Uluru at Last

Finally, we caught a glimpse of the big rock we’d traveled hundreds of miles inland to see: Uluru (pronounced “Ooolooroo,” with equal emphasis on every syllable).

We arrived at our hotel in time for a late lunch, and took the first available shuttle to the rock. The shuttle lets passengers off right at the base of the trail used to climb to the top of Uluru. This surprised me because I already knew that visitors are strongly discouraged from summiting.

My guidebook says that Uluru is considered to be a sacred place by the local Anangu people, and that seemed reason enough not to climb. I wouldn’t swing from the rafters of the Blue Mosque, so why should I be allowed to leave footprints all over Uluru? A display at the visitors center elaborates, explaining the top of Uluru is a place traditionally reserved for men who have been through a special initiation ceremony, meaning that even Anangu women would not be allowed to climb. Seen that way, I felt like I definitely had no business on top.

Near the trail entrance, there are numerous signs asking visitors again not to climb. Two caught my eye. One was printed in several European languages, although for some reason English was not one of them. I could read enough of the French to get the gist of it: The sign reminds you that if you should manage to kill yourself climbing, this will not only be a huge issue for you, it will also make your parents and friends very sad. The Anangu will also be sad, it says, so just think about that before you go risking your life on the steep, slippery rock.

It was the second sign, though, that really cinched it for me. It had a quote from a local tribal elder saying simply (in English): “You shouldn’t climb. It’s not the real thing about this place.”

This sounded like something out of the Book of the Tao, and I loved it. I decided that the elder’s words could almost be interpreted to mean that the Anangu discourage visitors from climbing not so much because they find the ascent offensive, but more because it drives them crazy to see us wasting so much energy on what seems to them like a pointless endeavor.

What, then, is the real thing about Uluru? I had no idea, but I hoped I would find it on the Anangu-approved trail that circles the base of the monolith. (Photos from our hike are here.)

Is That Uluru?

When traveling between Alice Springs and the Ayers Rock Resort, I think a lot of people mistake this monolith for Uluru. (At least I hope I’m not the only one who has done this.)

The rock pictured here is actually Mt. Conner, a few meters shorter, a few million years older, and 55 miles distant from Uluru. Both Uluru and Mt. Conner pop up out of the desert in a similarly dramatic fashion, and both were probably formed by the same process of erosion.

One major difference between the two is that the former Ayers Rock is now often called by its Aboriginal name, Uluru, while Mt. Conner appears stuck with its plain old European moniker.

Lonely Highway

A lot of people—including me, until very recently—think Alice Springs and Uluru are just a kangaroo hop away from each other. In fact, they are separated by almost 300 red, dusty miles. It took us close to six hours to make the trip by bus. It took this long partly because there were a number of stops for photos and shopping, and partly because the road pictured is the second-largest road between Alice and the rock.

This road is the Lasseter Highway, and yes, I was standing right in the middle of it when I took the picture. Seeing this made me wish that for this part of the trip, at least, I had rented a car. Driving on the opposite side of the road in a major city like Sydney would probably be beyond me but on a road like this, I think the only hard part would be staying awake.

Emotional Emu

I guess I’d be in a bad mood, too, if I were left out in a cage in the rain. So I’m not hating on the bird or anything. I’m just making an “I” statement, which is that I was very scared of this emu. It was as tall as I am (okay, I’m not all that tall but I would be FOR A BIRD!) and it had red eyes. My sister used to have a cockatiel (an Australian bird, incidentally), and it could leave a welt if it put its little mind to it. I shudder to think what a bird 400 times that size could do.

A Dingo Ate My Preconceived Notions

We took a bus from Alice Springs to Uluru, a distance of almost 300 miles. This coach tour came with narration and several planned stops. The very first one was at a camel farm that had several other exotic animals on hand. We were told there was enough time for a quick camel ride, but it was beginning to rain, so we just said hello to the dromedaries, waved at the alpacas, gave the angry emu a wide berth (seriously, I don’t know if it’s rain or tourists that they don’t like, but I think that thing would have taken a finger if we let it), and set off in search of the dingo puppy we’d heard lived on the farm.

