On the Road, Version Australia: Perth to Coral Bay

We're in Coral Bay! We've been on the road a week -- and oh, boy, do we have a lot of things to talk about. I'll just start at the beginning and try to keep it organized by day. This is going to be a lengthy post, so bear with us.

Day 1: Perth to Cervantes, or, Justin and Meredith Meet the Improbable Chariot. She is equipped with a fridge, microwave, sink, bed, table, curtains, and all the amenities. Justin, especially, is utterly enamored by RVing, commenting brightly after we ate our first sandwich lunch, "This is so awesome. A sandwich! With mayonnaise! At a table!" It's the little things.

We left Perth in a flurry of nerves and windshield wipers, having been steeled for the weirdness of driving on the left but not for the standard transmission. We succeeded in only driving into oncoming traffic once -- a major victory, if you ask me. [Justin: Meredith kindly uses "we" here, but of course it was me.  The most embarrassing thing I think is turning on your windshield wipers when you mean to use your blinker.]  It only took us about a half hour of trundling through the wineries lining Perth's outskirts before we were essentially alone. Well, us and the emus.

This one was hanging out at a gas station off the highway called Southern Cross. It had a windmill. I took a lot of pictures of the windmill. And then we were on our way to scenic Cervantes, where we experienced our first caravan park, right next to the Indian Ocean. And we were rewarded in our survival of jittery Day 1 by a miraculous sunset.

Day 2: Cervantes to Dongara, or, The Day We Learned What A "Skimpy" Is. Our day began with a southerly circuit down to Nambung National Park to see the Pinnacles.

 

No one exactly knows what created these things. The Aboriginal people of the area say that they are the reaching fingers of lost sons who went wandering in the desert and got sucked down under the sand. First explorers thought they were remnants of shipwrecked vessels. Now, some scientists think that they are some kind of fossilized or limestoned petrified forest, or compacted sand, or something. What they are, for certain, is otherworldly.

Flocks of galahs perch in them -- galahs are common, but very striking, pink and gray parrots. We wanted to see a honey possum, one of the tiniest marsupials, but were not rewarded. And emus eat desert berries and poop around the pinnacles. We were very proud of our discovery.

[Justin: As if I had made it myself]

Then we headed out to Lake Thetis, one of the many hypersalinated lakes around this area, and one of the locations where stromatolites still persist. Moving on the road, saluting other campervans, we took a detour down a dirt road towards Lesueur National Park to check out some of this season's wildflowers. Three observations about that road. First, we were introduced to the fact that not very many of Australia's roads are paved at all; you go two seconds off the beaten track and you're on red dirt. Second, we didn't see a soul. For ages. Ages and ages. Third: The road was so deserted that we nearly hit a kangaroo. (It hopped! That's still such a novelty!!) We freaked out, stopped the van in the middle of the road, and ran off into the bush chasing him for a while. He won the race.

We filled up on petrol at a station where a friendly station owner washed our windshield for us out of kindness and impressed us with his ability to do math very quickly in his head. And then on to Dongara, a workingman's town, where we went to the pub to work out our itinerary for the next day and were a little shocked that the barmaid, a very attractive woman in her mid-twenties, was dressed like a naughty policewoman, complete with gun in garter belt. This, apparently, is the concept of the "skimpy." (After we were educated in this concept, I realized why the bar did not have a ladies' room. I had to go next door into the restaurant.) The highway workers in their reflective vests who peopled the place were very taken with her. We wound up putting a few rounds away with the fellows at the pub, chatting about purchasing property in San Antonio, their weapons caches, and the "aboriginal problem" -- none of my probing questions, by the way, will ever change these guys' minds, but after a beer or two I did try a bit. We ate some meat pies for dinner (we've gone native!) and meandered our way back to our caravan after a memorable taste of "real" Australia.

Day 3 and 4: Dongara to Kalbarri, and then Kalbarri Again. We hauled out of Dongara in a flurry of dust, having miraculously avoided a hangover by a whisker. We drove straight up to Kalbarri, passing through the towns of Geraldton and Northampton, where we missed the annual Airing of the Quilts. [Justin: And let me say I'm still smarting from that one.] Let me just say, at this point, that the vast majority of our time is spent driving and looking at this:

Australia has a STAGGERING AMOUNT OF NOTHING IN IT. We drive for kilometers and kilometers and it is all low scrub and red dirt and barely anyone else on the road. The emptiness is just remarkable. And we're hugging the coast! We're both looking forward with trepidation and curiosity to what it's going to be like in the middle!

