Category: Uncategorized

It really is red.

Oh, wait a minute – that’s a photo of the surface of Mars. This is a photo of the Australian landscape as viewed from our maiden voyage in a helicopter.

We drive down the Stuart Highway to Alice Springs.

Alice Springs isn’t the most picturesque of towns. It’s the  closest thing to urban that we see in a while, so we spend a few days here. We visit a few museums, such as the excellent Central Australia Museum.

The Central Australian Aviation Museum tells the story of flying in the outback. It has lots of nifty aircraft, too.

These are both in the Araluen Cultural District, conveniently just across the street from our caravan park.

Megafauna Central is another impressive museum just opened in town. It features the story of big animals that used to exist until the arrival of humans in Australia, then became extinct shortly thereafter. Just like North America, where megafauna roamed the continent until the arrival of humans. Coincidence? I think not.

The grounds of our caravan park are home to birdlife galore. A flock of galahs do a Galah Quadrille on the front lawn.

(You may notice that we really like galahs.)

We want to visit the secret CIA base at Pine Gap, but can’t even find a road sign to it. No big surprise.

On the way out of town, we pass a memorial to John Flynn. John Flynn is the man who started the Flying Doctor Service in 1923, as related in another entry.

We do a loop near the West MacDonnell Range.

Along the way, we stop at these places:

We spend the night at Glen Helen.

This is the house of artist Albert Namatjira. We first hear of him at the Queensland Art Gallery. We rave about the QAG in an earlier post.

Hermannsburg itself is an interesting place.

A mission founded by hardy – or optimistic – Germans in the 1870’s.

Also home of the Hermannsburg Potters, whom we also first hear about at the Queensland Art Gallery. We consider purchasing one of their pieces but don’t find anything that matches our living-room curtains. Just kidding.

People in Hermannsburg let their stock wander free around town.

Returning to Alice Springs on our way south, we visit the Desert Park. This is a good place to see elusive denizens of the outback up close.

Like these thorny devils.

Or these beautiful red-tailed black cockatoos.

And this banded lapwing, fussing over her eggs.

Even some dingoes.

More about dingoes to come.

Heading south, we detour to visit the Henbury meteor craters.

This is a place of splendid isolation. Fifteen kilometres down a dirt track deters casual visitors.

Turns out you can camp here. We plan to do so on our way back north. No amenities but an outhouse (delightfully known here as a ‘dunny’).

On the Lasseter Highway. People sometimes mistake their first glimpse of Mount Connor for Ayer’s Rock.

We spend a few days around Ayer’s Rock (or Uluru).

A quote from the Lonely Planet Australia guide:

‘There are some world-famous sights touted as unmissable that
end up being a let-down when you actually see them. And then
there’s Uluru: nothing can really prepare you for the immensity, grandeur, changing colour and stillness of ‘the Rock’. It really is a sight that will sear itself onto your mind.‘

Different sections of the rock have their own characteristics.

We also go to the Olgas (Kata Tjuta) a couple of times.

We do some hiking in the area.

Eventually we pack up and drive a few hundred KMs to King’s Canyon.

These are wave ripples in what used to be the bottom of a sea.

An exciting development – we are offered a heavily discounted helicopter ride. Neither of us have been in a helicopter before.

And off we go.

We spot Matilda in the caravan park. Of course, she’s parked sideways when everyone else parks straight in.

Aboriginal hamlet of Lilla. Population 15.

Nothing like a ride in a helicopter to drive home the vastness and the emptiness of this part of the world.

A Tale of Two Dingoes – Red Centre

At the King’s Canyon caravan park, we notice several signs about dingoes.

There are more signs around the park.

They even have anti-dingo gates in the ablutions blocks.

We think this is slight overkill. We haven’t seen any dingoes in the wild so far.

Imagine our surprise when we leave the car park at King’s Canyon to find a dingo casually loping along beside the road.

The same evening, we see another in our caravan park. It strolls across our path at a distance of three metres – twice – and pays us no attention at all.

This is interesting, because we just downloaded and watched A Cry in the Dark the previous evening.

We leave Queensland for the Northern Territory. First point of interest we come across are the Devil’s Marbles.