We found him here, hiding under a rock because of the rain. He wasn’t overly friendly, but he let us pet him. I didn’t get the impression he wanted to eat anyone’s baby, although naturally no one offered him one. Either someone was pulling our leg about it being a dingo (entirely possible, although this is what they look like), or else these animals have gotten a bad rap.

Walking a Mile on a Camel

As I mentioned a few posts back, early explorers of Australia often used camels to get around because they could handle the desert conditions much better than horses. Camels were also used to help transport people and supplies when rail lines were first being laid in Australia.

When the bulk of the exploring and building was done, a lot of camel drivers made the grimly practical decision to let the camels go free, even though there was no reason to think the domesticated animals would survive in the wild. But they did, to the point that today there are so many camels in Australia that some are exported back to the Middle East.

No one knows how many camels there are down under. Estimates run from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands. All we can say for sure is that with this many camels, riding one isn’t really an exotic experience. But it felt like one when we went for a sunset camel ride at a farm just outside of Alice Springs.

Luckily the riding didn’t involve a lot of skill—the camels just loped along very slowly in a single-file line, led by a rancher on foot. It wasn’t even very hard to get up on the camels. Unlike horses, camels can kneel right down on the ground, making it really easy to step into the saddle. The only hard part came when the camel stood up. They’re really tall, and they rock forward and then back as they stand up straight. The lurch is a little bit scary and so is being up so high, but we got used to it quickly.

Pipi and I both rode a big guy named B.J. Like all the camels there, B.J. had one hump, which I rode in front of and Pipi sat behind. I’d heard that camels can be foul tempered, but B.J. was nothing but accommodating, and by the end of the ride we decided that we liked camels almost as much as kangaroos.

We wandered through the desert for about an hour, watching the sun set through increasingly atmospheric clouds. We saw wild kangaroos. Afterward, we got to stick around and help feed the camels hay with the rancher and his wife, a self-described Bondi Beach girl who still can’t believe life led her to the desert. Apparently she came to Alice Springs on vacation, and like Mary Anne Singleton in reverse, realized she’d found her place and decided to stay.

We liked Alice Springs, but not enough to do anything rash. We would be sticking to our itinerary, and early the next morning we departed for Uluru, or Ayers Rock, the giant, mysterious monolith that pops up out of the desert in the middle of the country

Thorny Devils

Pipi and I both arrived in Australia with ideas about things we were hoping to encounter. For example, I’ve known since I was a teenager that I like Australian music and furry Australian animals, and I planned our itinerary in such a way that I could experience both.

Pipi, too, arrived with a dream about something she’d like to see, but it wasn’t anything she’d known about since high school. In fact, it wasn’t something she’d known about when she got on the plane. Pipi fell in love with a thorny devil lizard she saw in documentary during the flight across the Pacific.

For this we have the excellent Qantas in-flight entertainment system to thank. There were so many films, documentaries, and TV programs to watch that I don’t think we saw very many of the same shows. I did steal a few glances at the reptile documentary while I was watching (but mostly listening to) something about the band Hunters and Collectors. I noticed that Thorny devils are cute by lizard standards. They have spiky armored skin, and look like little stegosauruses, only adobe-colored and about the size of a kitten. They even walk a little bit like newborn kittens, with a funny stuttering gait that makes them look like they’re not quite sure what to do with all those legs yet.

Thorny devils are native to central and western Australia. We never saw one in the wild, but we did encounter two lizards in captivity at the Alice Springs Desert Park. This was a peak experience and we watched them snuffle up ants for quite a while. (And dreamed about getting one to live in our kitchen. One winter in our old apartment I thought we’d have to get an aardvark to keep things under control.) We were nearing the end of our trip, and getting close to seeing everything we had reasonable hopes of seeing.

