Bon Scott

In a park near the waterfront in Fremantle, I stumbled upon this statue. It’s a tribute to Bon Scott, the original lead singer of the band AC/DC. He was born in Scotland, but raised in Freeo.

Later, at the Fremantle prison, his name came up again. As I said, we didn’t have time to tour the jail, but we always make time for gift shops. Numerous copies of a Bon Scott biography were displayed there. When I asked what the connection was, I was told that Scott served three different terms in the prison, for robbery, assault, and one of my favorites, “unlawful carnal knowledge.”

So he wasn’t necessarily the nicest guy in the world, but I bought the bio anyway. Flipping ahead to the end, I read that (SPOILER) he died in 1980 and was buried in Fremantle.

This inspired one of my favorite travel things: a spontaneous non-Frommer’s sanctioned quest. Neither Pipi nor I are huge AC/DC fans, but suddenly signs seemed to be pointing toward a pilgrimage to Bon Scott’s final resting place. I don’t mean that literally, of course, but it actually wasn’t too hard to get to the graveyard. A city bus took us right to the gate, easily visible from the road.

I expected a big Jim Morrison-style scene, but found just the opposite—the grave was impossible to find. I may have been working with outdated information. It doesn’t really matter. I’d only been dimly aware of the man when I woke up that morning, so I can live without completing my quest.

While I can’t say that I have a deep appreciation for Bon Scott’s music, I am appreciative of the fact that he inspired us to have an unusual travel experience. Most visitors to Fremantle have an alfresco lunch and visit the museums. But not too many of them can say they’ve wandered fruitlessly around a suburban cemetery. I may not have closure, but I do have cocktail party chatter.

Fremantle

One other thing we really liked about Perth was Fremantle. “Freeo,” as it’s often called, is a suburb of Perth on the coast of the Indian Ocean. (Perth itself is several miles inland, connected to the sea by the Swan River.)

Approaching Fremantle on the tram, I saw a dolphin frolicking in the river mouth, which seemed to bode well. It was a gorgeous fall day, and the first thing we did was have lunch at a brewpub right on the water. On the way to lunch, we passed through a park full of wild parrots, and I was struck by how odd it is that people pay money to go to zoos in Australia when exotic wildlife is hopping around free.

We also went to a chocolate factory, because every municipality in Australia seems to have one and we felt obligated to explore them all. We spent much more time than we expected to at a museum devoted to shipwrecks. In the early days of international shipping, when the southern continent was hardly more than a rumor to Europeans, traders used to bump into Australia all the time on the way to Indonesia. The western coast is littered with wrecks dating back to the early 17th century, and the Fremantle Maritime Museum has artifacts from many of them. The most impressive is a large section of hull from the most famous Australian wreck, the Batavia, which foundered on a reef in 1629.

Because we had spent so much time looking at skeletons and rusty things at the maritime museum, we found we didn’t have time to tour the Fremantle prison, which is the Alcatraz of Western Australia. We did see a moving art exhibit there devoted to English female prisoners transported to Australia. You hear a lot about the male prisoners who were the first Europeans down under, but less about the women, although there were thousands of them.

We also spent more of the day than we realized we would just walking around the downtown. Fremantle is much smaller than Perth, and a little bit greener. It’s full of Moreton Bay fig trees just like this one. They grow all over coastal Australia, and I really like them. Like Fremantle, they seem to invite relaxation.

Koala Encounter

Caversham also has koalas. Although koala cuddling is legal in Western Australia, this particular park doesn’t allow it. You can, however, pet them, gently, on the flank, with the back of your hand.

I’m not sure why the petting protocol is so weirdly specific, but after the ranger’s spiel, I understood why we weren’t allowed to grab them and squeeze them as we pleased. It’s because koalas get so little nutrition from the only thing they can eat (eucalyptus leaves) that they spend 20 hours a day sleeping to conserve energy. The other four hours are spent binge eating. They’re busy little creatures, and don’t have much left for their fans.

Petting was nice, though. There were six or seven koalas in the enclosure, and the ranger pointed out the one on duty. You’re only allowed to touch one at a time, and the designated object of affection rotates every 15 minutes so no single koala gets too sleep deprived. The dopy, unnamed koala I got to stroke was very docile and very soft, and I could easily have lingered longer than 15 minutes if I weren’t worried that I would send it to the hospital.

(And no, to answer your question, they don’t let you give them water, even though it's all anyone has wanted to do since this picture came out. Apparently koalas normally get enough liquid from the leaves they eat, and rarely drink water.)

The Camera Adds Ten Pounds

That’s Big Bub’s story, and she’s sticking to it.

Big Bub is a hairy-nosed wombat. She’s the star attraction of an afternoon program at the Caversham Wildlife Park in Perth. With park rangers supervising, you’re allowed to approach, and in some cases touch several animals, including a quoll (a small, opossum-size marsupial); a wallaroo (looks like a mini-kangaroo); and a blue-tongued skink (a reptile with a tongue like a sharp-pei).

I arrived in Australia thinking for some reason that wombats are small, maybe the size of chubby cats. So imagine my surprise when they lugged out this furry little sumo wrestler. Hairy-nosed wombats can weigh up to 88 pounds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bub were close.

Interestingly, we were told that wombats look chubby, but are mostly muscle because they are basically God’s little tunnel borers. The camera can fool you.

When Kangaroos Attack

Surprisingly, not everyone liked the kangaroos as much as we did.

Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport

We kind of got off on the wrong foot with Perth, but there are a lot of good things about the city, starting with the place we stayed, Miss Maude’s Swedish Hotel. I picked it solely because my Frommer’s Guide mentioned a smorgasbord breakfast, but I didn’t regret it. Pancakes, crepes, cold cuts, cheese, bread, honey, jam, sausages, yogurt, baked beans, muesli, and as much coffee as I could drink were just the highlights. It was by far the best breakfast we had in a country that takes breakfast pretty seriously.

Another great thing about Perth is the Caversham Wildlife Park. This park is like no zoo I’ve ever been to in the United States. You’re allowed to interact with the animals in a way that would never be allowed here—maybe for good reason.

My favorite part of the park was a giant enclosure where you were allowed to mingle freely with kangaroos. There were dozens of them, which you were free to pet and feed. Signs urged you not to over-feed them, not to bother the ones in a roped-off rest area, not to give them anything but the provided pellets, and not to touch the joeys. But I never saw any park staff around enforcing the rules. People did seem to be treating the animals respectfully, but I was surprised at the lack of supervision, and at the fact that we were allowed to stroke and hand-feed wild animals in the first place. (And I did catch one unclear-on-the-concept family trying to feed some kangaroos a sandwich. That can’t be good for them.)

Kangaroos are surprisingly soft. For some reason I thought they would have coarse horse-like hair, but their fur is very plush. I doubt feral kangaroos would be so friendly, but this mob has learned that we are there to feed them, and are not shy about asking for food. If you don’t produce pellets quickly enough (because you’re trying to take their picture, maybe), they will put their little hands on your arm and gently suggest that feeding time is now. Gentle is the word, though. They have teeth but are very dainty about not using them as they snuffle kangaroo food out of your hand.

Feeding the kangaroos was one of my favorite Australia experiences. And I discovered that my Caversham Wildlife Park visit had a lasting effect: Kangaroo meat is at least as common on Australian menus as horsemeat is in Europe. I can eat horse (I know, because I did once, in Italy), but every time I was offered a nice kangaroo steak, I’d think of this one with its paws on my belly, sticking its deer face up into mine, begging for a pellet, and I just couldn’t do it.

(Yes, I’m a big softie. The next time I take a child to a petting zoo, I’ll probably come back a complete vegetarian.)

Perth

By the time we woke up on our last morning on the train, it was clear that we had left the desert and were approaching the coast. The land was considerably more lush, turning to farmland, and we saw some kangaroos. (One was standing in the middle of a field of sheep, looking as though it were trying to blend in.) As the sun came up, we saw a group of hot-air balloons lifting off over the hills outside of town.

Already Perth seemed different from the rest of dusty Western Australia. It soon became clear that Perth is just different, period. We learned on the train that the city is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney. Perth was founded and to an extent still is populated by people who have made their fortunes in the goldfields. Consequently, Perth, like Kalgoorlie, has a little bit of a wild-west feel to it. Or, as a tattooed, chain-smoking cab driver told me, “We’re a little oker here.” (An “oker” is essentially an Australian redneck. Oh, and the driver was a woman.)

