In the land of Oz

"I'm going to Koh Pah Ngan!"

2009-06-10T11:21:00.001-07:00

Alek and I wanted a ride back to our guesthouse from the nightmarket in Chiang Mai. Alek was wearing only one flipflop since the other one had broken on the way to the market. After an hour or so of wandering through the stalls of beaded jewelery, beer chang tshirts, carved wooden elephants, candy and fisherman pants and of course flip flops, we failed to find a suitable pair. Although the streets of Chiang Mai were clean, the walk was lengthy for a person with only one shoe, and so we approached one of the tuk tuk drivers who lined the streets outside the market. Most tuk tuk drivers spend their days lounging horizontally in the backseat of their vehicle calling out to anyone whose skin or attire reveals their status as tourist. "Tuk, tuk? Where you go now? You see baby tiger? I take you." Despite this annoying habit, a tuk tuk is the cheapest way to get home for a person with just one shoe, so we approached a driver, telling him we wanted to go to Tai Pae Gate. He quoted us a price of 40 baht. We only wanted to pay 30 baht and told him so. He gave us the usual customary routine of shock that we would name such a low price but after a bit of haggling back and forth, he pulled out a coin and said, "heads you pay 40, tails you pay 30." I fipped the coin and we got home for 30 baht.

I can't imagine ever spending the time at home to make such a fuss about the difference between a ride that cost $1 and $1.30USD. But that is the way in Thailand. Haggling is expected, its a way of life and the Thais know it can also be fun -- like our man with the coin who turned his business into a game of chance. And since no one really needs to get anywhere with much urgency, there is always time for a bit of haggling.

This attitude towards time also makes driving a songtheaow a profitable profession. A songtheaow is a pickup truck with a covering on the back and two benches along the sides. You get in and out via the back, which has no door. Songtheaows are sort of a cross between a bus and a taxi in that you can flag one down, tell the driver where you want to go and arrange a price like a taxi, but then once you get in, you might find that there are already other passengers or you may pick up additional passengers and go to their destination first. This makes it very difficult to know how long your trip might take.

songtheaow

In Thailand there is apparently not too much importance placed on knowing how far away your destination might be either. While in Chaign Mai, I rented a car for a day with an English couple (Lara and Dave), an American guy (Garret) and a Dutch girl (Joanna). We drove out to Doi Ithanon, the hightest point in Thailand. Along the highway a rod sign indicated, "Doi Ithanon - 84 kilometers", about 15 mintues further down the road another sign read, "Doi Ithanon - 84 kilometers". The next sign read, "45 kilometers" and 20 minutes later the sign said, "53 kilometers". Well at least we were headed in the right direction, even if we had no idea when we would get there.

I'd flown into Thailand on April 22 and landed in Bangkok. In the airport I befriended Joanna, from Holland. We decided to share a taxi and after arrival at a guesthouse, also a room. Asia has very few dorms to offer, so guesthouses and huts are the welcome alternative. Other than in Bangkok these spaces generally cost about $3-$9 US dollars -- and for this price you are getting 4 walls and a toilet of your OWN. I can now see how a $26 dorm room to share with 8 people is painful for those who travel Asia before Australia.

Bangkok is intense. Crossing the street takes a leap of faith. Street vendors sell mysterious looking food everywhere you turn. Locals speaking near perfect english approach you within 5 seconds of pulling out a map to supposedly assist you with finding your destination. But beware, they almost always have an agenda.

Joanna and I spent a 100 degree and very humid day checking out temples. Visitors to temples are required to cover their knees and shoulders-- and at the Grand Palace, to your ankles and elbows. For most Thais, dressing in pants (even jeans) and tshirts in any level of heat or humidity is normal. But somehow they don't ever appear to be sweating. Toursist walk around with sweat literally dripping off their faces and the Thais look like they are standing in an invisible box of aircon. I read in the Lonely Planet that Thais often shower 3-4 times a day and so if someone stinks on the bus, it's probably you -- or the dirty hippie next to you -- or maybe the pigs in the truck up ahead...

Anyway, the temples are gorgeous. They are often covered in gold or colorful stones. At one, there is a 45 meter "tall" buddha inside... except it is laying on its side so it is more of a 45 meter LONG buddha. At another there is an emerald buddha, which is about a thousannd years old and has been housed in many locations throughout southeast asia in that time. Making the assuming that in order to be of such importance, this buddha must be somewhat near the scale of the 45 meter buddha, I wondered how this emerald buddha was moved such long distances so long ago...until I removed my shoes and entered the emerald buddha's temple to find it was about a foot tall.

Shoes are not allowed in temples, or in some restaurants or stores. There are constantly piles of shoes outside the doors to these places. I got so used to being barefoot that on occasion I'd forget to get my shoes before continuing down the street.

After leaving Bangkok to travel on the night bus north to Chiang Mai -- where the food is amazing -- and then further up to Pai -- where I stayed in a bamboo hut, rode an elephant and a motorbike (and fell off both); I traveled back south for 2 days, through Bangkok and down to Koh Phan Ngan for the April full moon party where hoards of drunk tourists think its a good idea to jumprope with fire.

After 4 nights of barely sleeping at night, I hopped into a longtail boat to sail around the coast of Koh Phan Ngan to a beach called Haad Tien, and a yoga, spa and meditation resort called The Sanctuary. Here I would meet up again with Alek, who now had replaced her broken shoe, and Harry, with whom I'd attended the Blues and Roots festival in Australia. We spent our days doing... well, not to rub it in... but pretty much nothing. The resort was right on the beach, it was the only thing on this part of the island, which was only accessible by boat or by foot. The scenery here was perfect, the atmosphere calming and I quickly noticed that the other visitors referred to the place as "Paradise".

But it was here that I made my decision that it was time to go home. I was tired, my money was running low, and I was thinking about home alot. And so after about 10 days of internal debate, I realized that if I wasn't able to live in the moment and truly enjoy a place like "Paradise", well then there was no where else in the world that I should be at that moment, than home.

And so I went.

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Drive on the left in Australia

2009-04-25T02:21:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-04-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

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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Furnished with air and cardboard

2009-03-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

It is 4:30 pm and I am drinking a beer, Boags Draught of Tasmania, while sitting on my sleeping bag that is on top of my airmattress in my very OWN room on Fitzroy Street in St. Kilda, Melbourne. I have to go to work at 6.

On December 26th I moved into a sharehouse on Gurner Street in St Kilda. Bad move. I knew it would be crowded and I knew it would be messy. What I didn't anticipate was the lack of a consistantly working toilet and the bed bugs.

I shared a room with an 18 year old Candian guy, a 26 year old French guy and a 19 year old German guy (who was eventually replaced by a 23 year old Scottish guy). The Canadian snored like a tyranosourous rex and the French guy, with whom he'd been traveling for several weeks, would occassionally resolve this problem by getting up in the night and giving him a good smack with a pillow. He encouraged me to do the same but I resorted to blasting my ipod in my ears instead.

As soon as I'd finally gotten accustomed to the dinosaur racket and started to be able to get some sleep, the bed bugs discovered me, and told their friends that I was tasty. I began to sleep in long pants tucked into hiking socks, a tshirt tucked into my pants and a hooded sweatshirt over the whole thing with the hood up. Once or twice I added gloves to this getup as well. This left only my face exposed, which was the last place I wanted to be bitten but the only place I couldn't find a way to protect without suffocating myself. Occassionally the bugs did find a way up into my sleeves or I'd come home too tired or drunk to put together the whole ensemble and there would be a feast.

So why didn't I just leave? Why didn't I just pack up my stuff and move on to somewhere else? Well I'd moved into the house in the first place because it was cheaper than a hostel and it was within a safe nighttime walking distance from my job. And as it turns out, most of the hostels in that area, except for Base which is much more expensive, have bed bug problems of their own. I looked at some other sharehouse options but they were either twice as much money, or they threatened to be another of the same, crowded, dirty bed bug ridden situations. The last thing I wanted to do was put the effort into cleaning and freezing/heating all my stuff to get rid of any infestation I might carry with me, just to get contaminted again. Therefore I was on a constant search for a new home but was willing to continue to hold out for a home with some standards.

About 2 weeks into my stay at the house, Kathleen, a coworker at the restuarant and an Irish backpacker, had mentioned that her apartment would have an opening soon. I planned to take this spot, but 2 days before I was to move in, 2 of her roommates became uncomfortable about the risk of me bringing the bedbugs with me. Five of Kathleen's seven roommates had experienced a bed bug infestation of their own at some point in their travels and understood that my plans to heat, freeze and clean would ensure that the bugs wouldn't hitch a ride in my bag, but these 2 were unaccustomed and fearful, so I was not allowed to move in. It sucks being a leper. I was back to square one.

After 4 weeks of trying to find a new place to live, the bed bugs started to bite my face -- probably because that was the only piece of skin that was left exposed by my sleeping costume. I was getting pretty desperate. An Australian coworker, Carmilla, and her American boyfriend, Reese, had very kindly offered that I could come sleep on the floor of their spare room if I couldn't find anything else. I was within a few hours of taking them up on their offer when another option I'd been hopeful about came through.

Ben, a 28 year old English guy who had just recently gotten a 3 year visa sponsorship from his job had posted on gumtree.com.au (the australian equivalent of craigslist) that he had an unfurnished room available. Most backpackers ignore postings regarding unfurnished rooms, but I was ecstatic about this. There would be no bed but I would have 4 walls and a door all to myself. I met with Ben and after a bit of a bidding war between myself and some other hopefuls, I got the room. I would move in the next day.

Everything I owned was subjected to a rigorous bed bug inspection process before it came into the new room. If it had not already spent 5 days in a freezer or been heated in the drier, it got cleaned in a sink, inspected by sight and sometimes also quarrantined in a ziplock bag. Three days after the move, with no new bites, I declared myself bed bug free!

I furnished my room with a $21 airmattress from Big W (like Walmart), $7 mismatched sheets from an Opp Shop, a shelving unit I made out of 4 cardboard boxes from the restuarant and a bit of duct tape, and 2 folding lawn chairs Ben lent to me. I couldn't stop smiling for a week.

The only downfall to the new room is that it is a building that is next door to a former hotel that the city has turned into housing for the homeless. Even though it is "housing" there are still frequently people asleep on the sidewalk out front. The building is unstaffed (I think Australia has so few homeless that they just don't know what to do with the few they do have) and the cops show up about 1 in every 3 days to calm some noisy dispute. Yet I've never once worried that a gun might be involved because I've learned that this is a fear that has no basis in Australia and is merely connected to the part of my heritage that includes the 2nd Amendment.

Somewhere in the month of January, I acquired a 2nd casual position with a catering company. They had events all over the city, but they frequently sent me to the event they referred to as "Horses", officially known as the "The Man from Snowy River Arena Spectacular". It is a circus type event where horses dance, do impressions of other animals ("This horse will now do an impression of an EAGLE!"), and prance around in a general manner that must only be entertaining to "horse people". There is a bit of juggling (by people, not horses) and comedy as well. My job at the horse show was to serve drinks at the bar and to set and clear the few VIP tables inside the circus tent. Insanely easy -- especially in comparison to the chaos at the restaurant.

The biggest challenge when I started at the restuarant, bigger than learning to set the table with the "cutlery and serviette" on the right, bigger than digesting the idea that egg was a possible pizza topping, bigger than remembering that tomato sauce means ketchup and napolese sauce is the red sauce on spagehetti, bigger than remembering that entrees are small sized dishes that come first, bigger than faking enjoyment in the wierd tiny pizzas with mounds of toppings, bigger than stifling a giggle whenever anyone ordered a "small American" (like me?), bigger than the urge to correct people when they ordered a "chicken parma" (It's PARM! Just PARM!) ...was learning about Australian drinks. When someone asks for lemonade they are looking for Sprite. No one seems to know of the drink that we know as lemonade so I guess they don't get confused but I don't know why Sprite would qualify as "lemonade". If anything it should be Lift that should be called this. Lift is a soda that is slightly lemon flavored and is also referred to as "lemon squash". There is Fanta which is like an orange soda. Lemon lime bitters is a common drink made from lime concentrate, agnostic, and sprite. Coffees are italian style -- with names like flat white, short black, long black, latte, cappucino, machiatto, and the wierdest of all - babychino, which is for kids and is just warm milk in a shot sized mug. There are iced coffees, which do not involve any ice, they are icecream in a glass with coffee flavored milk poured around the icecream and whipped cream on top. Then there are the beers (and all their nicknames) -- Carlton Draught (Draught), Crown Lager (Crowny), Cascade Light, Peronni, Victoria Bitters (VB, VicB, VBitter), Pure Blond, and of course Corona -- which is served with lemon instead of lime! Some people will order by just saying, "I'll have a medium The Lot and a beer." Well which beer, dumbass? ("The Lot" is the name of one of the pizzas. It comes with sauce, cheese, ham, mushrooms, capsicum (bell peppers), hot salami, olives, onions, shrimp, bacon, pineapple, and anchovies).

The staff at the restuarant are all either backpackers or Indian. Most of the Indians are students, but some, like the cooks, are immigrants to Australia. As an American, I was again a novelty. And again, everyone had questions and comments.

I was working at the restaurant in the days leading up to Obama's inaguaration. Amrit, a 22 year old student from India who made pizza's on the weekends, always seemed to know exactly how many days were left until Obama was officially president. And afterwards he always greeted me with, "So what is new with Obama? Did you speak to him?" or "What happened to Obama? He hit his head on the helicopter?"

Sonny, the head chef, also from India, said to me, "This Obama, he's got some good vibes on."

Roni, a 19 year old Indian student, who's sense of humor took me awhile to understand, said one day, "Why do Americans hate Indians?"
Me: I dont think they do.
Roni: Is it because India will be the next superpower?
Me: I thought that was gonna be China. India is just taking over all the call centers and no english speaking person call get computer help that they understand.
Roni: "Exactly."

Amrit and I discussed a bit of history when things were slow. He asked me, "Who are these red indians? I heard that term and I didn't know what it meant so I looked it up on the internet and it said they are from America. But who are they? Where did they come from? And why are they called red indians?" We talked about Christopher Columbus thinking that he'd found India and therefore calling the people Indians. Amrit said that Columbus went to India as well, which would be a hell of a lot of traveling for one man in that time period and according to wickepedia, is not true. Days later, Danny, one of the Australian owners of the restaurant tried to tell me (and I think he seriously believed this) that Christopher Columbus also discovered Australia but thought, "oh that place is crap" and kept going. Apparently everyone thinks Columbus discovered their home... that guy gets around...)

Amrit and I also got to talking about the Britsh occupation of India. I guess I always thought that the native people of a formerly European-occupied or colonized location would think negatively about that occupation. But Amrit surprised me when he said: "The British did a lot of good things for India. They built railroads. And before the British came if an Indian man died before his wife, they threw his wife into the fire alive with him when he was cremated."

Amrit also managed to sneak in his bit of sarcasm whenever possible, with: "Jamie, you are number 1. You must be American."

Billy, one of the cooks found a way to rag on everyone's nationality in a, this-sounds-really-mean-but-if-you-have-a-good-sense-of-humor-you'll-understand-that-it's-a-joke, sort of a way. But even my very excellent sense of humor was surprised that he would use September 11th in his comments. I guess lots of people make jokes about tragedies in other parts of the world, as innappropriate as they may be. It was just surprising he would direct this particular commentary towards an American... one who's spent lots of time in New York.

Here are two examples of Billy's jokes.
(After I dropped some cutlery.)
Billy: What happened?!
Oh just that. I thought it was September 11th.

Billy: Bring this to the pizza station.
Me: Where?
Billy: The pizza station. Do you have pizza in your village? You know, that village that used to have 2 towers.

Indu, a 24 year old Indian student, one of the few who plans to return to India when she has finished school so that she can work in child welfare, said to me one day, "I saw this thing on utube. They were interviewing Americans and asking them simple questions. And most of them didn't know the answers. They were so stupid!"
I rolled my eyes and said, "Yeah but you could interview people in any country and find enough people who didn't know the answers anywhere."
"No, no, there were so many of them!"

It must have been a particularly bad day because this conversation annoyed me enough that I started thinking ---- Is everyone trying to infer that I come from a place filled with ignorance? Even if they aren't calling me ignorant, is it much different to infer that everyone I surround myself with IS? And why do people feel like it is ok to pick on Americans like that? Is it like getting the chance to pick on the bully? The saddest part is that I'm sure it was an American who put the video on utube thinking it is funny to see "how stupid some people are". And probably never realizing that the rest of the world is watching and thinking "how stupid Americans are." Which made me think of something my dad likes to say, that I think my grandma used to say to him, "You can open your mouth and show the world how stupid you are or you can keep it shut and let them wonder." Americans have the most media, digital and otherwise, floating around out there. And it all says something about us. In my
experience most of the misconceptions that I encounter about Americans are admittedly attributed to the movies and tv shows the misconciever has seen. They are made by us, frequently mocking ourselves and often in an exaggerated manner. The problem is that if you're not American and you've never been to the US and I am the first American you've met, well then how are you supossed to know that those shows are exaggerated mockery and not mockery of the truth. I then find myself being asked if everyone in America owns a gun. Somebody should have listened to Grandma.

I've been in Melbourne now for 3 months -- all summer. The daytime temperatures ranged from 55 to 114 (sometimes in the same week!) and it's only rained twice - for about 10 minutes each time. I've been living only 3 blocks from the beach but I've only been on it about 5 times. I made it to 6 of the 10 St Kilda night markets, where my 20 year old Swedish friend Marielle and I would split a bottle of wine and listen to the drums. I learned the proper pronounciation of my last name from Giacomo, an Italian backpacker also working at the restuarant. And in return taught him that he does not "ate Sundays", he "hates Sundays". Although not always a piece of cake, my time in Melbourne has been enjoyable, but I'm ready to move along.

You've all heard about the bushfires. And probably know more about them than I do (I don't have access to a tv). As of 3 days ago, February 27, they were still going on. I am south of the city and the fires are north so I never so much as smelled smoke. But 5 minutes ago, I received a text message from the Victoria police saying that there is extreme weather expected tonight and tomorrow with high winds and fire risk. How do they do that?

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Santa eats mince pie.

2009-02-09T18:50:00.000-08:00

On December 1, newly healthy from a nasty sinus germ, I boarded a plane to Melbourne excited to return to Australia and begin to research jobs and apts so that after my final stint of volunteer work, I'd be able to stay in one place for a few months. But my immune system had different ideas and by the time I exited the plane, I was sick again. I spent 4 days mostly just hanging around the YHA Metro in North Melbourne reading in the rooftop sunroom during the day and overdosing on cough medicine at night in an attempt to prevent my 7 roommates from murdering me.

At the time I didn't know it but this was the start of a 7 week stretch of trickier and less excitig times. I can say this now because as of this writing, things have turned around and I'm back to being astonished by my luck. But you'll have to wait for the next post to hear about that.

Anyway, on Friday, December 5, I rejoined CVA in Bendigo. I had expected to be housed in Melbourne for at least the weekend but once again they threw me for a loop when they put me on a train to Bendigo and told me to stay there for 2 weeks. I practically had to drag out of them instructions on what to do when my train arrived in this alleged Bendigo; which further increased my former frustrations with the organization.

Bendigo began as a mining town and is now the second largest city in Victoria -- Melbourne being the first. If you saw Bendigo and knew this little fact you would get a very clear picture of really how sparsely populated Australia is. Bendigo's downtown area makes Toms River look like a major city.