R.I.P. Sam the Koala

Thirsty little Sam, the koala who survived the bushfires near Melbourne last winter, died in surgery recently. I do realize that the real tragedy is the huge number of animals--not to mention all the people--who died in the actual fire, but still, this makes me sad.

Change of Plan

We had an ambitious plan for our one whole day in Alice Springs. This plan involved the Aboriginal culture museum, a museum devoted to women of the outback, and the Alice Springs Desert Park, featuring the flora and fauna of Central Australia.

The park was our first stop. Gradually, though, it dawned on us that we could spend all day here. So we did. We took our time, seeing all the animals and reading every sign that caught our eye. It felt liberating to jettison our itinerary.

Among the many tidbits of information we learned at the park is that Central Australia used to be covered by an ocean, and that there are only two or three bird species in the world that use tools, and this park has an example of one—an eagle that uses rocks to crack open emu eggs.

We also stumbled upon a lecture on Aboriginal culture given by a man from the Aranda group (or “mob,” to use his word). We got a crash-course in the complicated customs and rituals that enable people to survive on land that doesn’t have a lot to offer. The talk was pretty interesting, and we felt a little more comfortable about our decision to skip the Aboriginal museum and give our one activity for the day the attention it deserved.

When You See the Southern Cross for the First Time…

…You inevitably hum that song to yourself.

This particular night in Alice Springs wasn’t the first time I’d ever seen the Southern Cross. The very first time was several years ago in New Zealand, and yes, the Kiwi friends who showed it to me did serenade me with a chorus of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song.

On this trip, I saw the Southern Cross dimly from an observatory in Sydney, and spectacularly late one night going through the outback on the Indian Pacific train. Alice Springs, though, was the first place I’d ever had the chance to take its picture.

Here’s how you find the Southern Cross: There are two bright stars on the far left of this photo. If you draw a line through them and extend it, it bumps into the constellation, which is fairly close to being upright. There are five stars, but I can only see four in the photo, and the one on the far right is dim. The cross is proportioned like a kite.

The Southern Cross is no Scorpio, or Orion (who is sometimes visible in the Southern Hemisphere, but he stands on his head—it gives me vertigo to even think about why that is). The Southern Cross is not very dramatic. But it’s elegant, it’s iconic, and it is off-limits to us northerners. Catching a glimpse of it really did make me feel just a little bit more like I understood why I came this way.

(See, actually if you’re from the Northern Hemisphere, you hum the song to yourself pretty much every time you see the Southern Cross.)

A River Runs Under It

I didn’t mean to be too harsh on Alice Springs. The Aboriginal situation was troubling, but I did like the town. I came to Australia hoping to find some of the characters and customs, invariably described as either “offbeat,” or “quirky,” that are so often seen in Australian movies. I found them in Alice, where even the pigeons are a little off. Look closely at this one—he looks pretty normal, except he’s got a Mohawk. That’s one tough-looking pigeon.

We visited at the wrong time to see the wacky sporting event that is Alice’s claim to nautical fame, but it was enough for me to know that I had visited the only town in the world with a boat race that is cancelled if there is too much water. Or really any water. This race is the annual Henley-On-Todd Regatta. It happens every August and is run along the course of the Todd River.

The Todd is dry for all but a few days every year. Only a sustained downpour will make the riverbed fill up, and this just doesn’t happen much in the Red Centre. (It was explained to me that in central Australia, rivers run upside down, with the sandy bottom visible and the water normally flowing just underground.)

Most years, the regatta takes place on bone-dry land. Participants compete in Flintstones-style bottomless boats. Racers carry the vessels and run with them along the riverbed. A trickle of water is no big deal, but if the actual river should make an above-ground appearance that day, the race has to be postponed. (This really did happen in 1993.)

A hydrophobic boat race definitely qualifies as quirky in my book, and added to Alice’s appeal. In addition, we had a good dinner at a restaurant with a menu emphasizing bush tucker ingredients, and I finally got a picture of myself with a bottle of the Pure Blonde lager I’d been seeing all over.

