Chapter 9: My ass fell off about 2000km back on the highway

OH! MY! GOD! It’s about 6 days after my last peckings on this word processor. My ass is soooooo numb, that I can’t feel it, in fact I haven’t felt it in about the last 4 days. I think it dropped off about 2000 km ago. It was proba bly gangrous. In total we have travelled about 3500 km in 7 days, Perth to Broome. There is so much to see, but one forgets – at least until the 7^th hour in the bus – just how big Australia is: roughly the size of the USA. So, while this little trip has had its moments, the ratio of pain to gain has been rather high! To wit: another odious tour guide leader named Rob (this one I’ve nicknamed Repulsive Rob) who talks incessantly about how many female clients various other tour leaders of his acquaintance have managed to bed while running the trips. He’s vile, vile, vile. But, anyway let’s focus on the highlights. At Monkey Mia, a dolphin swam up and rubbed my leg as I stood knee deep in the water at the beach and she seemed to be smiling at me. Then the next day at Coral Bay in the evening we went quad biking down the beach at sunset to see a loggerhead turtle nest hatching. That was amazing, something I’ve wanted to see all my life. There were 42 eggs in total, but a wind-blown sand drift had buried the nest so deep that the baby loggerhead turtles couldn’t dig through to the surface. So the ranger dug them out, explaining that in the natural world they would have died but that the turtle conservationists felt that something needed to be done to restore the odds for the turtle, given the rarity of these turtles now, to counter the depredations of man. These include continued hunting, habitat destruction of key turtle nesting sites, introduction of alien animals (such as foxes in Australia) which plunder turtle egg nests when the rangers don’t find and protect them, and also the dumping of plastic bags in the oceans which turtles, fatally, will eat thinking them to be jelly fish. The little turtles were perfectly formed, not much bigger than an Oreo cookie with flippers. But it was a perfectly formed little turtle. They grow to the size of a meter and half in length and can weigh up to 200kg, and after spending some 30 years reaching sexual maturity in the open seas they will come back to exactly the same beach they were born on to nest.

I was desperately keen to dive on the world famous Ningaloo Reef just off the coast of Coral Bay (which experts say is superior to the Great Barrier Reef) but we only had one day there and on that day all the dives were booked up, sadly. And so, I didn’t get to see the whale sharks either; I was there a couple of weeks too early. But I’ve decided to come back to do this part properly; more on this later.

Later, at Karajini National Park (after hours and hours of driving) we did the most spectacular gorge walk called the Miracle Mile. The rock there is sedimentary, but quite hard due to severe compression when it formed about 2.5 billion years ago. It is blood red due to the iron ore in the rock, but is too old to contain any fossils. An uplift from the ocean floor left amazingly regular horizontal fractures in the rock, such that parts of the canyon system look like the ruins of ancient temples. There were parts of the canyon system that we had to swim through pea green water with our belongings perched in plastic bags on our heads, but the high point was when we basically had to free form rock climb (no ropes) along fairly sheer canyon walls (albeit with lots of little ledges, shelves, footholds, etc). The tour guides warned people that it was really difficult, but when we got down into it, past the point of no return, I was surprised at just how dangerous it really was. But I was astounded that they guided our group down into it, since our group constituted of 22 people, the majority of whom are young, overweight, silly British girls who CHOW DOWN on chocolate, chips, pop at every gas station stop, scream at EVERY bug no matter how small, wear full make-up every day, and complain about anything involving physical activity. But it was quite thrilling because for a lot of people in the group it was the first time they’d ever done something so adventuresome, and they were thrilled to discover indeed that they could do it. Many would have pulled out, were it not for the fact that very early on their was a rock chimney which we shimmied down, which was effectively a point of no return. When they came back they were so enthused by what they had seen, but also by what they had done. It made me realize that people can do much, much more than they think they can, and the same applies, I guess, to me.