Although the volunteer work didn't begin until Monday, the Melbourne office had purchased a train ticket for me to go out to Bendigo on Friday -- which meant finding something to do all weekend in this tiny town. There were only 2 other people staying in the house over the weekend, two 24 year old Korean guys. They had been in Bendigo a week already and were excited to show me the library (where we could use the internet), the lookout tower (from which you could see the whole town), and well that's about all there was do. But mostly I think they were just very excited to ask me questions about America, such as (take note that they frequently used the word "famous" to mean "popular"):
Who is more famous in America, Beyonce or Mariah Carey?
What is the most famous thing to eat in America? KFC?
Have you met any famous people?
What is the most famous drama in America?
Do you watch Prison Break? Do you watch Lost?
Is WWF wrestling very famous in America? Does everyone watch it?
Does everyone have a gun in America? Do you have a gun?
Is it very easy to buy drugs in America?
Are there lots of Christians in America?
What is the most famous brand of clothing in America?
Why do you eat so many sandwiches?

So many questions. Sometimes I felt like a Martian being subjected to questioning about my mysterious world.

We watched Ugly Betty one night and they couldn't quite get over just how "ugly" she was. There were frequent groans and "Ohh, so ugly!" Then they asked me "What is the name for the barricade on her teeth?" ...Braces?

On Friday night we went down the street to the center of town where there was a christmas tree lighting ceremony going on. It felt like going to see the fireworks on the 4th of July at Lake Carasaljo. Except it was December... and there was a huge Christmas tree... and christmas carols... and santa arrived on a trolley... and there were no fireworks... or lake.

Well I guess the extent of the similarity was just the warm weather and the crowds of families with their blankets and lawn chairs gathering at dusk in the center of town. But in anycase, it was an experience that was at the same time so foreign and so familiar.

By the time Monday rolled around I decided that I was going to finish one more week of volunteer work and skip out on my 8th and last week. I was getting anxious to establish a bit of routine in my life, and not the kind of routine that involves walking loudly to scare off snakes, digging holes, smoko time, or eating nasty mystery lunch meat. Of course there were quite a number of other reasons why I decided it was time to call it quits but I'll keep my explaination of them here brief.

I have plenty of criticsms on the policies of CVA and the attitude of some of their staff. However, having been on the inside of an organization responsible for managing volunteer projects I do understand the wealth of challenges involved in making such project happen. And CVA faces some additional challenges in language barriers, providing overnight housing and meals, and the great distances that often must be traveled to get to the locations in need. Therefore I hesitate to say that there is for sure a better way to handle things. There are small ways that improvements could definitely be made. For instance, teamleaders should be required to bring soap and cleaning supplies with them to any house where their team will be staying. And providing accurate directions when sending volunteers out on their own shouldn't be so hard.

That final week with CVA was the slowest week ever. The work we did was mostly easy, driving around taking water samples from the Murray River and running Ph and oxygenation tests on them; except for a few hours of painful cactus removal on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday we were staying at the house to make some repairs and improvements and to clean out the shed. One of the suggested improvements was to hang a map on the wall at the house that labeled the local movie theater, pharmacy, parks, internet etc. I volunteered to create this map because, duh, I love maps.

On Thursday afternoon the new head branch of Bendigo Bank happened to be having a grand opening ceremony just a block away from the CVA office, and the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd was going to be speaking. The other office staff were going and invited their new cartographer (me) along to check it out. We literally just trotted up a side alley and around the back of the stage where we joined a small crowd (less than 75 people) in perfect view of the ceremonies and speaches; although we had to look at the back of the heads of all who were speaking. I could not believe how close we were able to get to the prime minister, with no security checks and no huge crowd to fight.

That Friday I jumped on the train to head back to the city. I spent a good portion of the next week researching job and living options. It seemed there were plenty of places to live where you could pay rent by the week and not be required to sign any sort of lease. The jobs department was looking a bit trickier however since I couldn't manage to find any creative temp agencies like the sort I would use to find work in New York. I called and sent my resume out to many regular temp agencies expressing interest in both design work and administrative office work but the response, if I got one, was always that since it was less than 2 weeks until Christmas, nothing much was going on until January.

By the end of the week I decided that since city life making me antsy that i'd spend less time in Melbourne than the 4-5 months I'd originally planned and get back to traveling after only about 3. This meant that since I'd have less time to work, I'd need to get started doing it soon. So I created another version of my resume that included jobs I'd had in highschool and college and went off in search of restuarant or counter work.

The first place I tried was Fitzroy St. in St Kilda -- the beach town of Melbourne. Since I had no actual waitressing experience, just a few months as a hostess at Martells in Point Pleasant, I was doubtful that anyone would actually hire me for waitressing jobs. But when I spoke to one of the owners at a chain pizza and pasta place that day the conversation went something like this:

Him: Do you have experience?
Me: Not as a server but I did work at a very large restuarant in New Jersey as a hostess.
Him: New Jersey? huh? There are a lot of Italians in New Jersey.
Me: Yeah I guess so. I'm one of them.
Him: (Glancing at my name on the resume... first time he's looked at it) Heh. You are Italian. Come in tomorrow at 6.

And so I had a one day trial for about 4 hours, for which i did not actually get paid, and by the end of that 4 hours I was taking orders and using the computer. So even though no one told me so, I guessed I was hired because for the rest of that week they kept telling me to come back the next day. I still had absolutely no idea what I would be getting paid or when, how many hours a week I would generally get, or if my stupid ass knees would be able to cope with this kind of work, but it was a bit of income, and it was in the place where I'd hoped to live after Christmas, so I was content.

Speaking of Christmas, by now there were just a few more doors left to open in the huge advent calendar in Federation Square. Each night they made some sort of show out of opening one of the doors that involved a strangely costumed dude hanging from wires about 60 to 80 feet off the ground and lots of colored light beams. It was very strange. Even Maxine, who has a degree in dance and choreographs performances was befuddled by this odd event.

Maxine and I spent the week of Christmas in the same hostel being each other's substitute family. We'd both found it a bit trickier than usual to meet people since our arrival in Melbourne, so it was just the two of us for Christmastime.

Since December is both the start of the season of summer, the end of the school year, and Christmas there was a great mix of things going on in the streets that to my northern hemisphere oriented brain did not seem to fit together. For instance, there were salvation army musicians on the corners playing Christmas carols in the warm weather (although at only about 67-72 it was unseasonably cool for December in Melbourne). There were graduates leaving their ceremonies in cap and gown and lining up with friends to have their picture taken with Santa. There were beachgoers wearing bathingsuits and Santa hats.

Although the collision of the excitement of summer with the excitement of Christmas means that December and January are just one big party everywhere you turn, it also means that nothing too exciting happens six months later in June. I think it would be very depressing to have put all your fun eggs into just one month's basket.

It seemed to me that Christmas was more toned down in terms of the media and decorations and seeing it everywhere in your face, than it is at home. Maybe this is because there is also the start of summer to celebrate; or maybe it was my lack of access to media, suburbs and actual families... I don't know. But I do know that I saw very few instances of Christmas lights on houses or plastic figures in yards.

Maxine and I ate our Christmas dinner at the hostel. We were quite pleased with this purchase as not only was it a good price at $15 it looked and tasted like normal good food... not like hostel food.We spent the early part of the afternoon on the roof with our bottle of wine and the later part wandering about the mostly deserted streets, save for some groups of asian families.

It was a Christmas that was educational more than celebrational. It passed in a way that made me wake up on Dec 26 thinking, was that real? Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? Did I really see a huge tree made out of plastic stars that sang Christmas carols, did I really see santa with graduates on his lap? Did I really go to church and find that some of the christmas songs had the same tune and name but the words were completely different? Did Maxine really tell me the disturbing fact that in England children leave santa mince pie?!

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Can we frolic with the lambs?

2009-01-26T18:35:00.000-08:00

All I wanted to do was go to sleep. I even skipped dinner to just go to sleep. But although the clock read 8:37 it wasn't dark out yet and so I just got into the clean, warm, bunkless hotel bed and watched TV for the first time in 5 weeks while I waited and waited and waited for the sun to call it quits for the night. It was 10:30 before darkness arrived and I fell asleep.

Christchurch New Zealand is at a southern latitude of 43 degrees. To put this in perspective, Chrischurch is the same distance from the south pole as Toronto, Canada is from the north pole. Therefore, they get quite long days in summer and short ones in winter. And the temperatures, at about an average of 67 in the daytime and 48 at night, were much colder than I'd been accustomed to over the past 4 months.

I'd flown from Sydney to Christchurch with Dennis on November 21st. We found Huiwon at our hotel, completing the reunioin of our trio on yet another continent. (Huiwon, Dennis and I traveled in Peru together in August of 2007). This time we'd be touring with Contiki, a company whose tours are geared towards 18-35 year olds and are most well-known for their party-filled tours of Europe. Since Contiki was created by a New Zealander (more commonly referred to as a Kiwi), we'd been reassured by STA Travel in New York that Contiki tours of New Zealand differed from their tours of Europe in that they tended to be more scenic based, attract a crowd a bit older than 18 and involved the kind of partying that did not include dancing on tables. Turns out that last part was not entirely true.

Our group consisted of 43 travelers; 9 guys, 34 girls, 2 couples on their honeymoons, 25 Australians, a dating German pilot and stewardess, several miners, an explosives engineer, a Kiwi tour guide, an Aussie bus driver and one super annoying Canadian jerk.

At 350,000 people, Christchurch is the largest city on New Zealand's southern island. The southern island is home to 1 million of New Zealand's 4 million human residents who are far outnumbered by the 60 million resident sheep. While the majority of the southern island of NZ is rural, mountainous, astonishingly scenic and ruled by sheep; Christchurch is a small city with a sprawling suburb similiar to others around the world -- except that it is filled with people who think that the number that comes after 5 is sex.

The New Zealand accent is quite similiar to the Australian accent in terms of their mutual boycott on pronouncing the letter "r". But there is one major difference. Kiwis pronounce their short "i" like a short "e" and vice versa. So "Do you have a tint?" means "Do you have a tent?" and "He's weaying a rid shet" means "He's wearing a red shirt".

After departing Christchurch we began the first of our many long bus journeys. Except for two days in Queenstown and two days in Wellington, every day included between 5 and 8 hours spent on the bus. The route usual took us through the mountains which meant every morning there was a mad dash for the coveted front seats (i.e. seats with a reduced chance of bus sickness). The remaining 85% of us were just left bopping around in the back with an occassional sick bag.

We traveled south from Christchurch to Milford Sound, which isn't really a sound but a fjord. A fjord is a body of water created by a melting glacier. We arrived and boarded a boat that would house us for the night out on the sound. Around 7:30pm, which is still very much the middle of the daytime in southern NZ, we had the option of taking out a kayak on the sound. It was raining quite hard but how many times do you get to kayak in a lake made of glacier ice, in the rain, surrounded by tiny penguins and mountains with waterfalls at a time of day that the large majority of humans equate with darkness or near darkness. So obviously we kayaked away. And obviously I beat Dennis by a whole kayak length in a race back to the boat. Obviously.
(I know, Dennis, I know. You hate me.)

After our night on the boat, the next stop was Queenstown, known as the adventure capital of the world. Queenstown was just a farming village until 20 years ago when AJ Hackett invented bungy jumping and set up the first bungy jump there. Queenstown still only has a few thousand residents but attracts over 1 million tourists each year who come for activities from skydiving, to canyon swinging, to white water rafting, to riverbording (going down the rapids with nothing but a wetsuit, a helmet and a small boggieboard), to jet boating, to even just checking out Lord of the Rings filming locations.

Two days before our arrival in Queenstown we were asked to choose from a list of activites available in Queenstown so that spots could be reserved for us during our limited time in town. After a great deal of debate and peer pressure both inside and outside my own head, in a moment of bravery/stupidity, I signed myself up for a skydive. And then I immediately proceeded to go into major introvert mode as I ignored everyone and turned my brain insideout trying to figure out why I would do such a thing and what percent chance there was that I would puke on my tandem diver while falling to the earth.

By the time we arrived in Queenstown I was angry that anyone had ever even invented skydiving and was at such a loss as to how to get out of it that I curled up in the fetal position on the bed and whined in a way that led Huiwon to comment, "I have never seen you like this before." To which I responded, "I'VE never seen me like this before."

But by the morning I had expended all my fearful energy and adrenaline, and resigned myself to the fact that there was no way out. If it was to be my day to go, then so be it. (Of course for the price of $300 I could have gotten out by simply not showing up and abandoning the money I'd paid. But I guess I wasn't so afraid that I was willing to, in essence, PAY $300 to keep my feet on the ground.)

However, after all that energy spent on fear, in the end mother nature gave me an out when the jump was cancelled due to rain. Huiwon and Dennis were able to reschedule for the next day but I was scheduled to do an all day river trip and did not have any timeslots left for skydiving. This meant I got to keep my feet on the ground for free.

Ruth's bungy jump

The river trip turned out to be a canoeing trip through the mountains and although its not as exciting to describe as plummeting to the earth would have been, it was an enjoyable day with scenery like you've only seen in movies like Lord of the Rings. Literally. I mean you really saw it in Lord of the Rings.

However, as soon as I saw Huiwon and Dennis after their skydive, that weird little itch to jump out of a plane was back again. And so it's back on the list. Why I can't be happy without torturing myself with constant physical and mental challenges I've yet to figure out.

While in Queenstown Huiwon and I also managed to find some time to visit the Kiwi Exhibit. The kiwi is a the national bird of New Zealand as this is the only place in the world that it lives. It is a flightless bird about the size of a chicken but it's eggs are about 6 times the size of a chicken's eggs. The kiwi lays the largest egg in relationship to its body size of any egg laying creature in the world. It also looks quite strange because it has 2 legs but no wings, arms, or front leg type appendages.

Before the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand the Maori people, who came from the Polynesian Islands had been living there for between 700 and 2000 years. This is not all that long considering the 50,000 years the aboriginees are believed to have been in Australia. Before Europeans, New Zealand was a place completely without mammals or even marsupials. There were only birds and reptiles for millions of years. Since there were no preditors these natives creatures had not developed any fear instincts. So when Europeans brought cats, rats, ferrets and stoats many of these bird species were wiped out very quickly. Could natural selection have been anymore obvious for Darwin when he sailed up in the Beagle?

The kea is one bird that is still holding strong in New Zealand. The bird is believed to be as intelligent as a 3 year old human.

By now it was nearly Thanksgiving. But as we all (should) know, there is no Thanksgiving in New Zealand. That also means no turkey. The only meals available to us that particular night were a vegetable pie or bangers and mash. I opted for the latter to at least work some mashed potatoes into my Thanksgiving.

The daytime hours of Thanksgiving day were spent at Fox Glacier. A few days before we arrived, a storm wiped out the trail that is normally used to hike up to the glacier. Since that route for visiting the glacier was no longer an option, our only chance was now to take a helicopter up to see it. I hadn't planned to travel up this way for fear my pesky knees wouldn't be able to make the icy journey back down from the glacier. We boarded the helicopter in groups of 6 and flew for 6 minutes. The helicopter dropped us off on the ice and we were ushered to a low area where we had to crouch down while the helicopter left to get the next of our 8 groups. Each time the helicopter returned we crouched and waited in the wind for it to leave again. We strapped cramps to our boots and in groups of 12 followed our guide around the strange land of ice. We crossed over deep crevices, under ice bridges and even through an ice tunnel, while all the time the ice was dripping and melting. Since it was summertime, this is to be expected. However, Fox Glacier is melting more rapidly in the summer than it is accumulating in the winter and it is expected to be completely gone within the next 10 years.

Our final stop was Wellington on the southern coast of the north island. Wellington is the windy city of New Zealand. There are on average 170 days of winds over 60 kph each year (about 40 mph).

After some final Contiki-style party time and some karaoke in Wellington, Huiwon, Dennis and I officially departed the Contiki tour. Others on the bus had paid for a 16-day tour that continued north through to Auckland and the Bay of Isles. Huiwon and Dennis would fly to Auckland and spend a few days there but I choose to skip Auckland and return to Australia.

I can confirm that New Zealand is just as breathtaking as you've heard. 2 weeks after my return to Australia I was back with the volunteer program and two Korean guys I was working with asked me why I never took any pictures of the Murray River in Victoria and it's surrounding landscapes. I showed them my pictures of New Zealand and explained that I just didn't find the Murray River picture worthy having just come from New Zealand. They oohed and aahhed over my pictures as only someone raised in an Asian country can do. And they agreed that the Murray wasn't worthy in the eyes of my camera.

Unfortunately I spent the majority of my time in New Zealand fighting some germ that had taken up residence in my sinuses. Coupled with a regular dose of bus sickness, I was left feeling pretty crappy. As a result I feel as though I didn't appreciate most of the sights and adventures of New Zealand for their full greatness. Although the Contiki tour was well run and is a great way for people who don't have a lot of time to see more in a short period of time, since I was coming from a slower sort of travel style, I couldn't help but feel a bit rushed. So just maybe I'll have to go back there some day. Did I hear Americans can get a working holiday visa in New Zealand?

View pictures at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=51205&l=7da77&id=802088251
and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=54289&l=d5e67&id=802088251

You need real shoes. Like heels.

2008-12-16T03:42:00.001-08:00

On my final day in Byron, Grant from Virginia pointed out, "I haven't eaten a meal indoors in 3 months. And I think I would hate it." I too had recently realized that I disliked the idea of returning to a city -- away from the bush turkeys and lizards, hammocks and tents, guitars and digeridoos -- back to the crowds, dwellings with walls and doors, and people who dressed in clothing without holes.

But the time had come to meet Rachel and so at 8:55pm on November 8th, in the midst of a torrential downpour, I boarded the Greyhound for the final leg of my east coast bus pass -- a 13 hour journey from Byron Bay to Sydney. I lucked out and was one of the few people who got 2 seats to myself. After some careful contortion a person my size can actually sleep comfortably on two seats. My head and torso are short enough to lie flat and my legs... well my legs just fend for themselves. But the point is that I can fall asleep and stay asleep for hours.

Of course it shouldn't surprise you that I am enfatuated with the efficiency the night bus provides. It saves not only on the cost of accommidation for the night but also on usuable daytime hours that would otherwise be spent sitting on a bus. And there is the added bonus of getting to check out the crazies who decide that 2:37 am is great time to board a Greyhound bus in places with names like Woolgoolga.

When the bus arrived at Sydney Central Station at 9:45 am, I scrambled to gather all my bags from the sidewalk and suit up into my official "on-the-move" arrangement of baggage. The hostel was only a block away and Rachel had already called to say she'd arrived so I excitedly hurried off... little realizing I'd left an item of some importance sitting on the sidewalk. Uh oh... suspense!

As I approached the YHA Sydney Central, I happened to look up and spot Rachel's back crossing the street at the next corner. Running to catch up with her was an impossibility considering the load I was carrying so I opted for plan B and yelled "RAACHELL!!! on the top of my lungs. Now picture this on a city street with me looking like a luggage cart with a head sticking out the top. Perhaps my social skills had deteriorated along with my hygene and desire to live indoors. A few attempts at this ferrel(*1) method of communication got the job done and she came back and hugged me and my baggage; even though she couldn't get her arms around us.

On the move

We got some breakfast and had a catchup and a wander through a bit of Sydney. It seemed as though no time had passed since I'd left home -- until the moment Rachel offered me a piece of gum. My wide-eyed excited response was "::gasp:: Gum?! I haven't had gum in so long!" As she handed me the piece she said, "I think it's time for you to come home. You are way too excited about this."

We spent the next 48 hours checking out Sydney -- the Opera House, the Sydeny Harbour Bridge, The Rocks, Circular Quay (pronounced "key"), the Australia Museum, a woman who fit herself into a 36" square box on the street, wine that was NOT goon(*2), $5 kangaroo roll(*3), hermit crab races(*4), etc.

