Of Flies and Roadkill...

October 14
We’ve been telling you all about how wonderful our Australian travels are: warm temperatures, swimming, tropical beaches... Then we realized that, where you live it may be a blustery Fall. You may be going to work and get really ticked off reading about how nice our trip is... So we figure it’s time to tell you about the down side of traveling. How it’s not at all what it’s cracked up to be.

:-( The distances we have to drive here to get anywhere are terrible... One day we did 930 KM.

:-(The temperatures can be murder. It’s been an average of 33 degree, sometimes up to 41 degrees C.

:-( The flies are awful... they want to settle permanently up your nose.

:-( You always have to walk to a shower building, dragging all of your clothes, towel, toiletries, the key... Then you have to balance on one foot in a wet showerstall, trying to get dressed.

:-( The flies are terrible.

:-( There’s no Heineken to be found in the Outback. !

:-( It’s hard to find good coffee here, especially in the supermarket. Almost only instant.

:-( We track sand into our van all the time. Have to sweep piles of it out. All the time.

: -( You should see the flies here.

:-( We keep hearing about killer jellyfish, crocs, spiders, snakes.. That sort of stuff starts to take a toll on the mind...

:-( Every night we have to take down the table, try to fit all the cushions into a bed and wrestle a sheet around it all.

:-( Every morning we have to take down the whole bed before we can sit at our breakfast table.

:-( We have a sunburn. And sand in unmentionable places.

:-( There’s just two of us. If you want a new conversation it gets limited sometimes.

:-( When we run out of a book to read, all we can do is hope to find a book exchange in the next campground. New paperbacks are $20.- here.

:-( Our stove has 3 burners but you can only fit two small pans on it at once.

:-( Did I mention the flies?

:-( Our fridge is about a quarter of a normal one. And it’s full of beer. “Baby beer,” Kees says, referring to the alcohol content of 2.5%.

:-( Almost no internet, and if we can get it it’s expensive.

:-( You should see the flies. They like beer.

:-( Our bathroom is about half the size of a small broom closet. Try pulling up your pants in that!


:-( We see more roadkill than houses.

There. I hope this makes you feel better.
Now I have to run. To the gorgeous white sand beach with the blue water and palmtrees. Sorry.

Dream Time

Thursday Oct 3

Manuel almost died five years ago.
He is an aboriginal man, 50 years of age, who, like many indiginous people, drank too much. He basically drank himself to death. After a 17 day coma, he actually survived. But the doctor told him “One more beer and you’ll die.” Manuel managed to not touch a drop of alcohol since then, and to turn his life around. He now offers a unique, cultural experience which we, as visitors to his country, thoroughly enjoyed. In most places you have no opportunity to interact with locals, and taking photos is not allowed. So when we read the advertisements for Top Didj Cultural Experience, we decided to give it a try. “It might be tacky, it might be touristy,” we thought. But it turned out to be fun, interesting and worth the money.
When we showed up at the art gallery, at 9 AM, we found a gallery and a store full of local art and giftware to browse. But we also found two tiny baby wallabees which we could pet and cuddle.
Then the ten or twelve people in our group, walked to a large outdoor shelter, sat in a circle and met Manuel. He told us about his life. How he was born in the bush, welcomed into the world by the women of his clan with smoke and rituals. He talked about hunting barefooted, living in small shelters and being eight years old when he saw his first whitefellow. (Caucasians are whitefellows, aboriginals are blackfellows.)
He explained family life, how clans can not marry within too close a circle of relations. How families go to other regions to meet families with suitable girls, which are promised to a certain boy at age 4. Once they reach 13 or so, the couple start living together. They don’t know the marriage ceremony. But, he said, much of their tradtional way of life, music, dance, painting and even language will no longer exist in a few more years. “Nowadays,” he said, “young people come home, sit in front of the TV with a Cola and that’s it.” We saw the exact same thing in Nunavut with Inuit people and their culture. But there they seem to have more support to hold on to language and culture. Here there is, apparently, none.
I love their term ‘dream time’. It refers to life before and after your current life. The ancestors live in dream time.
Manuel showed us how to paint a traditional turtle and kangoroo, using a certain number of lines and colors, dictated by his clan. If you know about aboriginal art you can tell which clan, family and in which region made a certain painting.
He showed us how to make fire in the bush and how to spear a kangaroo. He actually still goes into the bush these days to find his own supper. “I have learned,” he said, “that you always have to work for your food. Either by hunting it. Or by working to earn money before you can buy it.”
The hanting sounds of the didgeridoo lingered as we left the dusty town of Katherine behind us on our way to Western Australia and, hopefully, cooler temperatures than the 40+ degrees here.