Both Pipi and I noticed independently that there were a large number of walking wounded in our neighborhood, which was close to a shopping district and otherwise seemed respectable. People just seem to hurt themselves in Perth. I got a hint as to how this might be happening our first evening in town. Walking to dinner at about 7pm, we saw a man getting out of a cab who was already falling-down drunk. I know he was falling-down drunk because the first thing he did after getting out of the cab was to fall down. Then he began yelling at the driver, who shouted back, but finally just drove away.

I also, for the first time in my life, saw someone who was literally spitting mad. He was walking down the street with a woman, and something she said must have set him off, because he stormed off across an intersection against the light, alternately swearing at her, shouting blasphemous things at the sky, and expectorating into the street. The light had not yet turned and the woman was still waiting to cross the street legally when I got to the intersection myself. I could hear the mad man, who was halfway down the next block, still yelling and spitting. She looked at me, smiled apologetically, and said, “He’s a little angry today.” I guess I’d be upset, too, if I kept hurting myself all the time.

The Indian Pacific Spans the Land

If anyone wonders what my train postings would have sounded like set to country music, this should give you a pretty good idea. The song is by Australian music legend Slim Dusty. It was one of those pieces of music that played over the train P.A. system. I’m tempted to pretend that I hated it, but the truth is I like songs about trains and I love ones that mention exotic place names. He had me at “Nullarbor.”

High-Calorie Kalgoorlie

Not long after leaving Cook, we crossed into Western Australia. For a while, the landscape didn’t look any different, but gradually, as we left the Nullarbor Plain, the bushes got a little taller and closer together. By late afternoon, we were seeing real trees again, and it was clear we’d left the harshest part of the desert behind. By evening, we were approaching the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie, where the train stopped for several hours.

By this point in our journey, we’d realized that the rule about not being able to get off the train unless you’ve booked a tour was completely unenforced. So we had the sense to explore Kalgoorlie (“Kal,” to its friends) on our own. This involved passing up the opportunity to take a nighttime bus tour of Super Pit, the world’s largest open-cut goldmine. We decided we could live with that.

We were too late for the sights of Kalgoorlie, which are almost all museums, devoted to mining, history, and the sex industry. (This last one was our first clue that Kalgoorlie might be a little rough around the edges.) We set out on foot anyway. We’d had dinner already, but were hoping to find a restaurant where we could have dessert. Almost as soon as we’d left the train station, we passed an Asian-infused white-tablecloth restaurant, but passed it by, hoping for something a little more….I hope we didn’t use the word “authentic,” but we probably did.

Kalgoorlie reminded me of gold rush-era towns I’ve been to in Alaska and the Sierras, but Kal is what Australians call “fair dinkum;” the real thing. Places like Skagway and Nevada City have preserved main streets with hitching posts and bars with saloon-style swinging doors. Kalgoorlie has actual dirt-streaked men slumped over schooners of beer who have come directly from the mines to their barstools without passing the 21st century. It’s a real hard-drinking, two-fisted kind of place where a stagecoach or a shootout wouldn’t look too out of place.

Because the mines are still going strong in and around Kalgoorlie, the town is fairly prosperous, and nice to look at, even at night. There is one very long main street, supposedly wide enough to turn a camel team around in. I have no idea how much space that requires, but I imagine Hannan Street can handle it. The buildings mostly date from the 1890s, which is when gold was first discovered here.

Unfortunately, the only establishments open when we arrived at around 8pm were Chinese restaurants and the kinds of hotels you drink at. We figured our dessert chances would be better at a pub, and I decided that the one with a sign advertising “hot skimpies” looked promising.

At this point, I feel like I should explain my train of thought. Australians are compulsive diminutizers, especially where consumables are concerned. In a week in the country, I’d learned, for example, that “brekkie” is breakfast, a “chockie” is a chocolate candy, and a “stubby” is beer that comes in a short bottle. Somehow, in that context, it made sense to me that a “skimpie” might be edible, and that a place serving them might have sweets, as well.

No sooner had we walked in the door than our dreams of dessert were snuffed like the flames on cherries jubilee. We found ourselves in a pub with only a few patrons, all young guys who looked like they’d stopped having fun about an hour ago, and were now settling down to the serious work of getting drunk. “Skimpies” turned out to refer not to any kind of snack, but to the black latex bikinis worn by the barmaids. I’m sure we made quite a sight, standing there in our fleecy pullovers with wallaby-in-the-headlights expressions on our faces. There was no option but retreat, so we left.

A few doors down, another hotel had a menu posted that included pie. It really was pie, but we never got any. We were ignored by the waitress for about 10 minutes, and when she finally came around, she told us that the kitchen had just closed.

Her only suggestion was the hotel we had just fled, and that’s when we realized that we needed to find a place a little less authentic. We went back to Danny’s Restaurant, the first place we’d passed, and somehow white tablecloths didn’t seem so off-putting any more. Inside the décor was Japanese minimalist with no mining kitsch to be seen. Our waitress was fully clothed, and happily brought out the dessert cart for us.

Pipi had sticky date pudding, which was delicious. It was more like moist cake than a pudding, and coated in a caramel sauce. I had my first-ever pavlova. I wasn’t sure I would like it because meringue covered in whipped cream sounded a little insipid, but it was so good that we later made it at home. Sweet, creamy, soft, crunchy, and fruity, this classic Australian* dessert was exactly what I was in the mood for. I only wish we hadn’t wasted so much time that evening looking for something more real.

*I realize that pavlova is one of those things, like Russell Crowe, that Australia has appropriated from New Zealand. I think that there’s enough of both to go around.

Cook, Australia

On the train, there was a PA system that piped music into every car more or less constantly. Luckily, this could be turned off. I say “luckily,” because it was terrible music. Every once in a while a good song would lull me into listening. Midnight Oil’s “Dead Heart” made me smile and think to myself, “Hey, I’m listening to an Australian song, IN AUSTRALIA!” Then the next song would be a syrupy ’70s ballad, like “I’ve Been to Paradise, but I’ve Never Been to Me,” followed by a show tune, and I’d remember that Bill Bryson, in his book, In a Sunburned Country, described the soundtrack to this journey as probably being taken from an anthology entitled “Songs You Hoped You’d Never Hear Again.”

Sometimes the music would be overridden by a commentary track. This you couldn’t turn off, but that was okay with me because I love passive learning. Give me an excuse to stop what little I am doing, and disembodied voice spooning factoids into my brain and I’m happy.

One tidbit that I gleaned while crossing the Nullarbor Plain is that 99% of the population in the state of South Australia lives south of the 32nd parallel. I had to wait until I got home to my atlas to discover the significance of this fact. It’s basically a fancy way of saying that almost everyone in South Australia lives if not in the city of Adelaide, then in one of the many communities along the state’s southern coast.

The inlanders are scattered very sparsely across an astoundingly empty landscape. We got a glimpse of just how lonely life can be for these one percenters when we stopped at the tiny town of Cook, South Australia. (Latitude 30.61421 south.) Cook was never large, but when the owners of the railroad stopped relying on the town’s well to refill the trains’ water tanks, Cook turned into a near ghost town. Today only five people live there permanently, supporting themselves by selling trinkets and soda to train passengers and providing accommodation to train staff who take required overnight breaks here.

As you can see from the sign, the locals have a flinty sense of humor. There really did used to be a hospital in Cook, but it has been closed for years. (I also took a picture of a small building labeled “Historical Gaol Cells of Cook.” It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the joke—it’s an outhouse.)

The nearest town of any size is Ceduna (3,500 people), a five-hour drive away. There’s a tiny airfield, although I’m not sure where you can fly to, and of course, you can always take the train. Well, not always, but it’s an option four days out of the week.

On those four day when the Indian Pacific passes through, the population explodes a hundred-fold for about half an hour. It must feel a little like groundhog day for residents, because I imagine every group does pretty much what we did: laugh at the silly signs; read the plaque commemorating the 60th anniversary of the day the Men of the Trees planted 600 saplings (sadly, 60 years later, they couldn’t find a tree to pin the plaque to; it’s attached to a boulder); gaze down the line of track stretching a hundred miles in either direction without a bend; buy sodas; and then hustle back to the train when the air horn blows, leaving Cook and its five souls in peace until the next load of shutterbugs chugs into town.