Opera House

kangaroo roll

crab races

When we'd had enough of the city we headed to the Hunter Valley for a wine tour where I made the unfortunate mistake of being hungover BEFORE we started drinking at 11 am; but made it through all the tastings anyway, even the crazy chili shot.

It was around this time, about 3 days after arriving in Sydney that I realized that my hiking boots were missing. These were the boots that cost me a lot of money, were extremely rare in my size (only 2 pairs in the whole of the US) and required a bit of a wild goose chase before I managed to locate them at a store in California. Therefore as you can imagine, I really wanted them back. The only reasonable explanation for their disappearance was that I'd left them on the sidewalk when I got off the bus. My only hope for getting them back was that someone brought them into the Greyhound office that happened to be located near the store. When I enquired at the store, the man at the desk said, "I do have one pair of boots. They are very small." Jackpot.

We took the train out to Katoomba and the Blue Mountains to see the 3 Sisters and the Janolan Cave--where we had the priviledge of standing next what is believed to be the oldest known mud in the world--which in turn would make the caves the oldest known caves in the world. But don't hold me to it, that “fact” was imparted by our tour guide -- who just might have been the Australian double of Napoleon Dynamite.

Napoleon?

Janolan Caves

3 Sisters

We visited Bondi Beach for a day and spent 2 days in Manly Beach. Although these beaches are quite nice, the scenery does not even compare to the beaches of Queensland and northern New South Wales. I wished Rachel had more time and could have see these places that had floored me again and again. They were so abundant for such a length of time, that I think I began to take their scenery, atmosphere, and seclusion for granted. I was beginning to mourn those places and began to wonder, if I feel so overwhelmed and uninspired in a city the size of Sydney, will I ever feel ready to return to New York?

Reason why Australians have plastic Christmas trees.
Australian's get straight to the point.
Really straight to the point.

Dennis arrived in Sydney a week later and Rachel and I returned to the city center to meet him. We introduced him to kangaroo rolls and crab races before his jetlag got the best of him.

The following day was Rachel's last, and since we had not managed to locate a real, live, hopping, pocket-toutting, wild kangaroo, a trip to the zoo to see a real, live, pocket-touting, confined kangaroo was in order. Since Dennis also wanted to check "kangaroo" and other marsupials off his list and I'd already visited my share of Australian zoos, Dennis and Rachel made this trip on their own; leaving me to happily spend the morning reading in bed. As I'd explained to the two of them -- I am not on vacation, I am on an adventure. And the pace of an adventure is a bit slower than the pace of a vacation... kind of like a marathon vs a sprint.

After Rachel left us, I promptly got sick. Guess my immune system was just so sad to see her go.

I agreed to accompany Dennis out that night anyway and after some dinner and a few drinks we found a gay bar, as had been our intention for the night. But the bouncer took one look at me and determined he couldn't be letting a straight girl the likes of me into his establishment. Of course he claimed that my sandals (not even flip flops!) were the problem. "You need real shoes. Like heels," he said. Yeah sure. That sounds like sexuality profiling to me.

Dennis and I moved out to Bondi the next day where it rained and rained and rained and I slept and sniffled and slept some more. I think the highlight of our time in Bondi was meeting Jada from Canada and finding out that the name of her town in Saschachewan was Regina--pronouned Reh-j-eye-na. Yes she's heard all the jokes. But checking out hot Aussie waiters pulled a close second.

Chaos in Bondi

Is it a pool? Is it the sea? Is it a pool?

On November 21st we left Sydney behind when we boarded a flight to the land where men are men and sheep are scared. Or so I'd heard.

Footnotes:
1. Ferrel is the Australian term for Redneck or people who are not domesticated; as in the opposite of a domestic cat is a ferrel cat.
2. Goon=Aboriginal word for pillow, pillow=what the bag that is inside of box wine is used for when the contents are finished
3. Kangroo roll=Kangaroo steak, shredded tasty cheese, grilled onions and barbecue sauce on a hoagie roll. Does not come with a plate but does come with a beer.
4. Patrons at Scubar have the opportunity to choose one of 16 hermit crabs to name and support before the 16 crabs are released at the center of a large round board. The first crab to find its way to the edge wins it's supporter a prize that varies in value from hundreds of dollars to crap.

A special thanks to Rachel and Dennis for taking much better photos than me on this leg of the trip. Photo credit goes to them.

Creepy mustache required

2008-11-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

As I was packing up my stuff to leave Byron Bay on November 8, the most common response I received from those who learned about my looming departure was "why?"

The Arts Factory, a hostel and campground in Byron Bay was one of the most unique places I have called home in Australia. Although I was there for only 12 days, I spent most of my time with travelers who were putting down loose roots in Byron for a few months by living in tents on the campground and held jobs in town. It was nice to stay in one place for awhile and consistently have the same people around... even if it was for only just short of 2 weeks. Mimi, you got it just right in your facebook message when you said it appeared that I had found my way to a "hippie commune in the 60s". Except for the addition of computers, the internet, a reception desk and the election of Obama; I felt like this was exactly where I'd found myself. And I loved every second of it.

The Arts Factory may be most well known as the hostel where you can sleep in a teepee. In addition to the campground, and dorms there is a large teepee with 10 beds, a bus converted into rooms, cabins, and The Pentagon. I was a resident of The Pentagon, which was a 5 sided tent with wood floors, electricity, and 4 sets of bunk beds. But of course I couldn't help but smirk every time I was asked where I lived and had to respond, "The Pentagon."

Bus rooms

Teepee

If I had time to stay much longer in Byron I would have looked into getting a tent and staying on the campground. This campground is not the type with defined lots where everyone gets equal amounts of space and plenty of room between themselves and their neighbors. It is more like a squatter’s village or refugee camp. Tents are sometimes only a foot or so from one another. There are tarps strung from trees to shade the tents, clotheslines hung all over and bushturkeys running about stealing anything they can carry. Many people stay long enough that it is worthwhile for them to put furniture (mattresses, tables, bamboo rugs, milk crates to use as dressers, etc.) inside their tents. Most of these items are purchased or adopted from former campground residents. Let's just say I was a bit jealous that I didn't have enough time to try out this lifestyle for myself.

Campground

Cooking in the kitchen at the Arts Factory

I remetup (is that a word?) with Dan from NJ who I'd met a month earlier in 1770 and since he'd been at the arts factory for a few weeks already, he'd already gotten to know the other long termers on the campground and brought me along to bonfires on the beach and at the quarry, a Halloween party at an actual house (!), Sunday nights when the fat lady sings at the Beach Hotel, bacon cheese hamburger night with the boys, rainy afternoon movie time on the porch of Ben's tent, the 24 hour (meat) pie shop, the drum circle and whatever other craziness was going on.

Bonfire at the quarry

One afternoon I'd joined a group of people having a barbeque on a beach that required crossing from one beach to another by scrambling around the bottom of a rocky cliff over the rocks as the surf washed in and out on the low parts. We hung out there for a few afternoon hours and I FINALLY saw the ocean life that people were always pointing out but I could never spot. Three dolphins, about 50 meters from shore were swimming and jumping out of the waves. It should have been a postcard.

Byron is one of the best places in Australia to learn to surf. And so when I arrived in Byron it was time to put the money that Rachel, Greg, Linar and Mike gave me for my birthday towards surfing lessons. It was raining on the morning of the first day of the lessons but the waves were very calm -- so good for beginner surfers that our instructor said that if we couldn't stand up today we should just give up on ever being able to do it. I stood up for every wave except one. I could have used some extra instruction on how to dismount without making a fool of myself though. We were surfing quite close to shore and frequently I was still standing on the board as it road up into about 6 inches of water on the beach -- and I usually flopped off the board onto my hip or butt (or my face) like a dying fish. On the second day the weather was awesome and the waves were a bit bigger but now we were responsible for figuring out when to paddle and stand up on our own so it was a bit more difficult. I had the next day off which was really lucky because it ended up pouring all day. The following day, the weather was nice again but the rain from the day before was the result of a storm out on the pacific which meant the waves continued to be large from the storm and the tide quite strong with the water washing back to the ocean at about an 80 degree angle with the beach. The ocean battered me again and again both on my way in and on my way out. I did stand up a few times... but still couldn't figure out how to get off the board gracefully.

I was in Byron for Halloween. Apparently Canadians do Halloween like we do, but no one else does. Australians don't do decorations, pumpkins or trick r treating. It seems that their only recognition of Halloween is the occasional costume party. Which means that when about 30 of us (mostly American and Canadian) walked through town in costume on our way to a party we attracted enough attention to qualify us as a parade.

The end of Halloween was not the end of the excitement for the weekend. November 1st marked the 1st day of Movember, and there were many razor anxious guys around Byron ready to participate. Movember is an Australian and New Zealand fundraising event where guys sport ridiculous and usually creepy mustaches during the month of November. They ask their family and friends to sponsor their facial hair to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer and men's mental health. Since living in a tent with very little belongings often also means shaving is optional, there were probably more guys who removed facial hair to leave a mustache behind than those that had to start growing from scratch. There were way too many excited participants at the Arts Factory. So if my pictures appear to be full of creepy looking mustache clad characters, you now know why.

A few days after all the mustache excitement began was the day we'd ALL been waiting for... American election day. Since New South Wales is currently 16 hours ahead of EST, when the poles started to close at 7pm EST on the 4th, it was already 11am on the 5th in NSW. Sooo, election day monitoring for us happened on the 5th. This day happened to be quite rainy, which meant that rather than being on the beaches, or playing guitars on the campground or wandering about town, many people were seeking shelter on the kitchen balcony and covered area below the kitchen. Danny, from England, set up his laptop in this area and was consistently monitoring the BBC website. Grant, from Virginia, initiated the phrase, "Happy Obama Day", early that morning way before any polls had closed. Dan, from NJ, brought the celebratory beers. Claire from Canada, downloaded the acceptance speech from youtube on her laptop and a crowd of us "huddled around 'a radio' in a forgotten corner of the world" to watch. And unnamed people participated in another celebration titled "Bongs for Obama."

Throughout the remainder of the day we Americans received congratulations from Australians, English, Canadians, Israelis, Germans, and quite possibly much more. Liz from PA remarked that she was relieved because this meant that maybe she would be ok with going home again someday. Claire from Canada commented that this was a good day for Canada too because "the last 8 years for Canada has been like having a retarded siamese twin."

A few days before the election I was at a bar and an Australian woman must have heard Dan and I talking and came over and asked if we were American. She then followed this up with a phrase that was a first for my time in Australia. "I like Americans." I'm pretty sure we both looked at her with dropped jaws. Haha just kidding. I said, "Really? That's not something we hear often." She said something along the lines of, "Americans are loud. And they can be loud and annoying. Australians are loud and annoying too. But Americans have conviction. They get things done. So I like Americans." That reminded me of what the Italian girl Gulia said way back in Cairns when a bunch of us were discussing the meteorite that is predicted to come dangerously close to earth in something like 2020. She said, "I'm not worried about it. The Americans will do something." So maybe some of the world does believe there is a hope and a use for us yet. :)

View pictures at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=40994&l=0acee&id=802088251

"So this is why they call it the bush" Continued

2008-11-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

After returning to Brisbane from Cannondale I joined our team leader, Cameron at his friend Amanda's apartment for some beers. That's the second real living dwelling that I've been to in this country. We sat on her balcony (which they call a veranda) and she had a beautiful view of the city. Apparently both Cameron and Amanda normally don't care for Americans... ok I think they might have used the word "hate" but that's kinda harsh so I'm pretending they didn't say that.

But I passed the acceptable test and of course we had to discuss the reasons why this is the case. I think it all pretty much comes down to an ignorant self-centered cockiness that has been their past experience with Americans. Amanda was extremely well-educated about American politics. She said she thinks our candidate choices are really sucky and she doesn't think either one is a good pick. But I asked her if she could think of someone who would be a good option and she didn't have an answer for this. However, she did comment that my reason for voting for Obama is the best argument for either candidate that she has heard anywhere. (I think that was the moment I passed the American test.)

On Saturday morning I joined a tour group to go to Morton Island for 2 days and 1 night. Morton Island is another sand island, just not as large as Fraser Island. This adventure included snorkeling among ship wrecks, sand tobogganing in the desert, visiting a fresh water lake, a lighthouse and another beach with rips strong enough that it was not advisable to enter the water even just up to your knees. Unexpected adventures included: breaking down in the 4-wheel-drive truck on the inland sand track, witnessing a bird/duck creature pluck a fish out of the water that was twice the width of the bird’s neck and swallow it whole, rain, and my first Australian campfire.

Saturday night’s sunset from the western beach might have been the most beautiful sunset I have seen in this country yet... and I've seen a lot a sunsets.

On Sunday night we returned to Brisbane. Technically I was no longer supposed to be staying at the CVA house in Brisbane. But since I only took one small bag to Morton, I had to go back to the house to get the rest of my stuff. And the house sleeps 20 people and I knew there was only 1 person scheduled to be there on Sunday night. Annnd since I knew the door code, it seemed a waste to not just sleep there for one more night. So I went back to Albion and crept quietly around that creepy old house. Luckily the one other person staying there, who I hadn't met before, wasn't frightened by my presence and I got a free place to stay for the night. I packed up early on Monday and crept out without anyone from the office noticing.

I took an 8:15am train from the house to the main station in the city where to get the Greyhound bus to Byron Bay. The train was full of people going to work -- in offices! I had tuned that part of life out of my head for so long that I'd kinda forgotten that not all people in Australia are environmental team leaders or tour guides who don't wear shoes. But even so, sitting in a coffee shop in a train station in Brisbane and watching people go to work, I noticed that they looked so much more relaxed, so much less frantic, and so much less crowded than people in New York.

I spent 4 weekends in Brisbane and initially I wasn't so impressed. But by the end it had begun to grown on me. It reminds me of Denver…except with palm trees and purple trees and a beach not so far away and people who conclude every paragraph with "no worries".

See more pictures at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39458&l=8dc01&id=802088251

"So this is why they call it the bush."

2008-11-07T22:18:00.000-08:00

Picking back up on my earlier comment that I spent 4 weekends in Brisbane, when I left Mooloolaba my destination was to return to Brisbane. I was scheduled to arrive at the Brisbane CVA office in South Bank around noon. I successfully navigated the bus to the train into the city but then ended up walking entirely around the outside of the train station (with all my stuff) looking for the bus to south bank before figuring out that I could have just stayed on the train one more stop to get to my destination. I purchased another train ticket, boarded the train, encountered an Australian guy who said, "You're crazy for trying to walk around this city with all that", exited the train, walked about 400 meters uphill in the wrong direction, turned around and reoriented myself and walked about 600 or 700 meters to the correct location of the office. Then I wanted a nap. But at least now I know that I can walk a kilometer with all my stuff.

Brisbane CVA differs from other CVAs in that they have a house just outside the city that can house 20 volunteers on the weekend but during the week they send all volunteers to assignments outside of Brisbane.

The CVA house in the city looked like the kind of place a horror movie could be filmed in. The architecture was old, the rooms were in a maze like pattern and the front door which had no porch light was mysteriously open all the time. Haha... no, that's just how people do it in Australia, doors spend most of their time open.

Sign in the bathroom. There was also a 4 minute sand timer hanging in the shower.

The other spooky thing about the Brisbane house was that it had 3 other Americans in it! There were only a total of 7 of us staying at the house that first weekend I arrived. Corey, 22 and from PA; Pat, 18 and from Buffalo; Will, 20 and from NJ; Maxine, 21 and from England (I volunteered for one week with her in Cairns as well); Anita, 19 and from Germany; Stefan, 19 and from Germany; John, 23 and from Korea. Everyone was there on their own. Corey had just graduated from Pratt and was spending 2 months in Australia before getting a job; Pat had just graduated high school in June and although he was super smart he didn't get into any schools that he really wanted to go to and so decided to take a year off to volunteer and travel as well as fill out applications to reapply to college; Will was attending Lehigh but would have been required to declare a major this semester and since he was unsure between engineering and something that would lead to law school, he was taking a semester off to figure it out; Anita and Stefan had both just finished high school in Germany where it is normal to go to high school until 19 if you are tracking yourself for Uni as well as common to take a year or 2 off to work or travel before actually going to Uni). Anita wants to go to Uni for marine biology but would prefer not to go to a German Uni since they have no ocean or "sea" as she says. She's in Australia for a year or two trying to figure out if it will be financially possible for her to go to Uni here. Stefan is completing 13 weeks of volunteer work with CVA in various places all over Australia before he will go back to Germany to fill his public service requirements. In Germany there is a lottery that everyone gets put into for public service at age 19 or 20 and if your name gets called you are required to spend a year in the army or as a firefighter or paramedic. Stefan is doing his voluntarily because he will get free training as a firefighter and paramedic and if he likes it enough, then after a year he can start getting paid to continue doing that work. John is in Australia working and traveling before going back to Korea to finish his degree in tourism, at which point his family would look down on a decision to travel because he would be expected to put his degree to work. Maxine, who I first met in Cairns in early September, will be completing 12 weeks with CVA over 4.5 months. She just finished a degree in dance and creative writing and is in Australia to travel before she has to look for a job at home.

Maxine and I went out that first Friday night and met up with 5 Irish girls I'd met on the Whitsundays and 3 Irish girls she'd met on the Whitsundays. The first bar we went to was filled with Australians who'd come straight from work all dressed in their work clothes. It was strange but they seemed so foreign to me that it was almost like I forgot that I'd ever actually been part of that professional working world. It was a bit weird and awkward as so we eventually peaced out for the comforts of... what else but an Irish pub.

And it was here that I met Canadian Chris who surfs in Canada. I didn't know that was physically possible. But apparently with a good wet suit and a whole lot of conviction, one can surf in Vancouver. He's out in Australia for a year enjoying the warm water. He'd just spent a number of months traveling from Cairns to Brisbane and living in his van. He was in Brisbane for about 2 weeks hanging out with people he'd met along the way through couchsurfers.com. (I’m not going to explain it. If you are curious check it out.) He’d also come to Brisbane to sell his van before flying down to Melbourne to spend another 3 months surfing there before the end of his visa would send him home. Over the course of our conversation he revealed that he did not usually like Americans but that he did pay more attention to our politics than to Canada's. When at the end of the night we exchanged Australian phone numbers he commented that he could not believe he wanted the phone number of an American. I guess now I know what it is like to be the stereotyped minority. Except unlike minorities whose culture is evident on their faces, no one knows my identity until I open my mouth and share it.

So back to that CVA business. On Monday my team consisted of myself, Maxine, Will, Pat and another Korean guy named Kim who joined us that morning. Our teamleader was Fab. And our assignment for the week was Happy Valley on Fraser Island! The trip would take us 4 hours back up the highway along the coast and 2 hours on the beach "highway" on the island. We were making this trip in a 4wd "troopie" as this group called it -- which meant sideways bench seats and occasionally flying off the seat resulting in the addition of a few new bruises to the collection on my legs as well as a bump on the head.

Our accommodation on the island was another one of these Australian structures that is caught somewhere in between of being inside and outside. The bedrooms had 4 walls but like any campground type structure were inhabited by spiders in every crevice. The kitchen and bathroom could be described the same way but the common area had 2 walls that were really just screens overlayed with a metal grate. This kept most bugs out but not wind, rain or temperature. The floor was like a wooden deck raised a few feet above the ground. There was about a half inch between each board and so when we swept you never needed a dust pan because you just swept all the crumbs, dirt and sand into the cracks and down onto the ground. There was real furniture (ie not outdoor or waterproof furniture) in the common area and a tv with dvd player so it was a bit disorienting as to whether you should think of yourself as indoors or outdoors. This was highlighted on Wednesday night when we experience a torential downpour while we watched a dvd in the dark. We had to turn the volume up because the rain was so loud -- and because there was no wall between us and it. (For those who were wondering, the movie was either Predator, Alien, Alien vs. Predator, Wagons East, Blood Diamonds, or a Kiwi film called Eagle vs Shark. We watched them all that week. Oh yeah and Kiwi means a person or thing from New Zealand.)

