Brisvegas again

I'm back at my Aunt's house in Brisbane...I was last here about 10 months ago with Vic...how beautifully symmetrical. Anyway, alot to update on...

First off, we were extremely thankful to find a buyer for the car. On saturday morning we bowed to inevitability and went around with new signs - this time advertising the car for $1400, down from a previous $1800 - and soon enough the calls started coming in. By the end of the day we'd sold the car - for $1200 - to a really nice English couple. They didn't mention the crack in the windscreen...so neither did we. I quashed my pangs of guilt with the thought that all's fair in love, war and second-hand car sales.

(Laura is sad about selling the car but I just look stupid)

After a couple of ecstatic nights out and a final day in town - the weather finally deigned to be sunny so we spent it by the lagoon (artificial beach) - we made a speedy exit from Cairns. I wasn't overly keen on the place. It's in a lovely tropical setting (the best day I had was when we left the city for Kuranda, a little village in nearby mountains and rainforest) and the reef is breathtaking.



The town itself does have some nice buildings with balconies and verandas galore, but the place is so permeated by tourism that it doesn't seem to have any identity beyond that. Add to that the proliferance of English/Irish/German/Canadian backpackers who've flown up from Sydney with the intention of getting wasted night and day...the clubs put on toad races, wet t-shirt contests and "Mr Backpacker" nights, and play insipid, soul-destroying commercial r'n'b, which gave me an attack of "the media is DESTROYING all advances made by feminism" depression. Not keen.

Anyway, Laura and I decided to part ways for our trip down the east coast - partly because we're working to slightly different timescales (her flight is on monday, mine thursday), partly because we both felt we needed more solo-travelling time, and partly because we've spent approximately 90% of our time together for about 5 months now and needed a break. We got on the coach together, and then I stopped in Townsville while she continued down the coast. (We'll be meeting in Sydney for a goodbye session, never fear).

Left to my own devices, then, I had a day and a night in Townsville, and another in a little place called Rainbow Beach, separated by a night on the coach (ouch, but it gave me some valuable reading time). I enjoyed the 3 days immensely - after travelling with the car for so long, it was nice to assert my independence again. The weather was glorious. Townsville - which we'd passed through on our way up the coast - is a lovely city very much in the tropical Australian model, charming but, I began to feel after a while, almost sinister in its perfection...the sea front is developed in a series of parks, skate ramps, swimming pools and copious quantities of children's playgrounds, with landscaped lawns stretching down to the well-patrolled beaches (netted for jellyfish, with vinegar dispensers provided in case of stings). Public barbeques abound along with toilets, showers and changing rooms, all eerily clean and well-kept...as a Dutch girl I was talking to commented, "Where's the graffiti?" In Europe these areas would be well and truly decorated with some urban art, the barbeque gas would have been set alight and the whole place would stink of piss. Are Australians just better at peeing tidily? Does the council clean up far, far more diligently? Or are there less disenchanted teenagers expressing pent up anger and hatred through vandalism? The whole population of cities like Townsville seems to be white and middle-class, to have young children and to take regular exercise...with maybe a couple of aborigines thrown in. We know where the asylum-seekers are - detained in camps in the desert. However, this doesn't explain the absence of all other ethnic groups and wage-brackets...I suppose they're all crammed into suburbs like Cronulla, Sydney.

My next stop, Rainbow Beach, is a tiny town - just a cluster of shops and hostels really - on the coast near to Fraser Island. I climbed off the coach, cramped and fed up, and ran straight into the sea, to be knocked about by the huge waves. I spent a beautiful, solitary day - I think I acheived self-actualization - eating, sleeping in the deserted dorm, reading, writing. At sunset I ventured out for a combined walk/run/explore and stumbled across the feature known as a "sand-blow", a sand cliff that must be upwards of 20 metres high, separating beach and rainforest. Sliding/running down it was immensely enjoyable. The rainbow sands of the name were a slight disappointment to me, I must admit: basically the sand comes in three colours: your typical Australian pale gold, black and white. Hardly justifies the "rainbow" moniker...I suppose it was wishful-thinking to expect green and blue sand. Damn.