Our introduction to Kalbarri was a lookout point over the Indian Ocean, where we watched migrating humpback whales pass.

Thar she blows!

We stayed at Big River Ranch, a relaxed horse ranch with probably 35 horses and several goats, two of which were feral (a big problem, actually; the owner's mom, Rosalyn, asked us to drive slowly unless we saw a goat, in which case to "speed up."). It had a large campers' kitchen and attracted a bunch of other wanderers like us. We had great conversation with a couple of Ozzies from Melbourne who are driving all the way around the country, and who had seen all six seasons of the West Wing. (Side note: can you imagine watching six seasons of a television show detailing the nuances of Australian politics??) We slept peacably.

And the following day we were treated to a beautiful 8km hike around the gorges in Kalbarri National Park.

I don't know if it really comes across in this photo, but the Loop Hike follows a bend in the river and starts out on a precipitous ridge line on plated red stone, and then descends down into the riverbed where the trail gets a little, uh, rugged.

[Justin: Seriously, someone went down there and drilled two holes in the rock and attached the sign to make sure that people would go this way.]

I navigated it with skill.

We passed through acres of yellow wildflowers on our climb back up. The humming of the bees was loud and consistent. As was the bleating of the feral goats and the unwordly squawking of the Australian crows, which sounds eerily like a human -- think The Shining's "red rum." Oh, and did I mention these freaking crazy anthills?

We climbed back up to Natural Window's overlook slapping (called the "bush salute") away the dive-bombing flies and ready for dinner back at the Ranch.

Day 5: Kalbarri to Denham, or, Shark Bay World Heritage Day. Itchy feet got us on the road early to Shark Bay. Our first stop after many many many miles of nothing (and a bit of a gas scare -- we rolled into Billabong Roadhouse on empty, even though we started with half a tank!) was Hamelin Pool, home of the telegraph station that relayed NASA messages in the sixties, and the infamous Naked Telegraph Pole Man:

Yes, I bought a commemorative stubby holder. Also notice that, despite Bill Bryson's assertion to the contrary, the man is not wearing his boots. Fact check fail.

. . . and the world's largest colony of stromatolites.

These colonies of cyanobacteria were the only thing on earth for, like, 2000 million years. They photosynthesized en masse, producing oxygen, long enough to actually change the world's atmosphere and make more complex life possible. They were mostly eaten by the creatures they helped create, but here, where the hyper-saline environment (created by the wall of sea grass at the top of Hamelin Pool) is intolerable to most other forms of life, they continue to flourish, creating little bubbles of O2. We stopped in the telegraph station where kindly Terry showed us a little five-minute video and his collection of creepy things in jars, and introduced us to the only stromatolites in captivity and told us fantastical stories about the telegraph line. We learned a lot, including that human beings are the "fingernail on the armspan of life:"

And that Alan Ginsburg spent a bunch of time in Australia. There was a photo of him playing sticks on the wall.

From Hamelin Pool we trucked on to Shell Beach, again a product of the hypersalinated water; billions of little shells, the remnants of little clams that can tolerate the salt, are piled 17m deep in places.

The effect is mind-boggling.

We then rolled on through Shark Bay. At this point we were filled with thousands of questions about the salinity, the history of this place, the weird things we were seeing. Shark Bay, as this whole area is called, is a World Heritage site, fulfilling all four of that designation's criteria. Fortunately, the UN had thought to build a truly spectacular museum (they call it a Discovery Center because it's more pictures and text than objects) that answered most of them, and also told us some great stories -- about, for example, a dude who survived at sea after a wreck for 11 days in his icebox while the current blew him in a big circle. We decided to skip on the real tourist attraction in Shark Bay -- the tame dolphins that visit the nearby resort of Monkey Mia -- and tucker down with some local seafood.  [Justin: The restaurant claimed to be the westernmost restaurant in Australia, which simply by looking down the street at all the other restaurants we can safely say is a bit of an exaggeration.] Those bricks behind Justin are made of the shells we mentioned earlier.

This is Crayfish. Like everything else in Australia, it is bigger than normal crayfish.

Oh! I forgot to mention our stopoff at a wildlife-viewing overlook, where we were incredibly blessed to see a grazing dugong (a relative of the manatee!), as well as a bunch of sharks and rays.

