Traveling, Nerd Style

It's no secret that Justin and I are nerds. 

[Justin: Well it isn't a secret anymore.]

Lawyer nerds. I mean, we took a victory shot at the Supreme Court of Western Australia, for Pete's sake.

Woo! Justice!

But I think that the nerd tendency is serving us delightfully well on this trip.

Both Justin and I just finished reading Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country (which, here in Oz, is inexplicably called Down Under instead). Bryson's travel MO in the book is to read everything he can get his hands on about Australia, and then conduct his way through the country accordingly. For example, after reading about Shark Bay's stromatolites -- a rare living example of the earliest life form on earth -- he makes a pilgrimage to go see these living fossils. (NB: we plan on going there, too.) The information he picks up by reading everything he can get his hands on lends depth and texture to travel; after all, most hotels kind of look alike.

I was inspired by this. So, when we were in Sydney, I forced Justin to go to a series of used bookstores to peruse their often chock-full Australiana section. Most of the volumes that we have seen are unavailable in the U.S., fascinating, and arcane, and I've been snapping them up feverishly. (So much for traveling light.) Hence, as Justin so nimbly mentioned last post, the 1962 volume published by the long-defunct Walkabout Magazine entitled Unique to Australia, which lists the birdies and beasties peculiar to this continent. (Most of the science, by the way, is egregiously wrong, but it's still interesting, and the wrongness kind of makes it funny.) I'm now reading another Walkabout volume of essays, just because I couldn't get enough of that quaint sixties tone of voice, and just finished a piece by an outback sheep rancher in the 1930s describing life with the herd. The author, Arthur Upfield, returned to Australia after serving in the air force in World War I, and traveled around the country "by pushing a swag on a bike minus the pedals." (I'm not kidding.) And before that, I plowed through the unbelievably fascinating, and totally infuriating, The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper, which details the recent death of Cameron Doomadgee, an indigenous Australian living on Palm Island, at the hands of a white policeman. I've seen Rabbit-Proof Fence (and you should too) but that didn't stop her description of the Stolen Generations and the utter injustice in the system from breaking my heart all over again.

Australian history and ecology particularly lends itself to this kind of travel-reading because it is so prone to short, amazing anecdotes. It's a country of one-liners. The School of the Air is a  correspondence school that is conducted in part over the radio, to provide the students -- who are scattered throughout the outback -- with some semblance of a classroom experience. The monotremes, native only to Australia, are a totally unique class of mammal that lays eggs. (Even Boing Boing loves the duck-billed platypus.) The Aboriginal people's origin on this continent is nigh inexplicable: they did not evolve from anything living here; cannot have crossed any land bridge to get to this place, which was an island long before humans existed; and, if they came here by boat somewhere between 50,000 to 125,000 years ago, as is now commonly thought, they did it at least 30,000 years before any other human on Earth had mastered sea travel. And this place has kangaroos, which I saw three of from the train! And black swans!

With little gray cygnets! When early explorers returned from Australia claiming they had found a mysterious land with jumping deer, egg-laying furry things, and black swans instead of white, everyone thought it was a hoax.

And this plant:

Kangaroo Paw!

I could go on. The point is that I like traveling like a dork.

Now. I should show you some photos of Perth.

It's pretty here. Perth is built on the Swan River, which confuses me eternally because I keep thinking we're on the coast. It's got a population near 1.4 million, but feels like a small town. We met some other travelers who live around the corner from our hostel and had a few beers with them at a party the night we arrived. The next day, we were walking down the street when the same crew hollered at us from a bar across the street and forced us, terribly unwillingly, to come have a pint with them. Like I said, it feels small, even though it's twice the size of San Francisco.

It also houses Kings Park, which is probably the best city park either Justin or I had ever seen. We walked for three or four hours and barely scratched the surface of this place, which has a detailed native botanical garden as well as acres and acres of bushland.

We arrived as there was some sort of festival going on. So in addition to informative plaques telling us about native plants:

Spinifex is dangerous. Its spines are tipped with silica, which break off and become embedded in your skin if you touch it. This caused many early Australian explorers to suffer festering sores.

... and Baobab trees for me to hug:

Baobab trees store water. You can tap those bulbous trunks and drink "sweet water" according to my 1962 Unique to Australia book.

... there were drummers dressed up in Mardi Gras feathers:

... and a large crowd of people amassed to see a New Orleans brass band.

I was hoping to see an echidna but was not gratified. Instead we got excellent locally made stout and chardonnay.

Today we start out on Adventure Number 2: we are renting a campervan and driving 4500 kilometers all around Western Australia, (you'll want to click that link, it's pretty cool to be able to show you our proposed route) both north into the outback and the Ningaloo reef and south to the Valley of the Giants, where old growth jarrah and karri forests still persist, despite Australian foresters deep desire to turn those beauties into wood chips. We will take three weeks to travel through this crazy road trip. Our access to email may be limited, but since we're making a figure 8 through Perth, we should be able to update the blog at least once from this truly spectacular public library. (Yes, I know, I'm waxing poetic about a library. Would you really expect anything else from us nerds?)

Meredith [and Justin]