The first month in Oz is over and the moon is fattening again. The last full moon occurred shortly after Sue and I arrived when we bush camped on an deserted beach called Ninety Mile Beach--odd name since Australia is totally metric. For example, the car is averaging 14 liters per hundred kilometers. The beach is around halfway between Sydney and Melbourne on the SE corner of the continent. Heeding the warning of almost everyone I’ve met to date, we got off the road around dusk because it was roo country and the hoppers become active at that time. The big ones look like deer with all the weight shifted to the stern. The locals have enormous roo bars on their front bumpers because I’m told a direct hit can do a lot of damage when those hefty rear thumpers roll up over the bonnet and crash through the front windscreen.
The beach ran north and south to both horizons without a footprint in sight. The only thing to block the sight of the moon rising from the sea was South America, umpteen thousands of kilometers away.
“Bush camp,” I told Sue.
“No tent,” she said.
“No worries.”
By 6 PM the black curtain of a subtropical evening had fallen. By 7 PM we were ensconced in sleeping bags in the hollow of a sand dune well above the high tide line. At 8 PM the moon arose and shown so brightly I had to cover my face to sleep. At 1:19 AM the sprinkles began… (Never again now that Sue has purchased a copy of Venomous Creatures of Australia, sleeping under the stars is verboten.)
The first few days in Sydney were lost to jet lag and fish and chips. Sue and I stayed in a large Victorian house painted entirely in pink close to Kings Cross, Sydney’s red light district of sorts. The early morning prowl for coffee often left us in diners with hookers wrapping up the night shift. It was either that or put up with the debris of the previous night’s revelers in the hostel. I didn’t mind.
The original plan was to buy a decent vehicle and an old pop-up trailer to tow around the country but, after a day touring the new car dealers on Parramatta Road, we learned that Australia wouldn’t let us buy comprehensive auto insurance—liability to protect the other guy, yes but something to protect my car, no. That left buying a junker from a departing backpacker or finding a reasonable long term rental. “Screw this,” I told Sue. “Let’s learn how to drive on the other side with someone else’s car.”
So we slunk out of Sydney on a quiet Sunday morning. Sue took the first shift behind the wheel and white-knuckled it out of town without having to make a right turn. To keep in my lane on the highway, I adjusted the side mirrors to point down at the rear wheels. The biggest problem was (and still is) the reversed location of the controls for the turn signals and the windscreen wipers. Many a smile I have noticed on the faces of other drivers when they see the wipers come on as I slow down for a turn.
Melbourne was the ideal place to practice driving on the left because trams share its streets, forcing drivers to use an unusual maneuver called the hook turn when they need to turn right. Intended to get trams down the middle of the street without being blocked by turning cars, a hook turn is best explained using slow motion, animated video clips but I’ll borrow from Lonely Planet:
“To turn right at many major intersections in the city, you have to pull to the left of the actual intersection, wait until the light of the street you’re turning into changes from red to green, then complete the turn. These intersections are identified by a black-and-white hook sign that hangs down from the overhead cables. This manoeuvre can be disconcerting for first-timers; the trick is to stay calm, observe a few locals doing it, and never start the right turn until you’re sure that the light has fully changed and no one is still coming straight through the intersection (along your original line of travel). Once you get the first one down, you’ll see there really wasn’t anything to worry about!”
If you fail to hook turn where you should, a chorus of honking results or, considerably worse, your car is flattened by a tram about half the weight of an ocean liner. Trust me.
Otherwise the week or so in Melbourne was characterized by looking up old travel mates, discovering that none of my debit cards would work in the local ATMs, and the eventual purchase of a brand new pop up trailer called the Finch. Go to www.jayco.com.au for a look. No more tenting for Sue after many months of tents being blown down, blown away, and filled with bugs, sand, mud or water or any combination thereof on past trips. The insurance debacle was resolved by renting a mature but allegedly reliable car from a small company north of Melbourne called Car Connection—-a 1989 Ford Falcon wagon with 208,000 Km on the odometer. Check out www.carconnection.com.au for rent-a-decent-wreck.
Sue and I drove north through shiraz country to Griffith to see an old friend from our Africa trip but when we discovered frost on the windscreen one morning, we said to heck with this and hastened to the beaches north of Sydney.
So we have followed the coast to warmer weather via beaches, rain forests, and noisy birds. Waking up to a kookaburra’s raucous chatter (who who who hah hah hah) is like no other. Ditto having 50 large white cockatoos celebrating happy hour in a tree overhead. And then there’s the lorikeet, a small parrot of bright green, red and blue plumage. At a wildlife centre we visited they feed the wild lorikeets every afternoon who show up en masse and swarm the surrounding trees while the staff hands out plates of a syrupy liquid that the birds love. In no time you are covered by a dozen anxious birds eager to lick it up. Unfortunately one or two birds get too excited (or possibly overeat) and lose control of their bowels. My hat needed a good wash afterwards.
The Gold Coast was too congested, the Sunshine Coast too rainy and Fraser Island too sandy but I liked them all. At night I hook up the trailer up to water and electricity in clean, quiet caravan parks and fall asleep by 8 or 9 PM. Backing the trailer into a camp site is tricky but I have figured out the secret: ask your traveling companion to take her flakey hand gestures to the other side of the campground while you are undertaking the effort much to the amusement of all your neighbors who set up lawn chairs to watch. No surfing for me—too chilly; a little hiking in the national parks, some guided ocean kayaking and a lot of cajoling Sue to get into cold water. Nothing adventurous or harrowing. Having recently read Deep Survival-Who Lives Who Dies And Why by Lawrence Gonzales, I now realize that my fate under duress is likely the same as a deer frozen in night time headlights on the highway. Just being here is good enough for me. I no longer need physical challenges or emotional excitement. Getting a satisfactory grip on my mental reality is ok with me or, as Sue once put it I think after sex, better than ok. A few museums or outdoor tourist attractions are fine but prowling op shops (secondhand stores) for kitchen equipment, perusing yarn shops for new knitting projects and rubbing shoulders with the friendly Aussies in pubs and caravan parks are equally fun. One of the odd songs from Dr. Dimento on my iPod has a chorus of “hubba, hubba, hubba, I’m a happy boy” and that’s where I want to be, with or without Prozac.
No more details for now-—I am not documenting or photographing this trip, just hanging out in the present and making Sue laugh. As I write we are near the Whitsunday Islands, a collection of San Juan like islands at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef in southern Queensland. Today was a magnificent day for a two hour catamaran ride to Reef World, a floating platform anchored in a channel on the outer reef. The water is so brilliantly blue and turquoise that you half expect your skin color to have changed after swimming in it. With black rubber wetsuits and roped routes to follow along the edge of the reef it was snorkeling for dummies. And fabulous. No sharks but one big sea turtle and lots of giant clams. Clouds of fishies of all colors, coral of all shapes and Wally, a big grouper-like fish with thick blue lips and large eyeballs that left no doubt when he was making eye contact. You could even pet him.
Sue and I are continuing north up the coast of Queensland in search of salties (saltwater crocs that will hunt humans) and a good oncology clinic (a place where the folks are always glad to see you even if they don’t know your name—-Cheers for sick people).
Next time you talk to Sue, ask her how she got the nickname Sidewalk Sue.
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