While still in Cloncurry, Queensland, we visit John Flynn Place. John Flynn is the man who started the Flying Doctor Service here in 1923.

An interesting sign on the door of the restrooms in the garden.

Also in the garden – noisy flocks of corellas.

Cloncurry is a bustling place – a new zinc mine opened nearby in 2017. The caravan park we stay at is home to scores – maybe hundreds – of workers. There’s an air of dynamism and full employment and money sloshing around.

Bravo, Australia. I get the feeling that if anyone proposes a mine – or any other extractive activity – in Canada these days, people start squealing like their hair’s on fire. Don’t know where they think the money that comes out of the money taps comes from.

Speaking of mines: our next stop down the slab is Mt. Isa.

Mt. Isa’s raison d’être also lies in mining.

We take an underground mine tour. Also underground is this hospital.

After the Japanese bombed Darwin in WWII, people feared metals-rich Mt. Isa could be next. So the hospital built an annex underground, with the help of the local miners.

Both tours are led by local retired miners. Interesting characters, to be sure.

We cross into the Northern Territory and overnight in Barkly Homestead.

Maria wants a photo of a ‘Watch for kangaroos’ sign.

Ever since driving inland, this is the routine: every few hundred kilometres is a roadhouse, with a hotel/shop/caravan park/fuel etc.

In between is a lot of nothing. It’s a good thing we both love empty landscapes. The emptier the better.

This is the telegraph station at Barrow Creek. This is one of a series, some of which are still around.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Northern Territory

An axiom of mine is, ‘Don’t say that you’ll never be in a particular location again that you’ve been to before, however unlikely.’

We come to Three Ways, where the Stuart Highway that goes north-south and joins Adelaide to Darwin meets the highway that stretches east to the coast of Queensland.

This intersection has changed surprisingly little since I spent the better part of a day here 38 years ago while hitch-hiking around Australia.

I spent seven hours here waiting for a lift. I would sit on my rucksack, reading a book. When a vehicle came along – every half-hour or so – I would stand up and try to look non-threatening. I eventually landed a ride all the way to Townsville, if I remember correctly.

How times have changed. ‘…even children get older, and I’m getting older, too.’

We move further into the Queensland outback.

We tour the Cobbold Gorge.

As at the Undara lava tubes, the original owners/lessors  of the property struck a deal with the government to develop natural attractions in return for giving over large parts of their property to become parkland. Tourism is probably a safer bet than cattle raising out here.

We overnight in the tiny hamlet of Georgetown. Evening brings a flock of galahs in  the wires overhead.

On the road east next day. In some places, the highway narrows to a single lane. Approaching vehicles both move half onto the gravel.

Maria is really tickled by these signs in particular.

We stop for lunch in Croydon, another former mining centre.

Our orders of fish and chips contain enormous hunks of barramundi.

We continue to Normanton. From there to Karumba Point, on the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The road between Normanton and Point Karumba is flat as a pancake.

We see many Brolga cranes, but as soon as we stop to take a photo, they take off.

Behind the caravan park are mobs of wallabies. Some of them like coming up to the fence to study the humans inside.

Karumba Point has a wonderful, end-of-the-world feel to it.

It’s a popular thing here to gather at the shore and watch the sun go down.

We head south down the Matilda Highway to Cloncurry.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland outback

In the nearly four decades since I was last here, colloquial Australian English has evolved into a broad-vowelled dialect that can be hard for outsiders to decipher. I’m reminded of an episode in one of Paul Theroux’s books in which he shares a compartment on an Indian train with a group of young locals. It takes ten minutes for him to realize that the group is actually conversing in English.

For example, we go on a mine tour in Mt. Isa. At the end, Maria asks me ‘What’s a ‘fayday’? She tells me the guide has repeatedly instructed participants not to forget our ‘faydays’ before we leave.

Eventually we learn that the word is ‘photos‘: everyone gets a photo of themselves taken at the mine entrance.

From Cairns, we make plans to head for the Queensland interior. We drive north to Port Douglas.

Port Douglas is too crowded for us. This must be peak season for visitors.  We decide to travel a bit further north to Mossman.