Dingo

Our work on Fraser was just weeding. We sat on the ground and pulled out crows foot on the campground in the mornings when the tide was too high for us to drive from our accommidation in Dundaburra to Happy Valley. And in the afternoons we went to Happy Valley and pushed through the bush looking for Easter Cassia, which we pulled out of the ground and hung upside down from the trees so that it didn't reroot itself. Easter cassia is fairly easy to pull out but finding it, which meant plowing through branches and brush and vines and the insects that inhabit them was not my favorite. But we did occasionally push through to the top of some hill and could see out to the ocean that was perpetually in earshot and the sight was another one to make you stop in your tracks -- well either that or a sharp wait-awhile vine that snagged you around the shin.

Anita, me and Stephen

On Friday we headed back to Brisbane and went out for a few drinks at a very typical backpacker bar called Down Under. And on Saturday Maxine, Anita, Will, Stefan and I took a two hour train and bus ride to Surfers Paradise to spend the day. Contrary to the name, Surfers is not really the most ideal place to find good surfing waves. It is however, a great place for nightlife. Unlike all other Australian beaches I have seen, the beaches in Surfers are lined with tall buildings and feels kind of like what I'd imagine Miami would be like. Maxine commented this beach reminded her of European beaches.

My favorite part of Surfers was the talking bathrooms. Just off the beach was a series of individual toilet units that on the outside were reminiscent of a porta potty. But once you got inside, this was no temporary nasty toilet. When you closed the door, the bathroom spoke to you to inform you that you had 10 minutes to use the toilet and that you should lock the door. Then "All You Need is Love" began to play. There was no button to flush the toilet but the toilet would flush automatically when you turned on the water to wash your hands (I was also in another one where the door unlocked when you washed your hands). It was like using the bathroom on Star Ship 9.

The following Monday, Will, Pat, Corey and Stefan had all left for their next destinations and my new team consisted of myself, Maxine, John and another Korean guy named Martin. Our teamleader was Cameron and our location was Kennelworth in the Cannondale Mountains about 2 hours outside of Brisbane. Our task was more weeding -- but this time the foreign plant of choice was Lantana.

Each day began with a 3 km hike out into the woods -- but this time with the luxury of a trail -- to meet one of the (power) rangers. Lantana is a plant that was brought here from Europe by the english to create hedges. It grows all twisted and entwined in itself and generally grows about 6 or 7 feet tall, although if it latches onto a tree it may creep even taller. The roots come out of th ground fairly easily but getting yourself in close enough to them to get a good grasp is a bit tricky. Also it's branches are stiff like sticks, not flexible like a flower stem, and so when they do come out they are pointing 7 feet in every direction and sometimes a power ranger might pull one out and stab an innocent American girl in the eye. But no worries, my contact saved the day -- even though it subsequently fell out into the dirt. But I'm like a master bushwalker and managed to find a way to clean it and pop that sucker back in.

Of all the places I had been so far the Cannondale Mountains poised to biggest threat in terms of deadly Australian nature. Several species of poisonous snakes were known to live in those woods; including the brown snake. A trapdoor spider joined us for smoko one day, but the funnelwebs stayed away. There are leeches, jumping ants, plenty of breeds of ticks and stinging trees inhabiting these woods too. I'd always thought that you only find leeches in the water but I was wrong, they live on ground too. Our teamleader, Cameron, had 3 leeches on him in one day. Jumping ants literally jump to about knee (or in my case, hip) height and they bite. Based on the Martin's expression after falling victim to a jumping ant, I deduce that it is as painful as the Australian’s claim. But this pain subsides -- kind of like a bee sting. The stinging tree on the other hand keeps you in pain for weeks/months. These woods were home to GIANT stinging trees, which means that they are about as tall as a 6-8 story building and they have leaves about the size of your hand (not my hand -- your hand) that are covered in silia containing a poison. The silia just need to brush your skin to become embedded and when this happens they will continue to sting until they come out. And it usually takes a long time for them to get out. They are too tiny to pull out with tweezers, although sometimes a bit of tape will do the trick. Temperature changes aggravate the exposed area even more, so showers -- both hot and cold -- are extremely uncomfortable. But you must be thinking, “ if the leaves of a giant stinging are located 6 stories up into the air they can't be much danger to people, right?” No, no, you silly American; these leaves fall to the ground and their silia continue to be capable of stinging you for 100 years after they fall. That's right, dead leaves that want to hurt you are hanging out all over the ground, crumbling up and disgusing themselves as innocent rubbish. What kind of place is this where even the leaves are out to get you?

Then there is the ominous bush turkey; who won't bite but will steal your lunch. I may have mentioned bush turkeys before. They are black, about two feet long, have a red face and a yellow hangy neck. They creep around looking for things to steal and bring them back to the mound that they build out of leaves and sticks and flipflops (or thongs or pluggers or whatever you'd like to call them). They make a noise that sounds like "HHMMMMMM". They can't really fly but they do jump and manage to get up into trees, especially ones that have plastic bags containing ham sandwiches tied to them, but their balance isn't so hot so occasionally they fall out of the trees. Their thievery doesn't end with food products as we discovered when Martin informed Cameron "Turkey steal you cigarette." And sure enough, a bush turkey had run off with the whole box.

Bush turkey

Refilling my waterbottle in a creek. Tasted and looked like perfect bottled water.

Pulling out lantana is not so much fun so we managed to entertain ourselves with a hike up a dry creek bed one day, a hike along the edge of a wet creek another day, and a hike to a waterhole with a waterfall to go for a swim on a third day. Only Cameron, Maxine and I went out to the waterhole, and we arrived to find that we had it completely to ourselves, which Maxine commented would be impossible to find in England.

When we wrapped up in Kennelworth, on Friday, we headed back into Brisbane. After checking on facebook and my Morton Island plans for the weekend I joined Cameron and his friend Amanda at Amanda's apartment in Fortitude Valley. It was great to chat with a few Australians on a level that wasn't restricted by their tourguide or teamleader status…

OK I am tired and so this post will have to be continued at a later date.

See more pictures at:
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Do you have the kitchen sink in there?

2008-10-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

There is a sign along the side of the highway as you enter Brisbane (pronounced briz bin) that says "Brisbane - Australia's most livable city." Who was in charge of writing taglines that day? Debbie Downer?

For the last 4 weekends I have arrived in Brisbane on Friday or Saturday and left on Monday. Brisbane is the largest city outside of Melbourne that I have been to in Australia so far. Cairns was a "city" but the downtown (or CBD as they call it) is small and exists pretty much only for tourists. And everything outside of Cairns CBD is really just a large suburb. So arriving in Brisbane for the first time on Saturday October 4, I was greeted with familiar city sounds and sites for the first time in over 2 months. Brisbane is still pretty small as cities go but it has experienced a great deal of growth over the last 10-15 years.

When I arrived in Brisbane on the 4th I was traveling with Jess and Alex, the 22 year old English girls that I originally met in 1770 and had traveled to Fraser Island with. After parting ways with the rest of our Fraser Island group, Jess, Alex and I went to Noosa for one night and then continued on to the Australia Zoo near Gimpy (yes, there is a town called Gimpy). We brought all our luggage with us to the zoo and locked it up in lockers for the day.

Australia Zoo, is the "Home of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter." This is where many of Irwin's crocs live as well as plenty of animals with pockets and spikes, and venom, and crazy wacko names. There were of course plenty of kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and lizards. There were cassowaries and dingoes, emus and wombats, tasmanian devils and every one of the 10 most poisonous snakes. There were non native species like camels, otters, elephants and american alligators (probably just for the sake of comparison to the ginormous salties). We went to see the croc show at the Crocoseum where in addition to hand feeding the crocodiles chunks of meet, they also released all kinds of colorful and huge tropical Australian birds. There is no roof on the Crocoseum so the birds really could have just flown away. But they circled in and out and around and all came back to their trainers. I used the $41 from the 50/50 the New York Caresers held on behalf of my trip went to pay for my ticket to visit the home of these crazy marsupials. Thanks guys! I heart animals with pockets!

I didn't technically need to be in Brisbane for another week but I decided that it would be more fun to go to the zoo with Jess and Alex and spend the weekend with them in the city than to venture on my own again. Plus, the Canadian and English guys from our Fraser Island trip were living in Brisbane for another 2 weeks and we'd made plans to go out with them on Sunday. Turns out we were super tired by the time we arrived on Saturday and just spent the evening uploading pictures and checking email. The boys had been at a music festival for the day and when they called around 10 to see if we would want to come out, we sillily passed on the offer to save our energy for the following day. What we should have foreseen was that the boys would been in worse shape on Sunday and would therefore back out on those plans. Boys! But the 3 of us made it out to the Normanby Hotel (an old hotel turned into a bar) anyway and had a good time.

I parted ways with Jess and Alex on Monday morning. They were continuing further south and I headed back north a bit to a town called Mooloolaba (pronounced MOO lu la ba). Since I was backtracking I couldn't use my Cairns to Sydney Greyhound pass or I would run out of kilometers about 100k short of Sydney and they'd have to chuck me off the bus into the bush.

So instead I took regular Brisbane area public transportation. This involved taking the train to a bus. Brisbane's transportation system is pretty good. And it's very new, easy to use, clean and not crowded. As I boarded the bus to the hostel with all my gear, a woman who I believe was in her late 70s asked me, "do you have the kitchen sink in there?" I chatted with this woman for the bus ride and it turned out that she was born in England but had been living in Oz since she was about 10. She has some grandchildren who are now back living in England (Who knows why!) To keep in touch with them she has a small device about the size of my fold up keyboard when it is open (like 10 inches by 4 inches) and she can type out emails and send them via cell service... just like me. I showed her my phone and keyboard. Funny that the only person I've encountered in my travels who is able to send emails remotely like myself is a woman in her 70s. Love it.

Mooloolaba is a bit off the normal backpacker track. There is only one hostel and many of the people there were in town to find work as strawberry pickers. They get picked up at like 6:30 am and pick until about noon, but after that it is too hot so they send everyone home. They get paid by the amount that they pick and average is about $50 in a 5 hour day. For those who are thinking that this is strange that travelers are working as strawberry pickers, here is the deal. Australia does not directly border any country... especially any developing country with people who are willing to do manual labor for very little pay. Therefore, there is a constant shortage of people to work in agriculture jobs. The solution is that jobs that in America would frequently be filled by Mexicans and Central Americans, in Australia are filled by European, Asian and American travelers in their 20s. These people are often college educated and come from middle class backgrounds but are desperate for some quick cash without commitment in order to fund their journeys. You must have a working holiday visa in order to do this work (that is the visa I have) but other than that you can usually show up in Mooloolaba, or Bundaberg or Bowen or any of the many other base locations for agri work and make arrangements to start picking capsicums, or mangos, or pineapples, within a day or so and quit whenever the trauma of the heat, the thorns and the repetition conquers your psyche. As an added incentive, any traveler who does 3 months of agricultural work can get an extension on their visa to stay for a 2nd year.

I stayed in Mooloolaba from Monday through Thursday nights. It was a pretty quiet week. I didn't make much of an effort to make friends because I was really hoping for some time to myself to read on the beach and wander around and keep things inexpensive. However I did have one adventure that week -- in the mall. On Thursday it was cloudy and cool so I decided to go to the mall so that I could see a movie, buy a new shirt or two (clothes get worn out quickly when you wear the same things several times a week), and find a new book to read.

Well it turns out that in Australia I look like a criminal. I was taking my sweet time in a H&M type store called Supre. I was debating a lot because when you have to carry everything you own on your back, and you aren't earning any money, you don't want to make any rash purchasing decisions. Anyway, the store employees didn't seem to think that my slow method of shopping was as innocent as I did, and they suspected me of shopping lifting. They told mall security that they thought I might have put clothes on under my clothes in the dressing room. Fair enough, considering my speed and the number of times I went in there... but if they had used their brains it would have only taken one glance at me to realize the absurdity of this since I was wearing a WHITE TANK TOP... the kind where the only thing I could hide behind it would be a neutral colored bra. Or maybe a pair of stockings. And since this store didn't carry either of those items, there wasn't anything I could have gotten in there that wouldn't be just as obvious as writing thief on my face. But even so, the mall security guy took me to his little booth and made me empty out my bags. Amongst my wallet and cell phone and sunglasses was my white sweatshirt, which thankfully has permanent dirt stains on the sleeves, my plastic box with my sandwich for lunch and my water bottle. Maybe these items weren't helping my case since they made it look like I was a bum in need of a day of shoplifting. But after pointing out the white-tank-top aspect of the ridiculousness of this scenario to Mr. Mall Security Guard, he agreed that I was just a traveler with whole lot of time on my hands and sent me on my way strip-search free.

And that was the end of my time in Mooloolaba.

Leaving Australia zoo.

Can someone tell me what this sign means?

Everybody eats.

2008-10-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

I just ate a cup of fruit pulp. Sounds pretty gross but it is really just frozen pieces of fruit put into this machine that churns it up real fast and pumps it out looking like icecream. It was quite good but some hot fudge, or even Nutella would have made it better.

I bet you don't even know what Nutella is. It is a brand name for hazelnut spread...like peanut butter but made from hazelnuts instead of peanuts. It is dark brown and so it looks like chocolate and also manages to taste like chocolate. It is as common around here as a topping for toast as butter. Another common toast topper is vegemite. Don't know about that one either? In england it is known as marmite. Oh wait, you wouldn't know it by that name either. Vegemite is a vegetable extract turned into a paste. It looks the same as hazelnut spread but tastes VERY different. I have not actually tried vegemite out here since I had a lovely introduction to it during the New York Cares Staff Day blind fold taste test in July 2007 which was rigged to favor the english staff members (How can you guess a food you've never tasted or even heard of, escpecially while gagging? Haha, just kidding, Mel!)

Anyway, it seems people either hate or love vegemite. But enough people despise it that the crew of Spank Me used it as a punishment for breaking the rules of the boat. Any plastic bags, papers, beer cans, cigarettes, clothing, etc blows or slides overboard, becoming a death trap for turtles and dolphins and you receive a vegemite fine -- a spoonful of vegemite to be eaten by itself. Stand on the stairs and block traffic -- vegemite fine. Put on Jack Johnson or U2-- vegemite fine. Knock over the skipper's coffee -- vegemite fine. Wave to your friends while snorkeling using the universal distress signal -- vegemite fine and a very angry wet crew. Anyway, those few that do enjoy the vegemite claim it is best on toast with butter. I've also seen it with eaten with butter AND melted cheese.

Speaking of butter or margarine, it has recently come to my attention that the whole world puts margarine on their sandwiches except for maybe me. Am I crazy? No one in NJ does this, right? NY? The whole east coast? Have I forgotten? The aussies do it, the europeans (all kinds) do it, even the canadians do it. If you purchase a sandwich it will have butter. I don't get it. Aren't there enough other flavors on your sandwich that you don't need butter too? On the last day of our fraser island trip we had no more margarine left. I said, "No more butter, now you all have to eat your sandwiches like americans!"

The grocery stores here are like scaled down versions of our. Makes you realize really how much excess we have. In Australia you can find anything you might want. You just might not find it in every single store, or in 17 different varieties. Unless we are talking about kitkats... they have tons of different kinds of kitkats. There is a cookies and cream kitkat that is amazing. Cookies are called biscuits, unless they are chocolate chip, in which case they are cookies. There is a "biscuit" here called a Tim Tam. It is sort of a square chocolate covered waffer with an oreo like cream on the inside. Other than Tim Tams I have been too impressed with the cookie selection. There are a lot of plain type cookies that are type people like to dip in tea. They do "tea" here, like england.

I still can't believe how many people have watched me make a sandwich and put jelly on top of my peanutbutter and say, "Peanut butter AND jam!? That's weird." I had no idea PBJ was really so american. I mean I knew it was a quintessental American food but I would have thought the idea would be so simple that it would easily spread. It's even more of a shocker to see how many people think that the combination is gross. I mean I'm sure they have sung about "peanutbutter jelly time"...

The fries here are called chips and the chips are called crisps, unless the fries are the big fat kind, then they are called wedges or if they come from McDonalds then they are called fries. There is a sandwich at McDonalds right now that comes with avocado. I got a breakfast wrap with avocado. Are they adding avocado at home too or is this just because the avocados here are abundant and perfect? There is also a limited edition sandwich called the McAustralia. In case you can't make it out in the picture, the description says, "Traditional damper bun, 100% Aussie beef, premium bacon, juicy pineapple, and bbq sauce."

Oh but back to those chips fries crisps. They have meat flavored potato chips. I mean bbq flavored is one thing. But there are chicken crisps, and roast beef crisps and steak crisps. Apparently these are also common in Europe. Do we have this and I just not noticed? I was quite amused to discover this snack.

There is one ingenious item that has been a regular in my diet. They make small single serving cans of tuna in a flavored sauce. These are awesome for a traveler because it means you can make a sandwich out of just the loaf of bread and the can of tuna (both of which travel and store well) without needing an mayonnaise or anything else to flavor the sandwich. You can also make a salad and add a can of tomato basil tuna and you won't need to buy any salad dressing because the sauce with the tuna is enough for the whole salad. This is also crucial since you can buy a single serviing of salad dressing and since the remaining bottle would have to be refrigerated, which is not an option on long bus rides and days when your bag is locked up in a locker at the zoo.

-Bell peppers are called capsicums.
-Bagels are almost non existant.
-The closest thing to a tostito is a plain dorito.
-Pizzas only come in small sizes, ie personal pizzas or dominos type pizzas. I have yet to see a large slice of pizza.
-Peanut butter is not as good.
-Granola bars suck.
-Organic is hard to find. (I miss kashi)
-All the produce is perfect and delicious (maybe this is just compared to JC).
-Ground beef is called mince.
-Dishes referred to as curry are quite common and are not what I would think of as curry expect that they are spicy.
-The bloomin onion was invented by Outback and exists only at Outback.
-Ketchup is often called sauce.
-Salad dressing is often called sauce.
-Cheddar cheese is sometimes called tasty cheese and sometimes called cheddar cheese and i've yet to figure out the difference.
-People will put cheddar cheese on their spaghetti dishes.
-There is no "american" cheese.
-The english love their beans on toast and spaghetti on toast, and although that idea is quite foreign in the US, you can find it on menus in Australia... along with plenty of fish and chips.
-I haven't yet been able to find any black beans... just baked beans, red kidney beans, and chickpeas.
-Raisins are called sultanas.
-I think coronas taste different, but there is no reason why, since they are all bottled in Mexico.
-There is no hershey chocolate. But there are many varieties of Cadbury and kitkats, and anything made by mars.

- Burger King is Hungry Jacks.
- Pretzels are not easy to find.

I've given up taking the nutritional value of foods into account when making my purchases. I consider the price, I consider the protein to carbohydrate ratio in my meal, I consider the potential leftovers and if I can hold on to them until my next meal; but if I turn the package over, the nutritional information means nothing. This is because most items don't list calories, they list energy using kilajewels (kj) I believe. I have no scale on which to judge this measurement. And everything seems to have more fat than I am used to seeing on the package. At first I thought the unit was different for this as well but then I remember we also measure our fat and protein in grams. It probably always seems higher because there are not so many low fat and lite varieties for food here.