One last appealingly oddball aspect of Alice Springs is that it was the queerest place we went in all of Australia. At dinner, surrounded by short-coiffed, sensibly-shod women who appeared to be either lesbians or German tourists (for some reason it can be really hard to tell the difference), Pipi wondered aloud if an Olivia cruise was in town. I didn’t even realize she was joking until I was gently reminded that we were 750 miles from the ocean. Alice Springs is just that kind of surprising place, and we could have used more time there.

A Town Called Alice

On the afternoon of the day after we left Adelaide, we arrived in Alice Springs, a town of 27,000 that is about as close to the middle of nowhere as I’ve ever been. It’s also as close to the middle of Australia as most visitors ever get. This whole area is known as the Red Centre, and is indeed both red and central.

Two things about Alice reminded me of Arizona. One was the MacDonnell Ranges, a ridge of adobe-colored, weathered hills that looked like rocks I’d seen in the Southwest.

The second thing that made me feel like I was in Arizona was the sad collection of dilapidated houses on the outskirts of town. Watching the news the day we arrived, I saw a report about the Aboriginal people who lived in these houses. The structures were provided by the government but were so inadequate that residents had taken to cooking in their front yards. The situation shocked me a little, and reminded me of a depressing college road trip across a Native American reservation in Arizona.

Alice Springs was the first place where Pipi and I saw Aboriginal people in any number. I don’t mean to make the situation sound entirely bleak. A number of businesses in town did seem to be Aboriginal-owned, and galleries sold a lot of quality indigenous art. But it was hard to ignore the aimless crowds of Aboriginal people congregating in the dry riverbed that runs through town. Some sat reading like they were at the beach, some painted, and some stared into space like they were just taking a personal moment to regroup. But as we crossed the river on our way to dinner, it was clear that most were hunkering in for an evening spent drinking around bonfires.

Pipi and I were a little taken aback, especially since we had seen so few homeless (or under-housed) people so far in Australia. We had been hoping to learn something about Aboriginal culture, but this wasn’t exactly what we were expecting. Luckily, we were soon to see a more positive side.

What’s up With the Name?

The Ghan is named after the Central Asians who were some of the first to regularly trek into Australia’s parched interior. They were a lot more successful than Europeans because they thought to use camels rather than horses. In actual fact, not very many of these explorers were from Afghanistan. Most were from Persia and what’s now Pakistan, but the name stuck around long enough that the rail line following their route became known as first “The Afghan Express,” and later, “The Ghan.”

The current route of the Ghan takes it from Adelaide, on Australia’s southern coast, almost directly north to Darwin, on Australia’s Top End. Cathedrals have been built in less time than it took to construct this line. Ground broke at Port Augusta in 1878, and by 1929 it had only gotten as far as Alice Springs, in the middle of the country. So many of the original track’s ties (or “sleepers,” as Australians call them) were eaten by termites that long stretches had to be re-laid. This took until 1980, and the extension to Darwin didn’t open until 2004. (I’ll save you the math—it’s 126 years.)

The stretch between Adelaide and Alice Springs, which took 51 years to build, now takes the train just under 24 hours. After the three-night trip on the Indian Pacific, it felt like a commuter jaunt. It seemed like we’d just set up the beds, arranged our nest, and taken a few glances out the window looking for kangaroos and suddenly we were pulling into the outskirts of Alice Springs.

Take a Gander at the Ghan

Here’s the Ghan at the town of Port Augusta, South Australia. This was the only major stop for us, as all the organized tours along the line were in towns north of where we got off the train.

We didn’t see much of Port Augusta. The train didn’t stop for long, and the station is not in an exciting part of town. The most interesting thing to look at within walking distance of the train was the train itself, almost eight football fields long. The locomotive was much longer than the platform it pulled up to. Pipi and I were lucky enough to be in a car that was easy to disembark from, but many passengers at the end of the train had to walk through several cars until they got to one that opened onto the platform.