Before we leave PD, we sample some meat pies for lunch. One is crocodile pie and one is kangaroo pie. The crust is stamped accordingly.

Mossman is much less frenzied. We visit the Mossman Gorge.

Back at the interpretation centre, we spot this enormous spider. I ask Maria to put her hand near it for comparison. She obliges.

On the other side of a mountain range, the land changes from rain forest to fertile farmland. We pass though patches of forest with signs to look out for Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroos. We don’t see any, though.

It doesn’t take long for the terrain to become Outback-y. This is the track we take to the Kalkani Crater.

We climb to the crater’s rim

There are wallabies around the trail.

We camp in Undara Lodge. We awake to two galahs squawking overhead.

The hawk flying by at the same moment was a happy accident.

Undara is known for its lava tubes.

We carry on to the remote hamlet of Einasleigh. Lots of red dirt, like Prince Edward Island.

We have lunch and a beer at Einasleigh’s sole hotel.

Surprisingly, the young woman behind the bar is from Boston. The many people in Australia with work visas are encouraged to work at least three months in remote locations.

The draw here is the Copperfield Gorge.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland interior

A guide tells us that the thousands of pensioners – ‘grey nomads’ – traveling around Australia these days are improving the economy of the outback. They actually pay money for things like guided tours and stay in nicer resorts. This in turn creates jobs for locals so everybody doesn’t pack their tents and move to Sydney or Melbourne. Nice to know that the boomer generation is good for something.

We have a good time in Cairns (which seems to be pronounced ‘Cains‘ – like the economist.) Getting here is fun, too.

(Note: because WiFi is difficult to come across in Australia – unless there’s something we’re missing – we’re a bit late in our blog entries. We’re already halfway across Queensland. To avoid confusion, we’re adding posts as WiFi becomes available. So we may be a week or two behind.)

Some of the inhabitants of our caravan park have a sense of humour.

We continue up the coast to Cairns. This is the beach at Flying Fish point.

This is typical countryside in the north of Queensland. Lots of sugarcane. Sweet!

Like most places in this part of Queensland,there are crocodiles everywhere.

Cairns boasts a flashy new aquarium.

I remember Cairns as being rougher and more frontier-like. Now it’s a very civilized place.

We visit the excellent Botanical Gardens.

In the conservatory is a beautiful selection of orchids.

Of course, most people come here for some sort of Great Barrier Reef experience. We book a snorkeling tour for the day.

Among the youthful, international crew is a professional underwater photographer. She does a good job of snapping GoPro-deprived punters like us.

The experience is very unlike our idyllic snorkels in the Togian Islands. There, the water was like glass. The sea was calm, with a temperature like bathwater. The coral was spectacular, the fish teeming. In the two locations we visit  here, the sea is much rougher than we expect. The water is kind of cloudy. And cold. We’re tossed around like corks. I’m sure there are many places in the thousand-plus kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef with amazing snorkeling; we’re happy to have had our time in the Togian Islands.

Still, it’s a grand day out.

We’re happy we went to the aquarium in Cairns, too. Like reef viewing from the comfort of dry land.

We enjoy a ride in a glass-bottom boat – our first.

This is our non-glass bottom boat.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Cairns

In our earlier travels, several times we find ourselves near famous whale-watching locales, such as Husavik, Iceland, and Hermanus, South Africa. We ask each other if we want to go watch whales and inexplicably say ‘Meh… no thanks.’

Despite being jaded cosmopolitans, we’re pretty chuffed when, on the return trip, the captain announces our boat is slowing down because there’s a whale between us and another vessel.

Our resident marine biologist – yes, our boat had one – informs us it’s a juvenile humpback whale.

Now that’s cool!

Brisbane is delightful.  I didn’t even stop here in 1979-80: at the time, Queensland was under the conservative Bjelke-Petersen regime, and Brisbane was probably the un-hippest city in Australia.

How times change. Brisbane is a thriving, forward-looking kind of place.

We visit the Queensland Art Gallery. It’s one of the best we’ve ever been to. And we’ve been to lots of galleries around the world.

I love this work, Under the Jacaranda.