Nullarbor Plain

Here is a list I jotted in my notebook the day after Adelaide. It is entitled “Things I Would Not Be Surprised to See on the Horizon,” and it includes the following items:

Buffalo
A covered wagon
Camels
Mongol hordes
The Mars Lander

After leaving Adelaide, we traveled through the night, heading roughly northward and following the eastern rim of the Great Australian Bight. For a few hundred miles, the track followed close to the ocean, and we passed through many towns.

The next morning, though, we awoke to land that was flat, dry, open, and forbiddingly orange in color. As the morning went on, the sand cooled to a salmony pink, but the few trees went from stunted to scrubby to non-existent. The only signs of human habitation were the occasional remains of burned-out bonfires and discarded Victoria Bitter cases. Once I looked out the window and saw a large skeleton (Camel? Horse? Cow?) next to the tracks. That’s when I knew for sure we had turned west and arrived at the Nullarbor Plain.

The Nullarbor is a forbidding patch of desert where temperatures can reach 130F and only about six inches of rain fall annually. The name Nullarbor sounds Aboriginal, but it’s actually derived from a Latin phrase meaning “no trees.” Early European Australians had a mania for crossing the various geographical obstacles that punctuate the continent, but still didn’t manage to traverse the entire plain until 1841. The first white man who did, Edward John Eyre, described the Nullarbor as “a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams.”

Of course, he didn’t cross by train. Which is too bad, because we were told (admittedly by train staff) that the Indian Pacific is the best way to see the Nullarbor. It’s certainly the most comfortable. There are roads across the region, but the major ones skirt the desert, and the little ones are unpaved. Navigating them involves some intense advance planning to make sure you don’t run out of gas or water.

We didn’t have to worry about any of that on the Indian Pacific. The temperature was perfect and gas wasn’t a worry on the air-conditioned electric train. There was a water fountain in the corridor, and we had a box of Tim Tams stashed away. All we had to do was sit back and watch the starkly beautiful and astoundingly empty landscape pass by.

Addled in Adelaide

Now that I am home, the first thing everybody asks me is “Didn’t you just love Australia?” And I did love being there. It is a beautiful country and we had a great time. After travels in Asia and Europe, it was really refreshing to feel very far from home but yet be more or less able to communicate with the locals.

The second thing everyone asks me is, “Aren’t Australians just the nicest people?” It seems that everyone, even people who have never been to Australia, have somewhere met an Aussie and found this person to be instantly likeable. I know I have. In Xi’An, China, in 1992, I shared a table at a crowded restaurant with a pair of women from Melbourne, and before dinner was over, we were making plans to travel to Tibet together.

Everywhere Pipi and I went in Australia, we were treated with kindness, and noticed people going out of their way to make sure our trip went smoothly. The best example I can think of was when we took a city bus to an animal park outside of Perth. The old lady at the front of the bus could have let us discover for ourselves that the part of the park where the animals were was a good mile uphill from the bus stop, but she didn’t. She grabbed my arm as I was about to exit the bus and explained that there was an intercom near the bus stop, and that we could use it to call a free shuttle that would pick us up and take us to the part of the park she’d correctly guessed we wanted to visit. She didn’t have to do that, and I don’t think every American would have, but one thing you’ll never hear an Australian say is, “Leave that lady with the map alone; I’m sure she’ll figure it out somehow.”

As kind and generous as everyone was, though, there was something a little unsettling about Australia. It was hard to put my finger on, and even harder to articulate. As much as I enjoyed my time there, I did feel a number of times like I’d slipped into a wormhole and emerged in the 1970s or ’80s. And not the fun, neon-lit ’70s and ’80s, where we danced under disco balls and had hair we can laugh about now. This felt more like the pre-United Colors of Benetton, Cold-War ’70s and ’80s; the time when we found it entirely plausible that Chinese people were keeping ancient secrets from us, and nobody thought Sting was being overly dramatic when he sang, “I hope the Russians love their children, too,” because everyone knew those Russians were different.

The best example of this cultural time warp I can come up with is a comment made by a tour bus driver in Adelaide. Adelaide is the capital of the state of South Australia, and the train stopped there late in the day that started in Broken Hill.

Adelaide presented a dramatic contrast to Broken Hill. Adelaide has a population of over one million people, for one thing. It’s also a very attractive city, with the downtown core almost completely surrounded by huge swaths of parkland. But it doesn’t have a lot of sights per se. Almost every place of interest the driver pointed out was some kind of historic house, once owned by the second governor general of something, or the lady-in-waiting to someone I’d never heard of.

I confess that my mind started to wander a little bit, but I snapped back to attention when the driver pointed out a particular park that he said was often inhabited by homeless Aboriginal people. “The city tries to get them into housing,” he huffed, “But a few days later, they’re always back.” He paused, and then added, “It’s just in their culture.”

From the little I have learned about Aboriginal culture, I think it is true that most Aboriginal groups do have a long history of being nomadic. But they do not have a 40,000-year history of lying around drunk in the landscaping, and I thought it was a little disingenuous of him to imply that the whole sad and complicated situation can be explained by the fact that those people are just different.

Silvertown Blues

Our first opportunity to visit an outback outpost came early in the trip. Not long after sunrise on the first morning, the train pulled into the mining town of Broken Hill. There aren’t many stops on the Indian Pacific route, so we booked a bus tour to be sure to take advantage of this one.

The street names, which read like my high school chemistry textbook (Sulphide, Iodide, Cobalt, Bromide) were new to me, but I had seen some of the actual roads before. Broken Hill played itself in the 1994 film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s the place where the drag queens think they’ve won over the locals after a fun night at the pub, but wake up to discover that their bus has been vandalized.

For a small town—the population just dipped below 20,000, down from a peak of 30,000 in the 1960s--there is a lot to look at. In the heyday of mining, there were 72 pubs. Many of these handsome stone buildings with wrought-iron balconies still stand, cheek-by-jowl with “tinnies,” small buildings constructed at least in part out of locally plentiful corrugated metal. There’s a radio station housed in a building with a façade that looks just like an old-fashioned wireless, and a six-story slag heap. The heap isn’t exactly pretty, but it’s interesting. The bus driver told us that there is $17 million worth of silver in that pile, and that the technology exists to extract it, but the process would cost $42 million—one of the cruelest examples of good news/bad news I’d ever heard.

After the town tour, we were taken to the bald, gouged, and artificially flattened top of the highest hill around. I assumed that this was the town’s namesake, but later I read that the original, eponymous hill has been mined out of existence. Lead, silver, and zinc are still being carved out of the remaining land. We were told that in the early 1900s, explorers complained that the dense foliage in this part of the country literally ripped the shirts of their backs, but today the landscape is denuded of trees, and full of deep crevices that have been mined for ore.

Our attention was directed to three flagpoles on the hilltop. One flies the Australian national banner. The other two were both unadorned. One, we’re told, flies a red flag when there’s been a mine accident, and the other waves a black one when there has been a fatality underground.

The black flag has flown over Broken Hill more than 800 times in the last 150 years or so. It’s not surprising, then, that the most prominent building on the mountaintop is a memorial to the miners who have lost their lives here. The rose-studded walls list the names and ages (one was only 12) of every victim. The date and cause of death are also listed, and the litany is darkly fascinating. There’s probably no good way to die in a mine, but I was still shocked at how many horrible ways there are to go. I noted falling, electrocution, tetanus, lead poisoning, explosive mishap, an ore-cart crushing, and a live burial under mine tailings before I’d even finished with the 19th century.

When we’d had our fill of underground death, we were bundled back on the bus and driven down the hill. The bus stopped at an art gallery, Silver City Mint & Art Centre on Chloride Street. Here we could browse what seemed like acres of art, including an impressive array of chains and bracelets crafted from local silver. There were paintings, heavy on horses and big-sky landscapes; whimsical pottery; only-in-Australia novelties like wine bottle holders fashioned from rabbit traps; and, incongruously, a large candy counter. (Australians do seem to have elevated liquorice to an art form, so maybe that’s the connection.) Not for sale was a work of art called “The Big Picture,” billed as the world’s largest acrylic painting on canvas by one man. That’s a lot of qualifications, but at 12,000 square feet, it will almost certainly fill your large-canvas viewing requirements.

Little of this art was to my taste, but if I’d been more ambitious, I could have used our allotted half-hour of browsing time to seek out something a little edgier. There are about two dozen galleries in town, giving Broken Hill one of the best artwork-per-capita ratios in the world, so I could almost certainly have found satisfaction somewhere.