The landscape on this trip started out as familiar flat, scrubby outback, but gradually got redder and more eroded, until it looked a little like Arizona. I expected blazing sunshine, but for most of the first day, the sky was moody and overcast, and I could see rain in the distance.

After Port Augusta, the Ghan’s route turned northward away from the coast and did not pass through any sizeable towns until it arrived in Alice Springs about 18 hours later. At about 9am the morning after leaving Adelaide, the train crossed the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory. This was a big deal. An announcement was made 15 or 20 minutes early so we could be sure to be watching for the signs that marked the otherwise undetectable state lines. We all lined the corridors, and at the climactic moment I, like everyone, took a picture. I’m glad I have a picture because I didn’t really see the signs—I was too busy trying to take a picture of them.

There’s probably a lesson there, but my point is that this was not the kind of trip where you can expect the scenery to entertain you. You make your own fun on the Ghan, which, as I have said, is the kind of trip I like. Australian train travel is probably not for everyone, but I enjoyed it, and if your idea of a relaxing day is one where a road sign is the biggest thing that happens to you…well, I think you people know who you are, and I urge you to hit the rails if you’re ever down under.

Well, It’s Not Like There’s A Secret Handshake

I learned two things the day news of Prop. 8 reached the Ghan. (Well, three, if picking up a new form of non-violent protest counts.) The first thing I realized is that Australians are much better informed about the world than the world is about Australia.

The second is that you just never know where you’re going to find allies. Who knew Linley was gay? Who would have guessed that his big, burly bloke of a co-worker would be perfectly comfortable talking about wedding details with him? It just goes to show that you can’t make assumptions about anybody. (And that my gaydar goes seriously on the fritz in foreign countries.)

We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Redecorating

Just before departure from the Adelaide station, Pipi went off to purchase some snacks and came back nearly in tears. She’d walked past a TV tuned to the news, and had seen a report on how California’s Proposition 8 had just been upheld.

We were surprised that California politics were news at all in South Australia, and I wondered if we were the only ones who had noticed.

We hadn’t been on the train long before I had the answer. In the dining car, I heard the big, red-faced guy serving dinner ask our car attendant, Linley, about his upcoming wedding. Linley, who had not, up to this point, set off my gaydar, mentioned that the ceremony would take place in Europe. “Good thing it’s not in Los Angeles,” said the ruddy one, “They just outlawed it there. Six people got hurt protesting.”

I expressed my dismay at having missed the protests. Part of me was ready to overturn a car. “Surely you don’t actually want to be destructive,” said Linley, “Maybe you just want to sneak into politicians’ offices and redecorate or something like that.”

It was an odd proposition, but not a bad idea, really. I’m thinking Brokeback Mountain posters all over Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Sacramento lair. Or even better, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert memorabilia. Those girly men were fierce.

Into the Dead Heart

Adelaide we also left by train, specifically the Ghan. The Ghan goes from Adelaide all the way north to Darwin, on the north coast, but we were only going as far as Alice Springs, about a 24-hour journey.

During the afternoon of our departure, we skirted two bodies of water, the Gulf St. Vincent, and the Spencer Gulf. This was the last we would see of water for the rest of the trip. It was also the last we would see of major population centers. Eighty-five percent of Australians live within 30 miles of the coast, and we were heading inland rapidly. Our destination—and the end of the trip—lay in the area known as the Red Centre; the dry, landlocked, camel-dotted interior of the country. This part of Australia is also sometimes referred to as the “Dead Heart,” but as we were to see, it was actually pretty lively.

Wobbly Wallabies

Pipi and I got to five out of seven Australian states. The ones we missed were Queensland, which has the Great Barrier Reef and seems like it deserves an undivided vacation to itself, and Tasmania.

I have nothing against Tasmania, and wish I could have fit it into our itinerary, but something had to give. I don’t really regret passing it over…or at least I didn’t until I read this. Tiny, meandering marsupials on opiates—now there’s something you just can’t see in this hemisphere.