The trip was also significant for the following reason. Initially, I was very upset with myself for mucking up this portion of my trip, by bypassing Perth (where there are apparently great things to do like diving with seals), by spending a lot of money pointlessly changing my flights to see certain flights and then failing to actually see them (like Ningaloo Reef and the whale sharks), and by taking this tour, which has imprisoned me on a hot cramped bus with these silly people. Finally, after working myself into a total frenzy of irritation and angst and general grumpy-moodiness, I just had to accept that this trip was not going to be what I wanted it to be, and that I was not going to see all the things that I wanted to see on the West Coast. And I let it go. For those of you who don’t know me, this was really hard to do. And when I did let go in this way, I felt an amazing lifting sense of release and I started at the same time to really enjoy the company of the people on my tour, though unfortunately our guide still remained Repulsive Rob. Now we are on the road to Broome, which will be an enforced rest stop for me of at least 5 days before I fly to Brisbane and from then up the Queensland coast to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. I will write more later.

Chapter 8: The Great Wet Rainy Red Center

So anyway. As I was saying. This morning (was it really this morning? It seemed like some never, never land of fog and fatigue) I got up at 4:30 am (ugh) in Melbourne to catch my flight to the Red Center, Alice Springs. Only here it’s really rather green, rather than red, due to unprecedented amount of rain they’ve had here. I rented a bike from my filthy backpackers lodge (filthy!) and cycled around to the many aboriginal art galleries here. Saw some AMAZING paintings and also a lot of cheap crap done for tourists. Still, the good stuff is really fantastic. I wenTt into one gallery, and from across the room my eye was drawn magnetically to this one painting, which I later discovered was called Yam Seeds Dreaming. I must have an innate eye for quality in aboriginal art because it was the most expensive painting I saw the whole afternoon for $11,000, by a very esteemed but dead lady named Emily something-or-other. Then I went to the gym, and then up to Anzac Hill to watch the sunset. I sat for an hour there, and the air, and the sky were huge and clean, just beautiful. The desert, for me, is always full of peace and right-on IT-ness. (IT is that feeling of being connected, fundamentally, to the earth, to this world. A sense of well-being, belonging, happiness. And, I must report, I had the most amazing example of synchronicity this well. Reading the Economist in my dwall this mornign on the plane, I stumbled across the full quote from Goethe, alluded to in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (Chapter 4 which I read just last week), and which I have been meaning to try to track down, as being hugely meaningful for me right now:

“Whatever you do, or dream of doing, begin it. Boldness has grace, power, and magic in it.”

Then, tonight, just to prove my truly spiritual credentials and connectedness with this ancient earth, I ate Skippy the friendly kangaroo for supper. Connoiseurs will want to know that I ate him with a demiglaze sauce. I can feel his little tail hopping around in my tummy.

It’s the next day. I had a dreadful night. The filthy hostel gave me a room, which actually should more accurately be called the stink-pit, fronting the street and I had a vast number of very rowdy Aboriginals shouting in the street directly outside my window the whole night, plus doors banging in the hallways of the hostel, given that I was unfortunately situated right beside the exit door. I’m sleep-deprived for sure now. Anyway, I’m sitting uncomfortably on the bus (it’s VERY cramped!), making my way out to Ayers Rock or Uluru in the local Aboriginal language. It’s a site of great spiritual significance for the Aboriginal peoples, containing a large number of sacred sites, where the ancient mystical beings dreamed the world and the landscape into existence. We hiked around the base of the rock, went back to the camp for a swim, and then returned to the rock for sunset, which, as you know from all the photos, sends light horizontally through the atmosphere, refracting it into its constituent parts, shining the red light onto Ayers Rock itself, where the iron oxide is already quite red. In other words, at sunset Ayers Rock looks like it is on fire. Only we didn’t see this. Why not? Because it rained. Actually that’s too mild a word. I think to say that it dumped-huge-bucket-loads-and-running-sheets-of-water on us would be more correct. In fact, for most parts of this trip, I couldn’t even see the rock itself. But there is an amazing peace in the desert, despite the rain, and Uluru is a very spiritual place. More prosaically, did you know that it is the largest single rock in the world (called a monolith), rising some 380m out of the earth’s surface. I tried to discover how far underground it extended, Rob, our slimy tour guide answered, with all the self-assuredness of an absolute tyrant at the height of his regime, 7km. This gave me the first clue that there was something seriously wrong with this guy, as I’m pretty sure that the earth’s crust isn’t even 7km thick. More examples of Rob’s slimyness followed. He would put punk music on the bus loudspeaker early in the morning, and when we complained said it was to keep him awake, and he didn’t really care what we thought!