When I got back on the bus, my watch told me it was about half-past eight, though it was in fact only 8am. Broken Hill is in the eastern state of New South Wales, but it has closer business connections with the South Australian city of Adelaide, 318 miles away. So the town operates on Australian Central Standard Time, making Broken Hill a chronological island perpetually one half-hour out of synch with the surrounding state.

Whatever the exact time, it occurred to me that it was very early on a Sunday morning for an art gallery to be open. Perhaps because I hadn’t yet had my morning flat white, I didn’t realize until we were once again rolling through the nearly empty streets that the place had, of course, opened especially for us.

From the top of the hill outside the mining memorial, three landmarks had been easily visible. One was the Palace Hotel on Argent Street, where the pub scene in Priscilla was filmed 15 years ago, testament to a movie career that never really got off the ground. Another is that silver-ridden slag heap, a daily reminder of the quickly diminishing returns to be had from mining these days.

The third was the 27-car, 2,332-foot-long Indian Pacific train that we had come in on. Today, as it does every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, the locomotive had disgorged hundreds of people who have purchased little and seen no color outside of the Arizona/New Mexico brownish-red range in as much as three days. Under these circumstances, almost anyone might acquire an appreciation for art.

If the Palace Hotel is Broken Hill’s boisterous past, and the spent pile of ore its uncomfortable present, then the train would seem to be its future. Broken Hill never made it as a movie Mecca, and will never again be a boomtown. But it’s interesting to consider a future that involves drawing people to Broken Hill’s mineral bounty, rather than selling the silver away, leaving Broken Hill with nothing but more and more names on a wall and ever-deepening holes in the ground.

Broken Hill

I’d meant to write something lengthy about a visit to the town of Broken Hill, NSW, but I didn’t get it finished. I’ll finish my thoughts next week, but for now let me set the scene with a photo of the downtown. You can see the train in the foreground. The large brick building at the far left is the Palace Hotel. This pub had a cameo in the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s the place where the drag queens initially encounter some hostility, but one manages such an exquisitely obscene comeback that everyone has a good laugh and suddenly it’s like they’re all old friends. The rules of Aussie mateship are more complex than an American can ever imagine.

Into the Outback

Like Eskimos with their proverbial avalanche of words for snow, Australians have a colorful range of synonyms for “the middle of nowhere.” A partial list includes:

Barcoo
Bullamakanka
The bush
Mulga
Woop woop
Mallee scrub
The dead heart
Back of Bourke
In the backblocks
Beyond the black stump

I mention this because on the train, Pipi and I became acquainted with nothingness more quickly than I expected. The Indian Pacific left Sydney in the mid-afternoon, and spent the rest of the arvo (see; it really is a different language) snaking through the suburbs of the largest city in Oceana. By sunset, we were in the Blue Mountains, which, though rural, are a popular getaway for Sydneysiders, and still felt pretty settled.

In the morning we woke up in the outback. We were still in the state of New South Wales, but we were hundreds of miles inland from Sydney and a world away. The ground was flat, red, and dotted with sparse, scrubby trees that didn’t grow more than 20 feet tall. It looked like Texas allowed Arizona to give it a makeover--nothing dramatic, just a little color and a few arboreal accessories. It was exactly as lonely as I’d hoped, and I felt like I could take in the emptiness for a little while longer before I would feel the need to discover an outback town.

(A special thanks to Pipi, who researched the list of nowhere words, using the excellent book The A-Z of Australian Facts, Myths & Legends, by Bruce Elder.)

Photos Are on Flickr

I finally got photos uploaded to Flickr. Here are some quick links to sets I created for different parts of the trip.

Sydney

Indian-Pacific Train

Perth

Melbourne/Warragul, Victoria

The Overland Train, Adelaide, and the Ghan Train

Alice Springs

Uluru (Ayers Rock)

Narrative will resume tomorrow!

All Aboard the Indian Pacific—Please Remain Calm

We liked Sydney a lot, and could easily have spent more time there. We never got to the Tim Tam factory, for example. I’d also hoped to get to a second location of an excellent music store called Red Eye Records, although I bought so much music at the branch that I did get to that I’m not sure how much more I could have brought home.

I also could have snacked at Max Brenner a half-dozen more times, but as with the music situation, it’s probably best that I didn’t get to indulge myself further. So as much as we enjoyed Sydney, I think we were both ready for the next leg of our adventure, which was the three-night journey to Perth on the Indian Pacific train.

This train takes its name from the fact that you will, if you stay on the train for the whole 65-hour, 4,352-kilometer, trans-continental journey, glimpse both the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. Along the way, you pass through three Australian states, change time zones twice, and cruise along the longest stretch of perfectly straight track in the world—297 miles without a bend, and precious little change in elevation, either.

One of the first things I noticed as I settled into our cabin was a sign on the wall (actually an emergency safety notice) saying “Don’t Panic.” And I could see where Indian-Pacific passengers might be a little on edge: The economy-class sleeper compartments are small. Really small. By day there are two seats facing each other with a folding table between them, a comically narrow closet, a luggage rack high overhead, and a sort of a Murphy sink that folds out of the wall like the bed in an old-fashioned studio apartment.

I also noticed a bunk bed suspended about 15 inches from the ceiling, and my palms got clammy imagining sleeping in such a tiny space. By night, though, the bunk is lowered several feet, and a bottom bunk, perhaps inspired by the sink, flips down out of the wall. Full linens and towels are provided. There are single-sex toilets at one end of each carriage, and, remarkably, two showers at the other end. A red-service dining car served bland but perfectly adequate hot food. It was snug, but there was enough space under the seats and in the closet to keep our bags out of the way and our diversions close at hand. I confess that I did have a moment of panic when I first saw the tiny space where we would spend the next three days, but once we’d left suburban Sydney and spotted our first-ever wild kangaroos, I decided I was up for the outback adventure.

Just Because

Here's a koala eating eucalyptus. They do a lot of that.

Opera House

I thought I knew what the Sydney Opera House looked like. It’s smooth and white, right?

Not quite, as it turns out. It’s actually a slightly pinkish beige, and I learned on a tour that the exterior is made of ceramic tiles. They’re laid out in a pattern that suggests fish scales, or feathers. It’s a pretty outlandish building, designed by a Scandinavian architect who wasn’t positive his own design could even be built.

And if you think the current building is wacky, you should see some of the other proposals. A contest was held in the 1950s to solicit ideas for the design of Sydney’s new opera house, and the ones that didn’t look like Frank Lloyd Wright boxes looked like places the Jetsons might go to see a show.

And here’s another interesting tidbit about the opera house. The seats in the main performance hall (where unfortunately you aren’t allowed to take pictures) were made out of materials chosen because they absorb the same amount of sound as a human body. This means that a diva who has been rehearsing in an empty hall isn’t startled by a change in tone when the house is packed on opening night.

Maybe that’s common in opera houses, or maybe it’s a musical urban legend. But it impressed me nonetheless. Interestingly, the author Jan Morris, whose book Sydney I have with me, says that Australians like to sniff that they have the best opera house in the world. The only problem, they say, is that the façade is in Sydney and the interior is in Melbourne. I didn’t see an opera in either place, so I can’t say if I think this is true.

Dugongs

I knew Australia had wacky wildlife, but here’s a creature I didn’t know about: The dugong. These look like manatees, and I never did find anyone to tell me if they’re the same creature we have in North America. In any case, I’ve never seen a manatee with my own eyes, so this was a new experience.

These dugongs live in a deep tank in the Sydney aquarium. You can look down at them from a walkway around the edge of the tank, or you can walk through Plexiglas tunnels at the bottom of the tank and watch them swim above you.

That might sound scary, but even small children seemed to love it. Dugongs are the size of park benches, but so roly poly that it’s just hard to take them seriously. They look like they’re smiling as they happily Hoover up romaine lettuce left on the bottom of their tank in an approximation of the naturally growing sea grass they would normally eat.

(Lettuce! They got this big on lettuce! What in the world do they eat when they’re dieting?)

The aquarium has two large tanks. The dugongs live in one, and Great Barrier Reef creatures live in another. In one part of the second tank I saw a coral shelf surrounded by lots of little dentist-office fish. That was nice but we’d seen so many angelfish by this time that I was ready to move on pretty quickly. Just as I was about to walk away, a giant potato cod (“sofa cod” is more like it) drifted out from under the shelf and scared us half to death. Pipi and I both sort of shrieked, and as we looked around nervously to see who’d noticed, it slunk back under the rock to wait for the next victim. I almost think it was doing this on purpose. I guess it probably gets pretty boring swimming around the same tank day in and day out.