I have heard that Australia recently passed the US for the fattest nation. And yet people keep asking me"is everyone in America fat?" Dude, are you looking at me? If EVERYONE was fat, and I walked around looking like this, don't you think I'd be reduced to a pancake by now? And so I carefully explain that Australia actually now has a higher percentage and so if they walk around on the street in Australia they can assume to see a similar sort of ratio of fat to thin in America.

Speaking of pancakes... Australians love their pancakes. I even saw a pancakes stand in the food court at the mall in Maroochydor. But they seem to like them with things like lemon and peanut butter and jam on top. Not with syrup. Or maybe syrup is just to expensive to be included in a free backpacker pancake breakfast.

I probably average about $13 a day on food. Many hostels have free breakfast -- which is really just toast. But when it is available I always eat it. Some hostels also have a $5 meal each evening (one option only) available for about 1 hour. Common $5 meals would be barbeque (sausages, onions and potatos), pasta, pizza, chicken snitzel, or burritos. I have one square plastic box that I frequently carry around with a sandwich in it for lunch -- that is whenever I have access to ingredients for making a sandwich. However, my major weakness to keeping the food budget in check is icecream. Gelato, frozen yogurt, sundaes and even fruit pulp that looks like icecream is everywhere, and I just can't resist.

Sand in places you didn't know existed

2008-10-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

Today is the 8 week anniversary of my arrival in Australia. It will be another 9 weeks until I arrive in Melbourne to settle for a bit.

In the last week I have been involved in several conversations about how all of us travelers are perhaps the luckiest people on earth. And how we don't understand why more people, specifically Americans, don't take advantage of life, youth, freedom and their two legs and get the hell out to here or there or anywhere.

The night I was leaving 1770, I was sitting outside, writing the previous post, at the best hostel I have been to yet (Cool Bananas) and I met Dan and Tim, from New Jersey! Eight hours, a few beers, and a dinner of bangers and mash later we were still sitting at the same table discussing our journey's -- where we'd been, why we decided to come to Australia, and how it all compares to our home state. We discovered that we have a mutual friend -- a guy I knew in college and they knew from their hometown. It was such a relief to speak to people who knew, amongst other things, what I meant when I used the acronym TCNJ. But they were getting on a 2am bus to Noosa at the end of those 8 hours and so it was time for another round of goodbyes.

I moved on to Rainbow Beach the next day with Jess and Alex (both from England), and Andrea (from Switzerland) who I'd met at Cool Bananas. We were all going to Rainbow Beach to travel out to Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world. Fraser Island also has a very unique eco system in that it is virtually the only place that rainforest grows in sand. Minus a few paved parking areas inside fancy resorts, there are no paved roads on the island. The island is only accessible via ferry -- the kind that carries vehicles. Your vehicle must also be 4WD since you will travel the length of the island by driving on the beach. For a package price, a hostel called Dingos in Rainbow Beach arranges for rentals of 4x4s, sets you up in groups of about 10-11, provides tents and other camping equipment, purchases food for 3 days and 2 nights, and gives you a map and some tips. The tips include: how to drive on sand, how to avoid being one of the 300 vehicles that get swept away into the sea each year, how to finding places to camp, and how to avoiding getting eaten by dingos.

Jess, Alex, Andrea and I decided to stay together as a group and quick grabbed a group of 4 guys -- Tim and Josh from England, and Ford and Skylar from Canada -- to join us. We were later assigned 3 more girls; Yolanda from Holland, Anne from Denmark and Barbara from Switzerland. Amongst our group we had 2 nurses, a paramedic/firefighter, a mechanic, and even two lawyers. In the case of any emergency, we'd be covered.

4 trucks left from Dingos Tuesday morning with 10-11 people in each. I think my favorite part of the trip was just driving around in the truck on the sand "highway". Since it was high tide we had to take an inland path on the southern part of the island the first day. This was also made of sand but went through the jungle rather than along the beach.

The first afternoon we stopped at Lake Mackenzie -- a freshwater lake with water clear enough to see through to the bottom in many places. By 2:30 we headed out to drive an hour up the island to a shipwreck in the area where we'd been advised to look for camping. All 4 trucks met -- although our team -- the A team -- arrived first and choose the spot... all others followed. This was to be a theme for the trip. The A-team was pretty much always first, fastest, and most efficient.

Before the sun had set, 16 tents had been set up, trucks and tarps were in place to block the wind off the ocean, steaks and potato salad had been cooked and eaten, the beer and goon had been opened and our 43 person beach party had begun.

On day two, we took our time packing up camp because the tides would not allow us to drive until late morning. We boiled some eggs and introduced a few europeans to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while we waited. Next stop was Eli Creek, where you can hop in the shallow and again insanely clear water and float along with the current (perhaps practicing a crocodile immitation) out to the beach.

After Eli, we headed up to Indian Point, where we climbed a few rocks up to a place where you can see the ocean on two sides and can frequently spot sealife. I was able to see a sting ray, 2 dolphins and an eagle's nest. This spot was another one of the many places that I keep thinking, "this is so beautiful, nothing could top this." And then inevitably, a day or two later something does.

We traveled back south along the island to find a camping spot for the 2nd night and again it was the A team that did the scoping out and the choosing of the location. Before we settled on a spot we had to dig the truck out of a few sand drifts but we beat out the other teams anyway. One truck never found us that night and had to camp on their own. Too bad for them because the site, the food and the party was even more memorable... or I should say NOT so memorable... for some.

By day 3, our hygiene had deteriorated pretty badly. But since the tides again did not allow us to drive in the morning we walked our stinky behinds 2 km up the beach and 2 km inland to Lake Wongai. The shore of one side of the lake is a huge and very steep hill of sand -- which of course taunts anyone with testosterone to run down and dive into the water.

After our hour long walk back from the lake we sat down for a lunch of eat-any-random-leftover-you-can-find with a side of sand. Then we headed back for the ferry to Rainbow Beach.

It was another awesome time. I have been really lucky so far with my random groups on trips like this. The people can make or break the experience. Our group was so much fun that I have decided to continue to travel with Jess and Alex for a few more days. And we will meet up with the 4 boys in Brisbane on Sunday as well. They've all been in Australia for almost a year and so their visas are coming to an end. Skylar and Josh will be heading home, at least for a little while, and Ford and Tim will go to Southeast Asia for the next 4 months or so.

Its addicting this traveling thing. Especially when you can travel and then work just enough to fund more travel and then travel a bit more. I might be hooked.

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Life as a fish

2008-09-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

I am writing from the beach in a town called The Town of 1770, usually referred to as just 1770. Who names a town using a number? I've met many an Australian and New Zealander who joke that Australians just name things exactly the way they are... nothing fancy--the blue-tongued lizard, plates and tables coral, the territories of Western Australia or Southern Australia. 1770 got it's name because this was the year that Captain James Cook first landed in Australia and at this location.

1770 is the only place on the east coast where you can dive and surf. It is the end of the reef and therefore the start of the surf. I arrived here on the overnight bus at 9:30 this morning after a 9 and half hour ride from Airlie Beach. Not the most comfortable of places to sleep but at least I saved $25 on a hostel for the night.

(COOL BANANAS IN 1770)

So let's back up a bit from where I am now and fill you in on the time I spent at Airlie Beach and at the Whitsunday Islands. Airlie Beach actualy does not have a beach -- which I guess contradicts the theory that Australians name everything exactly the way they are... hmm. What Airlie does have is an inlet of sorts with really calm shallow water that at low tide is just a shelf of mud. But to make up for this there is a man-made lagoon and beach area.

Anyway, 8 days ago I left Magnetic Island to head to Airlie Beach. On the ferry ride from Magnetic to Townsville I met three American (gasp!) girls from Connecticut. Megan, had been living and working in Sydney for the past year and Erin and Catelyn, who are twins, had come out to travel with Megan two months ago. I took the bus with them and although we were staying at different hostels in Airlie I met up with them each day for some time on the "beach", dinner and some long overdue beers.

(Me, Meagan, Erin and Caitlyn)

Where Mission Beach and Magnetic Island were really nice quiet places to visit, Airlie Beach has an actual nightlife, even if the main strip consists of only 3 streets. We happened to be in Airlie for the weekend -- Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights -- and on top of this it also happened to be the start of the September school holiday. This is a holiday (for no particular reason as far as I've been able to gather) for both public schools and universities. Therefore, being that it is also spring here, the closest thing I can equate it to is spring break. It is in no way as crazy as American spring break (at least not in Airlie) but it does bring many Auustralians to the beaches and the bars. Which was awesome because it has been otherwise uncommon for me to be around Australians outside of tour guides and the people who run the CVA projects. Even many of the people who work at the hostels are travelers and not Australian.

The hostel I stayed at for the weekend in Airlie was called Airlie Waterfront and was situated in exactly that location -- waterfront. The view... from the kitchen, not from my room... was flat out perfect..

However, the room itself was still one of my favorites because... there were NO BUNKBEDS! It was a 6 bed dorm and I was there for 3 nights and in that time every bed changed owners every night except for 19 year old Andy who had been staying in the room for 2 weeks but had just gotten his diving license, a job at a restaurant and a room to rent and moved out on Saturday. He plans to stay in Airlie about 2 - 3 months and says he hates England and is never going back.

Some other roommates were two Irish brothers, one of whom is living in Sydney and gave me his business card and said to call if I were ever in trouble(?); Mikel from France who came to Australia on a year-long work and travel visa 12 years ago, found a job to sponsor him and has been here ever since; Emily from England who had just arrived in Airlie from the Snowy Mountains where she had spent the winter working at a ski resort and now that it was spring was looking for work and a room in Airlie. Alex from Norway, who told me that I was the first intelligent American he had met, to which I responded, "I don't know if that is a compliment or an insult." In any case, I needed to introduce him to some more intelligent Americans, so he and his friends joined me and the connecticut girls at beeches that night.

All these stories aside, all of us were in Airlie for the same reason -- the Whitsunday Islands. The Whitsundays are 74 small islands all intermingled with the reef. There are tons of different boats you can take out to the Whitsundays -- there are snorkeling or diving boats, there are boats that just sail and visit islands, there are party boats and there are even tall ships that fly pirate flags and look like they just sailed out of... I don't know... 1770.

On advice from Judith, (remember the German girl I camped with at Cape Trib?) I signed up for a boat called... Spank Me.

The other Whitsundays boats are called things like "Wings" or "Apollo". So having to respond "Spank Me" whenever asked what boat I was taking also results in good conversation. As people were arriving on the pier to board the boat, a german guy would ask each arrival, "Are you going to Spank Me?" At the time I thought he must know what it was that he was saying and think that he was being funny. However, just before boarding the boat he turns to me and says, "What does this word mean? Spank?"...

Spank Me was formerly a racing sailboat and won some big race that has Sydney in the name of it... hmm facts. It is now retired and instead sails around the Whitsundays taking passengers on 3 day, 3 night diving, snorkeling and obviously, sailing trips. Although Spank Me sounds like it would also qualify as a party boat, since the trip was 3 nights instead of 2 like most boats, it was also a bit more money and therefore was not appealing to the very young partier-backpacker crowd. Not to say we didn't have a good time -- just not the type of good time that involves people falling overboard.

The girls from Connecticut had chosen to do a 2 night trip on another boat and so we said our goodbyes on Monday with plans to meet up again further down the coast.

You are only allowed to bring one small soft bag plus alcohol on the boats. So I packed up my small backpack, put the rest of my stuff in storage for $5, hid some food in the back of the fridge at Airlie Waterfront, hired myself the required stinger suit (like a wetsuit but doesn't do much to keep your warm just to protect you from deadly invisible jellyfish), bought a 6 pack, and located the pier. About 15 minutes later 5 girls walked up each carrying a 30 pack, and some also with a box of goon (Australian for wine in a box). Mike from England and I, who had both choosen to bring minimal alcohol, exchanged looks of concern regarding our purchases and hurried back to the liquor store for more.

There were 26 passengers and 5 crew on Spank Me. As we boarded the boat, our shoes were taken from us and we were directly to the two giant cooler compartments on deck to store our drinks. As the 5 girls carrying 30 packs boarded the boat, the skipper commented, "You girls must be Irish." Oh and they were.
The average age of this group was older than most of the people I have met in Australia so far. There were actually 7 of us who were 27!! Hooray, I'm not so old! 27 year old Shane and Noel were Irish guys spending 2 months traveling Australia and Thailand; 25-27 year old Norita, Caroline, Norma, Kate and Dee were 5 Irish girls driving the coast in a camper van after spending 5 months working in Sydney; 32 year old Christoph was a Polish guy who had been living in Bondi beach (near Sydney) for 4 years, mostly surfing with a little contract IT work on the side, and he was traveling with his best mate Bart who had come to visit for a few weeks with his wife, Evelina, and her sister, Anna (Bart and Evelina were Polish but had been living in Dubai for the last year); 3 german girls, 24 year olds Clara, Sabrina and Ulla, and a swedish girl, 27 year old Sophie, who were all studying together at Gold Coast University; 27 year old Mike from England who had just finished up his degree in arch
etecture and was traveling for a few months in Australia, Thailand etc; Mikel from Denmark, whose story I never really got; Patrick from Germany who had a round the world ticket and had been to Machu Picchu earlier in the year; 22 year old George from England who had 8 weeks left on his round the world ticket and had been traveling in the US and Mexico earlier in the year among many other places; 20 year old Leanne, from Oregon who came to Australia with plans to stay for months but was trying to figure out how she could switch to the year visa; 19 and 20 year old Isabell and Brita from Sweden who had met in Australia earlier in the year and were now traveling together; and 27 year old Tobias from Germany who had just finished a degree in politics and was traveling and diving around Australia and Thailand, and to whom I had to explain the meaning of "spank".

The deck of Spank Me was void of anything not absolutely necessary to a racing boat. This makes sense, since in order to be fast the boat must carry very little. All this meant for us was that the only place to sit was on the floor. It was so relaxing to have such limited options as to how to spend your time for 3 whole days. You were either sitting on the floor and talking to your neighbor, laying down on the floor and sleeping, sitting on the floor and eating or drinking a beer, or in the water. Well I guess you could have been in bed or in the bathroom, but who wants to be there when you have perfect weather and perfect scenery and 30 awesome people to hang out with?

Included in with our trip, you got your first scuba dive for free. For licensed divers, this meant the first time they hopped off the boat in scuba gear. For unlicensed divers this meant a 30-minute introductory session in groups of 4 with the dive instructor. We did this on the first day and of course I got put in the first group and was chosen to be the first to jump off the boat all geared up with airtank heavier than my all my backpacking gear combined, weight belt around my waist, stinger suit, vest, mask, flippers and of course, regulator (the thing that you breath through). Taking that step off the side of the boat feeling like you are carrying so much weight that you won't even be able to stand up much longer is damn scary. What if they didn't really put the right about of air in your vest and you don't float right back up the surface? How far down will you drop with all that weight before you rise up again? But they don't leave you very much time to panic. They just sort of
set you up, tell you to look at the horizon, give you enough time to throw out a few choice vulgar words and insist you take a giant step off the boat.

Once I had surfaced, Priscilla, the deck hand, instructed me to grab onto the rope on the side of the boat slide down out of the way of the next jumper and wait for the rest of the group. Since this was only a 30 minute introduction, everything happened very fast. We each had to display to the instructor, Shawn, that we could perform 3 breathing and water clearing tasks just below the surface. In order to do this, Shawn would press a button on a tube attached to your vest that made you less bouyant and cause you to sink until your head was below the water. You could still pull yourself back out of the water if necessary but it took a great deal of effort to stay that way. I ended up having some issues with finding a mask that fit and they had to throw down 2 different masks for me to try before I found one I was happy enough with. Because of this delay and subsequent rushing through the 3 skills, I didn't feel entirely confident under the water. One other girl opted to get out of the
water because she couldn't get the hang of it, but I couldn't bear the idea of giving up after all this so I joined to the group and headed out away from the boat anyway. Shawn changed the pressure on our vests and we sunk down holding onto a rope that went about 10 meters deep. Eventually to my surprise, Shawn waved to us to let go of the rope and we swam around the (mostly dead) coral. It was definitely a unique feeling swimming like this underwater and having the option to go not only forward and back and side to side but up and down. However, there wasn't much to see that was all that interesting. The reef I saw on my Cairns snorkel trip was much nicer and much more colorful. I ended my diving day though when I managed to get water in my mouth, tried to remedy this and ended up also getting water in my mask, so I panicked a bit and swam up to the surface holding my breath. Shawn practically beat me to the surface with questions of "why did you take your regulator out of your mouth?", to which I had no response other than, "I don't really know what happened, I panicked." So anyway, I am glad that I did the intro dive, but if I were ever to dive again, I would want to do a real dive course where they start you in a pool and give you plenty of time to get comfortable with the equipment.

Another highlight of all Whitsunday's trips is the visit to White Haven beach. The sand here is like baking powder in both it's color and texture. The water is entirely clear and calm. The only way to access the beach is by boat and the only permanent man made structure on the island is a bathroom. We spent an afternoon on this beach enjoying the steady ground under our feet.

One of the perks of Spank Me was that you could participate in putting up the sails on the boat.

We had great weather right up until the early morning of the last night when the boat began to sway in a way that had many people wondering if they would fall out of bed. Once we put the sails up and began sailing back to Airlie, the boat took some pretty steep tilts, several of which had most of us holding on to keep from sliding across the deck.

I could probably go on and on about the sailing experience but this post is getting quite lengthy and I have to go get myself ready for a trip to fraser island -- where I will be spending 3 days in a 4x4 with 10 people on an island with no roads.

See more pictures by going to facebook and viewing the group "Spank Me!!"
Or go to:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=35972&l=7e35f&id=802088251

Magnetic Island

2008-09-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a python was wrapped around me and its head was sitting on my arm and she looked at me and opened her mouth big and wide. Everyone around me gasped. I didn't flinch. Something is wrong with me.

The python was named Amanda. I guess it must have been a snake yawn because there were no fangs and she didn't lunge at me. Maybe she found me really boring.

I am at Bungalow Bay Koala Village on Magnetic Island. This is both a YHA hostel (rooms are actually cabins), campground, and a koala, bird and reptile sanctuary. I took the tour of the sanctuary yesterday, during which I held a baby crocodile, touched a Koala, had the little incident with the python, and allowed a bird to stand on my head.

--Did you know that crocodiles have evolved very little in the last 60 million years. They have just gotten a bit smaller as they have gone from eating dinosaurs to eating possums.

--Did you know that of the 42 people who have been killed by crocodiles in australia in the last 100 or 200 years (I can't remember) that 32 of them were drunk, 4 were drunk backpackers and 2 were drunk American backpackers (the other 2 were drunk German backpackers).

--Did you know that Koalas are not bears. They got that reputation because when Europeans arrived, a bear was the most similar thing that they knew that a koala looked like. But koalas are marsupials and therefore are related to kangaroos and wallabies. They evolved completely independently of any bears.

--Did you know that baby koalas eat their mother's poop for their first 5 days of life. And they must do this so that they can develop the bacteria in their stomachs that they need in order to eat a diet consisting 100% of eucalyptus leaves.

OK enough facts. I also saw an echnid, many lizards, a talking cockatoo, and the crazy screechy colorful birds below.

I arrived on Magnetic Island on Wednesday morning via a ferry from Townsville after a horrible night in a hostel in Townsville. The night was kind of reminiscent of a Saturday night in a freshmen dorm, except that I had 5 roommates instead of 1, they were Irish, and I was no longer 18 years old. OH and my top bunk with no ladder was concave enough to qualify as a hammock.