Aside from Slimy Rob, what about the tour itself? Well, it’s really rather hilarious, though grisly too. We have far too many people cramped on far too small a bus. However, I met some very nice people, such as Suresh, an Indian American from New York who kept me well supplied with iced coffee, sanity, and healthy dollops of a delicious cynical humour. Also, Joe and Barbara from NY who are as into wildlife – she works in wildlife animal rescue operations - and as NOT into our tour guide, Slimy Rob, as me! But the area is beautiful and worth the trip. One thing strikes me: how similar the vast blue sky, light green scrub, and red soil of central Australia is to the bush of South Africa. Apart from the lack of acacias, and the fact that somehow, indefinably, South Africa is much, much more beautiful, I wouldn’t know I wasn’t in the bush just outside of Johannesburg. I also visited the excellent Desert Research Center just outside Alice, which is a huge ecological and environmental research and educational center just outside Alice. I saw large numbers of the native marsupials which have mostly been driven to the edge of extinction by habitat destruction and the European introduction of animals like rats, foxes, rabbits and cats (which have gone feral). (These introduced animals compete for food and breed faster by virtue of the fact that they are placental mammals rather than marsupials.) I learned all about the animals and plants in the desert, and the Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to these flora and fauna, and how they survived in the desert. It reminded me so much of what we know about the lives of the San or Bushman in Southern Africa before they were harried to the edge of extinction, and how well attuned these people were to their environment. Fascinatingly, Aboriginal rock art has a lot of parallels with Bushman rock paintings and carvings both in terms of style, content matter, and, it is thought, spiritual significance. Oh, the bus is stopping, pulling over to the roadside. Something’s up, we’re taking a short break. Stay tuned. I’ll be back!

Well, we’ve just been sent out into the roadside scrub to gather wood! I never! Apparently, if you get even the tiniest splinter of this wood, with its native bacteria, inside your skin, it goes septic and you run a large risk of blood poisoning. And we’ve been instructed to break off branches and push down dead dry trees and drag them over to the trailer. We got up at 5am, were herded like cattle onto a tiny uncomfortable bus, are now being sent into the bushes in work gangs to tread through thorns, and battle potentially deadly snakes, scorpions to gather fuel. I feel like I’m part of a prison chain gang. Well, now we are back at camp, where I am hiding in the bushes to avoid having to assist in the preparation of dinner. Folks, I think this is it, my last despatch from the Red Center. I’m off to Perth tomorrow and then up the West Coast, hopefully to swim with the whale sharks! (I’m a bit early, but I have been praying for them to arrive.) I will write more.

