her to her new job on a cattle station. Since there are no train stations or buildings or even paved roads in this part of the Nullarbor, the only way the truck and the train knew to stop at the same place was that the cattle station had made arrangements with the train to stop at a particular kilometer marker along the rail line. There's no other possible landmark to use -- and EVERYTHING looks the same for hundreds of miles -- red dirt covered in 1 foot tall brown scrubby bushes spaced apart about 6 inches to 2 feet.


Above: Nullarbor Plain

When we arrived in Perth at 10 am Tuesday, April 7, (much to the relief of all), I searched for a hostel with my seatmate, Diana. Neither of us had a reservation, thinking that Perth wouldn't be too crowded. We were wrong and ended up having to walk about the Northbridge section of Perth with our packs for longer than we would have liked.

My impressions of Perth are quite similar to those of Adelaide -- small, clean, great weather, not many people living in the city but suburbs have easy access to the city. The cost of living on the west coast did seem to be a bit more expensive than the east and the houses were most definitely the biggest and newest I'd seen in Australia. We encountered neighborhoods that had homes that looked more like what you'd find in upper middle class America, than the mostly single story modest homes I’d seen throughout most of Australia.

I took one last tour, a 3 day trip through the southwest corner, around Margaret River and Albany. I had an opportunity to purchase this tour for almost half off and figured that as long as I'd made the long journey to the west, I might as well see a bit of it other than the city. We visited a few wineries and a brewery; more interesting rocks along the coast including a place called Elephant Rocks and a blowhole; the place where the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet (more about that in a minute) and a tree top walk amongst the Karri trees. Again, all this was lovely. But my enthusiasm dwindled.

Has anyone every heard of the Southern Ocean? I told our tour guide that we'd learned in school that there were 4 oceans and that the "Southern Ocean" wasn't one of them. "Was it perhaps another name for the Arctic Ocean or really a sea?" His response was, "I don't mean to be rude, but that's so American. I bet you only learned the oceans that border America. There are 7 oceans -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Southern, Arctic and.....uh... well there are 7." I've since looked it up and remembered that the Arctic Ocean is the one at the north pole, so it can't be another name for the Southern. According to About.com, "most often the world is divided into four major "oceans" - the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Arctic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. Some consider there to be five oceans - the fifth being an ocean surrounding Antarctica called the Antarctic Ocean or Southern Ocean."

My very last stop in Australia was Fremantle -- which at 20 minutes southwest of Perth by train is really more of a Perth suburb, but according to at least one local couple, it is a "city" unto itself. But by American standards it would be a town with a large downtown center area. By now I realize that size is defined much differently in Australia.

The weather was perfect the entire time I was in Fremantle (actually it was perfect in Perth too) -- high 70s with an occasional jump into low to mid 80s. I spent my first few days doing my usual wandering routine; checking out museums, beaches, parks... all the cheap stuff. While sitting in one of these parks reading about my future adventures in Asia, Soula and Jared, who I'd met in Byron Bay wandered by and saw me. Turns out they'd been working in Perth for the last few months but were getting bored of Australia too and would be flying to Jakarta, Indonesia in just over a week. (I was relieved to hear I wasn't the only one feeling this way.) Later in the week I went with some girls from the hostel to the Little Creatures Brewery for dinner. If it's not too crowded they let you sample a few sips of each beer before you decide which one you want. I tried 6 :)

On Saturday the West Coast Blues and Roots Festival was happening in Fremantle. The East Coast Blues and Roots is a 5 or 6 day event in Byron Bay that happened over Easter weekend. The West Coast event is only one day since many of the smaller acts drop out when they discover just how far it is to drive their equipment from Byron Bay to Fremantle. (Think NJ to San Diego -- with 1/12 the people and towns; and zero of either for at least 1500 miles.) When I bought my ticket a week earlier, I'd assumed I'd meet people along the way who'd also be going. Up until 5 minutes before I was going to leave, I still hadn't. But at that very last second I discovered that a guy I'd spoken to in the kitchen that morning (about his plans to go to Asia in a week) and his 2 friends* were going, so I tagged along, and we had a great time. And I had 3 new best friends for the remainder of my time in Fremantle… and Australia.

I never had faith in things just working themselves out like that at home. But in Australia it just happens. Again and again and again.



*(The 3 of them were all English and were named Will, Harry and Elizabeth -- I don't think it gets much more english than that!)