I especially like the whimsical touch of the real jacaranda blossoms on the floor under the painting.

We drive up the coast to Noosa Heads. This is too overcrowded for us. We continue to less populated beaches.

Many are nearly deserted – one blessing of living in a sparsely-populated land.

We follow the advice of a man we meet in a caravan park, who suggests a few picturesque places to stay on our way north.

Rather than spend every day driving, we find a spot we like and spend a few nights there and relax during the day.

Still, driving is  fun. We observe the scenery. We listen to ABC while we drive. It’s a lot like listening to the CBC. (Except for the Australian accent, of course.)

It’s advised to swim beneath a pair of yellow and red flags due to ‘marine stingers‘.

This is enough to keep me out of the water for the duration. Their effects  range from ‘a slight prickle’ to ‘agonizing death’.

Doesn’t stop Maria, though.

This is Horseshoe Bay, near Bowen, QLD. Bowen is famous for its mangoes (!)

We find that traveling in our own vehicle, we have fewer opportunities for taking photos – just because ‘a body in motion tends to remain in motion’ and all that.

We enjoy staying in caravan parks. They’re clean and quiet. The inhabitants are usually pensioners escaping the southern winter.

Everyone is extremely friendly. We conjecture a drinking game where you have to down a shot of Bundaberg rum every time someone says ‘no worries’; we’d be legless by midmorning.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland

Australia is a birdwatcher’s paradise. Everywhere we go are parakeets, kookaburras, and other avian exotica. (This clearly marks us out as tourists, that we think of parakeets and kookaburras as ‘exotic’.)

For the first time ever, we actually pay for an iPhone app: Morecombe and Stewart’s Birds of Australia.

It’s official. We are going mobile.

We pick up our van –  who we name ‘Matilda’ – in Caringbah, in the south of Sydney. This means that after not driving for eight months, I now have to pilot a right-hand drive vehicle with a manual shift on the left through the entire length of Sydney to get us north of the harbour.

Slightly nerve-wracking, but we survive.

We stay in campgrounds along the way. The blog may not get such regular updates; not every campground has WiFi (unlike nearly every cheap guesthouse in Southeast Asia.)

We get lost a few times when we stray from the motorway.

After not getting very far the first few days while we provision Matilda, we reach the Queensland border and the chill goes out of the air.

Australia is well set up for camping. The sites we’ve been to so far are a delight.

The scenery is nice, too. I enjoy long-distance driving.

Interestingly, the first time we turn on the radio, we hear a story of how ‘Bluesfest in Ottawa, Canada’ is threatened by the presence of a killdeer nest. Everything’s connected.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Sight or Insight of the Day – Going Mobile

Driving along outside Port Macquarie, we spot a sign: ‘Want to pet a koala?’ I can’t slam on the brakes fast enough.

We feed wallabies and kangaroos.

They are surprisingly gentle and delicate creatures

I can cross ‘pet a koala’ off my bucket list.

We arrive in Sydney from Denpasar.

It’s winter here. Temperatures plunge to 10 degrees Celsius. We neglect the blog as we concentrate on finding a camper-van so we can head north, back into the warmth.

This turns out to be a challenge. We look at several vans, but the ones that fall in our price range have sky-high mileage (like three or four or five hundred thousand kilometers) and look unreliable. We find a rental at a reasonable rate and we leave Sydney in a few days.

It’s great to be back in a place where you can drink water out of a tap without becoming deathly ill. And they have sidewalks. Among other things.

We go to a dance performance at the Sydney Opera House.

When it’s sunny, it’s pleasant to walk.

After we sort out our transportation, we visit a few excellent museums.

• the Museum of Sydney
• the Australian Museum
• the Hyde Park Barracks
• the Susannah Place Museum
• the National Maritime Museum

And more.

The quality of museums here is superb – much better than I remember from 1979. Australia is well over its ‘cultural cringe’ phase and is now duly celebrating its status as one of the best places to live on Earth (almost by accident, like Canada), and the twisty path it took to get here.