On an unrelated note, I want to apologize for being out of touch. Everything’s fine; it’s just kind not as easy as I’d hoped to get an internet connection and, as I think I mentioned, I’m on vacation! I won’t be for much longer, though, so posts should pick up soon.

Taronga Zoo

The zoo here is amazing, probably the best I’ve ever been to. It’s not just the scenery. The zoo also has great shows, like a ranger talk about birds punctuated by actual raptors and parrots swooping over the audience on cue. And there is a large Australian animal area that comprises almost half the zoo.

I have always had a particular love of koalas, so a highlight for me was getting to go into a cage with two of them. This one was named Katy, if I remember correctly. It might have been Katy’s friend Trevor. It’s kind of hard to tell them apart.

You can’t touch the koalas here, or anywhere in New South Wales, for that matter. Koala cuddling is only legal in a few states, and yes, there actually are laws on the books concerning koala cuddling. It’s a different country. So I don’t know what they feel like, but I can report that their fur looks very soft and plush, but maybe not so clean.

An interesting note about Australia: As anyone who has read Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country knows, almost everything in Australia can kill you. It has toxic snakes, spiders, jellies, crocodiles, fish, and even seashells that can bring down a grown man. But the bears? Sleepy, stoned, and perfectly harmless.

(Yes, I know koala bears aren’t really bears, but I still think it’s interesting.)

Here is a link to more photos. I apologize if some of them don’t have captions yet. I’m on vacation!

Tomb With a View

I expected to like Sydney, so I wasn’t a bit surprised that it has turned out to be a friendly, sunny, agreeable city. What surprised me a little bit was the discovery that it is also an attractive city. I knew the harbor was supposed to be pretty, and I knew the weather is good, and I knew that the Opera House is one of the worlds’ most striking buildings. But I also know that Sydney is a relatively new city, as world capitals go, and that it grew enormously in the last 50 years. I worried that this would mean a lot of bland, hastily built post-war sprawl.

In actuality, Sydney has a really interesting mix of old and new architecture. There’s no old district; instead you find solid sandstone Victorian-era government buildings right next to light glass skyscrapers. I find the variety nice to look at, and I can’t think of another city where old and new are integrated in exactly this way.

But far more striking than the architecture of Sydney is the setting. I know that everyone says this about the place, but I guess everyone has to discover this for his- or herself. What really drove it home for me is the observation that harbor views are so plentiful here that they are actually giving them out to dead people and animals.

On our first day, we visited a cemetery near Bondi Beach that stood on a bluff overlooking the open ocean. (It was a setting for some movie we’d never seen.) This was a spectacular setting, but it had nothing on what we saw yesterday at the zoo. The Taronga zoo is situated on top of a hill across the harbor from downtown Sydney. On a clear day, which we had, you can see the above vista from much of the park. It’s a little distracting. At one point, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to look at the giraffes in the foreground or the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background more. I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone by not automatically prioritizing God’s creatures over man-made constructions, but please keep in mind that they have giraffes at the zoo in my hometown, but I’d never before set eyes on the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Here is a link to photos. I apologize if some of them don’t have captions yet. I’m on vacation!

Greetings From the Land Down Under

Pipi and I are in Australia! We arrived in Sydney at 6am this morning, and hit the ground running, immediately embarking on a narrated tour of Sydney movie locations.

For most people, the highlight of this tour would have been driving very slowly past Nicole Kidman’s house, hoping she’d come out (no luck there); lunch on Bondi Beach; or getting the dish on where celebrities hang out in Sydney. But Pipi and I are not most people. Our favorite part was the very first stop on the tour. This was the Harbourview Hotel (pictured), which was featured in our favorite Australian movie of all time. We want to make our Harbourview stalking experience complete by going back for dinner or a drink (it’s one of those hotels that’s not for sleeping), but this will do for now.

After our tour, we stopped by a chocolate shop near our hotel that we saw from the van. This turned out to be Max Brenner’s Chocolate Bar, which offers chocolate bonbons, decadent chocolate desserts, fondue that is nothing more (or less) than a melted chocolate bar, and the best hot chocolate ever, in flavors like toffee and Dutch orange. I thought our hotel, at the edge of the Central Business District, was well located when I booked it, but now I know I made exactly the right accommodation decision.

Our day has been very long. We haven’t slept in a real bed since Sunday morning, and as I write, it’s Tuesday night. So we’re a little delirious, and it’s not just the cocoa taking. Tomorrow will probably be a long day, too, because I expect to be up around 4am with jet lag. The plan is to take a ferry across the harbor to the zoo. I wonder how early they open?

Here are some photos of our first day.

Waking up Canadian

Here’s an unsettling thought: You may be Canadian and not even know it.

If you’ve suddenly found yourself putting vinegar on your French fries, listening to a lot of Rush, or getting uncharacteristically excited about hockey, there’s a possible explanation: You may have become Canadian on April 17.

Probably you didn’t, though. My understanding is that the new laws apply only to people born outside of Canada to Canadian parents. So if you have no known connection to the great white north, it’s unlikely that you are now from there.

Still, if you find yourself seized with the sudden desire to smother perfectly good potatoes in cheese and gravy, you might want to check out this link to see if it is possible that you are Canadian.

On a Different Note…

…So to speak, is the music of New Zealand opera legend Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Strangely, Ms. Kanawa has been in our local news lately because an employee of a bank in Alameda, California, is accused of embezzling a large sum of money from her.

Play it Strange

New Zealand tends to get overshadowed by its bigger, louder neighbor across the Tasman Sea. This has certainly been the case for me lately. I’ve been getting myself in the proper frame of mind for my upcoming trip to Australia by watching a lot of Australian movies and listening to a lot of music from down under.

My neglect of New Zealand’s contribution to popular culture is especially egregious right now, as May is officially New Zealand Music Month. (Well, it is in New Zealand, anyway.) This inspired me to put together a tribute to some of the strange, beautiful, genius music from the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Split Enz: Six Months in a Leaky Boat
Tim Finn’s New Wave paean to the rugged individuals who settled New Zealand.

The Swingers: Counting the Beat
Led by the mad genius Phil Judd, the Swingers were the most famous band to come out of Split Enz that wasn’t Crowded House.

Neil Finn: She Will Have Her Way
Here’s another Split Enz alumnus, Neil Finn, at his Beatlesque best.

Tim Finn: Fraction Too Much Friction
And here’s his brother, Tim. I saw him open for Suzanne Vega when I was in high school. At the time I hadn’t really heard of him, and was impatient for the main act. Now I wish I had been paying more attention.

Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
Long before there were Tegan and Sara, there were the Topp Twins. This song might be better with the just the audio because the clothes and the hair are, frankly, a little distracting. But acoustic sister jams don’t get much catchier than this.

Flight of the Conchords: Business Time
Proof that New Zealand zaniness is alive and well in the 21st century.

Better Than a Boomerang?

I’m going to ask if I can’t pick up a copy of my thermal image on my way out of Australia. That would make a truly unique souvenir of my trip.

Are You Hot or Not?

I’ve been emailing a wonderful woman in Australia named Janice who organizes and conducts tours of movie locations in Sydney. Because Australia aside, I love Australian movies so much, I scheduled this tour for our first day in the country. In our emails, we’ve been trying to figure out exactly where and when we should meet.

In the course of figuring out how long it will take Pipi and me to get downtown from the airport, Janice has informed me that because of swine flu, there will be one brand-new immigration hurdle to jump through at the airport: a thermal imaging machine. These machines scan a traveler’s body and report his or her temperature down to a fraction of a degree. These machines can’t say for sure if a person has the H1N1 virus, but they can at least flag visitors arriving with a fever.

This seems like a pretty good idea. What would make it a great idea would be if they performed this screening before we got on the plane. They way they do it now, they can stop one infected person from bringing down a whole continent, which is good. But speaking selfishly, I’d really like it if they found a way to keep that one infected person from sitting next to me for 15 hours.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Pipi was just in Eureka, California, on business. While filling up the rental car at the Bigfoot Gas Station in nearby McKinleyville, she was struck by a sign so odd that she submitted it to the Signspotting web site. You can see it—and rate it—here.

Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

My cable company likes me so much (and why shouldn’t they—I just started giving them five dollars extra a month so that I can watch soccer games filmed with what appears to be the original Zapruder camera) that they gave me a voucher for a free on-demand movie.