Anyway, after departing my new drunk Irish friends (who woke me up several times including one purposeful one around 330 am so that john could find out who I was, where I was from, and apologize for waking me up), I put half my stuff in a locker at the ferry terminal and skedaddled out of Townsville on the 10 am ferry. Magnetic Island has a population of 2000 people. It also has wild koalas. I arrived at the koala village and immediately realized I needed to stay more than just the 1 night I had originally planned. Maybe the experience from the night before was getting to my head but I just did not want to leave this place. So I changed my bus from Thursday to Friday, pushed back my reservation at my next destination and I am staying another day.

Last night I treated myself to a personal pizza and a beer and sat down with my little keyboard to send some emails. As always, you are never really alone for long around here because before I'd finished my pizza I was in the middle of a conversation with a couple from Manchester, England, a grandfather from Newcastle, Australia, and a (humorously drunk) guy from New Zealand. We discovered that we all had the experience of initially waiting for our "mates" (friends) to want to travel with us and then finally deciding to stop waiting and just go on our own. But once we'd arrived we discovered that this is the best possible way to go about it anyway! (The girl from England had been here for 6 months before her boyfriend joined her.) Traveling alone means you never have to compromise because every decision is yours. And you make more of an effort to meet new people if you are alone--hence finding yourself in a conversation with people representing almost all of the major English speaking nations of the world.

Grade 4 rapids

2008-09-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Back on the bus. Going to Townsville and traveling there with two Welsh girls, Anwen and Bev.

Quick story though.

Went rafting today. Amazing. They needed 6 more people to participate in the extreme rafting trip so they upgraded myself and 5 others (including the two Welsh girls) for free. Extreme rafting just means that we go to the head of the pack and don't have to wait in line behind the other rafts at each rapid, that because we move faster we get to stop and jump off rocks from 5 meters up, get out of the raft and body surf down a section of rapids (not actually that much fun), slide down a rock and get forced down underwater for 10 seconds if you have a normal amount of body weight (5 seconds if you are me), and it means that your guides are hotter.

This is not rafting like we do in Pennsylvania in July. On the bus on the way to the Tully River, one of the guides explained to us that a grade 6 rapid is a rapid that is considered deadly and undoable. As soon as some one rides that rapid and survives it becomes a grade 5. We would be on many grade 4 rapids.

Also while on the bus on the way to the river we stopped at some railroad tracks because a train was crossing. While there an Australian girl says to the driver, "Hey can you open to door for a second?" The door opens and she jumps out of the bus. Everyone starts saying, "What is she doing? Is she going to puke?" She hops back on the bus 30 seconds later, puts her hand in the air and says, "It is! It's a bag of weed!"

Which indeed it was.

Sea creatures

2008-09-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

I burnt my butt. I forgot that when you snorkel your butt needs lots of sunblock. Whoops.

Snorkeling was absolutely awesome. I went snorkeling once before (in the Bahamas) and found it quite difficult. Water kept getting in my mask and I felt like I was drowning. And if I remember correctly, we might have been drinking a bit of that mysterious rum punch beforehand? Maybe it was just a hangover. Or maybe it was residual drunkenness from the day before? Do any of my Bahamian spring breakers remember?

Anyway, this time all my gear was worked well and my head was sober and unhungover.

Not to mention it was the GREAT BARRIER REEF we were looking at. The night before my snorkel trip I went to a program called Reef Teach. This is a 2 hour long presentation where you learn about the fish, sharks, whales, turtles and corals that you could encounter out on the reef. You learn how to identify different creatures, where to find them, what is ok to touch, and what to swim like hell away from. The girl doing the presenting was American (woohoo!) so I didn't have to do any sort of accent or phrase translations as she spoke. I'd recommend attending this if you ever find yourself in Cairns about to go out on the reef.

The boat ride out to the reef was about an hour and a half. We did about an hour or so of snorkeling and then we had the option to hop onto another boat with a glass bottom for a ride around where you could check out the reef without actually being underwater. Then we hopped back on our big boat for lunch. Next we sailed out to another location where the tide was going out and revealing a sand cay. We snorkeled out to the cay, hung out a bit and snorkeled back to the boat.

I saw Nemo and Dora. I saw a sea turtle from the boat but didn't get to swim next to one--although others on the boat did get to do this. I held a blue starfish and a cucumber fish.

Every way you turn there Is something new to see. And it usually comes in colors that are shocking to believe occur in nature.

I'll be snorkeling again next week in the Whitsunday Islands and am very much looking forward to it.

On Sunday I started the first leg of my long journey on the greyhound. I bought a hop on hop off pass from Cairns to Sydney. The pass is good for 6 months and I can get on and off the bus as many times as I want between those two locations. Each time I want to get onto a bus I go onto the Greyhound website and book myself a seat on the particular bus I will get on. There are usually about 4 buses a day leaving from any location along the route so you have your choice of times. The other two bus companies, Oz Experience and Premier, offer only 1 bus a day and sometimes only one bus every 2 days. Which means that with them you have to go when the bus is going.
With me, I like to make the rules.

Anyway, what I was getting at was that on Sunday morning I started my bus pass and took the bus 2 hours to Mission Beach. Now this is where traveling light actually becomes important. The hostel I was staying at was called Absolute Backpackers and was located 200 meters down the road from the bus stop. Therefore this hostel does not offer a pick up service. And I can't call a cab to take me the equivalent of about 2 city blocks. So I have to be able to put one foot in front of the other for 200 meters--and not end up with a hump on my back. This walk would be the first test of truly traveling like a backpacker. That morning I'd eaten as much oatmeal and raisins and I could in an effort to drop a few ounces from my food bag. So with my big bag on my back, boots hanging off the side and sleeping bag underneath, and my little backpack on my front, and a medium sized pocket book in one hand and a green canvas grocery bag (filled with my tree planting clothes) in the other hand I set off
I arrived about 10 minutes later with cramps in all kinds of crazy places.. but with all belongings still in hand.

I've been trying to figure out if I actually have more stuff than other people. Most people have two backpacks and a grocery bag, just like me. But everyone comments that they can't see me under my bags. But I think I have the same amount of stuff as others... I just have less surface area on my body on which to carry it all.

So I passed the first luggage test. But I will still be ditching a few more items here. My rule is, if I don't use it in 3 weeks then I don't need it--except for a few long term necessities like 9 months worth of contact lenses.

There is not much in Mission Beach, and especially not much in Wongaling Beach where I am actually staying. This is where people come to skydive. Mission Beach is the only place in Australia that you can skydive onto the beach. Since I'm going to be skipping that activity, l will instead being going White Water Rafting on Tuesday on the Tully River in grade 4 rapids with two Welsh girls I met yesterday.

Today I walked the 5 km along the beach to the tiny town of Mission Beach, checked out every single shop in town, and walked the 5 km back along the beach. The beach was like walking into a postcard. There are very little people around here so during my 5 km walk I encountered maybe 12 people, about 5 of whom I watched arrive on the beach via parachute, and 1 of whom was a completely nude guy standing at the edge of the rainforest.

It was an excellent slow and timelineless day. But tomorrow will be exactly the opposite.

Defending my country

2008-09-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

I'm getting tired of the following conversation "You're American? Who are you voting for?".

In case you weren't sure, the world really is paying attention to everything the United States does.

I watched a half hour on an Australian morning show about Sarah Palin. Updates on the campaigns are almost as common here as they are in the US. Although there is definitely more media attention on Obama.

I'm also getting a bit tired of defending my country. Europeans, Australians, and Asians have all asked me, "WHAT is your country doing?!", "Why can't you guys get it together?", "How did you guys ever elect Bush? And then why did you do it again?!", "Aren't you glad to be out of the country now?", And the ever popular, "Who are you voting for?"

They all know Obama. Some people can't remember McCain's name, but the ALL know Obama. And if they had the chance they would ALL vote for Obama.

A guy from New Zealand who now lives in Australia and is employed by an environmental agency that frequently works alongside CVA, asked me, "Do you think Obama will last more than 6 months? I think there is just still too much racism in your country."

I've been asked about the electoral system, if people really go out and vote, and about campaign spending. And again, "How did you guys ever elect Bush?"

Remember the 911 conspiracy theories? I remember them being a topic of conversation 4 or 5 years ago. But out here people are still on that topic. Maybe it is the presence of an American that makes them want to talk about it. They want to know what I think about the theories. They want to know if I was in New York when it happened. And they want to know, "Why the hell did you guys ever elect Bush?"

They share their own country's election proceses with me. Did you know that there are 12 parties in Holland and that when you vote you get to vote for your #1 candidate, #2 candidate, #3 candidate, etc; putting all the possible options in order of preference. You never have a candidate that wins by a majority but I think there is something to be said for increased options. And people from England/The United Kingdom/Great Britian are all mixed up. Most of them don't even understand the differences between the 3 titles and what the reasons are that they use all these titles.

They watch all our TV shows, and movies and listen to our music. I watched the last half of "The Italian Job" dubbed into... Italian. Australia has Australian Idol, and I saw a commercial for a "new" show called, "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?" But they mock so many of our methods as "so American" -- peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, giant containers of anything, the size of our pool tables!

I was about to play pool at the Serpent one night when I noticed that the table and the balls were smaller than I was used to. I asked an english guy what the deal was and he said, "They are bigger in America because that's what you do in America. EVERYTHING is bigger." They also apparently call the game with the bigger and table and balls that we play "snooker" and the game with the smaller balls and table "pool".

Guilia, an Italian girl on my Cairns CVA team, told us that her family has kept the bottle from a 100 pill container of asprin from a trip to the US 9 years ago as a souvenir because they found it so hilarious that anyone needs to buy 100 asprin at one time. In fact she said, "If I want to kill myself, I go to America. They sell all drugs in big bottles."

They ask me if there are bitches near New York. Oh wait, they mean "beaches". The word always sounds like "bitches" when it comes from a native French or Italian speaker and always makes me laugh. But I can't explain the difference in the sounds to them and therefore they are all still out there asking for the nearest "bitch".

I've started to adopt some Australian into my language for the sake of clarity. Today I asked if we were going to meet in the "car park". I've started to tell people that it is a good idea to "hire a car" to go to Cape Trib. And I've succumed to calling cheddar cheese "tasty cheese". I won't use the phrases but I'm no longer thrown by "entrees" being something you eat before your main course, and the toaster being on the "bench" in the kitchen, or putting my "rubbish" in the "bin".

Put I've gotten off track here. The point WAS that as a Canadian woman who has been living in Australia for the last 20 years said to me, "The US really IS the leader of the free world. And all other countries do pay attention to what is going on over there; sometimes even more so than they pay attention to what is going on in the politics of their own countries."

That's scary. That's a lot of pressure.

Digging in the mud

2008-09-12T16:00:00.001-07:00

My time with CVA Cairns has almost come to a close and I haven't even filled you in about it at all.

I was signed up for 2 weeks with Cairns CVA. As oppossed to at Uluru where 2 weeks actually meant working for 10 days in a row and living entirely secluded with your team and team leader; 2 weeks with the Cairns CVA and I believe all other locations actually means 14 days, working Monday through Friday with weekends off to do as we liked. Each week long session goes from Friday to Friday with housing and meals provided even on the weekend before you have begun to work. So when I showed up at the CVA office/house at 11am on Friday August 29th just outside the city in a town called Marobool, I would be housed and fed by CVA starting that day but would have the weekend to do whatever I pleased... not bad.

On this particular Friday, I showed up at the house and found myself amongst a team of 7 Japanese college students and their "translator" (whose English was horrible). My initial fear was that this was about to be the loneliest and most confusing week of my life -- in addition to basic language barriers the japanese team for some reason believed I worked for CVA and I just could not seem to communicate to them that this was not the case.. They asked me for directions to places I'd never heard of and even the translator asked me if I would be cooking all the meals... uuuh no.

However, I was reassured that I would not be staying with this team at the CVA house, located above the CVA office. I would instead be staying at a hostel with another team who was on their way back from staying in Bramston Beach for the week. The hostel was the same one I'd already spent a night at -- The Serpent -- and Judith was still there one more night so this was excellent news.

My team returned to the house around 2 and out piled a rather large team of rather young and rather British--for lack of a better word--kids. Some were headed home that day but many were staying on for another week or two. I wasn't sure whether I'd prefer spending my week with 18 and 19 year olds with whom I could communicate but who were very much intent on being as drunk and high as possible every opportunity they could get; or with 18 and 19 year olds who were very polite and quiet but whom might be expecting me to cook them dinner. Hmm.

Anyway, I started to get to know my team and as I did they started to drop like flies. First, 18 year Nick, who is the spitting image of Ron Weasley, took a dare from a 10 year old at a skateboard park that resulted in a sprained left ankle and a torn ligament in his right wrist. The next day he decided to finish off his other wrist by getting it tattooed with a lightening bolt.

19 year old Jemma was planning to get her free weekend at the hostel and quit first thing on Monday... so she did just that.

19 year old Dan, had some sort of a mix up about medical forms and a medical card he had left in Sydney. This compiled with some other issues resulted in him being kicked out by about Thursday.

On Wednesday, 22 year old Vans decided she'd had enough of the work we were doing and she tried to quit but was guilted into staying.

And on Thursday, I succumbed to the strep throat I'd been fighting all week and announced I'd be going to the doctor and not on the project.

So my first week of CVA Cairns was a bit dramatic. Those of us who remained formed a rather small team that was also again highly female—and made up of many city dwellers--one of each from London, Paris, Milan, New York, and Seoul.

The work that we were at least supposed to be doing was assisting the Green Corridor Project. This is a 20-year long Queensland (the Australian state where Cairns is located) project whose goal is to reforest the banks of the Barron River with the tropical plants that are/were native to the area previous to the arrival of Europeans. Over the last 150 years the rainforest has been cut down to create farmland here. The farmers brought in fertilizers that as a result of rainfall have ended up in the barron river. The river flows out to the ocean, where the Great Barrier Reef is located and deposits the fertilizers at the reef. The fertilizers are like poision for the corals. So ultimately deforestation is killing the Great Barrier Reef. By planting trees along the river, the fertilizers and other chemicals are broken down and dilluted by the trees and plants so that they do not reach the ocean in such poisonous quantities. A second purpose of the Green Corridor Project is to create a "green corridor" of tropical forest so that animals, specifically a large bird called a cassowary, can move between the remaining areas of tropical rainforest and breed with one another, keeping the genetics of the species healthy. The cassowary is endangered but for reasons I don't understand, the bird is such a vital part of the tropical ecosystem that they say that if it were to go extinct, the rainforest in this area would also not be able to survive. The cassowary is one of the oldest surviving species still in existence in Australia. Hundreds of thousands of years ago there were all kinds of weird now extinct animals in this part of Australia... But the cassowary (and the crocodile) has made it through to today with little if any evolutionary change.

As we drive all around northern Queensland to our various sights along the Barron River, we frequently see cassowary crossing signs. The picture of the cassowary looks as though the sign is warning that a Muppet might cross the road here.

Apparently cassowary are somewhat dangerous. They are about 4 feet tall and can run fast. They have been known to kick and even kill a few people by using a claw on their foot to slice you right up the back. Fortunately, I didn't yet know this little tidbit the day the Germans and I encountered a cassowary on one of our wild hiking expeditions. I don't have any pictures of the beast though, so I guess we did know enough to just keep moving.

So now you know all the reason why we do this work in cairns. Now here is a bit of how we did it.

The first week we spent several days fertilizing (with organic fertilizer) and watering plants that had been planted over the last several months. Sometimes this was along the river at the side of the road, sometimes it required climbing down a cliff, and sometimes it was on somebodys private property (usually a farm) who had donated a section of their land to be part of the corridor.

The second week we dug holes, planted trees, fertilized them, and put mulch around the trees. Depending on the day we did just some or all of these activities and everyday we visited different sights in Cairns, Kuranda, the Atherton Tablelands, and Brampton Beach. Although it is still technically the dry season, we never needed to water these trees because it rained ALL week. This was good because the normal temperature would have been damn hot in the sun (we experienced that the week before and over the weekend) but bad because we were just always wet. On Thursday we planted trees along the river bank on a cattle farm. The holes had been dug the day before and were filled with water. It continued to rain Thursday and so planting trees was equivalent to playing in the mud -- red clay mud. The cows wanted in on the action too and stuck their heads through the barbed wire to eat the trees we were trying to plant.

Here's James Bond's spy cow checking up on us.

During week 2 we lost a few people and gained a few more. And we moved into the CVA house. It was quite nice to get out of the hostel and have a place to stay that had a TV (gasp) and a real kitchen and bathroom. Our team was again almost all female (gasp... no wait that is not surprising) and again mostly European. Guilia from Milan, Camille from Paris, Maxine from London, Rita from Italy, Victoria from Madrid, Melanie from France, Yong from Seoul and me.

ABOVE: My team and another CVA team in Kuranda.

Workdays are generally split into 3 shifts -- two in the morning and one in the afternoon. But this week, due mostly to rain, we frequently only did 2 shifts and then would spend the afternoon visiting waterfalls and parks and beaches. Of course it is still raining at the waterfalls, parks and beaches, but it was nice to have the opportunity to go to many of these places that had I been just a regular tourist I wouldn't have the means to get to, nor the inside knowledge to find. We did go one day to the centenary park, which is an area within Cairns of protected rainforest with a 400meter walkway through it and the botanical gardens with all kinds of crazy tropical plants. I am not usually one to get all impressed by plants but this was really really awesome. Unfortunately I have no pictures because I didn't want to take my camera out into the rain.

Today was the last day of Cairns CVA and we spent it digging holes and planting trees on a super steep creek bank in Kuranda on some private property. The people who owned the land had a barbeque for us at the house and I had a chat with the woman and found out all kinds of interesting things. For instance the woman is Canadian, and the man is American (from New York City) but they met in Guatamala and then lived in Indian for many years. But when their children were about 7 they decided they needed to go somewhere that their kids could get a decent education. So they made a list of all the places they thought they might like since neither of them wanted to return to the north american continent. One of their requirements was that they wanted to live someplace tropical. They had never been to Australia before so they came to Brisbane, bought a campervan and just north until they reached the rainforest. The next problem was finding work in such a remote place in their field that would also make them eligible for visas that would allow them to make Australia their home long term. They were artists... mostly theater but the woman also used to design a line of clothing. So they started Tjapukai -- a park and theater that presents Aboriginal dance and ancient stories. And they've been living in Kuranda and Cairns for over 20 years.

I went to Tjapukai the weekend before but the park was closed because they were hosting a huge Reggae festival. So Maxine and I went to the Reggae festival instead. Which was equally if not more awesome. So many hippies... like real ones with dreads arriving in hippie vans. Awesome.

Well anyway, I'm back on my own now. I will be volunteering in Brisbane at the same time as Maxine so I'll meet up with her again. And Guilia insists she is coming to the US in November 2009 because she really wants to check out this thing we call Thanksgiving. But other than this I'm back to being a loner. But as the Australians would say "No worries", I'm at a new hostel in the city called Bohemia Central that I really like and I am going out to the reef to snorkel tomorrow and heading off down the coast on Sunday; so there is still plenty of adventure to go.

Where did this nasty bug come from?

2008-09-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

I have strep throat. Well it is unconfirmed strep throat but the doctor did give me antibiotics.

Where might have this nasty bug come from? I have 3 possible guesses.