Aliens Invade Australia

Wed Oct 2    

I wonder if someone ought to tell Australians that their country has been invaded. I don’t think city people will sleep if they knew the extent to which the entire country has been taken over by aliens!
Cities, networks of roads, amazing dwellings have sprouted up all over the Outback and beyond. Millions, no billions of the invaders have taken over the country. Termites that is.
All over Australia we have seen termite mounds, thousands along the roads, into the bush. In the harshest areas where humans couldn’t hope to live, these creatures thrive.
At first we wondered what the red stone peaks were. Ant hills? But they were too point, too stony. Later we learned that these termite mounds only occur in Australia. I guess when the Dutch and Spanish explorers first spotted the continent, and turned up their noses at it, the termites grinned and said “We’ll take it!” Now they own the lot of it.
From small red mounds along the curb, to yellow towers of over 2 meters tall - termite mounds are everywhere. I even saw postcards of termite mounts. Really.
But they are amazing. Like ants and bees, termites have a queens, nymphs, workers, soldiers and alates. Each has its own job to do. The termite is only slightly larger than an ant, sometimes called ‘white ant’ because their skin is so thin it is nearly transparent. Such a vulnerable insect couldn’t live in this climate if it wasn’t for their amazing architectural skills. The mounts protect the queen, who lives near the bottom surrounded by soldiers. Near the top is the food storage. The mounts are completely water proof (important in monsoon season!), fire resistant, and insulated. The have aligned their homes north-south so that it receives the least amount of heat and one side is always in the shade. Scientists have figured out that these ‘magnetic’ termites sense north-south. They are blind so they can’t see where the sun is. The mounds are ventilated to prevent fungi and bacteria from spoiling their food. The colors of the mounds change, of course, as the soil changes. They range from gray to yellow to fiery red.
Even the style of architecture seems to change per region. I wonder if what the termites teach each other, changes subtly until a whole new style is achieved. In some areas the mounds are skinny and pointy, while lately we have seen much rounder, wider mounds that almost resemble upside-down strawberry pots. 
We can probably learn much for these amazing insects. For now, it’s the most abundant species we have seen. Australians have a wicked sense of humor. They have taken to dressing up the mounds. There’s no other form of entertainment when driving roads that are thousands of kilometers long with not much else in sight but termite mounds. So we see termite mounds along the road wearing t-shirts, aprons, hardhats, sunglasses, even frilly underwear. I don’t know how the termites feel about this, but it sure gives us something to look forward to.

From Great Barrier Reef to Outback!

Fri/Sat Sept 13/14: Surfers Paradise, NSW to Hervey Bay, Qld.

Hervey Bay was wonderful. A smaller town, right on the beach. It seemed like city council here had the foresight to preserve the entire water front as park and green space. A long walk/bike trail led from one end of town to the other, stringing together parks, playgrounds, even a free water park. The three campgrounds, right on the water, were council parks. We had a spot on the beach but it WAS windy! Beautiful warm swimming along with the pelicans. Spent 2 nights here.

Sunday/Monday Sept 15/16
243 years ago. At this very spot. A large sail ship approached the north east coast of Australia. Captain James Cook and his botanist, Mr. Banks, came ashore here as the very first Europeans.
No GPS. No mobile phone. There’s still no internet so that part still feels primitive. But otherwise Cook would probably not recognize this very spot, the Town of 1770. We arrived here by road, not ocean. We navigated north along smaller backroads from Hervey Bay. We were surprised how quickly green and relatively populated areas made way for dry and isolated range land. Sometimes it felt like ‘outback’ already. Town of 1770 has not much besides a crowded campground at the end of the road. Good thing we phoned ahead and booked a site for 2 nights. As soon as we stepped out of the car, a lady said “Hello again! We met at the Horseshoe Bay ferry on our way to Bowen Island!” We racked our brains... until we discovered that she mistook us for other Canadians and that she meant HERE, not in BC! Amazing.  

This is just looking down from the boat!

The campground is fairly run down and feels more like a parking lot. Our neighbors are less than 2 mtr away. But we spent all day Monday away on the Great Barrier Reef! Since we came all this way we decided to follow our heart and see for ourselves what we were taught about even in grade school in Holland. The catamaran took us out into the open ocean for over an hour before we spotted what looked like sandbars. But they were corral reefs, exposed at low tide. The high ocean waves came to an abrupt end into a shallow, peaceful and turquoise lagoon. We navigated through a channel into the lagoon, spotting mating turtles and an amazing aray of fish. The boat moored at a floating dock and we were taken, in small groups, onto Lady Musgrave Island, the most southern of the Great Barrier Reef islands.
Wading thr0ugh the water, we reached a bleached corral beach where two huge loggerhead turtles had stranded themselves on too hot a day. The guide was worried about them dying and so Kees, along with six other strong guys found themselves a loggerhead turtle rescue squad.

It took 7 men to lift the turtle back to water.

Me snorkeling!

They hoisted the 300 some pound turtle toward the cool water. Until she frantically flapped her flippers. But, in the end, they both made it back into the water. Likely after having deposited their eggs on the island, which will hatch in just eight weeks.  The rest of the island was bird paradise. Black Noddy Terns make their nests among the tangle of tropical trees. Their nests are all over and their guana covers everything. The birds themselves are so at ease in this paradise that you can practically pet them. You can be within a foot of them and they still don’t fly away.  I snorkeled in the blue waters, seeing hundreds of different colored tropical fish, ranging from bright blue, to yellow striped to skinny barracuda’s. We also took trips in a glass bottom boat and in a boat with a deep underwater keel and glass windows. We had tea and a lovely luncheon on the boat. All together well worth the cost. It made for one of those fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime days!

Tuesday Sept 17
Drove 500 km from 1770 to Emerald, Queensland. Landscape changed from lush green to dry green. Cacti along the roads. Towns further apart and temps higher. Nice green corner of a campground though. And from now on.. 500 km per day will get us to Uluru!