I knew I had to use this windfall wisely. It occurred to me that I should probably order a long movie, to maximize the value of the gift. If it were something I’d been meaning to see, obviously that would be a good thing, and if I could claim it were educational, or even work-related, so much the better.

This is how I came to watch the entire movie Australia by myself this evening, while Pipi was away on a business trip. It was kind of fun, and romantic, and full of really pretty things, like outback scenery and Hugh Jackman. Unfortunately, it was also full of really bad special effects, alcoholic Ocker characters, and magical aborigines. I almost always like Australian films in general, and those by Baz Luhrmann in particular. But this was no Strictly Ballroom. It wasn’t horrible; it just proves that Australians can have their sweeping epics fall flat, too.

Underwater Photography

I’m rough on cameras. The last film camera I bought was purchased in Hong Kong when I was studying abroad, an acquisition that was necessary because I had taken its instamatic predecessor with me on an unscheduled dip in the Formosa Strait. And my first digital camera is, as far as I know, at the bottom of China’s West Lake, the victim of a boating accident. So if I ever ask to borrow your camera, please gently but firmly tell me to get lost. Especially if I’m going to Asia. (Or swimming.)

Dude, Where’s My Charger?

I was talking to my father about travel inconveniences, and he brought up an excellent point: Technology can make some things about traveling easier, but it does introduce a whole new set of headaches. Chief among them is the seemingly constant need to charge gadgets. I remember my friend John and I desperately trying to keep our cameras, computers, telephones, and iPods charged up using one single outlet in a tent in Mongolia. It’s not really a fond memory. The cell phones and music players we obviously could have done without, but I was trying to blog and John is a professional photographer, so we really needed our big battery-powered toys to work.

This new need to charge things kept me from moving into digital photography for a good year. When Pipi and I went to Cuba in 2002, we were told that the island ran on the same voltage as the United States. What we didn’t realize, however, was that our hotel in Havana was a Dutch-run establishment that attracted mostly Europeans, and the plugs all fit continental-style power cords.

The front desk had a few adapters available for guests to borrow, and I remember lively negotiations for them among the members of our group who had brought digital cameras. I watched this drama from a smug distance, and hung onto my film camera until it came to the end of its natural lifespan in Hawaii the following summer. If I hadn’t had to replace that camera then, who knows how long I would have resisted moving into the digital age.

Gone Digital

Film is another thing Rick Steves says he has stopped discussing in his books, because he feels that most tourists have gone digital.

Although I still love the idea of art photography on film, and do own a film camera, I don’t really miss the practice of worrying about film while traveling. Hustling up multiple rolls before departure, keeping them separate from the exposed film, trying to find camera shops in strange cities when I inevitably ran out, worrying about the airport x-ray machines ruining my photos….none of these rituals is one I am nostalgic about.

I know a lot of things about travel used to be easier in the old days. You used to be able to wear shoes, pack nail clippers, and carry an oil drum full of shampoo if you wanted to, as long as it fit in the overhead bin and you could demonstrate that it wouldn’t ignite as you chain-smoked in your seat.

Travel has obviously acquired some inconveniences in recent years. But I find it helpful to remember that it has shed some, too. Modern technology means we never have to worry about leaving the airplane tickets at home, or running out of film just as the Loch Ness Monster is ready for its close-up.

Those thoughts don’t entirely take the sting out of having children laugh at you as you get jets of air shot at you in a little glass cage and strangers root through your luggage, but they help a little.

Another Travel Ritual I Won’t Miss

As I was reading through this week’s travel section, an item in an article by Rick Steves caught my eye. While listing what’s new in Europe this year, he mentions, almost in passing, that he has taken information about traveler’s checks out of his newest guidebook editions, because his feeling is that modern ATM networks have rendered traveler’s checks obsolete.

This comes as a relief to me. I haven’t used traveler’s checks in a long time, and it just dawned on me that maybe I never will again. I won’t miss them. Losing a wad of checks while traveling is another disaster I somehow managed to avoid, which is remarkable, because that kind of thing is right up my alley. It’s a relief to know that I may never again have to worry about keeping track of serial numbers or finding a bank that’s open on whatever saint’s day it happens to be.

Armchair Travel

I just finished reading a fantastic book called The House at Sugar Beach, by Helene Cooper. It paints a picture of a place, Liberia, that I don’t think I’ll be visiting any time soon, but the picture is vivid.

The author grew up a privileged child in Liberia during the 1970s. In 1980, when she was 14, there was a coup and her family had to flee. An adopted sister was left behind to finish high school.

The author’s search for forgiveness from her sister reminded me a little bit of the movie The Killing Fields, and her journey from spoiled child to refugee reminded me of Empire of the Sun--although Helene’s own mother insisted that they were not technically refugees because they paid for their own plane tickets out of Africa.

Much of the book takes place outside of Liberia, but I still learned a lot about the country and its incongruous history. This taste will have to do until Liberia calms down enough to sustain a tourist industry. (I’m not holding my breath—even Lonely Planet recommends against going anywhere in the country outside of Monrovia.)

Little Things Seem Big to Nicole

Coin collecting is not a glamorous hobby. I know that. Shaking out my piggy bank and poring over handfuls of change looking for wheat pennies did not help my playground popularity as a child, and as an adult, fewer people than you might expect think that being able to tell if a coin came from Philadelphia or Denver is a good party trick.

But, getting excited about things that most people could care less about does have its advantages. For instance, something happened to me today that would be an annoyance at best to normal people, but which made my whole afternoon.

I went to buy flowers in a neighborhood where you pay for your parking at a machine that gives you a receipt to put on your dashboard. I have noticed that these contraptions often reject perfectly good coins, letting them fall through to the change return box, so I always check the box both before and after I put my own money in.

This time when I checked, I found an unexpected treat. It wasn’t a bent nickel, or a slug, or even a quarter with something stuck to it, but something even odder: an English 20-pence piece.

Okay, it’s not really that big of a deal, but I do love the idea that a machine designed to give me parking validation instead spat out a little piece of Europe.

Paper Tickets Are Dead

I also read an article that included a quote by a travel expert who declared paper tickets “technically obsolete.” What a relief. I’ve made a lot of dumb travel goofs in my day, but I never actually managed to lose a plane ticket. Now, I can safely say that I never will.

Armchair Travel

The tidbit about banking in Maui is just one of many facts I gleaned from a recent travel-section binge. I had a number of Chronicles stacked up, and finally worked my way through them.

Speaking of banking, one other interesting thing I learned is that the dollar is surprisingly strong against foreign currencies these days. About a year ago, for example, one U.S. dollar was buying about one and a quarter New Zealand dollars. But now one dollar is worth almost two Kiwi dollars. This is about the rate I remember from my visit five years ago. The news about Australia is also pretty good for Americans. A year ago the currencies were very close to equal. Now a U.S. dollar is worth about half again the value of an Australian dollar. That will help considerably down under.

Fun Fact

The bank in Hana, on the island of Maui, is open only ninety minutes a day.

I’m Just Saying

A partial list of places gay couples can get married:
Spain
South Africa
Nepal

A partial list of places they can’t:
Fire Island
Key West
Palm Springs
Buenos Aires
Greece
Sydney
Berlin
Los Cabos
Las Vegas

It occurs to me that a trip where a couple gets married in every country where it’s legal would be an odd but interesting adventure.

Not Strictly Related, But….

….Vermont! I did not see this coming.

How does this make me feel? Surprisingly sad. Sad because as good as the news is, it led me to notice that in one important way, California falls short of the example set by states to the east.

We have no maple candy here.

I learned this because I could think of no better tribute to Vermont than a spontaneous mid-afternoon maple sugar candy binge. First I tried Walgreens, then an upscale grocery store with lots of imported candy and cookies, and finally a candy store in a swanky neighborhood. No luck. The lady at the candy store said they sometimes get maple candy at Christmas. I told her that spring is maple syrup season and she smiled at me in a way that I thought was reserved for people who offer useless information. I left empty-handed and still unsure how to honor the Green Mountain State in a way that doesn’t involve a trip to Ben & Jerry’s.

I guess I can boil up some corn on the cob while I thinking that over. (Thanks to you, too, Iowa!)

Reading Material

It’s a looooong flight to Australia. We have a non-stop flight from Los Angeles that will take just under 15 hours. Much of that will be at what seems like nighttime to us, but I don’t sleep all that well on planes so I need something to do. We will also be taking two long train trips in Australia, and of course, there’s always the trip back.