We visit the excellent Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This painting, by Elioth Gruner, has a magnetic effect on me. I’m not sure why. I can imagine myself in a former life, moustachio’d, in a stripey gentleman’s bathing costume, sitting in a beach chair. It’s a windy, sunny afternoon, 1915. I’m looking at the war news in my Sydney Morning Herald. I look up from the page when a young woman asks me directions to the tram stop. It’s a Zen moment I never forget.

Your mileage may vary.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Sydney

A dictionary entry…

serendipity

sɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti/

The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy
or beneficial way. “a fortunate stroke of serendipity”

This happens to us a lot in our travels.

For example, we visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It just so happens it’s the last day of an exhibition featuring the ‘Lady and the Unicorn‘ tapestries from the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

This is like going to visit the neighbours for a cup of coffee. They have the Mona Lisa hanging in the kitchen.

I saw these in Paris in 1987. They are one of the most outstanding works of art on the planet, even though many people have never heard of them. (I thank God every day that I was born in the Golden Age of public education in North America.) This is only the third time in 500 years that they have been outside of France.

So long, Southeast Asia. Has it really been eight months? It seems as if we just left.

After Nusa Penida, we spend a few days on Nusa Lembongan. (Which is no Nusa Penida.) We are now in Denpasar, Bali’s main city. Tomorrow, we fly to Sydney, Australia and say ‘Au revoir, Southeast Asia.’

Some things we’ll miss about Southeast Asia:

• People have been very good to us almost everywhere here. Ordinary, everyday people  have treated us with courtesy and respect. (In fact, usually the only people who are unpleasant to deal with are people in the actual tourism industry: ticket vendors, transport providers, etc.) Being strangers in a strange land, not speaking the language, means we are vulnerable. We can’t count the number of times our bacon has been saved by the kindness of locals.
• Meeting wonderful and interesting people from different places, like Ulf and Susane. And Soufiane and Jessica. And Zane. And so many others. It’s a lot of fun hanging around with people much younger than we are.
• Eating in restaurants every day. We haven’t cooked a meal in eight months. And we like to cook. But it’s traditional here to eat outside the home often. If you like rice and noodles and a thousand variations thereof – and we do – you’ll never go hungry. And it’s economical.
• Speaking of economical, it’s refreshingly inexpensive. I’m sure this will change in Australia, but you get used to not worrying what things cost because whatever it is, it’s much cheaper than at home.
• The weather, and the fact that it’s never seldom cold. We are both great lovers of heat and loathers of cold.
• Amazing landscapes. Especially mountains. We don’t really take  photos in the mountains because cameras don’t capture the stupendousness of traveling through the high parts of Myanmar, Laos, and Indonesia.

Some things we WON’T miss about Southeast Asia:

• Garbage everywhere. In combination with armies of idle people guys lying around doing nothing. When they could be picking up the trash. And digging a hole to bury it in. Takes no skill. But it’s a universal third world trait to be indifferent to living in an ocean of trash. This is hard on people like us, who become apoplectic if we find so much as a gum wrapper on our front lawn.
• Animals in need of care. It’s another universal third world trait to be surrounded by mangy stray animals, some diseased, some crippled, some starving. And few people care. Even middle-class people in these countries purchase designer dogs most of the time. When there are millions of mutts around who’d like nothing better than a home to belong to. Caring for animals is a Western aberration.
• People spitting everywhere. Accompanied by dramatically noisy, espresso-machine-like  horking up great loogies and phlegmy gobbing and general belching into people’s faces and eructations and other noisy expulsion of bodily material. Projectile nose-jets of snot. Explosive uncovered sneezes. Oh no, we won’t miss that at all. We know, we know, ‘it’s only natural’, but Jeeze Louise, keep it to yourself, people.
• The general entropic state of decay in everything; even things that are new look like they’re falling apart or abandoned or just barely holding together or malfunctioning. It will be good to be someplace where this is not the norm.
• People wearing surgical masks. It’s just creepy. This probably started in response to pollution in China or something, but now it’s become a thing everywhere. And covered people women in general (even baby girls). And the godawful governments of nearly every country in the area. How do such nice people end up with such brutes? (And no, they’re not ‘puppets of the USA’.)

‘All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free’
– The Rascals, 1968

What a long, strange trip it’s been. And it’s not over yet.

