Random Rambles

Now, where did we leave off? Oh yes, in Kakadu National Park, on our way to Darwin.

We see more rock art and stunning formations at Ubirr.

It’s a short drive up to Darwin.

Darwin, like other places I remember, is much less of a frontier town than it used to be.

We visit the Flying Doctor museum.

These days, the majority of its fleet of aircraft are Pilatus, of Swiss manufacture.

Stoke’s Hill Wharf is a popular place to hang out.

I look forward to reaching Darwin to reconnect with an old friend, Lauretta. I first met Lauretta on a kibbutz in Israel. She was influential in my decision to visit Australia many years ago. A few years later, she convinced me to go to Africa for the first time, where she worked as a teacher in Selebe Phikwe, Botswana.

Lauretta – originally from Sydney –  is now a long-time resident of Darwin. She owns and manages a very successful shop selling aboriginal art and used books.

One reason for its success, I’m sure, is that Lauretta is very simpatico with aboriginal people. (She’s always had this gift, which is probably why she’s been comfortable living in remote places for much of her life.)

We go for dinner and watch the sundown on Stoke’s Hill Wharf.

At Mindil Beach, there’s a popular sundown market twice a week.

Lauretta has a regular stall here as well. We stand amazed at how busy Lauretta’s stall is. At one point, the transactions are non-stop. Still, she makes time to socialize.

Hundreds gather to watch the sun go down.

When in Rome…

The prize exhibit is a B-52 bomber, one of the few on display outside of the United States.

‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons…’
– Leonard Cohen

It takes up most of the interior. It is gigantic.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Darwin

Lauretta mentions that she has a friend nearby with a wallaby joey in her care. This we have to see.

Lauretta’s friend brings him out nestled in a cloth pouch, where he spends most of his time.

His mother was struck and killed by a car. Someone checked the mother’s pouch and Freddy was still alive inside.

Lauretta’s friend is a certified wildlife carer, not an eccentric amateur animal rescuer. Still, she admits it’ll be hard to pass him on to the next phase of rehabilitation back to the wild.

He is unbelievably cute. We spend ten or fifteen minutes fussing over him, which he clearly likes.

We make a dash from the NT into South Australia to visit Coober Pedy. Then it’s back up the Stuart Highway from Coober Pedy to Kakadu.

(A few months ago, we posted a list of things we’ll miss about Southeast Asia. Little did we know that one item would be universal WiFi available free from virtually everywhere. Even in retrograde laggards like Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

WiFi is hard to come by in Australia, at least in the remote regions we find ourselves in lately. One result is these long, unwieldy blog entries at infrequent intervals. Our apologies.)

As we leave King’s Canyon, we spot these camels on the side of the road.

At one time, camels – imported from India – were the only form of transport. When roads and trains appeared, the camels were released into the wild.

In a few hours, we’re in South Australia.

Coober Pedy is famous for its opal mines. The methodology seems to be: dig a hole, check for opals, move over a few metres, repeat.

Coober Pedy has a distinctly other-worldly look.

We visit the Old Timer Mine. This mine was sealed, forgotten, then rediscovered in recent times.

This is a leftover prop spacecraft from the cheesy Vin Diesel sci-fi flick Pitch Black. The area is a popular movie location. Did we mention it’s already ‘other-worldly’?

Coober Pedy is also known for its underground dwellings.

This is to escape the intense heat.

Here’s a seam of opal in the Umoona Mine.

The main reason we hot-foot it to Coober pedy is to book two seats on the Mail Run. Basically, this is a man with a contract to deliver mail to remote cattle stations twice a week. He takes passengers.

This is the Dingo Fence. North of the fence is cattle country, south of the fence is sheep country.

We’re happy that the vehicle used is no longer a bus. These days, Peter limits his passengers to four in a comfy 4WD, with a trailer for the mail.

He is an inexhaustible supply of yarns, local knowledge, and bush folksiness.

We journey 600 kilometres from Coober Pedy to Williams Creek, up the Oodnadatta Track to Oodnadata, then back to CP.

Anna Creek Station is supposed to be the world’s largest.

This is a wall enclosing an old well on the property, the year ‘1877’ engraved in a stone.

There used to be a rail line that follows the Oodnadatta Track. It was abandoned and replaced by another route when diesel locomotives came into use.

As elsewhere in Australia, we pass though several ghost towns that were once lively boom-towns.

We reach Oodnadatta in time for dinner.

The next day, we head back north up the Stuart Highway. Stopping for a coffee at the Marla Roadhouse, we spy a road train full of camels.

(Road trains, in case you don’t know, are enormous trucks pulling three or four trailers. A common sight in outback Australia.)

Not a sight you see every day.

A rally of vintage vehicles takes place along our route. This is a vintage MG at the Erldunda Roadhouse.

We mentioned that we plan to stay overnight at the Henbury meteor craters.  This we do, for one of the most unforgettable nights of our trip.

We are the only people for a hundred kilometres around. We scavenge enough wood to enjoy a bonfire under a gazillion stars.

We stop at the Ti Tree Roadhouse and make a lunch.

We wonder if this is an example of the wry Australian sense of humour.

Nope, it’s really a freezer full of frozen kangaroo tails.

We overnight in Tennant Creek and make it as far as Daly Waters the next day. At the outskirts of Daly Waters is an airfield. This was swarming with bombers and other aircraft during WWII.

There are a surprising amount of WWII sites up here. This area was largely vacant at the time – still is – but to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the threat of encroaching Japan overrunning one’s country concentrates the mind wonderfully.

This is also the land of ‘We of the Never Never‘. This is an Australian classic describing life in the outback at the turn of the last century on remote Elsey Station.

We visit the Katherine Gorge.

In Kakadu National Park, we see more water and greenery than we’ve seen in a month.

In Kakadu is Nourlangie Rock. Besides being a stunning formation in itself, it’s home to much Aboriginal paintings.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Coober Pedy to Kakadu

We wonder if the name ‘Kakadu’ is cognate with ‘Cockatoo’.

Apparently the answer is ‘no’. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but we’ve never seen so many cockatoos anywhere else. Of all kinds: sulphur-crested, red-tail and white-tail blacks, corellas.

I always consider how much cockatoos sell for in North American pet shops. As a squawky flock flies over head, I think ‘there goes $100,000-worth of cockatoos.’

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.