My evening's reading was interrupted by some drunken Australians, one of which offered to marry me to get me a visa (I took his card; good to have a back-up plan if the career ladder doesn't work out so well back home) and then argued with me over the value or otherwise of aboriginal culture (According to this guy, it is the indigenous people who actually caused much Australian land to become desert. Oh, right - and I thought it was the immigrants with their mining, development and pollution who'd screwed up the ecosystem!) I did take his advice about getting up to watch the sunrise, however, but the cloudiness of the morning limited the experience somewhat. Then it was back on the coach and Aunty Fiona met me in Brisbane. Since then I've been luxuriating in being in a proper house!! with my own room!! a bathroom where no one will steal my shampoo! I can leave my ipod lying about wherever I like! It's like a dream.

And finally, a coming-home update...I've delayed my flight yet again, but just for a week - I'm now arriving home on the morning of the 10th. This is because I will be spending a week in the US!! Flying into Los Angeles, and then I hope taking a trip to San Fran as well. Uber-exciting...

Open Water...

I can't believe I've been in Cairns for over a week now...and that the car is still not sold...but first let me update on happier things.

I've just got back from a day on the barrier reef, which was pretty fantastic...admittedly this was just a day-trip, which means I was only taken to the "outer" reef, which is, of course, much visited and damaged by excess traffic, but in spite of that the coral was beautiful, and perhaps because of all the warnings I'd had from marine biologists at my SKM job, telling me not to expect too much, I was wholly impressed. Both reef sites we visited were teeming with fish, and I also saw my first sharks...harmless reef sharks of under a metre long, but sharks nonetheless, swimming with that cool shark motion.

Laura and I took our reef trips separately, for business reasons - she went on wednesday while I showed a girl the car - and I have to admit that, left to my own devices, I behaved like someone not capable of looking after themself: I unequivocally award myself "ditzy blonde of the boat" prize. This started when I boarded the boat. As I stepped on, a crew member took the piece of paper I was clutching, handed to me by the ticket desk: "This number is very important - it's your safety number. That's how the crew keep track of everyone on the boat. Remember it." I nodded obediently, handed him the number and promptly forgot it, which led to a reprimand from the snorkel-hire girl - "What do you mean you don't know it? It's very important, I can't give this to you til you know it...go and ask the skipper." Argh - it took much wandering around the (somewhat overcrowded and smelly) boat to locate my number (136) which the guy next to me then sensibly, if humiliatingly, wrote on my hand.

The incident to which the title of this entry refers occurred at the end of the day, at our second reef site. The snorkelling was fabulous, and although I was getting cold I was determined to make the most of the day, so after jumping out to warm up and grab a coffee, I got back in for a final swim. I was calmly circling the reef, lost in the underwater world, when a little motor-dinghy pulled up beside me, and the guy driving it told me he was there to take me back to the boat. "I'm ok, I'm not drowning or anything," I assured him. "I can swim if you like." "This way's more fun," he replied, before hauling me on board (I assure you that I deported myself most elegantly). It was only when we got back to the main boat that I discovered that they were all ready to leave when they'd realised they were missing one person...they'd been calling my number for ages, and all afternoon people kept saying "Oh, YOU'RE number 136," with mocking smiles on their faces. Of course, I'm grateful that they took the trouble to locate me rather than driving off and leaving me to the sharks...

The best part of the day was undoubtedly my trial scuba-dive - this is where they strap you into all the gear and take you underwater with close supervision, effectively doing all the work for you so that you can experience diving without having to put in the 4 days' training required to become certified. The diet Coke of marine exploration, clearly, but I'm too time and money poor to take the open water course right now...so this was the best I could do. It was wonderful...once I got used to breathing in AND OUT (for some reason it was the latter that caused me the most problems) with the tank I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such a crazy experience, to look up and see the water surface several metres above your head...and to be able to move around the coral without the usual bother of surfacing to clear your snorkel...really fantastic. I loved it.