1. Judith, the German girl who I was camping with last week was not feeling well shortly before we parted ways on Saturday. We shared my waterbottle frequently during the 6 days we traveled together. We sought out free water sources whereever we could find them (bathroom sinks, campground taps, spickets at the back of a yacht club). And this meant when we ran low we all drank from waterever bottle still had water. Judith was heading out on a 7 day camping tour of the outback from Cairns to Uluru and so I really hope this is not where the strep came from because that would be a miserable place to be sick.

2. I finally made my first venture out to the Australian bars with an American guy (I am not the only American!) and an english girl who is part of my Cairns volunteer team. We tagged along with 4 french guys in button down pajamas and slippers; 4 irish guys attempting to replicate the irish flag by wearing green body paint on their upper bodies, white bathingsuits, and orange body paint on their legs; and 4 english guys who painted their face, arms and legs with blue paint - one of whom used WALL paint - because some girl was celebrating her birthday and wanted her friends to dress up like smurfs.
Crazy europeans.
Anyway, there are unconfirmed reports that "the Americans" did not return home until 4 am. This is fine for the young kids, but old folks like me get sick when we behave like hoodlums.

3. CVA is putting us up in a hostel this week (Nomads - Serpent). Part of the agreement with CVA is that they provide our food during our volunteer committment in the form of groceries. This is fine if you are in a house with just your team but in a hostel -- where you have to cook in a communal kitchen -- it's really difficult. I've seen some people make some really awesome meals in these communal kitchens. But I think the trick is that you have come straight from the grocery store, cook up you food and eat it all right away, avoiding the need to use the fridge. The fridges are so jam packed with food that it is practically impossible to get your stuff in or out without pulling out 15 bags belonging to others. And of course when you go to put those bags back in, you will undoubtedly put it back in someplace different than where its own put it, therefore causing that person to have to pull out 15 bags to find their stuff. Also, nobody has tupperware or plastic wrap. So when people open something and use half, they just toss it back in and sometimes it leaks...and leaks right through your canvas bag... and sometimes it is meat that is leaking right through your canvas bag onto someone else's open package of cheese. Anyway, as much as that is sketchy and dangerous, leaky meat juice does not cause strep throat. What might spread strep throat though is dishes in a communal kitchen that are not washed as well as they should be. Perhaps this is a long shot. But let's face it, a hostel will never be the healthiest of living environments.

We will never know the cause of my ailment. But the good news is that I have visited an Australian doctor for $55 and gotten an Australian antibiotic for $16. If I were Irish the Australian goverment would let met have all this for free. But I am not.

I did not go out on the CVA project today and instead slept for a huge portion of day. Fortunately, my team is sleeping at another place tonight up at Yungaburra and so I have the room to myself -- no people in and out and no needing to climb up and down to the top bunk. However in their departure they forgot to leave me some food. I happen to have a few of my own groceries. But these groceries are only the ingredients needed to make my favorite kind of oatmeal; quick oats, raisins, cinnamon (the consistancy of which is much less fine here) and peanut butter (which is not as delicious as at home). Therefore I ate oatmeal for breakfast, and oatmeal for lunch. I will splurge and buy some dinner from the hostel bar/restuarant tonight.

So speaking of this hostel, let me tell you a little about it. Nomads is a chain of hostels in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and perhaps elsewhere. They fall into a category of hostel called a "Flashpacker" (instead of backpacker) hostel. Flashpacker is a word used to describe a new generation of backpackers who are maybe not quite so tight on cash and are more interested in a trip that resembles springbreak than a trip that is culturally fullfilling. This is definitely not the case for everyone who is here, but there is definitely a larger party scene here than at some other hostels. Sometimes "Flashpacker" hostels will be a bit more expensive but this place is a bit outside the city and so they happen to have the lowest rates around while still providing a good, if not always quiet, experience. A 6-bed room was $18 and a 10 bed is only $10. The next lowest cost I saw in Cairns was $24.

ABOVE: All my possessions.

ABOVE: Our 4-bed room at the Serpent

Each night there is a free "meal" between 6 and 7 for all guests. This is really just a snack, (last night it was about 15 french fries and one chicken wing) but you can upgrade your free meal for $4 and this meal is usually pretty decent -- considering it costs only $4. Tonight is Thursday and every Thursdays there is a $10 beef, chips, salad and beer special. (Chips are french fries here, and what americans call chips are called crisps.) I had the beef and beer special last week mostly because I was enticed by the salad part. But the salad was whimpy and the beef was a big slab of fat. The "chips" and beer were delicious though!

There is a pool and and sand volleyball court at this hostel. Last Friday, Judith and I participated in a game of 7 on 7 volleyball with 12 guys of miscellaneous european backgrounds. The game sounded like this: "It's your serve, mate", "Bloody irish guy!", "Vat vous out!" "Get it together lads!"

Turns out that many of those guys we played volleyball with were actually staying at the hostel a month or more working there. They don't actually get paid, they just get free accommidation and 3 meals a day. They work about 21 hours a week doing things like driving the van back and forth into the city center to drop people off, take out garbage, put new sheets on the beds after people have left (most hostels require you to take your own sheets off when you leave), vaccuuming, painting the hallways, etc. Not too bad of a deal.

Oh and how could I forget. On Sunday, at about 6pm one of these typical safari/Australian looking 4WD vehicles drove through the fence surrounding the back of the hostel, across the sand volleyball court, and into the pool. AND when it hit the water there was no one in it.

I was nearby when it happened and yet strangely, myself as well as many others, didn't hear a thing. We didn't know it happened until we saw the smoke and the crowd gathering. It was a very good thing there happened not to be anyone on the volleyball court or in the pool because according to those who saw it happen, it came through very fast. Apparently the guy who was driving, lost control, tried to aim for a tree to stop the car, missed and came through our fence and then somehow managed to get out (unharmed) before the car got to the pool. The Cairns news came and the next day I happened to be near the tv area when the story came on. It was a bit of excitement for us. However, the pool has now been drained and is closed indefintely so they can repair it.

K, now you are fully filled in on how it works in a hostel. Hopefully I haven't scared away those of you coming out here who I have been encouraging to embrace the hostel option.

From the outback to the rainforest

2008-08-31T03:12:00.000-07:00

When last I left off, I had just arrived back in Alice Springs on an evening bus through the very dark outback. My original plans were to stay in Alice Springs until the 28th, when I would fly to Cairns to stay my next volunteering session. However, after just one night in Alice Springs I knew that I had to change those plans because more time in Alice Springs would be quite boring. Alice is not considered a safe place to be walking around at night. Whether this is actually the truth or it is just the Australian attitudes toward the Aboriginee population, I am not sure. But I did witness and loud, not very friendly sounding gathering around a bonfire in a park on my first night there while walking home from dinner with one other girl. We decided that was not something we'd want to encounter again... therefore I moved my flight to Cairns to the 23rd and upon my return to Alice I moved to a hostel (called Annie's Place) that had food service and a bar inside of it to avoid the need to leave at night. An added bonus was that a few of my fellow volunteers would also be staying there.

The first day back was spent enjoying my freedom from the buffel grass. I splurged on an $8.80 lunch at a deli with Tina. I did laundry and even dried my clothes (there was no drier at the volunteer house) although some things still did not dry completely and so I set myself up with a bunkbed laundry line.

The first night in this hostel Martijn and I had a whole 6-bed room to ourselves. The room even had a tv (with only one channel) and it's own bathroom (without a working light), but it was excellent! The second day we were joined by 2 stinky english guys just back from camping in the outback, another guy who I don't know where he was from, and Regina, one of the other volunteers, who had taken a longer route back to Alice via Kings Canyon.

Always on the lookout for free and cheap activities, Tina, Martijn and I signed up for a free half-hour trip to feed the rock wallabees at the edge of the MacDonnell Range. We hopped on a bus reminiscent of spring break 2002, I shook off of the awkward feeling that I am damn-old and headed off to feed wallabees right out of my hands!

That night we all ordered the $5 meal at the hostel, camel lasagna. The idea if eating camel was frightening but the meal was actually quite good. We followed up the camel with 3 pitchers of different australian beers, an Alice Spring brew, Tooheys and Southwark. And we followed that with some Olympics where we saw the curly haired Australian guy win the gold in pole vaulting.

The next day we went our separate ways. Although I left my almost empty suitcase with Tina to take with her back to Melbourne in October, where I'll pick it up from her in December. The only other option was to leave it in Alice Springs because I'd determined I could not do this backpacker thing properly with both a backpack and a suitcase. Such a relief to have less stuff, although I now have nothing on wheels which means I have to be able to lift all of my stuff at once--and put one foot in front of the other. I estimate that this is about 25-30 kilos--or 50-60 pounds--or more than half my own weight.

I flew to Alice Springs on Saturday the 23rd and arrived in Cairns at 8:30 pm. finally returning to warm weather. My hostel for that night immediately screamed out, "everyone here just graduated high school!" Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad, but they were young. When I asked two of my roommates, a scottish girl and a german girl, how long they had been in Cairns and what they had been doing, they responded that they had been there for 2 months and they had been doing nothing. Uhh, great. But I need out. Add to that scenario the need for earplugs to drown out the techno coming from the bar next door and I knew I couldn't stay in this place that made me feel ancient for more than the night. I planned to find a new hostel, stay a few nights while I tried to figure out how I wanted to get to Cape Tribulation (most northern point on the east coast of Australia that you can get to without 4 wheel drive).

Turns out I didn't need another hostel because the next morning I met 3 germans (Patrick, Lenny and Judith), rented a car with them for $45 a day, and left Cairns to camp for 4 nights on the beach and in the rainforest.

Judith had met Patrick and Lenny the night before and I met Patrick that morning at the reception desk of the new hostel I was about to check into when I overheard him asking about ways to get to Cape Trib. Turns out that Patrick, who I initially thought was American from his perfect english and his accent, was German but had done one year of high school in Texas (damn it, thought I was finally meeting my first American!), Lenny and Patrick were traveling together and had been friends for 14 years, and Judith had just finished doing a semester in Perth and was traveling until she had to get home to Germany for the next semester.

The whole trip only cost us $120 each. That includes car (a nissan station wagon from the 80s), food (pasta, pbj, and oranges), campgrounds (we could not fulfill Patricks dream to camp in the wild and had to pay for sites instead), and plenty of yarumba (cheap boxed wine). We only did activities that were free but we did manage to find several trails leading to awesome waterholes and beaches we shared only with a few other hikers and along the way spotted a cassawary, a croc, some crazy sort of turkey thing with a red head, a bird that looked like a velocerapter, a bug that hissed at us and a monster red and yellow spider.

We saw some really awesome beaches. Some had dead corals washed up on shore. There is some sort of sand crab that kicks up balls of sand from its hole and makes this patterns in the sand. The dot patterns are strikingly familiar to Aboriginee art.

Although we opted for the cheapest of campgrounds we did stop at some to check out prices that doubled as hostels and were the kind of place that you could totally stay for weeks... and people do. Dougies is a campground and caravan (Australian for hippie camper van) park that has at it's center an area that appears to be indoors but really is just a roof and a few walls here and there sections off a bar, a kitchen area for guest cooking, a laundry area, a dance floor, tables and pool table. And since the temperature is basically always perfect you never realize when you are going indoors or out.

Since Australia is such a dry country, campfires are never allowed. I missed having that smell but other than to make smores, there really wasn't any need for a fire. You certainly don't need the heat. It's really crazy how little difference in temperature there is here from day to night--maybe about 5-7 degrees.

I was very impressed with the english all 3 Germans spoke. Although Lenny and Judith needed occasional translation help from Patrick, the language barrier was a non-issue, thanks entirely to them. Although just like others I've met earlier in the journey, we discovered some words that exist in both english and german but have quite different meanings. Lenny got a kick out of my description that the sand was "mushy".

We also had a really interesting conversations about Germany's past and how it has changed the way things work today in Germany, how German kids are taught about the Holocaust and how American kids are taught about the Holocaust, how college works in both countries (semesters are Oct-Feb and April-July and its insanely cheap to go), about backpacking and why there are so many Germans and so few Americans doing it, about the US elections (people can not resist asking me about it and I am repeatedly shocked at how much these foreigners know about what is going on in US politics--and they all love to trash Bush), and the occasional teach-Jamie-German session.

Our journey went only as far as our ancient car would allow. Just beyond cape tribulation there is a sign that warns "4 wheel drive only beyond this point". There is not much of a choice anyway since a river intersects with the road here. This is the furthest north point on the east coast that a regular car can reach. Our journey only covered about 150 km up and 150 back so we had plenty of time for living cheaply and being lazy.

Exactly what I needed.

ABOVE: Big hissing bug outside of bottle shop (liquor store) in Port Douglas.

ABOVE: At campground number 3, Noah's Beach.

ABOVE: Crocodile hanging out on the beach on the opposite side of the river from the trail we were walking on.

ABOVE: Striped spider

ABOVE: 6 am campground number 4... Ellis Beach

Pictures

2008-08-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I think I know what is wrong with the pictures. I will fix them soon.

2 weeks

2008-08-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

Things I have learned after 2 weeks in Australia:

1. Australian money is made of plastic.

2. $5 camel lasagna is actually very tasty. I ate the whole thing.

3. If you ask a Korean how old they are an approriate response can be "where?" In Korea, you are 1 year old the day you are born and so when I asked Max who old she was, she said "In Australia I am 23, but in Korea I am 24, and 2 weeks ago I was 22."

4. Holland and the Netherlands are the same place. Holland is not part of the Netherlands, it IS the Netherlands, and at least one Dutch citizen has no idea why their country has two names.

5. Ghan is the name of the Australian train traveling between Darwin and Adelaide and also the Manderin word for "fuck".

6. One way to add an extra element of difficulty to the card game "bullshit", is to play with people of all different accents. Then, not only do you have to figure out who might be lying, you have to figure out what they are actually saying.
"two keens"
"is that queen or king?"
"keen."

"three ahce."
"ace or eight?"

you get the idea.

7. Australian animals are surprisingly trusting of humans.
--The butcher birds (for whom our buffel grass removal efforts doubled as a breakfast discovery service) would hang out as near as about 3 feet from us to snatch up skinks and legless lizards.
-- I fed wild rock wallabees... right out of my hand... like I had wallabee spit on my hand.
--That emu I saw in the liquor store parking lot(or "car park") last week was strutting around poking its head into circles of people, like he was just another one of us, hanging out, hoping someone might have a snack to share.
--The kangaroo we saw at Kata Tjuta allowed us with in about 6 feet of him before he backed away.
--But oddly, the least trusting animal I have encountered here, was a dog who wandered into our CVA living area and was so scared but yet so hungry that at first he kept about a 12 foot distance. Coaxing and food eventually brought him closer, but no one was ever able to get close enought to touch him.

8. They call it backpacking for a reason--you should only have a backpack. I decided that my suitcase was limiting my options so I threw out some stuff, gave away some other stuff, and left my mostly empty suitcase with Tina at the Alice Springs CVA office. She will pack up her things in it when she returns to Melbourne at the end of October and I'll get it from her when I get there in December. I owe her!

9. I am 149 centimeters tall.

10. In England and Australia, in order to be a doctor you only have to do 3 years of "uni" and 2 years of med school. That's a bit frightening.

11. Australian electrical outlets have little switches to turn each socket on or off.

12. It is possible to go 11 days without using one single paper towel or paper napkin. Sometimes gross, but possible.

14. Australia is an arid country as a whole but right now there is a drought which has put the Melbourne reservoirs at 40%. I assume that this is the reason that laundry is so expensive at $4 a load.

15. It takes a long time to remember to get into a vehicle on the other side.

16. I should have done this 3 years ago.

Back to semi-civilization

2008-08-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

I am back from Uluru now and have returned to the semi-civilization of Alice Springs. I was apologize for the long delay in posts. Computers, internet and cell service were hard to comeby in the outback.

But I was still typing away on my tiny portable keyboard and phone documenting my activities for you whenever I could. I have just posted several entries from the last 10 days or so below.

Kangarros, wallabees, camels and dingos of mythical proportions

2008-08-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

This post written on August 19, 2008.

There are so many dogs barking.

We arrived back from day 7 of 9 days of buffel grass removal at 3:30 and now I am sitting outside in the 4:30 sun (which out here presents the possibility of burn) in one of very few locations where I get a small enough bit of service to send some emails. I am not moving. The volunteer accommidations here consist of 5 trailers surrounding a wooden deck area with these really awesome permanent tarp type things hung from metal poles to provide shade on the deck. There is a trailer that is a kitchen, one that is two bathrooms, and 3 that are split into two bedrooms with 2 sets of bunch beds each. The trailer complex is located inside a fenced-in area that serves as the equipment storage space for the Uluru/Katajula Parks department. Surrounding the storage area is an Aboriginal community. We have been told it is not a good idea to leave the fenced area, not because of the people we might encounter, but because of all the dogs. Apparently, (and I heard this first from an Irish backpacker in Alice Springs who is a veterinarian) there is a pretty large problem with dog populations getting out of control because the aboriginees don't neuter them and they let them run wherever. Good thing I know all about pack mentality from The Dog Whisperer. There are packs of dogs everywhere and at least once a half-hour someone in that pack must be challenging authority because you'll suddenly hear a commotion of what sounds like 15 dogs all barking together... and sadly there is usually one whining in a "please don't hurt me" voice.

Today is day 8 of 10 working. We worked through the weekend making Saturday, Sunday and Monday "light" days by only working two shifts. We spent the extra time doing various hikes at Uluru and Kata Tjuta. It was at Kata Tjuta that I encountered my first wild Kangaroo! Or it might have been a wallabee... we weren't sure. But either way, it hops and has a pocket... which makes it awesome in my book.

The sunsets and sunrises here are AMAZING. When you are standing so that you are facing the rock and the sun is setting behind you, it casts all different colors on the rock as it goes down. And since it is a desert you can see the horizon in all directions to see how the sky changes. On the way home from Kata Tjuta on Sunday we stopped to see the sunset. There was a full moon on this night rises from the opposite direction as the sun was setting. Because the moon was so low it was really big and really awesome. Pictures can't accurately capture this experience.

And once the sun is down, there are sooooo many stars. Not even out in the midwest did I see so many stars. When you look up it looks like it could be snowing. AND you can see the Milky Way... easily. Last night we went on a star tour. This meant we stood out in a field and this guy told us about what we were looking at. Apparently you can see more stars from the southern hemisphere than anywhere in the north because the difference in the amount of light pollution is just that extreme. The guy also had two big telescopes set up for us and we looked at the moon, Saturn and several stars that look like just one star to the naked eye but are actually many stars close together. The middle of our star tour was interrupted by a crazy noise that had I been alone would have sent me running. It sounded like a growl from a dingo of giant mythical proportions. Tina reassured me that I was probably a camel. And the next day we did discover that there indeed was a camel farm not to far away.

A camel. Ha.

Translations

2008-08-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

This post was written on August 15, 2008.

Today is the third day of work at Uluru with Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA). I am part of a team of 8 people, including our 60-year-old english obsessive compulsive team leader (Martin), and the girl (Tina) that is to replace him starting the next session when he leaves--not for retirement, but for a 4 month holiday. Of the rest of us, I am the oldest--surprise surprise--but not by too much. The others are a between 21 and 23. They include 2 girls from Korea (Lily and Max), a girl (Regina) and a guy (Adami)from Tiawan , and a guy from Holland (Martijn).

Other than the two employees of CVA, I am the only native english speaker. Everyone else does speak english--but at varying degrees. The guy from Holland (Martijn) and the girl from Tiawan (Regina)can speak it conversationally--although we have discovered some humorous translations and strange uses of words. The other 3 understand directions and at least part of most conversations but usually take a bit longer to find their words.

