Day 10 - Bonus Post!

Things seen on the road to Mt Isa:

2383 dead kangaroos and wallabies by the roadside (this is an estimate, I eventually stopped counting).

512 blown tires (also an estimate).

110 kilometers at one stretch without a curve, sign or intersecting side road or... anything.

40 skeletal African famine cows plucking leaves off thorntrees.

8 actual passenger cars, the rest of the minimal traffic being poo softening roadtrains, safari style farm trucks (where do the farmers live??) and campers like ours.

4 settlements of any sort.

0 farm houses or any structures outside of the settlements.

0 live kangaroos.

0 police.

Oh, and I forgot. Either a bazillion or gajillion, whichever is the bigger number, termite mounds. The locals sometimes put t-shirts on them. This is distracting and strange. "Look, there's...! Never mind."

We didn't make it to Mt Isa, only Julia Creek as darkness comes much sooner here than expected. And after dark you don't want to be driving. See the kangaroo masacre statistic above. It's like they've joined a doomsday cult that tells them to gather on the roads at night and jump in front of roadtrains so that they can become reincarnated as... what? Wombats?

At least we got some laundry done at Julia Creek.

Day 10 - It's A Long Long Way To Mt Isa

OK folks, open your favorite map app and search for Mt Isa. Found it? Now look around it. See anything? Any geographical features of note? No, that's right, there are none. That blank space for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers around Mt Isa is called "nowhere". Now those of you who, like me, grew up in Saskatchewan may think you have a pretty decent handle on "nowhere ", as in " East Buttcheek is in the middle of nowhere". But I'm here to tell you that the Australian Outback does a highly advanced version of nowhere that makes the Canadian Prairie look positively bustling. 

And it is dry, startlingly dry. Especially since it was so wet in the Atherton Highlands just hours before. In fact the transition from one of the lushest places I have ever been to one of the most arid occurred over the matter of a handful of kilometers. Sudden. We spent the night at the end of a washboard red dust track amongst white gum trees and nervous wallabies. In the morning as I was filling our water tank from a nearby tap an old man with a big gap tooth smile approached me. He had that classic Australian old man look of boots, knee socks and baggy shorts revealing stick thin legs with that baked brown and black mottled skin of a dermatologist's dreams.

"You know that that's not drinking water mate." 

"Oh." I stared at the hose. The tank was almost full. "Is there anywhere nearby where we can fill with drinking water?" 

"I dunno. Not with the drought. But its fine for washing and you can boil it to drink."

"Oh well, I'll just drink beer."

"Good on yer mate!" He laughed and slapped my shoulder. I had earned my first 'good on yer'. I brushed the powdery red dust off my feet and climbed into the cab of the motorhome. Mt Isa is a long long way away.

 

 

Days 8 & 9 Welcome To The Jungle

I woke this morning to the sound of oddly subdued roosters and the sound of light rain on the fibreglass roof of the motorhome. I stepped outside into a world of green. Fifty paces from the campsite a trail plunged into the jungle. I stepped into a David Attenborough Planet Earth documentary. The crowing roosters (by way of explanation, the campground was  stocked with a pleasing array of barnyard animals) were replaced by a dozen strange birdcalls. The sound of rain on the motorhome was replaced by the sound of rain on the jungle canopy, not a drop making it to the ground. The green enveloped me, so dense and so intense that I could easily imagine that one could get lost for days in a single acre. By "one" I mean "I"; others may be less spastic.

We were on the Atherton Tableland, an Eden of not only jungle, but of incredibly fertile small farms, cute villages, ancient hippies and... wait for it... platypuses. Those of you who have seen the giant inflatable platypus in my basement know that I have an intense, some would say unhealthy, relationship with the creature. Consequently it has been high on my life list to see The Platypus in the wild. We had passed some parks guaranteeing platypus viewing but in these it was apparent that The Platypus was being held against His will for the pleasure of tourists. It was my wish that He (or She) be viewed in the wild and free. We stared at the water for a very long time. No platypus. We came back the next day. Again, staring for a very long time. This time... platypus! He revealed Himself! It was an astonishing and deeply fulfilling sight.

On to the Outback now, 3000 km to Darwin.

Day 7 - Seussville, Australia

There is no more Seussian place on earth than Australia. In fact, there isn't even a runner up. From the wacky starburst flowers through to the escaped lunatic kookaburra laugh to the absurd portmanteau platypus, this country was clearly designed by Dr. Seuss. The flocks of manic cockatoos, the trees with long spindly trunks ending in riotous fern fronds, the ibises with their ridiculous long curved beaks rooting about on people's lawns... all of it. Even the names of the animals: potoroo, bandicoot and hairy nosed wombat. Or the place names: Wagga Wagga, Woolooroomoo, Bong Bong and Humpty Doo (yes, seriously). Seen from this perspective Australia makes a whole lot more sense. I kind of love it.

Postscript: I got it the wrong way around. Seuss apparently did not design Australia. Rather it seems likely that it designed him, so to speak. Theodore Geisel declared Australia to be his favorite place in the world after travelling here in 1964.