Why do some call Nusa Penida the ‘egg of Bali’?

You can see by this map that Bali is vaguely chicken-shaped. Nusa Penida is the large island to the southeast.

Nusa Penida (‘Island of Priests’, in a Balinese dialect) is very relaxing after cosmopolitan Ubud. We read somewhere ‘Nusa Penida is what Bali used to be like 50 years ago.’ It’s certainly scenic.

We stay at the Casa Ari in the village of Toyapakeh, probably the best deal in Nusa Penida. New, clean, quiet, and a bargain for the island.

As usual, we make friends with the locals.

We rent a scooter for three days. Some of the roads are well-paved, but no wider than a bicycle path.

One of our first stops is the Pura Goa Giri Putri cave temple.

The entrance is tiny. You have to crawl on hands and knees to get inside. We’re sure this has some kind of ‘birth/rebirth’ symbolism.

Once inside, it’s huge. (I was going to say ‘cavernous’.)

We walk a dimly-lit walkway a few hundred metres that leads to another entrance on the other side of the mountain.

The Hindu priests sit around checking their phones, like everyone else on the planet.

We continue down the coast.

We learn interesting things about Nusa Penida: for one, the entire island is a bird sanctuary. For another, the island is considered bad juju by other Balinese, according to this site.

‘To the mainland Balinese, Nusa Penida is virtually unknown except
through legend. To almost all it is a place that is generally Angker, a term that is difficult to translate into English. About as close as you can come is to say that it is “scary”, or even “terrifying”, because of strong and mostly evil practices that is associated with the island. It is a fearful place, a source of disease, bad luck, and evil spirits.

The center for this evil influence is Pura Dalem Penataran Peed, sometimes spelled Ped, located on the northwest corner of the main island. Quite a few Balinese make the trip there for the odalan of this temple, which, as Budi aptly puts it in his mixed Balinese-English, is the “Angkerest” place in all of Bali because it is the abode of Ratu Gede Macaling, one of the most powerful and potentially destructive and evil of all of the various gods, or, to be more accurate, manifestations of God, to be found anywhere in Bali.’

Mind you, this dates from 1986. Things change in 30 years, and we don’t get the impression that locals feel the island is in any way ‘cursed’.

As is the case with many places of interest here, the last five kilometres or so  are down terrible, bone-jarring, scooter-destroying stony goat-paths.

Perseverance rewards us with a stunning view of Atuh Beach, nestled between two cliffs.

As we walk back up the trail, we look down and see three baby sharks, each one a metre long, swimming in the bay, invisible to the  people paddling unconcerned nearby. (They are not a threat. The baby sharks, that is.)

Next day, we visit the Peguyangan waterfall and temple. This means taking a steep metal stairway down a cliff face.

We watch three or four Cadillac-sized manta rays swim gracefully in the sea below

The temple hugs the cliffs at the base.

Maria samples some of the purifying waterspouts.

Another day, we take the scooter to Crystal Bay.

This is popular with snorkelers and other visitors.

We take a walking trail at one end of the beach to see where it goes.

The trail leads to a small white sand beach, with crashing waves of clear water and no other people. We have the beach entirely to ourselves.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Nusa Penida

The Balinese are among the most observant believers in their religion. They spend a lot of their time constructing and placing offerings just about everywhere as part of their observances – gateways, doorways, steps, crossroads.

Worship and purification take up a large part of every day.

It’s all very pretty and quaint.

And yet – at our guesthouse in Ubud, the owners have several cages of birds on the property. One in particular contains a couple of mynahs. The only drinking water they have is a ceramic bowl on the floor of the cage, old and murky with filth and droppings. We casually mention several times   ‘maybe you can change this water bowl today?’ ‘Yes, yes, OK, OK.’

But it doesn’t get done. We ourselves look in several pet stores in Ubud to purchase a couple of cage-mounted water dishes. The shops only have dog and cat supplies.

The point is – people spend hours of every day propitiating invisible and (probably) non-existent spirits while – in the real world – remaining oblivious to the genuine physical needs of a living, breathing creature in their care. It’s kind of like the nature of all religion writ small.