Above: Underdog Kenya beats South Africa at the International Rugby Seven in Adelaide. The whole Kenyan team ran across the field and lept over the fence to take a bow. Huge Kenyan cheering section sitting right behind me. Got it on video too :)

Pictures: Great Ocean Road
Pictures: Australian signs
Pictures: Kangaroo Island
Pictures: Adelaide
Pictures: Indian Pacific

Where are the Tassy Devils?

You might be surprised to learn that Tasmania is a real place. You might be even more surprised to learn that it is not it's own country but an Australian state.

Tasmania is an island that is less that 200 miles from north to south and east to west. It is located south of Melbourne and is reachable by an 8 hour ferry ride or a 1 hour plane ride from Melbourne. Hobart is the largest city in Tasmania. 200,000 people live there; which gives you an idea of the sparseness of the population on the rest of the island. Mainland Australians talk about Tasmanians the way Americans talk about West Virginians. The city of Launceston (pronounced "lawn-ceston") is referred to as "Inceston" by some mainlanders.

I skipped the expensive ferry journey to Tasmania and opted for an $85 AUD flight. (That's like $55 USD!) I'd made plans with Dan (from NJ), who was already in Tasmania, to meet in Hobart on March 3rd and venture from there out to various places around the island where we would do some hiking and camping. We had reserved a hire car for 8 days beginning March 9 so we had a few carless days to kill at the start. After spending 2 nights in a 20 bed dorm in a brand new, former night club converted into a hostel, in Hobart, we packed up our bags and headed off in search of some wilderness on our own two feet. In anticipation of this I had left anything outside of the absolutely necessary with a friend in Melbourne. My bag weighed only about 11 - 12 kilos on arrival in Tasmania. Dan's bag however, holding the tent, pots, stove, 7 liters of water, and a crapload of other miscellaneous gear (including a roll of duct tape that turned out to be a lifesaver on multiple occassions), weighed at least 21 kilos--before we added food. In most situations I hate to not carry my own weight, but in this case, if I'd taken any camping gear off him to carry myself, I literally might have been "CARRYING MY OWN WEIGHT". Well not exactly, but it sounds good.

The morning we ventured out it was raining. Dan had a real waterproof packcover but my rainproofing system consisted only of a plastic rubbish bag over top of the backpack with holes cut for the backpack straps. We boarded a city bus, paying the student rate of $1.50 (that 10 year old TCNJ ID with no date has been excellent to me out here) and rode out to the base of the Mt. Wellington trail. We walked for about 2 kilometers uphill with our bags hoping that the tip we'd been given-- that there was a place called The Springs that was not an official campground but where there is a stone hut and a place to pitch a tent-- would turn out to be true. Luckily it was.

We left our stuff in the doorless stone hut and went for a short walk. When we returned we found Bev and Gordon from Victoria in the hut having tea. We talked to them for a bit and they told me that I didn't sound like I had an American accent. (I get that a lot.) They were retired and had bought a used 4wd army vehicle and converted it into a campervan. They would be spending 6 months driving around Tasmania and sleeping in the truck. Their two daughters had done a bit of traveling in Europe and Asia but this trip to Tasmania was the first time either Bev or Gordon had left mainland Australia.

It was very cold that first night, and we'd heard that the night before it had actually snowed. We slept inside the hut, instead of in the tent. It was kind of an equal trade though because although we could make a fire in the hut, unlike the tent, it had no door and the heat quickly escaped. We partially solved this problem by using the DUCT TAPE to hang a heat blanket over the doorway.

In the morning we ate a breakfast of hardboiled eggs and avocado, put up the tent in a spot hidden from the road, left our heavy stuff behind, and started the climb to the top of Mt Wellington.

With my crappy knee situation I generally assumed that I would be slower going than whatever length of time the sign at the start of a trail indicated. However, it turns out that these time are pretty grossly exaggerated or are based on an 80 year old hiker, because we always completed in less time. At least this was good for my psyche.

After camping a second night at the The Springs (this time in the tent) we packed up and walked back down to the road. Before we arrived at the bus stop however, a car pulled up and asked us if we wanted a ride. Dan had done a good bit of hitchhiking on both the mainland and Tasmania. I was originally hesitant to the idea when we'd talked about it 2 days earlier, but the weight of the bag and the additional section of downhill walk we had ahead of us was enough to make me an instant supporter of this free mode of travel. I was the first to accept the ride.