But what is really interesting is watching all these native Koreans, Dutch and Tiawanese speak to each other in their own version of english. And to make it even more complicated for them, each of the 3 native english speakers that they are surrounded by here use different accents (English, Australian and American) and different phrases and slang that even the 3 of us have had to ask each other for clarification.

Last night, the English team leader asked the Dutch guy "How have you found the work?" And the Dutch guy proceeded to give him a description of how he found CVA online and thought it would be a great way to visit Uluru.

I have helped out with the correct pronunciations of words like "automatically", "canoe", "aluminum"(which varies from one english speaking country to another anyway), and "shithead".

We were discussing possible card games to play last night and one of the Korean girls suggested a game called "One card". She asked if we knew it and after a few minutes of contemplation it occurred to me that the game she was describing was "Uno"-- which is the spanish word for "one". Once we cleared that up, the Tiawanese guy joined us and the Korean girl asked him if he knew how to play "Uno --which of course he did not know what we were talking about because why would a Tiawanese guy know the spanish word used in english to describe a game that Tiawanese has its own word for.... whew.

And speaking of spanish, we had Tacos for dinner last night. One of the Korean girls and I were on cooking duty -- somehow I was automatically considered to be the taco expert here -- perhaps because I come from the same Hemisphere as Mexico? Anyway, the Dutch guy had never had or even heard of tacos before, and most of the Asian kids had only had them once or twice and had never had the hard shells like we were eating!

And the other morning the Tiawanese girl didn't know what oatmeal was and asked me how you make it -- if you haven't been around me at breakfast in the last year or so, you should know that I am an oatmeal connoisseur.

Anyway, as a result of all this crazy translation business I am finding that I am simplifying the way that I speak. I am avoiding big words and describing things in ways that are very simplistic. Sometimes I even find that I skip words and talk in broken english like they do! It's crazy how quickly people's speach patterns influence you when you speak 24 hours a day with them. I also am finding that jokes and sarcasm don't always translate. I am sharing a room with the Australian girl, which is nice because at the end of the day we can laugh over the miscommunications and mistranslations -- even those that occur between her language and mine.

A buffel grass invasion

2008-08-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

This post written on August 14, 2008.

A fly committed suicide in my oatmeal this morning. Not a good way to start the day for either of us. Unfortunately for me, once I fished him out, there were raisins in the oatmeal which made eating it a stressful task. Why not throw it out and eat something else you ask? That's just not an option around here... and anyway there are so many flies in the kitchen another one would surely take the opportunity to end it's life in the new bowl.

I suppose I should explain what it is I am doing out here at Uluru... or for some of you what Uluru even is!

Uluru is also known as Ayers Rock. It is the big red rock in the middle of the desert that you often see on books or websites about Australia. After the Great Barrier Reef this is probably Australia's most well known natural attraction... well beside all those crazy poisonous snakes and spiders and seashells.

Uluru is the Aboriginal name for Ayers Rock. In 1985 ownership of the land surrounding the rock was returned to the Aboriginal community. Management of the park is now shared by 4 white officals from the park and state, and 8 Aboriginal committe members (providing the Aboriginal community the ability to veto any proposal without explanation). With all of these changes, the name of the site has also been changed back to the original "Uluru".

It has been difficult for me to find scientific explanations for what this big ass rock is doing out here in the middle of the desert. There is no traditional welcome center like most parks in the US have with scientific explanations for what you are seeing. There is however, a cultural center, that was apparently only built in 1996, that provides information on the customs of the Aboriginal people, their stories and beliefs about the rock, etc. There is no scientific information because they have requested that there not be. I did find one page in a guidebook with the preface at the top "Please remember that this is a western point of view of how Uluru and Kata Tjuta formed. Anangu have a different belief accoiunt to Tjukurpa". You would think with a preface like this, the information to follow would be something along the lines of evolution vs creatiomism type conflict, and yet all it said is that the rock is made of a sedimentary sandstone rock, that both Uluru and Kata Tjuta exten
d for 5-6 km below the surface, that they have a red color because of weathering similiar to rusting on the iron mineral in the rock and that these two rocks were harder than other rocks that at one time surrounded them and have now eroded away. Strange to think that this could be a controversial idea.

So now that you know what Uluru is, what the hell would I be doing out here for 2 weeks. First you should know that other than this small Aboriginal community we are strangely living inside of, there are NO people out here for hundreds of kilometers.(Get used to me speaking in metric terms. I will convert over entirely as soon as I learn how to accurately express my height in centimeters). For 10 days I will be part of a volunteer team charged with the removal of invasive buffel grass. Buffel grass is a native grass of Africa that was originally brought to Australia to feed the invasive cattle that were brought to Australia from Europe to feed the invasive Europeans. Incase you do not know what I mean by "invasive", the term refers to a species of plant or animal that is not native to that part of the world -- usually it is a species that was transported somewhere by humans within the last 300 hundred years.

Having recently finished "The World Without Us" (Alan Weisman), I now look upon this idea of describing any life form as "invasive" as really more of a short-sited concept. If you look at life on a longer time scale, every species was at sometime "invasive".... or new to that environment. That's how evolution works. However, that is a conversation for another day.

Today, is simply about learning why it is that the buffel grass is considered invasive, what effect it is having on the environment of the Australian outback (at least as it has existed for the last several thousand years), what it is that is being done to reverse these changes, and why. And I have plenty of time to contemplate these things, as I swing my maddock repeatedly at the roots of the enemy plant. Apparently buffel grass, which is highly suitable for desert environments, has spread outside of the cattle pastures and now grows on 57 percent of the land mass of Australia. By taking up so much space it leaves less space for the native species, which are disappearing quickly. When the native species disappear,the small animals and insects that eat it disappear, and when the small animals and insects that are eaten by larger animals, like dingos and guannos, disappear so do the dingos and guannos.

Essentially that is the reason why we are doing what we are doing. We do 3 shifts a day starting at 7 am and ending at 3 pm. It is about 40 degrees when we start and about 75 degrees when we finish. We identify the grass, hack it out of the ground with its roots, bag it up and move the bags to the street. All the while under the shadow of the rock, the curious eye of the tourists, a film of red dust and a sun that even in the middle of winter requires application of SPF 50 every hour or so.

And for those of you concerned about the crazy Australian spiders, insects and snakes that I might be uncovering under these plants; I have yet to find a single bug-like or snake-like creature while traipsing about in the bush; unless of course you count the bee that stung me yesterday, and the fly that died in my oatmeal this morning.

When Adami took this photo he said, "I need to take picture. You look like working hard volunteer."

Camels and emus

2008-08-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

I just saw a herd of wild camels on the side of the road. Wild camels!

I am currently traveling the 450 km (no idea how that translates to miles yet) from Alice Springs to Uluru. I am on a bus with people who are about to begin a 3 day camping tour of Uluru and Kings Canyon. I am just getting a ride to Yulara, the town at the base of Uluru where I will do my first volunteering session. There are not a lot of ways to get out there and when my initial plan fell through, it took about 8 phone calls to find a company willing to make a stop there and who had a space for me on the right day.

In case you don't know why I am headed to this place called Uluru, let me fill you in. Uluru is the Aboriginal name for what was known for the last hundred years or so as Ayer's Rock.
This is the big red rock in the middle of the outback that after a picture of a kangaroo would probalby be the more commonly used image to represent Australia. I will be doing my first volunteering session out at Uluru. I have been told I need to meet someone named Martin at the post office in Yulara (the teeny tiny town at the base of the rock) at 1:30 on August 12. That is all I know. So this morning I left my suitcase at the hostel for 2 weeks and am going out with just my 2 backpacks. Which reminds me--I left my sleeping bag on the plane yesterday like a jerk. But I talked to the desk about it and turns out that people forget sleeping bags there all the time so they gave me one--which happens to be much newer and packs up smaller than mine anyway--I washed it and it is now mine.

On this bus there are about 20 people. However, they are the most geographically diverse 20 people I have ever shared a bus with. The countries represented included, US (me only) Canada, UK, Scotland, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Holland, and Australia.

I am getting annoyed that I keep meeting people that I like and I have to leave them less than 24 hours later! I exchanged numbers yesterday with a girl from the UK who has the same working holiday visa that I do and is staying in Sydney. She was out in Alice Springs because her 3 month job just ended and so she was doing some traveling before returning to Sydney to look for another short-term job. This girl, Jess, was one of my six roommates last night. All 7 of us were from different countries. We were from the US, England, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Australia, and Poland. And all of us were female and ALL were traveling alone.

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Dude, now I just had a close encounter with an emu.

To the outback!

2008-08-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

This post written August 11, 2008 but internet was unavailable until now.

I am flying again -- on my way to Alice Springs.

Melbourne was excellent and I'm happy that it is where I will be returning to later when it is time to make some money.

Since the weather is so mild everything about the setup of melbourne seems to be about taking advantage of the outdoors. Almost every restaurant has an outdoor area--even starbucks and Burger King (which is called Hungry Jack's here) have tables on the sidewalks.

A little FYI to Plaid... I spotted the PwC building within about 10 minutes of leaving the airport! They use the regular logo longways on the side of the building and the little icon on another side of the buildling. And it is impossible to miss.

Its a good thing I gave myself 3 days in Melbourne before heading to the outback, because it took that long to get a bank account, cell phone service, extra straps for my backpack, find new transport to uluru, unpack all my stuff and debate if I needed to ditch some wieght and then just pack it all back up again etc.... It wouldn't seem to be the case but when you decide you need to buy something its not just as easy as googling to see where the closest chain store that you are already familiar with is located... you have to first find out the name of a store that would even sell that type of thing... and then google it to find it's location.

I checked out a few banks for my best checking account options and ended up with NAB (National Australian Bank). Obviously they have to mail you the check card and when you are a homeless nomad like me, providing an address is not so easy. So I told the woman I would be back with an address that afternoon. Of course it was Friday, the bank was closed all day Saturday and Sunday and I was leaving at 8am Monday so there was a clock to compete with as well. My plan was to call the volunteer office in Alice Springs to ask if they would accept mail for me. However, this is not so simple either when you don't yet have cell service or a landline available to you. The hostel could sell me a calling card for $10 to use with the phones in the building but this was more than I needed for this call. So I found a $5 one at 711 (they are on about every street corner) and called from a pay phone. The guy assured me the mail could be sent there, but still I'm not putting any money in the account until I have my card and pin.

Next I was off to get service for my phone. At the Telstra store the dude with the clipboard directed me to a salesman from Kentucky on the premise that "he speaks your language." I ended up with a prepaid plan that allows me to make affordable calls within Australia as long as I continue not to have any friends who I might want to talk to for any more than 5 minutes. It is great for my current purposes of making reservations and calling bus companies to come back to get me after I am late and miss my 6:30 am pick-up.

The hostel I was at in Melbourne was called Greenhouse Backpackers. It was like a flashback to college except that there are no windows in the rooms and sometimes your roommate might be a senior citizen and that there is no class so some people stay up drinking till 7 am and sleep all day... oh wait that IS like college.

The first night I paid a little extra for my own room incase of severe jetlag.. It was a little freaky being alone in this room with no windows, no tv or radio to break the silence, and lights that go off automatically after an hour (to save energy) occassionally leaving you stranded in the pitch black. But after all my banking and cell phoning excursions, (not to mention traveling half way around the globe in one 36 hour mega day) I was pooped. So at 6:15 I full-out went to bed and slept until 5am -- with periodic time checks on my phone since with no windows I had no way of knowing if morning had arrived.

On the second day I moved into a 6 person bunk where my roommates were a girl who slept for 22 hours and two asian girls who I don't believe spoke any english. At least if they did, they didn't give in to letting me know while they hovered over me watching me struggle with a lock and wispering to each other in an unknown language. Once I finally got the lock open, my explaination as to what the cause of the problem had been, was met only with half smiles and a little laugh.

On the third day the sleeping girl got kicked out of the hostel (perhaps for sleeping and not paying) and the mystery asian girls checked out. My new roommates were an older woman from New South Wales, a girl from Tiawan and 3 English med students who were spending a few weeks traveling in Australia before going to New Zealand where two of them would be working in a hospital for 2 months. Helen, Laura and Anna--who were excited to get a mention here in my blog--allowed me to join them for dinner in chinatown and a drink at an irish pub. Such a relief to have a meal with people, and they just happen to be interesting and fun people too!

Thanks girls! I had a great time and I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip!

I have now arrived in Alice Springs... stay tuned.

AFL

2008-08-09T19:45:00.001-07:00

I went with people from the hostel to an AFL game last night. AFL stands for Australian Football League or more commonly referred to as Aussie Rules Football. The sport was first played in Melbourne in the 1890s. For awhile the only teams were in Victoria (the state that Melbouren is in) but it is now a national league and the game has spread to some parts of europe. It the most popular sport in Melbourne and most of Australia (Rugby is still more popular in Queensland and Sydney).

The game is a crazy combination of soccer, rugby, american football and maybe even a touch of basketball. The ball is oblong but not pointy on the ends like American footballs, the field is round (it is literally a cricket field since when the game was being invented those were the fields that were available in existing stadiums) there are goal posts on either end of field but without the horizontal bar. Players can throw, kick or carry the ball, but if they are carrying, the ball must touch the ground once every 10 steps which means they either bounce it (not easy with a ball that is not round) or they literally bend down and touch it to the ground. Tackling and even leaping up and stepping on another players' back or shoulders to get leverage are common... as well as fighting. AND they don't wear any equipment. No helmets, no pads, not even shin guards.

I didn't understand all the rules but here is a website that explains them if you'd like to find out more. http://www.afl.com.au/FanZone/Rules/tabid/7892/Default.aspx

I took some pictures which I will add here soon

The refs, who are dressed in yellow are acually responsible no only for making calls but for throwing the ball in (backwards over the head) from the sidelines when it goes out. There are also two people in flourescent yellow on the field. Each team is allowed one message runner --- meaning if the coach wants to tell a player something he sends out one of these flourescent guys to sprint across this gigantic field to talk to the player. As soon as he gets back again another messanger is dispersed. At other points in the game (i think after a goal is scored) dudes in red jackets run (and by run I mean sprint) onto the field with waterbottles. This is one game where everyone involved has to be in good shape!

I ate a meatpie. Apparently meatpie at a AFL or cricket game is like hotdogs at a baseball game. And they call the french fries "crisps" and ketchup "sauce".

At the end of the game they play the winning team's song and people sing. The song for the team that won sounded like it would have been a school song for a British boarding school... so wierd to end such a violent game with a song so... delicate. Had the other team won, their song was "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Flying and flying and flying

2008-08-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

My watch says 130 am.. The clock on the wall says 10:30pm. I am at LAX. I still have 15 hours of flying ahead of me. I am tired.

However, I do have to say that Quantas is awesome. My New York to LA flight was booked through Quantas but was run out of the American Airlines terminal. I don't know what the plane was labeled on the outside but on the inside it was 100% Quantas. It was almost like I stepped into a little flying piece of Australia right at JFK. The flight attendants all had Australian accents, the little individual tv screens with a large selection of free ondemand movies, tv shows, music and even video games all included a number of Australian produced options, AND the safety instructions (which by the way, were by-far the best and bluntest I have ever seen) referred to our mode of transportation as an "aeroplane". Adios New York.

I left New York at 7pm Wednesday (New York time) and will arrive in Melbourne at 7 am Friday (Melbourne time). I'm just skipping Thursday this week.

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According to the watch that is still set to EST it is 9:10 am... but I look out the window of the "aeroplane" and it is pitch black dark out. It's now been dark for almost 12 hours for me. And it will continue to be dark for at least another 5 or 6. Talk about a long night!

Speaking of looking out the window and night time... there are an enormous amount of stars visible out here in the middle of the pacific ocean. And since you can't see ocean below or anything but the stars for that matter, it feels like just maybe if I turn on my overactive imagination I could be flying around on a really crowded space shuttle in space.

I am still a big fan of Quantas but I happen to be in a seat where the little tv is not working. It is ironic that after so many months of being so busy preparing and packing and moving and buying and selling, that I am finally trapped for 14 hours in front of a device intended for movie and tv watching and it doesn't work. Oh well. I got one movie in on the first flight.

I am sitting next to an Australian couple who are probably in their early 60s. They are returning from a 2 month trip to the US and Canada. It was their first visit to North America. They mentioned having stopped in Toronto, New York, DC, the Florida Keys, Kennedy Space Center (this was their favorite), San Fransisco, San Diego, LA... That is a lot to do in 2 months. And its funny how in the US, we would think all those places are so far away from one another that they don't seem to fit together in one vacation. But they are probably thinking the same about my plans to traverse all over their continent. Because when you travel so far and the likelihood of coming back is low, you want to see as much as possible.

We get 2 full meals on this flight (which means I ate a 2nd dinner at what was to me 4am and will be eating breakfast when my EST set watch will say about 3 pm. To hold us over for 9 or 10 hours between these meals they have given us all a bag with several snacks and a bottle of water... i guess so that they don't have to keep pushing the cart down the isle and waking up all the sleeping passengers. Inside this bag is a little package of what I will describe as a dried fruit mix. There are raisins and dried bananas and several other unidentifiable chunks of orange and yellow with sugar on them. The Australian man next to me was eating these and held one out and said to me "It's a wichigrub." To which I answered, "huh?" He said, "The aborigines eat them. They pick them out of logs. I don't know what you call them in America but like a little grub." Sooo I am hoping he means his dried fruit was shaped like this "wichigrub". I have since inspected my little bag and have come to the conclusion that the fruit or candy (or grubs) that are inside are not intended to be shaped like any animal or bugs like an animal cracker or fruit snack might be so I am thoroughly confused as to what this conversation was all about. In any case, I am going to opt for the applesauce oatmeal cookies over this "wichigrub" snack.

By the end of flight my new friends had invited me to come visit them and the penguins that live near them on Philip Island -- about 2 hours southeast of Melbourne. Who knew there were penguins here!

You are doing what!?!

2008-07-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Yes you heard right. I will be spending 8 months in Australia beginning in August. And I have created this blog to keep you updated on my adventures and provide a place where you can leave me messages while I am away.

Some facts
Since most Americans actually know very little about Australia, here are a few facts to fill you in:
1. The land area of Australia is only slightly smaller than the continental US.
2.There are only 18 million people living in Australia -- this is less than the amount that the population of China increases each year.
3.When you fly from Sydney to LA, you arrive before you left.
4.Eighty percent of the plants and animals in Australia exist nowhere else on earth.

Most (and by most I mean ALL) of the facts above came to my attention from a book by Bill Bryson called In a Sunburned Country. I want to share a paragraph from this book:

"Every cultural instinct and previous experience tells you that when you travel this far you should find, at the very least, people on camels. There should be unrecognizable lettering on the signs, and swarthy men in robes drinking coffee from thimble-sized cups and puffing on hookahs, and rattletrap buses and potholes in the road and a real possibility of disease on everything you touch--but no, it's not like that at all. This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me. This is wonderful. This is exhilarating. This is why I love to come to Australia."

And this place, that's so like home also happens to have animals that don't walk or run, but hop -- and carry babies in pouches. And another one that is toothless, venemous, fur-covered, egglaying, semiaquatic and has webbed clawed feet. Am I dreaming? Remember that show Sliders?

My route around Australia
Since the only thing I love more than reading maps, is making maps, I have created this excellent map just for you that outlines the route my journey will take.
Click on the image to view larger.

Since I'll be spending the next 14 days before I leave moving boxes of my stuff; patching holes in my walls; weighing my luggage; eating all the extra desserts and sandwiches that you left behind; and spending some quality time with my car before our divorce, I will be quite busy and so I will write my next entry, which will include more details on my itinerary, during my 20 hours in the air.