Chapter 7: Free Fall

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAeaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! And so I found myself falling (well jumping really) out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. That’s nearly 4km high, for the more metricated amongst us. I couldn’t believe how high the plane had climbed. The earth was receding and receding still further, wisps of cloud drifted past and below the plane, the horizon of the earth curved and bent further, and we still surged higher. And we had only actually climbed 5000 ft at this point. Ian Temple asked to jump first (fool!) and so had to sit directly opposite the open door of the airplane as it climbed. I couldn’t look, either at the open door or out the windows. Anyway, eventually it was time, and after being hitched to Phil – oh did I forget to tell you I had tandem jumper instructor named Phil attached to my back? – he told me to stand up and the next thing I knew I was somersaulting out of the plane. Several rolls later, I remembered his instructions and made like a starfish. Half of the descent was free fall, and it went on for oh, about forever, in real time, and 60 seconds in clock time. Certainly enough time for the camera man plunging alongside me to get some great shots, which really look fetching save for the huge pulsating vein on my forehead, which I presume is stress-related. I’m giving the thumbs up sign and smiling, only it’s not really a smile. Rather the windspeed has forced my mouth open and I don’t have enough muscular strength to shut my mouth. Seriously. At any rate eventually Phil triggered the chute, and I got such a jerk in the process that I had a bruise in each of my arm pits. Then Phil started to do loop the loops and swirls and twirls with his acrobatic parachute. I had to ask him to stop before I threw up into the wind. Still, when we landed, I said to the video camera that it was great but I wouldn’t do it again. However, I realize that I lied. I would do it again! It WAS great! (Mum, their oldest skydiver was an 83 year old woman, so I’m signing you up too!) Except this time I want to go to 14,000 ft (much longer free fall) which is the maximum height that one can skydive from without using oxygen.

Also daring to dive out of this plane were three gay friends of mine, and a randomly assembled collection of quite the most heavenly young women backpackers. Some were from Norway, some Holland, some the UK and some Australia, but all were blonde, all impossibly lithe, tanned, beautiful and young. I thought it was curious that so many women were jumping relative to the number of men, but in fact the skydiving company told me that the usual ratio was about 80% to about 20% men, which I found very curious. Anyway, after we four guys got off the transfer shuttle back at our hotel, we all remarked how darn spooky it was how attractive and sexy we’d found all those girls were.

Where was this? Well, we had gone to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast to recover from the hedonism of Mardi Gras. The water was incredibly warm, the restaurants superb, I saw two koalas in the wild, though it wasn’t very exciting for the following reason. They sleep 20 of 24 hours, and of the remaining 4 hours in which they are awake, they only move for five minutes. (How do they get enough to eat, I wondered). Anyway, we had a great time, including a tropical rainstorm which outpoured anything I’ve ever seen in Joburg! And then I went back to Sydney to see friends and do a few more tourist things, but Sydney was raining. Yuck. Me, I’d be quite happy with sun 365 days a year. My friends dragged me out to yet more nightclubs, where I had a great time; no one smokes, they have shows of dancers, fire eaters, acrobats, and, unfortunately, the ever present drag queens, the laser lights are the best anywhere, the music is super upbeat, and the people are really really friendly.

Anyway, in Sydney, I fell in love. Yes it’s true. But, rather unexpectedly, I fell in love not with a guy, or even with the city itself. Rather I fell in love with the platypus at the aquarium. I simply must have one for a pet now. Stuff the cats, now safely at my Mum’s. It’s platypuses (or platypi?) all the way for me. I wonder how I can steal him?

Then off to Melbourne. A huge mistake for me; cost tons in terms of air mileage, taxi fares, and severely constrained the rest of my trip in terms of time. Because my time in Melbourne – which incidentally has bizarrely wide roads - was limited I made the great mistake of deciding to do a coach tour of The Great Ocean Road. Big mistake. I mean BIG. I was on a coach with the all mother-daughter brigade from China. I was the only non-Chinese person on the coach. I was seated next two a girl named Aster, who clearly didn’t understand me, or English very well, because she kept asking me the same question: Where was I going to next on my trip? Eventually she switched to: Are the girls pretty in South Africa? I think she wanted me, but her fierce-looking mother was keeping a beady eye on me. Fortunately she slept for most of the journey, waking only to cast her gimlet eye in the region of my privates and then ask me why we were driving this route so devoid of scenery. As if I knew! The bus driver was sooooooooooo annoying, as he didn’t stop talking on the tannoy for much more than a minute. I had the following "points of interest" pointed out to me (in the most annoying speaking voice I think I’ve ever heard): local garbage dumps , schools, shopping arcades where he sometimes has coffee when he comes out this way, "great beaches hidden behind those hills", where there’s "no time to stop". Eventually, we got to the destination, the Twelve Apostles and London Bridge and the scene of Loch Ard shipwreck. Well, ‘t’was pretty enough with a lovely Chinese jade green sea and milk-foamy white breakers crashing against red-orange sandstone cliff formations. Very pretty, but the Cape of South Africa still is tops for me. I was told by the bus driver, however, that I should cut the pictures out of the tour brochure and stick them in the photo album "because they’d be much better, and no one would know the difference." (So why travel? Stay home see it on TV, order your holiday snaps from an image bank and sleep in your own bed at night.) One good thing about Melbourne was that I got to see Cirque du Soleil’s new production Allegria which was great.