This means that I need a lot of reading material. Luckily, I have a number of books stacked up at home. I do feel, though, that I should stock up on some destination-specific reading.

I have a guidebook, a Frommer’s guide to the whole country that I’ve been flipping through. I’ve also already read Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.

If I’m feeling like something light, I might re-read The Thorn Birds. I read that once when I was quite young—probably too young, actually—and I remember having crushes on several characters and the whole southern continent as well. It seemed like a place with enough drama to satisfy a young teenager, which is a lot of drama indeed.

I also want to read Jan Morris’ Sydney. Her last book took me several months to get through, so that may be enough, but if anyone else has some good Australia books to recommend, I would love to hear about it.

Making a List

Speaking of music, here’s my Australia playlist so far.

Land Down Under, by Men at Work. Vegemite? Chunder? If you lived in New Hampshire in 1982, this song made Australia seem like the most exotic place in the world.

Lady, by the Little River Band. From 1978; probably the first Australian song I ever heard. My Mom and I both used to get so excited when this came on the radio.

Jessie’s Girl, by Rick Springfield. No, he is! Who knew?

Humming a Tune, by Mental as Anything. From the Starstruck soundtrack.

Body and Soul, by Jo Kennedy. A remake of a Split Enz song, also from Starstruck.

That’s the Way, by Deckchairs Overboard. An oddly mesmerizing song featuring a pre-Crowded House Paul Hester as well as a bass player that I thought might be a drag queen but isn’t. You have to see the video for this one.

Before Too Long, by Paul Kelly and the Messengers.

Something So Strong, by Crowded House. I saw this video so many times in the eighties that I only recently realized how well the song stands the test of time.

New Sensation, by INXS.

What’s My Scene, by the Hoodoo Gurus.

Dream World, by Midnight Oil.

Take it In, by the Waifs. I love this band!

Let Me Be, by Xavier Rudd. From 2004. See, I’m not entirely trapped in the eighties.

Throw Your Arms Around Me, by Hunters and Collectors. Okay, yes I am.

I know there some big omissions. No Olivia Newton John or Bee Gees, for one thing. I don’t think I own any songs by these artists. I guess don’t love everything Australian.

Tangled up in Blue

I hope it was clear that I was joking about being in a funk yesterday. Eating ice cream and listening to girls with guitars is actually perfectly normal behavior for me. It’s only when the music stops that you need to worry.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Sometimes when I submit an article to an editor, I hear back right away, but usually rejection takes a long time. The record so far is two years. So the nine months it took a certain Los Angeles-based publication to get back to me about an article on Japan that I sent them last June isn’t too unusual.

What is unusual is that I think nine months is the longest I’ve ever waited for this kind of message. It wasn’t exactly a rejection, but it certainly wasn’t encouraging. The email thanked me for sending the piece, and noted that they receive far more submissions than they can possibly print, making competition for column inches very tight. Then it invited me to look at their online editorial guidelines and wished me well.

It was, frankly, a little bit like being dumped by a serious smooth talker; the kind of breakup where the conversation seems nice while you’re in it, but later you realize that what they were saying was that there won’t be any more conversations.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. I’m not going to go get an extreme haircut over it or anything. It just kind of came out of the blue is all. Why now? Was I being needy? Did the editor meet another Japan article? Can we still be friends? I don’t know. I’m going to spend the next few days eating ice cream and listening to Joni Mitchell, and hoping it will all make sense eventually.

Meanwhile, Back in My World

This is what it feels like in Oakland today: Like it’s going to take divine intervention to turn things around.

I love Oakland, but it’s a rough time to be in the city. In January, BART police shot an unarmed man to death on the platform of the BART station closest to my house. Now a fugitive parolee has managed to kill four police officers single-handedly before dying in a standoff.

These killings took place around MacArthur Boulevard, a very long street that cuts through many neighborhoods, my own included. I haven’t gotten as far east as 75th Avenue on my walking tour yet, but yesterday I decided to jump ahead a little bit. I usually like to finish one neighborhood before moving on to another, but I wanted to see what was going on in this part of the town that has been in the news lately.

MacArthur Boulevard in Eastmont didn’t look all that different from the way it does near my house. There’s a big cemetery, which feels peaceful. But on the side streets, most yards have chain-link fences and big dogs.

The most remarkable aspect to the neighborhood right now is that there are several shrines set up to honor those who recently died. On two corners at the intersection of 75th and MacArthur there are floral tributes to the four officers. And on 75th Avenue, in front of an apartment building (I think the one where the suspect and the last two officers died) there is a memorial for the cop killer.

This disturbed me because I don’t see any way to paint this particular incident as an example of police brutality. Plus, the killer, with a long rap sheet and DNA evidence linking him to the rape of a 12-year-old girl, is a hard guy to feel sympathy for. Still, as the signs on the avenue attest, he was someone to somebody—quite a few people, actually. That gave me something to think about as I walked back toward my own, quieter strip of MacArthur.

Taking Care of Business

No matter; there is still plenty of time to square away little details, like hotel reservations. Right now I’m concentrating on important arrangements. I’ve already taken care of booking a tour of the Sydney Opera House and a walking tour of Sydney movie locations. And I’m making good progress on researching concerts we might like to see. I’m also making lists of movies we have to rent before we leave. (Top of the list are Australia, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert--again.)

When is a Hotel Not a Hotel?

Answer: When it’s in Australia.

It’s said that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems plausible. In a possibly related linguistic quirk, Australians seem to have developed several different words for “drinking establishment.” If you want to go out for a drink down under (as opposed to picking up something at a “bottle shop” to drink at home), you can go to a bar, a pub, a club, or, confusingly, a hotel.

Hotels in Australia always have beer, but they don’t necessarily have rooms. I learned this the hard way when I emailed the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney. I knew of it because it played a boardinghouse in my favorite Australian movie (Starstruck), and I thought it would be fun to stay there.

I wrote asking how much rooms cost, and wondered why they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to take my money. I finally got a politely restrained note back explaining that they aren’t a hotel you can stay at. That was disappointing, but maybe it’s for the best. The hotel seems to be right under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and it probably would have been too noisy for sleeping anyway.

If anyone has a recommendation for a moderately priced hotel in Sydney, please let me know!

Australia is Sooooo Big…

How big is it? So big, motorcycle gangs travel by plane.

I wish this were a joke, but it isn’t. A few days ago, rival biker gangs clashed at the Sydney airport, smacking each other with those metal poles that the velvet ropes go between. The melee spread over two floors. This sounds absurd, and it is, but someone did die, so it’s not really funny.

There are many unanswered questions regarding this incident, some of which probably only bother me. For one thing, how did the one gang find the other? As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t just meet people at the gate anymore in most places, and I would have thought Australia was one of those places.

Secondly, what was the biker gang doing on a plane? Australia, which has sunny weather and wide-open roads, is probably the ideal place to ride motorcycles. Why in the world didn’t they make a road trip of it? I know, I know, the distances between Australian cities can be huge, but they’re bikies (to use the Australian slang I just learned). What else did they have to do this week?

It’s hard to even imagine a biker on a plane. Real rebels don’t put their seats in the full upright position just because the man tells them to, and they certainly aren’t going to extinguish their smoking materials. And how did they get through the metal detector? There are many things I don’t understand about this strange and troubling gang incident, and I can’t believe I’m about to go halfway around the world to find the kind of senseless violence that exists right in the Bay Area.

Rising to the Challenge

This morning I didn’t know what KLM stood for, but I do now: "Koninkliijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij," which means “Royal Airline Company.” This information comes courtesy of my father, who is both a former airline pilot and a speaker of Dutch, so I didn’t have to go far to get the answer.

(K,L, and M are also the San Francisco public transportation lines that run under Market Street between the Financial District and the Castro neighborhood. When I moved to San Francisco, I quickly learned that to get to the Castro, I just had to pretend I was going to Amsterdam, another sexually liberated place with lenient recreational drug policies. Or so I hear.)

Fun Fact

Have you ever wondered why there’s no “u” in “Qantas?” This has always driven me nuts. Australians, like the British, put “u”s everywhere they don’t belong (colour, favour, etc.) and then leave out this one, which, coming after a “q,” I would have considered mandatory. But there is an explanation: Qantas is an acronym standing for “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.”

If only this new information somehow allowed me to use “Qantas” as a Scrabble word, but alas, a proper noun is a proper noun.