Day 7: Denham to Quobba Station. On the road out of Shark Bay, we saw four emus on the road and chased them safari style. I don't think I'll get over those weird half circles with legs. And then we rolled into Carnarvon, and, disappointed with the boringness of that fruit-growing town, we checked the map. I pointed at a dot. "Look, Blowholes," I said. "What are blowholes?" Justin asked. "No idea," I replied, "but there's a working sheep ranch 10 km down a dirt road where we can apparently park the van." "Done," said my intrepid traveling partner, and we were rewarded with these frenzied things:

Old faithful at the end of the universe

And, at Quobba Station, a walk with stubbies of Emu Bitter in the tidepools amongst cartoon oysters:

And this sunset, with migrating humpbacks breaching in front of it:

And a quiet campsite amongst friendly Aussies and their bounding dogs. Lesson: Take the adventure.

Day 8: Quobba Station to Coral Bay, or, WE'RE UP TO DATE FINALLY. We've made it to Ningaloo Marine Park, a peninsula where we're planning on staying three or four days to dive and snorkel in Australia's "other" great reef. Today, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. [Justin: There is so little of interest on Australian roads that they put up signs when you cross a parallel, which we have done 3 times now.]

Did I mention there is NO ONE ON THESE ROADS? [Justin: Hey I was sleepy.]

We are over 1200 km from Perth. We have traveled on many many lonely flat roads past infinite roadkill wallabies and scrub brush. We've taken showers that are salty from bore water and chatted with Australians who call us "city slickers" and use the word "billabong" in context. Witth a cheers with stubbies of lagers in our coozies, we bid y'all "g'day" -- Aussie style!

Meredith

On the Road, Aussie Style

Well, I tried to write a proper post but the photo uploader here is frustratingly slow, so I'll wait 'til later to give the full update. This is just a bookmark post to let everyone know that we have survived a whole three days of driving a standard-transmission campervan on the wrong side of the road!

The Improbable Chariot

We are in Kalbarri, Western Australia, and are staying at the Big River Horse Ranch with a dozen horses, two dogs and three hungry goats. The only other really, really exciting news that I want to report right now is that we have nearly run over a kangaroo and have seen not only an emu but emu poop!

Until later,

Meredith and Justin

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]

Sydney to Perth on the Indian Pacific Train

We're in Perth, the remotest state capital in Australia. (We're actually closer to Singapore right now than we are to Sydney.)  [Justin: Usually I just add my two bits over Meredith's shoulder as she writes these entries, but this time I'll add my comments in these brackets.  We're writing this entry from the Perth public library, which has free internet even to non-locals and a most efficient bookings system for the computers.  I like this place.]

As I mentioned before, we took a three-day train adventure to get here, which is, I'm now convinced, a spectacular way to see the country.

We were very, very excited when we hopped on board the Indian Pacific, our iron chariot and home for the next three nights. And surprised at the roominess of our quarters.

We're on a train!

That little metal thing by my elbow is a sink -- yes, a folding sink, which was immensely satisfying to shut, for some reason -- I'm leaning against one of two chairs and hanging onto the upper berth. The lower one folds down from the chairs. We even had little closets and nightlights and a trash can.

They gave us full run of a dining car and a lounge, which had free coffee and tea and little pastries at tea time. How commodious!

I extend my pinkie. Or try to.

[Justin: Meredith is reading a circa 1962 pocket book on Odd Things in Australia, of which there are many, as I learn every 5-7 minutes.]

We proceeded to take a lot -- and I mean a lot -- of photos that look like this.

And this.

And this.

[Justin: Either slackjawed amazement or I'm jetlagged.]

And this.

Our train rolled from Sydney through the endless Western suburbs and then the Blue Mountains, so called because of the haze of oil exuded by the gum trees (which, for the record, we didn't see, but we believe that they look blue sometimes). Our first stop the following morning was in Broken Hill, an active mining area; we rolled through at 6:40 a.m., though, so "active" isn't really the word for the town.  [Justin: But we did manage to get a real breakfast and avoid paying $3 for toast.]

Notice that Justin is, apparently, the only person out.

From there, we chugged on to Adelaide, where we visited the delightful Central Market, where we purchased delicious bread and hummus and cheese and other things to fortify us. (We did this, by the way, because food on the train was horrifying. You couldn't have made the pasta bake any worse if you had actively attempted to ruin it.) But Central Market was an unexpectedly great find -- if we lived in Adelaide, we'd shop there all the time.

We'd also patronize the lovely Exeter Hotel (NB: in Australia, a "Hotel" can be a restaurant, a bar, a hotel, or all three) all the time, too. They were playing Townes Van Zandt on the radio when we walked in and serving only the locally brewed beer on tap, two things we look upon with utmost approval. We didn't take any photos in Adelaide, though, except for this one, which I will share with you without too much commentary, because . . . well, because what can you say about this sculpture?