Thanks to my sister, Hilary, for bringing this to our attention!

One of Those Cities No One Cares About

In Adelaide, we watched an Australian game show called “Talking About My Generation.” This show pitted contestants from three different generations (Boomer, X, and Y) against each other. I am good with trivia, so I thought I might do well with the Generation X questions. But the very first one required knowledge of a 1980s vegemite jingle, and I realized that my knowledge bank is virtually useless down under.

One question involved knowing which Australian city was the first to see a certain product on grocery store shelves. The generation Y man guessed it was Perth. (Actually, he said, “Parth;” he was Irish.) This was wrong. The correct answer was Adelaide, the very place where we happened to be at that moment. “Ah,” he sneered, “I knew it was one of those cities no one cares about.”

This seemed harsh, especially in regards to Adelaide, a lovely city with nice parks, a gentle climate, and a surprisingly broad array of available foodstuffs. It is, as I have noted, a city so nice we went there twice.

And if our snarky Irish friend thought Adelaide was provincial, then it’s a good thing he wasn’t with us for the remainder of the trip, because our itinerary was about to get even less ready for prime time.

Adelaide

Adelaide has the distinction of being the only place in Australia (aside from the Sydney airport) that we visited twice. Both visits were very short, however. The first time was a stop of a few hours on the Indian Pacific train. I spent just enough time there to get mad at a tour bus driver, and then we were gone.

The second visit was also train-related, and also short. We arrived on the Overlander train from Melbourne at about 5pm, and the Ghan, the train we would take to Alice Springs, left the next day at around noon.

Adelaide is not a nightlife city, so that evening, we didn’t do much beyond dinner and laundry. I once paid $15 to have a resort in Hawaii wash a pair of pants, so I was happy to discover that our Adelaide hotel had self-service laundry machines. (I didn’t even mind that the laundry room was so far from both the front desk and our own room that I was given a map to follow.)

The next morning we explored what we could of the city. The hotel was within walking distance of Adelaide’s Central Markets, the largest produce market in the southern hemisphere. It had row after row of stalls selling fresh meat, produce, and other tasties. If you can imagine Seattle’s Pike Place market, only with fewer flying salmon and more kangaroo, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what it was like.

Pipi and I stocked up on bread, cheese, and jam for the upcoming train ride. This photo was taken at a stand where we only window shopped, having been cured of any desire to eat kangaroo in Perth. The array of goods was pretty amazing, and I learned more than I ever wanted to about kangaroo preparation. It was as if Forrest Gump’s army buddy was from Australia: “Kangaroo sausage, kangaroo fillet, kangaroo pepperoni, kangaroo curry, kangaroo stir-fry….and that’s about all you can do with kangaroo.” You could also get crocodile several different ways, and they had a few emu steaks. This was not your typical Bay Area farmer’s market, that’s for sure.

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Do

When it was time to leave Melbourne, we did so by rail, taking the Overland train. This train is named after the so-called “overlanders” who first explored the interior of Australia, and it runs between Melbourne and Adelaide at approximately the speed of a trotting emu. I believe the journey took about 10 hours, but it’s hard for me to do the math because there was a confounding 90-minute time change at the South Australian border.

This train journey was memorable for being possibly the most sedentary experience of my life. Because the journey is a day trip, there are no sleeper cars on the Overland, just two classes of seats. We splurged on the top class, where food is not free, but it is delivered to you. There are no stops on the route. There is no observation car to go to. There was enough room in the passenger car that I could have moved around if I had wanted to, and once I realized that, I didn’t feel like I needed to. I just settled in, made a little nest of reading material for myself, looked out the window, and ate what came my way.

Enjoying—as opposed to merely enduring--a train journey depends on your ability to do this, to slow yourself down to a near hibernating state. I love situations where there’s nothing to do because it means nothing is expected of me. And if nothing is expected of me, it doesn’t matter how quickly the time is or isn’t passing. After a while, I stop even looking at my watch.