Chapter 6: Lasers, fruit bats and bees

Well mother warned me! When I embarked on this world travel, I didn't get the usual motherly warnings such as "Don't take candy from strangers", "Always practice safe sex" and "Always wear clean underwear, in case you get in an accident and have to be taken to hospital". No, from my Mum, it was "Don't get stung or bitten by any poisonous Australian snakes, fish, spiders, or bugs". And what happened? Well, walking to the beach the other day, I stepped on a bee who (quite sensibly from the bee's perspective) stung me on the middle toe. Well, did my foot ever swell up! Walking was like trying to bend a grape! Happily the foot recovered in time for Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras was some experience. I got tickets to watch the parade from some stands right near the end. There were some amazing floats and then some pretty pathetic ones too. There was an entry - and actually quite a good one at that - from Papau New Guinea. The Sydney Police Force had a huge marching group, all in official uniform; they received huge cheers from the crowd. The Canadians had an entry into the parade, which was quite funny! The boys were cute, but they had the WORST choreography of all the float and marching entrants in the 2 1/2 hour parade. Personally, I think this speaks volumes about Canada. There was also an enormous contingent from Amnesty International to reflect how in many countries around the world gay people are still tortured and imprisoned, various local politicians, gay senior citizens organizations, and a HUGE contingent from families of gay people - who got loud cheers from the onlookers as well - and, of course, drag queens galore. On the whole the parade was actually quite inspiring.

The shows at the subsequent Mardi Gras party were also amazing; singers, acrobats, dancers, and of course the ever-present drag queens,who became increasingly bedraggled as the evening wore on! One show had trapeze artists on wires above our heads; they were covered in costumes of little reflective mirrors, and many multicoloured laser lights were directed at them, so that their movements on the trapezes (or is it trapezi?)became also part of the laser light show! I lost my friends within 1 hour of entering the party grounds, and as there were 22,000 attendees, I naturally didn't find them again. But I met some very nice Australians, and spent a good chunk of the evening dancing with them.

I also climbed the upper arch of Sydney Harbour Bridge the other day with my friends Keith and Harry, who were visiting Sydney from Australia. Had to use proper mountaineering equipment, and we had fetching shell suit costumes in pearly gray! Fantastic views of this amazing harbour, where there are so many bays and coves, and dotted little islands and as a result many, many sailboats, and beautiful ocean front homes.

The Botanical Gardens in Sydney are worth a visit. Wonderful old palms, strange fig trees, a rare fossil pine, recently discovered in one isolated valley in Queensland of which there are only 38 specimens in existence), shrieking sulpher crested cockatoos, and a pond which is roiling with huge black eels who eat the ducklings -the park staff have apparently tried to clear the pond of eels, but then just days after they have drained and refilled it - elvers are spotted wriggling through the grass at night to recolonize the pond. I was walking in the Gardens the other day, and I heard the chittering of birds, and looked up to discover instead a tree which was festooned with enormous bats, hanging like huge furry fruit. They clearly found the heat and humidity too much as well, because they were delicately fanning themselves with their wings like little old ladies at the Sydney Opera House on a hot day. (I also toured the Sydney Opera House. Beautiful outside structure. Hideous inside. May go there to see Carmen Burana which is playing soon.)

I'm off to Noosa today - a beach resort near Brisbane for some relaxation and sunshine; Sydney has actually been quite wet, but apparently that is normal for these summer months. Must go now to catch my plane. Will write more later