Yesterday was spent with Laura and Sven (one of the guys we went to Magnetic Island with) on a trip to a very cute little rainforest village called Kuranda. Laura and I have spent way too much time knocking around Cairns trying to sell the car/stressing over the lack of potential buyers for the car, so we decided we needed a break. I'm very glad we went, as the moment we left Cairns city centre we were surrounded by rainforest-covered mountains, which really helped to put the car worries in perspective. We explored the market for which the village is famous and went on a walk through the jungle to a creek. We then tried to walk to a waterfall but took a wrong turn and ended up spending about 3 kilometres walking along a rather uninspiring highway...no matter; as I pointed out, it gave us some exercise, so that when we eventually DROVE to the waterfall we didn't feel as pathetically lazy as perhaps we should have done. I'm glad we got there eventually, as the view was stunning. This year-long trip is so close to an end now, and I reminded myself (and everyone else who would listen, obviously) that I wouldn't always be able to watch the sun set over a spectacular rocky waterfall in the midst of tropical rainforest.

I love the way sunset (and sometimes rise) has become such a normal part of my daily routine. I'd like to keep it up when I get home, if I can locate the sun through that London smog...(on the other hand, I have mosquito bites ALL OVER MY FACE, and it's still raining here; maybe coming home isn't such a bad idea...)

I have more comments to make (mostly whining about the inferior calibre of backpackers in Cairns as opposed to the west coast, whining about English people who just get drunk all the time and whining about people who assume that because I'm English, I just want to get drunk all the time) but only 12 minutes of internet time left, so time to go. How many more updates can I squeeze into my last 2 weeks in Australia? I'll take it as a challenge...

Anyone want to buy a car??!

It's the end of the line. Here we are, in Cairns, designing an advert for our car, which we need to sell in the next couple of weeks both to keep ourselves afloat financially and in preparation for separating and leaving Australia. Sob.

The trip to Cairns was most enjoyable, somewhat surprisingly as we had initially planned to put the pedal to the metal and drive the whole 3,000 odd kilometres in a few days. That plan didn't quite happen...instead it took us a week and a half (still a pretty short amount of time for the vast distance we covered, I suppose) and involved plenty of sightseeing along the way.

We started off with a couple of nights at Kakadu national park. Kakadu is supposed to be Australia's most famous and most frequently visited national park or something - it's huge on the backpacker circuit. Despite strict instructions from Mike that we should take a four-wheel drive tour, as it would enable us to see way more than we could discover for ourselves in the car, we decided to self-drive it (if you saw the tour prices you'd understand). Although there were alot of places we wanted to visit but couldn't, as they were down 4-wheel-drive-only tracks (oh how I've bemoaned "only" having a normal car...) we still had some rather charming moments, including viewing the sunset over the wetlands/Arnham-land escarpment (well ok, we kind of missed the sunset and had to run, but the dusk was beautiful anyway) and sunrise over a birdlife-rich billabong.
Kakadu seems to be one of the best-preserved areas in Australia with relatively little environmental destruction/extinction going on (mind you, when I say "relatively little" there was still a uranium mine there...) There were also several Aboriginal rock-art sites, and we managed to catch two different free talks from rangers about the rock art (it was certainly the most heavily staffed and organised national park I've been to...possibly one of the most crowded as well, worse luck). The visitor centre also had fascinating information about Aboriginal culture. It's such a different way of viewing the world and thinking about things, and it's made harder to understand by the fact that many legends, traditions etc are secret really, so the version that outsiders are given is a ridiculously simplified one...very intriguing, though I really feel like I'm still trying to get my head round what "dreaming" and "dreamtime" actually is.

After two days of walks and camping we fled the mosquitoes (being a wetland area, Kakadu is really infested...we were fighting them off and are all covered in bites) and hit the road. Cathrin, our new German companion, was fantastic to travel with which was lucky as there were a few driving-intensive days, broken by a detour to see the Devil's Marbles, yet another rock formation (still loving those Australian rocks).