I know some people, people whose sentences are peppered with words like “structure,” and “goals,” and “accomplishment,” find boredom stressful. Not me. I think it’s liberating.

More Max

Another great thing about the Melbourne dining scene: They have Max Brenner cafes here.

We have taken to referring to Max Brenner as if he were not only a real person (he’s not), but possibly dating us. Is this healthy? Probably not, but it’s just a vacation thing. The only Max Brenner shops in North America are on the East Coast, and we won’t even be passing through any more Australian cities that have M.B. locations. Melbourne is where this bittersweet affair will come to an end, so we are making our time with Max count.

Like love-struck teens, we make excuses to walk past the store as often as we can. We try to go see Max every day, and if we are separated for an evening, we get a little peevish. I worry that we are very close calculating our two-week anniversaries and writing “Mrs. Max Brenner” on our notebooks.

I don’t know how to quit things like this soufflé with ice cream, strawberries, and two kinds of melted chocolate.

Good Eats

I knew before I arrived in Australia that the country is relatively welcoming of immigrants, but I was unprepared for just how diverse the population is. White Australians do sometimes say things that make me wonder if they’ve never met a person of color before—Pipi, for example, saw a cooking-show host call someone an “Indian giver" on live television. But I know this cluelessness can’t be for lack of exposure. Walk down any street in any Australian city, and you’ll see a surprising number of non-sunburned faces.

One happy consequence of this diversity is that Australia, while not exactly a foodie destination, does have some great Asian food. I had Malaysian for the first time in my life in Sydney, and in Melbourne, I had Peiking duck for only the second time ever.

One of the reasons I’ve eaten this dish so seldom is that at home, you usually have to order in advance, or wait a very long time for your duck to come. Not so at the Bamboo House restaurant in downtown Melbourne. Peiking duck is a regular menu item there.

After some delicious appetizers (including soup dumplings, hard to find in the United States), the waiter brought out half of a roasted duck for our inspection, dramatically presenting it in front of us like it was an expensive bottle of wine. We nodded appreciatively, not sure what we were expected to say. (“Yup, that’s a duck; can’t fool me!” sprung to mind.) The waiter took it away, and moments later returned with these little bundles, each of which had the perfect amount of duck meat, duck skin, plum sauce, and scallion inside.

It was fantastic, one of the best things we ate down under. Let’s hear it for the brave immigrants who are literally adding a little spice to the colonies.

Melbourne Forecast: Cool, with a Slight Chance of Melancholy

One thing I regret about the trip is not spending more time in Melbourne, although I don’t know what I would have cut short to make that happen. I just wish somehow I’d had a little more time to get to know this city.

Sydney is the heart of Australia’s movie industry, and many films are set in that city. Melbourne, on the other hand, is the epicenter of antipodean music, and so songs tend to take place there. Because of this, Melbourne was kind of like a pen-pal to me before I arrived. I felt like I knew it, but I wouldn’t have been able to pick it out of a line-up.

One aspect of Melbourne that keeps coming up in song after song is the weather. Crowded House’s Four Seasons in One Day is thought to have been written about Melbourne. In his song Leaps and Bounds, Paul Kelly mentions that it’s eleven degrees in Melbourne that particular May day. He means Celsius, but that’s still not exactly balmy. (51F.) And when the Waifs (in their song Take it All In) sing that, “We step outside, into the Melbourne Weather,” somehow you know they won’t be needing sunscreen.

Fittingly, Melbourne was the one place in Australia where I did get caught in the rain. But I didn’t mind, because that was just Melbourne doing exactly what I expected it to do. (By the time I finished with the music store I was on my way to, the rain had quit.) Mostly the weather was fine, just pleasantly cool and moody.

“Cool and moody,” come to think of it, might be a good description for the city in general. It has an appealing mix of staid European architecture and occasional flights of off-the-wall modern, as in this picture of Federation Square, a popular place for people-watching at the edge of the Central Business District.