I think, maybe, that the Bean is a more successful piece, don't you? 
[Justin: no I did not just make an inappropriate joke]

[Justin: One anecdote that Meredith left out: as we were leaving the pub we walked down the street to find a cab.  A prim gay man wearing way too much foundation comes up to us and asks us, get this, what day of the week it was.  He might have been drinking.  I won't detail the rest of the conversation, but let's just say he complemented my shapely posterior, and we quickly moved on our way.]

We picked up a lot more passengers in Adelaide. A lot of them. And they all had something in common. When we arrived back into the station, we looked at each other, and then looked at our fellow passengers, and then looked back at each other in wonderment: we were younger than the youngest of the gigantic, hundred-plus person crowd by more than thirty years. Without exception.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it did create an atmosphere that I found constantly amusing. Picture two grubby, lovey-dovey backpackers in their cotton duds and flip flops hanging out in the lounge car with the rest of the cardigan-wearing crew. An announcement comes on, but it's a bit too faint to hear. A voice calls out, "Everyone turn your hearing aids up!"  [Justin: This joke played disturbingly well.  Meredith doesn't even think it was a joke.]  Our theory is that a train journey like ours is basically a land cruise. It is neither fast nor cheap, even accounting for our steeply discounted backpackers' fare, so the only people who can undertake the journey have both time and money -- something twenty- and thirty-somethings like us usually do not have in tandem. Anyways. We chugged along with the pensioners, gleefully watching their knitting and attempting to be as polite with our tea.

We rolled on through the night after Adelaide and were woken by a thunderstorm that can only happen in wide open spaces. A thunderhead in the distance lit up every few seconds with bolt upon bolt upon bolt. I got scared and crawled into Justin's bunk and we watched it flash and roil until the sun came up, and we began the crossing of the spectacularly flat and featureless Nullarbor Plain.  [Justin: It is so flat it appears that you can see the curvature of the earth.  Amazingly, it was wet as we passed through, which is a bit unusual.  We have never been so entranced by nothing.]

Here I am making a very weird face, standing on the longest straight stretch of train track on Earth. [Justin: 297 miles without a bend!]

That photo was taken when we stopped to refuel in Cook, a town with a gift shop, a prison, and a rock with a plaque on it.

Everyone was very excited to take pictures of the rock.
[Justin: This place was so unexciting I was excited to take pictures of the rock.]

From Cook, we rolled on through the night until Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Australia's largest outback city, which was not very large, in which we vainly searched for an establishment called the Hogs Breath (a bouncer actually told us it was imaginary) and wound up eating dubious curry at a cookie-cutter Irish pub and attempting not to get run over by the crazy Kalgoorlie drivers, all of whom seemed to be fleeing something very frightening and dangerous. And from there, we rolled on through the night to Perth, where we sit now in a very civilized public library, using this lightning-fast internet for free.

Our plans from here involve a car, and a bunch of road trips both up and down the coast. We plan on visiting Margaret River, a famed wine region; the Valley of the Giants, to see the old-growth tingle, jarrah and karri trees; and possibly making a giant loop of a road trip up north, through ten or more national parks and some lonely outback driving.

All for now. All aboard!

Meredith

PS: I forgot, earlier, to post about two lovely little happenings in Sydney. First, we are delighted to report that we met an extra from the Mike Meyers movie So I Married An Axe Murderer, which, in case you don't know, is one of Justin and my favorite films and might actually be responsible for the beginning of our relationship. (A story for another time. Rick & Anne's, the insanely delicious Berkeley breakfast joint, is also involved.) This actress -- who appears in the first scene in the bohemian cafe, right before Mike Meyers delivers his legendary "Woman, Woah - Man!" beat poem, and apparently hands Meyers something -- sold us our tickets at the Sydney Opera House. She was jazzed to chat with us about being in San Francisco in the eighties and being an "important extra" in what is indubitably the greatest movie ever made. The next time we watch it, we're keeping our eyes peeled for a lady with a blond bob and a headband.

Also, I just have to post this. Have you ever seen any headline more Australian?

That is all.

More Sydney, Perhaps More Coherently

Until recently, I had this insane, stoic idea that jetlag was not real. I still think that it's overrated when one is going through only a couple time zones, like from the east to the west coast of the United States. But, my friends, when one goes halfway around the world, it is like having a debilitating, if very temporary, disease. Justin and I have been awake today since 4 a.m., and yesterday were so dead tired at 9 p.m. that we decided that we couldn't have dinner lest we fall face first into our soup. 