Day 6 - It's Better When The Screaming Stops

Once I held his head under the water for a good long while until the screaming and struggling stopped everything got a lot better. Alexander later declared that it was, and I am quoting verbatim here, "the best experience of my life!" To be fair Isabel screamed even more and to be fair they had both been rendered  even more irrational and sensitive than normal by hypothermia. I should explain that both were wearing masks and snorkels. I should further explain that both had chosen to sit in the "splash zone" on the catamaran out to the reef. Even in the tropics you can get very cold when you are skinny and wet amd in a strong wind early in the morning. In any case there was a wildly excessive amount of complaining and shrieking about ill-fitting equipment and sand and wind and cold and waves and and and... Until I just shoved their heads under the water. And then there was silence and then they saw how beautiful the coral was. It didn't last long - soon masks filled with water and knees scraped on things and shivering set in again, but while it lasted it was good. 

The drama limited our own time available to snorkel, but Lorraine and I agreed that the coral was as good as anywhere we've been, with a diversity of shapes and colours that would be considered tasteless anywhere other than in nature. And we agreed that we were fortunate to get out there early with a smaller group before the monster boats showed up disgorging so many snorkeling tourists that you could walk on their backs from one end of the lagoon to the other (they would probably protest, but if you were quick about it you could definitely manage it). 

So that was the Great Barrier Reef. But honestly, what I enjoyed the most was the sail out and back when the children were stunned into silence by the beauty.

Day 5 - How Does A Koala Feel About Being Cuddled?

I would have said, "aggrieved", but it turns out that this question is not the right one to ask as despite the fact that cuddling is clearly advertised what happens is really more akin to a brief grapple than what most people would define as a "cuddle". For the allotted twenty seconds (what this works out to in dollars per second is a bit of math I scarcely dare perform) one is permitted to have a koala clamp on to one's chest like a clawed barnacle, albeit a grey furry, arguably very cute barnacle.

So how does the koala feel about being compelled to clamp on to a series of strange chests? To the best of my ability to read their expressions I would say that they feel something on a spectrum running from indifference to stupefaction. Either that or they've been drugged. Judge for yourself in the photo below. And for those of you busy judging us for abetting koala enslavement I will say that you have not travelled through Australia with a koala besotted thirteen year old girl. Moreover I am told that their emotions in the wild also run from indifference to stupefaction. These are supremely relaxed animals.

However, all other considerations aside, it did allow me to play with my camera lenses and photograph Fred (the koala's unexpected name) and his neighbours.

Day 4 - Australia Wants To Kill You

"It's been really dry this year, so I reckon you'll be all right mate. Sometimes those roads are under a meter or two of water!"
I was buying maps for our drive next week across the top of Australia to Darwin. The shop owner was enjoying telling travel nightmare stories. He was smiling.
"Yeah, in The Wet even the truck snorkels are under water!"
A lot of the trucks here have "safari snorkels" which are exactly what you think they are - air intake pipes up at cab level. Bizarre looking.
"And watch for crocs Mate!"
"We'll stay away from the water and we'll be fine."
"No mate, those crocs will walk for miles from water hole to water hole when its dry like this. And those buggers can run!" He wasn't smiling anymore. "Just keep your eyes open."

Roger. Australia is also known as The Land Of Elaborate Warning Signs. This was the first verbal warning, but the countryside is festooned with signs pointing out the various ways in which Australia plans to kill you or at least make your life unpleasant. We've only been here two days and have already seen many signs warning us about those crocodiles plus marine stingers, electric ants and stinging trees. The latter promises "distress" in addition to "severe pain", as if "severe pain" were not enough encouragement to watch out. Watch out with a touch of paranoia I should add as the leaves depicted were comically generic looking.

Days 2 & 3 - My Brain Is Porridge

The far far side of the world after 45 hours of travel and four hours of sleep. The kids are leaping and sprinting while I barely manage to put my shorts on the right way around. The Jurassic Park beach (crocodile warnings!), the shrieky birds, the jungly hills, the comically thick accents... it's too much... just too much. I really need to get some sleep.

Day 1 - There Is No Sunday This Week

And no Father's Day this year. We chased the sun southwestwards from Vancouver, diagonally across the Pacific. Across the International Date Line from Saturday directly into Monday. Fifteen hours in an aluminum tube with my children; Lorraine already ahead in Australia. The Father's Day Marathon replaced by a marathon of sitting. But the children were merciful, quickly passing through overtired hyper into overtired stunned, but sleeping remarkably little as the unseen Pacific slid beneath them.

Two Days To Departure

This first post is a boring test post and a way to answer a question I've been asked a couple of times: how do you pack for almost three months away to destinations as diverse as Indonesia, Istanbul and Ireland? The short answer is "carefully".
The long answer is below in a photo:

That is everything I am taking. Everything. Ok, almost. The only exceptions are the sleeping bag I'll need in Botswana and Namibia, the suit I'll buy in London so that they'll let me into the restaurants on the Queen Mary, the stack of clean new US dollars I'll need in Zimbabwe (stay tuned...) and the credit card I'll need everywhere else.

Thanks to the miracle of the modern compression bag - basically a fancy zip-lock - all of the above, except what I'm wearing at any given point, fits into this:

The backpack is less than half the allowed carry-on size. But it has the weight density of a small neutron star and if I end up buying anything I'll have to bribe the kids to carry it for me...