Things were just getting a tad monotonous (camp for free at a rest area, get up early, drive drive drive, rinse and repeat) when we hit Townsville on the east coast, and fortuitously bumped into an old travelling-buddy, Sven - a guy we've been bumping into, on and off, ever since we left Perth. He was travelling with two new people, Asa from Israel and Verena from Germany. We arrived in Townsville in the early evening and, on learning that the ferries were still running, decided to take a spontaneous trip over to Magnetic Island, a small island off the coast that's an essential part of the East coast backpacker itinerary. We arrived in the dark, clutching our sleeping bags and some food and drink, but it all worked out fabulously - we decided that as we would miss the official Maggie Island full moon party (it's tonight) we would create our own, so there was much partying, moonlit swimming and dancing on the beach. At about 3am we realised that we didn't know where to sleep and didn't want to have to pay for a hostel, so decided to seek out a secluded beach to sleep on. (Despite being somewhat cloudy and not the sun-filled weather that I always expect from Australia, it was still wonderfully warm and humid). Somehow, this ended up with the six of us taking a 1.6 kilometre hike through the national park, clambering up and down steep, narrow rocky pathways through rainforest...at 3am, whilst far from sober, with 3 torches between us. I managed to lose one thong (sorry, flip-flop) and had to walk barefoot...I also lost my towel, as I discovered next day when I returned from my early morning swim. Luckily both items were located on our walk back...it was a weird but wonderful experience, and waking up on the beach made it all worthwhile.

More photos and news will doubtless follow when I get myself organised...

In the tropics

Hi there, I'm in Darwin and have finally succeeded in getting online...I'm finding being back in a city very stressful - there's suddenly heaps to sort out and I'm hemorrhaging money, after having such a cheap trip here (lots of bush camping and free rest areas). Anyway, to recap...

There have been various dramas since leaving Broome...the journey was fabulous - but not without negatives, of course: such is life. For a start, the nice German boy that we were going to give a lift to dropped out - he got a job instead - so Laura and I turned to plan B, which was to take a couple we'd met, a Dutch guy and German girl. We knew it'd be a challenge to fit 4 people, plus luggage, into the car, but we told ourselves that we wanted to get going, we'd save money on petrol, etc etc. Hmm, tragically we could tell from the moment we committed to taking them that it was probably a bad idea. Let's just call it artistic differences...the 4 of us just didn't get on.

(This depicts the evil pair, from the back...the only photo we have of them!)

Additionally, cramming everybody's backpacks, the tents, sleeping bags, 15 litres of water, 10 litres of petrol, and food for 4 into the car every morning was extremely stressful! To make matters worse, the night before we left Broome I was plagued by sickness - some kind of 12 hour bug, which was really unpleasant. As usual, I was too rubbish to assert myself and say I was feeling ill until it was too late, and then because I hadn't told any of the others that I wasn't feeling well, I became weirdly embarrassed about it and felt like it was too late...we were out food shopping and I kept excusing myself on other pretexts to go and throw up, until eventually I realised that it really wasn't my fault I was sick and no one would find it weird!

Fortunately, that passed, but the first few days we were on the road I still wasn't feeling 100%, which didn't help with all the negative feelings that were floating around the car anyway...

Nonetheless, the 4 of us did see some fantastic things, including Geike Gorge and Wolfe Creek meteorite crater...famous, of course, for the film. Although it is pretty isolated and hard to get to, as depicted in the movie (130km down an unsurfaced road. I drove us the whole way myself - it was getting kind of fun by the end, jerking along over corrugations etc...probably not the best treatment for the poor car, but hey. At least it started again next morning...) we were somewhat disappointed to arrive to find a very well kept national park free camping ground, with pit toilets and everything, and probably about 10 other vehicles all sightseeing. This led, obviously, to many hilarious jokes about the movie ("When the car didn't start, why didn't they just go to the campsite and ask for a lift?" etc) and also to a sneaking suspicion that making the extremely bumpy drive might have been a mistake. However, a quick sunset scramble up the side of the crater soon put paid to that concern: it was a really amazing sight - a beautifully circular crater - the 2nd largest in the world - in the midst of a completely flat, featureless Australian landscape of scrub and sand.

(sorry for the out-of-focus photo and finger, but it's hard to do a meterorite crater justice!)
We rose at 5am to watch sunrise, then walked round the lip of the crater, which took an hour, then climbed down into the centre, which felt like a secret garden, eerily quiet as it was sheltered from the wind, with a tangled jungle of small trees and scrub. The ground was coated with white powder which a quick taste test identified as salt.

(please admire my hat, which I knitted myself).