The girl and guy who picked us up had just come from a place called Florentine, where people were living "in trees" or so we heard, in protest of logging in Tasmania. We'd heard that an english girl named Sandy, who was a friend of Dan's from Byron Bay was supposed to be at this protest. At the hostel in Hobart we'd met someone who confirmed they'd met her there. The people in the car also said they'd met her but that she had since left the protest. It is so strange to be able to get information about your friends through complete strangers. But I guess in a place with as few people as Tasmania, that occurrence is common enough that people don't even bother to exclaim about it being a "small world". Their's literally IS as small world.

We arrived back in Hobart and restocked on food. I picked up a much needed sleeping mat and we hopped on another bus to take us to the highway, just north of the city. Here, in the rain, we began our hitchhiking journey to the Tasman Peninsula. Over the course of the day we never waited more than 15 minutes for a ride and most people would tell us that they picked us up because they'd hitchhiked themselves before and they wanted to return the favor. The first guy to pick us up had just won 1st prize for a painting he'd entered into a competition. He had a newspaper article about it in the car with him, which I read. He won $30,000! We rode for a bit with a high school math-history-gym-art teacher traveling with his 9 year old daughter and their dog; with an older man who owned a strawberry farm; a woman who had recently visited new york and another couple who I don't remember much about.

Why don't I remember? Because I was distracted by the realization that I'd left my north face jacket -- an essential layer for Tasmanian nighttime temperatures -- in the backseat of the last car.



We finally arrived at the campground around 4pm to discover that it was Tasmanian Labor Day weekend -- and the campground was full. The owner told us there was free bush camping inside the national park but that we'd probably have to walk 5 kilometers before we'd come across a usable spot. After a bit of deliberating over the maps and chatting with some cyclists friends who turned up from the Hobart Hostel, the campground manager -- who must have felt sorry for us since we didn't have a vehicle to take us elsewhere -- came over and told us he had a small spot where we could put the tent, as long as we kept quiet about it. We thought we really lucked out, until it rained and the tent, which had been reliable for many months, started to take in water at all of the 8 corners where the walls met the floor. The DUCT TAPE saved the day again.

In the morning with fingers crossed, I checked at the campground office to see if there was any word about my jacket. And there WAS! The woman had come by only 20 minutes earlier and had left a phone number. I called her and she said she would leave the jacket at the store in Port Arthur.
"I'm sorry, which store did you say?"
"The store. There's only one."

And sure enough, an hour and half later, having packed up and hitched a ride from Bev and Gordon -- who we just happen to have bumped into again that morning, we arrived in Port Arthur and found a building with a sign over top that read, "Port Arthur Store". After my jacket and I had a nearly tearful reunion and we began to hitch back to Hobart to pick up the car.

Once we had our Hyundai Getz, the weight of the supplies we carried wasn't so critical. We could bring non essentials like Tim Tams along!

We decided on a route around Tasmania that went to the west, then up to the north coast, through Launceston and down the east coast. The west coast of Australia is the least accessible area. A good chunk of the southwest is a national park with no sealed roads and even very few unsealed. We could only venture out as far west as Gordon Dam. And when we arrived there we were absolutely the only people. No staff, no nobody for who knows how far. But there was a very excellent echo.

This place void of people seemed an ideal location for me to learn to drive a manual car --on the left side of the road AND while sitting on the right side of the car. Since there was never any reason to stop for 100 km along the road, I soon learned to drive in 3rd, 4th and 5th gear; but it was a few days before I could manage a stop sign or traffic light without several stalls.

We headed north and visited Lake St. Clair, which is the end point for the Overland Track, then went up to the north coast to hike up to the top of The Nut in Stanley and around Rocky Cape. We passed through Devonport and Launceston to gawk at some fellow humans – the kind that showered on a daily basis. Next stop was the Bay of Fires where the red lichen stained rocks looked like an art exhibit.
The following night we gave the tent a rest and stayed with Dan's friend Sam at his house in the mountains that is entirely solar powered and draws it’s water supply from a rain water collection tank. He doesn’t have a flushing toilet but rather a pit toilet outhouse -- which except for the fact that you have to go outside in the cold at night to use it, wasn't any different than using a regular toilet. Throwing saw dust down the hole keeps the smell away, and a regular toilet bowl makes you forget there is just a big hole in the ground underneath.


Wineglass Bay

At our last destination of Wineglass Bay we did a final hike of 13km. The next day we were back in Hobart to return the car and catch flights back to the mainland.

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