So mornings and evenings aren't our best times. But that leaves most of the day, when we are awake, chipper, and properly caffeinated. Yesterday, we used that good time to traverse all 10 km (6.2 miles) of the Manly Scenic Walkway. Special thanks to Margot for recommending it: it was a really lovely tramp, and a truly gorgeous ferry ride over.

A view from the ferry on our way over to Manly.

Manly is a local community north of Sydney that may properly be called a suburb or a beach town, but is really more of a fiercely independent locality that defies both labels. According to our Lonely Planet guide (and the Internet), it was so named by Captain Arthur Phillip after he was impressed by the manly physique of the Aborigines living there, a factoid that amused us greatly -- we assumed it was named for Sir Herbert Manly or some other obscure Briton, like most of the names in Oz. The Manly Scenic Walk meanders from Manly Beach on the Pacific Ocean through the manicured community and up into a portion of Sydney National Park, which afforded us a good few kilometers of bush walking and incredible views of North and South Head, the gates of Sydney Harbor, with the Pacific beyond.

I like the ocean.

This is where I am eaten by a flying shark or a saltwater crocodile or something.

I don't have many photos of the bush, but I will just point out that the Australians are even burly about their trail repair: the National Parks folks were repaving the path with stones that had apparently been hauled up in gigantic plastic bags, like the ones that you get when you shop at Ikea. We had a nice walk all in all, and learned a bit about native flora and fauna. One bird's chirp sounds exactly like a firing laser. This place is cool.

We spent the evening watching Savion Glover, a world-class tap dancer who was, amusingly, a member of the cast of Sesame Street for five years, perform at the Sydney Opera House. It was a treat to be able to see a show there, and I think that Glover's feet might not actually be attached to his body. Glover and two other excellent dancers tapped on three individually miked hardwood floors, often to rhythms that were borrowed from earlier artists like Charlie Parker (Justin picked up on it!) and often in a kind of breakdance-like competition format. Truly great.

Today we head out for our first big Australian adventure. We are taking the train from Sydney to Perth, a journey that includes a span of rail that is the straightest stretch of track in the world across the Nullarbor Plain (so named because it is empty (null) of trees (arbors)). It will take us three days in our little sleeping car through the harsh outback to reach Perth, and we probably won't be able to access the Internet during that time -- but we'll have plenty of stories on the back end.

ciao everyone!

Meredith

PS: for whatever reason, Blogger's photo-upload interface is great when we log in as me, and terrible when we log in as Justin, which is why I've been authoring most posts. But I promise he's here. I haven't eaten him yet.

PPS. Did I mention that Australia has weird animals?

This one practically crawled into Justin's lap!

Safely in Sydney, and Jetlagged Beyond Comprehension

Sydney!

The computer in this hostel is uploading photos at about the same speed at which my brain is working, which is to say approximately molasses divided by snail, so this may be a short, poorly illustrated post. But we made it!

We hopped on a plane in Newark and flew directly to SFO. I hadn't thought particularly hard about the fact that we were driving from San Francisco to New York and then flying from . . . New York back to San Francisco; it didn't really strike me how ridiculous that was until we were over Ohio or wherever and Justin peered out the planer window and said, morosely, "Look at all those miles being deleted." In any case, we waved at Ghiradelli chocolates in the international terminal, made our connection with the only hitch being our sore backs, and then spent 14 hours in the air to get to Sydney. We watched the sun rise over the Pacific.

We've stayed alert and awake all day with flat whites (not entirely sure yet whether that's a cafe au lait or a latte, but it's my Australian in-country coffee order, and I'm not going to fiddle with it) and a long meandering walk through Sydney's astoundingly beautiful harbor area. It's a shiny city, and gosh, what can you say about the Opera House? We have tickets to see a guy who is reportedly the best tap dancer in the world there tomorrow night, so we'll get to spend more time among those shiny tiles. And we triumphantly walked halfway across the iconic Harbour Bridge.

We stood underneath where the flags are! That is the scientific definition of the middle of a bridge.

We also discovered that the commonest Australian birds look totally crazy. I think that us taking photos of the ordinary local fauna must look like the equivalent of tourists in the U.S. taking photos of pigeons, but I can't help it. I'm stocking up on weird Australian trivia, which I will share with the universe at a time when my brain does not feel like tapioca. We've successfully stayed awake until 9 p.m., and are now declaring victory and going victoriously to sleep.

G'day mates,

Meredith