The Third Sex?

Here’s something I’ve never encountered before: A few hours after booking our tickets to Australia, I went back to the Qantas site to double-check that my reservation had gone through. It had, but the site did want me to fill in some pre-departure information to make it official.

One of the personal details they wanted amused me. They wanted to know my gender, which is not so funny, but the options were: male, female, or “unspecified.”

“Unspecified.” Not “transgender,” or “intersex.” Not “none of your darn business.” Just “unspecified.”

I have the impression that Australians pride themselves on being a little more brash and forthright than their tea-sipping Kiwi neighbors, but I am reminded that both countries came into the world as English colonies, and it seems the Aussies haven’t totally lost their instinct for defusing awkward questions in a dignified and understated way.

(I marked “female,” but I’m seriously considering changing my answer just to see what happens.)

It’s My Recurring Dream

Do you ever have recurring dreams? I never have exactly the same dream twice, but I have recurring scenarios. Most of them are pretty common, I think. One is where I show up to work or class inappropriately dressed, or not dressed at all. The other involves being completely unprepared for something at school. Sometimes it’s a paper I haven’t written, but usually it’s an exam I haven’t studied for, and almost always, the class is math.

There is one other category of anxiety dream that I’ve been having more and more often as an adult. (I have lots of good dreams, too; they’re just more creatively plotted.) Lately I’ve been having stressful dreams about traveling and messing up. Usually I’m about to miss my plane for some really dumb reason--I can’t get anyone to tell me when the flight leaves, or I’ve forgotten to pack, or I realize on my way to the airport that I don’t have my passport or tickets. (I also often dream that the plane is flying really low, or landing on a freeway. I don’t know what that’s about.)

The one thing these travel dreams have in common is that I’m almost always on my way to Australia in them. I’m not sure why the land down under is so anxiety-provoking for me. I think it has something to do with the fact that it’s such a big deal to go there—I think I’m really afraid of messing up something that important and hard to reschedule.

I mention this because in May, I really will be trying to catch a flight to Australia. Pipi and I have been talking about this for a while, and we finally committed. I just bought two tickets to Sydney on Qantas. They’re non-refundable (although for what I paid, I think I get to keep the plane when we’re done), so we’re going for sure now.

It’s two months away, but I’ve already started a list of things (like packing) to be sure to do before we leave the house.

Small Digital World

My Hawaii article appeared in the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, and also online. There were a few comments posted to the online version. These reader comments can be pretty nasty, but the group went pretty easy on me. (I think--I am still scratching my head over the Jimi Hendrix/rainbow bridge post.)

What I didn’t see were emails that readers sent directly to the Chronicle. The next week’s travel section quoted a few, though, and one message made me laugh. It was from Sandi, the park ranger who helped turn around my bad attitude about the weather.

She didn’t say how she’d found the article, but she did say she liked it, and I’m glad. I meant for her to come off well. I needed a talking down that day, and Sandi came through. Thanks for reading, Sandi!

Not Losing Hope Yet

I wrote the Shanghai article quite some time ago, and I was starting to give up on finding a travel-section audience for it.

I happened to mention this to the people I will call, for lack of a better word, my in-laws. (There’s nothing lawful about it at all, but don’t get me started.)

Anyway, Pipi’s mother suggested that instead of trying to get travel publications interested in an article with a Jewish theme, I instead try to get a Jewish journal interested in an article with a travel theme. Genius! There’s hope for this piece yet.

Well, It’s Better Than a Dishonorable Mention

Here’s another interesting development: One of my stories won an honorable mention in the 2009 Solas Awards. This is a writing contest sponsored annually by Travelers' Tales, a Bay-Area publishing company specializing in travel literature.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that there seem to be a lot of categories, with several winners in each category. You’ll also notice that the honorable mention list is rather long. You’d be forgiven, then, for concluding that this is one of those competitions where everybody wins. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I did the math (and then had to go lie down for a while) and determined that it was a competition where hardly more than a third of the competitors won.

The story in question is one I’m happy to have praised, however faintly. It’s about Shanghai’s Jewish history. I’ve been having trouble attracting attention to it, and I was starting to think I’m the only one who finds the idea of Jewish culture in China intriguing.

“Hey, Let’s Go out for Mongolian…”

The oddest thing about Mongolia popping up again in my life is that hours before I noticed my yurt write-up, I had been chatting with a real Mongolian.

Pipi and I had gone out for waffles at a neighborhood place we’d never been to, and I was feeling eccentric, so I was wearing a suede herdsman’s jacket that I had bought at a natural history museum in Ulan Batar. Our waitress noticed it right away. She told me she herself was from U.B.—she was quick to add that she’d been born in the urban area, and I got the impression she wanted me to know that she was a city girl, no more a nomadic sheepherder than I was.

Later Pipi chided me for leaving without asking the woman where we could get good Mongolian food in the Bay Area, but sadly, I don’t remember Mongolia as a place with really great cuisine. I liked a lot of the things I ate; I just don’t see salt tea and fried mutton dumplings really catching on here. But then, Northern Californians do like a good yurt, so you never know what’s going to find an audience.

Published Again

Here’s a pleasant surprise: I was out of town the weekend of March 1, so it took me several days to get my hands on a Chronicle travel section from that weekend. When I finally did, I noticed that a small blurb of mine got published. I had no idea this was going to happen so I hadn’t even submitted an invoice. It turns out it literally pays to read the paper carefully.

Published

My Hawaii story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend. I’m very happy with it. The editing was minimal, so I stand by it all. Here’s a link.

On A Completely Different Note

Once upon a time, if you wanted to pick someone up at the airport, you used to be able to meet people at their gate as they got off the plane. I used to love that. I loved the anticipation of watching streams of people come out of a jetway and watching the face of one person in that crowd light up when they saw me. I loved being met, too, and I would always feel a twinge of sadness anytime I got off a plane unmet and had to walk past all those people hugging and kissing their loved ones. I would feel this way even if I was just changing planes and wasn’t even expecting anyone to greet me. It embarrassed me, but it would happen every time.

Now, of course, you have to have a boarding pass to be anywhere near a gate. I’ve gotten so used to the ritual of meeting people at baggage claim--or being swooped up in a touch-and-go curbside operation--that I don’t get wistful anymore walking through the airport by myself.

Just recently, though, Pipi happened to notice that they still have flight arrival information posted at airports. Why is this? No one meets people at gates anymore. You can only meet an arriving passenger if you have a boarding pass, meaning you’d have to be about to go somewhere. How often does that happen? Maybe more often than I think, but I’m pretty sure the posting of arrival information is just one of those quaint things, like no-smoking signs, left over from a bygone era of air travel.

Snow Day

Pipi and I are back from Boston. I’m afraid it wasn’t a fun trip—we were there for Pipi’s grandmother’s funeral. We left Saturday morning for what was supposed to be a punishingly quick trip to the East Coast, but were saved from ourselves by the weather.

On Sunday morning, the day of the funeral, we woke up in the hotel to discover that the biggest storm of the year had already dumped about six inches of snow on Cambridge, with no sign of letting up. Later that morning, as I stood by the snowy gravesite, I thought to myself that this must be Mother Nature welcoming Dorchester-born Grandma Ethel back to New England.

Pipi and I and the rest of her immediate family were supposed to fly back to California Monday, but the storm caused a huge number of flight cancellations and for a while, it looked like the whole party might be stuck. Pipi’s sister-in-law, Michelle, said she thought Ethel was telling us she wasn’t ready for us to go home yet, and I think maybe we weren’t ready to go, either. At brunch, we all batted around ideas about how to fill our extra afternoon in Boston and everyone but Pipi and I, who already knew we were grounded, put off checking the status of flights back to the West Coast.

In the end, the L.A. family made their flights out and only Pipi and I stayed behind. I wish I could say we spent our day going to museums and exploring the city, but the weather was really awful, so we mostly watched movies and read books. When we went out, we limited ourselves to the Harvard Square area. It was a classic lazy snow day, and it felt like a delicious indulgence.

Could Michelle be right? Could Pipi’s Nana have sent the snowstorm? I know the answer is no, that there’s nothing otherworldly about a nor’easter in New England. But it’s fun to think about, and I like the idea that the day off was one last thoughtful gift from a classy and considerate woman who will be missed.

We Interrupt This Broadcast

I am going to be making an unexpected trip to the East Coast. This should keep me busy for the next few days. I’ll be back Tuesday.