I like a little mood in a city. I’ll take atmospheric over sunny and bland any day.

Party in the Hole

In my back yard, we have many distressing holes. Most of them are just anthills. I worry that some of them are spider holes. A few of them are large enough that a snake is not out of the question, but it’s a lot more likely that they are just gopher holes.

My point is that most of the holes at my house, though they seem worrisome, are really quite small and, like many things in my life, would not remotely impress an Australian.

Take this hole, for example. It’s large enough for a 40-pound dog to disappear into. I know this because I saw a dog that size disappear into it, trying to find the wombat that created it.

This happened on the property of Nancy’s son Phil, who is one of the extended family members we visited in Warragul. The hills in the area are dotted with wombat holes, and farms in Victoria have wombats the way rural America has raccoons. Phil says it’s not at all unusual to see wombats waddling around at night, but we were there during the afternoon, so we didn’t see any.

We did hear them, however. After the dog ran in, we could hear two sets of muffled growls coming from deep within the hillside. This was the dog and the wombat talking trash. After a few minutes, they apparently agreed to disagree, and Bonnie the dog came back out unscathed.

We just don’t have anything like this in Oakland, and if we did, my pets would want no part of it. I am reminded again that even the dogs are brave in Australia.

Gippsland

We flew into Melbourne and spent the night there, but our next stop was really the countryside about 90 minutes by train outside of the city. The area is called Gippsland, and it is, to use a favorite Australian word, lovely. It’s much greener than Western Australia, with rolling hills and quite a few vineyards. It looked something like California’s Sonoma county, if you can imagine our wine country full of gum trees and kangaroos.

This area was ground zero for the fires that made international news last winter. Though everyone who lives there has a fire story and can point to exactly which window of their home they could see raging flames from, it was already hard to tell that anything had happened. It was almost eerie how quickly the land had healed itself, at least superficially.

Our specific destination was Warragul, a town of about 22,000 people. We were in Warragul to visit the lovely (again, there is no other word) Nancy Smith. Nancy is the mother of Pipi’s brother’s wife. That makes Nancy our….well, there really is no word in our language for this relationship. We think of her as family, and in return, she seems to think of us as stray kittens in need of nearly hourly feedings, judging from the TLC we received in her home.

I like to think of our trip up to this point as somewhat adventurous. Pipi and I explored cities we’d never been to, crossed a forbidding desert, and faced down wild animals. Once in Warragul, though, we entered a new phase of our journey, one that involved extreme pampering. Nancy put us up in the most comfortable beds of the whole trip (we slept 10 hours the first night), and fed us the best meals we had in Australia. Later we would again be intrepid explorers, but for the next few days, we would be torpid and well fed as we got to know this mellow corner of Victoria.

In the spirit of relaxation, I’ll think I’ll call it a day.

Off to Melbourne

Our flight from Perth to Melbourne was a little over three hours long and left at about ten minutes past 1991.

Getting on this Australian domestic flight was easier than any boarding process I’ve been through in years. We were not asked for boarding passes or I.D. at security. We were allowed to keep our shoes on going through the metal detector. We did, of course, have to show our boarding passes to get on the plane, but Pipi ended up sitting next to someone who only realized after he’d taken his seat that he was on the wrong flight, so they clearly weren’t checking too thoroughly.

The other interesting thing about this flight was that there was no boarding protocol. I think first class may have been able to get on early, but when it came time for general boarding, the gate agent leaned over and murmured a few unintelligible words into the microphone, and every single person in the gate area jumped up and formed a scrum at the entrance to the jetway. There was no pushing or shoving, though. The process was surprisingly orderly. I got the sense that everyone except Pipi and I knew exactly what was going to happen and what he or she should do when they got the signal.

Pipi and I were an embarrassment, though. We were still wandering around clutching our shoes in our hands and begging people to look at our driver’s licenses when boarding started. We were almost the last people on the plane. If the process had been any simpler, we probably would have missed the flight entirely.

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.