Anyway, after that it was back on the road with not much more to see until we reached the first reasonable-sized town, Kunnunara, just before the state border. It was here that Laura and I decided it would be a good idea to part ways with our companions. It just wasn't working out - personality clashes don't mix well with the intense travelling experience, especially when it involves being cramped up in a car together for hours on end!! When I heard the guy discussing "drunken abos" with a racist Australian I knew it was never going to work. (Genuine quote from the Australian guy, who we had met at a campsite, when he was giving us his address: "You can tell your parents you've got some friends in Australia now - some white people".)

I was hoping that, since all bad feeling was quite obviously mutual, we would be able to acknowledge it and part amicably. So much for that - as I should have expected, I suppose, it wasn't that easy. I did come out of it feeling like a heartless bitch who'd just dumped two people in the middle of nowhere, but I assure you that my intentions were good! Anyway, we know that they succeeded in finding an alternative lift as, very irritatingly, we keep bumping into them in national parks along the way...makes for many awkward encounters when we least expect them!

Despite all the dramas, Kunnunara was a really lovely town - it has a tiny national park right next door as well as a "celebrity tree park". Yes, we were confused as to what that would be as well - trees that starred in the background in movies, say? It turned out to be trees planted by celebrities, including one planted by the most exciting Australian celebrity of all...Rolf Harris!


Having split with Steff and Yurie, then, we were lucky enough to pick up a new lift - a really nice Swedish guy called Stefan, a truly easy-going person who we got on with really well.
It was so lovely to escape the awful atmosphere that had been building up for the last few days!! We set off anew with sighs of relief, and the countryside continued to amaze. I think we averaged a national park a day for the entire 9 day journey! The scenery in this part of Australia involves a sandstone "escarpment" (like a raised tableland), covered in parts with monsoon forest and tropical woodland, broken down in places with breathtaking rocky gorges, rivers, pools and waterfalls. Having visited so many parks and read so many "How the land was formed" notices, I feel like I should be able to describe it more technically than that, but apparently not. Ah well. Suffice to say that scrambling down a sandstone gorge to swim in a perfectly circular pool in the rock, fed by an impressive cliff-high waterfall is a wonderful experience, which can bear alot of repetition (which is lucky, as the majority of national parks I've been to recently have been strikingly similar). It puts me in mind (pretentiousness warning) of Coleridge's Xanadu -

"And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were caverns ancient as the hills,
enfolding sunny spots of greenery."


As we travelled further north (we're now in the Northern Territory) warnings about crocodiles became more and more frequent, and at one point I wondered if we'd ever be able to swim again - saltwater crocodiles, which are common here, are big (can grow up to 7 metres) and aggressive - they like to stalk and eat large mammals, including humans. They can remain underwater for long stretches, observing their prey, and launch themselves out of the water. Although they're called salties, they also live in freshwater rivers and creeks, and alot of places have "No swimming - crocodiles" signs up. Nonetheless, we have been swimming frequently - though only in pools which are regularly monitored for their presence - although with a certain amount of hysteria and nervous giggling. If only it wasn't so hot here - but when you've driven a few hundred kilometres in the heat of the day, and haven't showered in 4 days, the threat of crocodiles pales in comparison with the need to jump in some nice cool water. We've only seen one croc in the wild so far - it was quite far away, in the middle of a river - but I think I'll probably try to get to a farm at some point to see some up close (and I'm definitely going to try some crocodile meat at some point! Tastes like chicken they say...) We've also seen two snakes, although both times they were in the process of being chased and captured by a park keeper, which kind of took the edge off the drama somewhat.

Darwin seems like a really lovely city, and I'm only sad that we've had so little time here - we think we need to keep moving in order to give ourselves sufficient time to sell the car over in Cairns. Since arriving we've been trying to balance doing fun sightseeing with boring organisational stuff, and we also managed to find ourselves one day's work in a laundry - 7 hours of feeding sheets through a pressing machine = not fun AT ALL: I rank it better than telesales but worse than fruit picking, but at least the pay was ok. I've just got back from the museum now, which was very cool and interesting.

We had to part ways with Stefan here, so we'll be moving on tomorrow with a (hopefully) nice German girl called Cathrin. I'm a bit nervous of travelling with someone new after realising how bad it can be when it goes wrong, but fingers crossed this will work out ok!!