Antipodes part 3: Australia
11/26/10, 10:13am Sydney time. Right. So I made it from NZ to Australia, through Sydney (whose airport I was biased against immediately because the shuttle between terminals costs money) and up to Cairns. I was confused for quite a while because Queensland does not observe DST whereas NSW does. One night in the charming little hostel then up at 6am (which was perfectly fine because of the time change) and onto the dive boat. The schedule for the next three days was dive, eat, repeat, with eleven dives total, including two night ones. The guests were a mix of Australians, Americans and Europeans. The reef itself was maybe not quite as spectacular as I was expecting (hm, maybe a theme here), which is to say it was only a little nicer than Samoa. The highlights were sea turtles (including one I found sleeping during a night dive), anemones with clownfish and other species of anemone fish, reef sharks, and my favorite, the giant clams, a couple of which were a good 1.5m long, nearly Jules-Verne-sized. Also a lot of sea cucumbers, one sea slug, and the Maori wrasse, which looks exactly like how Disney would design a fish. Then one more night in Cairns; yesterday morning I went to the Carins Botannical Gardens, which had a lot of nice rainforest to walk through (featuring several kinds of fig), and a plant in a plexiglass cage which I guess is the Aussie equivalent of poison ivy: if you touch it, it injects you with a neurotoxin which causes pain in the area for as long as *months*, and there's no treatment. Yeah. They don't fuck around in Australia. So then an afternoon flight back to Sydney, and then straight to the hostel where I ended up sleeping for 12 hours; diving is supposed to be tiring, but it's strange that it didn't catch up to me for two days. Anyway, this morning after much tribulation I managed to sort out my accomodation for the rest of my time in Sydney (apparently there's some kind of big school gathering here this weekend, so tons of places were sold out) & am ready to enjoy the city.
5:41pm. Saw the Taronga Zoo, Sydney's main zoo. As you'll see in the pictures, I was able to see all the major Australian animals, including kangaroos & wallabies (which you get to wander in the enclosure with), a wombat (sleeping), various koalas (ditto) a platypus (I agree with Cal that it's smaller and quicker than you'd think), both species of echidna (very cute, similar to the kiwi), cassowary, Tasmanian devil, kookaburra, and of course the fresh- and saltwater crocodiles. (The zoo was very complete, and also had some American alligators for comparison.)
11/27/10, 7:04pm. So. After the last entry I went and saw a concert at, yes, the Sydney Opera House. It was Mahler 4, preceded by Mozart's famous clarinet concerto and excerpts from the opera Capriccio by Richard Strauss. The Sydney Symphony under the baton of Vladimir Ashkenazy, and featuring his son Dmitri Ashkenazy on the clarinet. It was quite good, although the cell phone of the woman next to me went off durug the slow movement of the Mozart, and I drowsed a bit through the Mahler (something that the Fouth perhaps alone among Mahler allows). Then today I had a nice late start and went to the beach. The famous Bondi beach, in particular. The water was too cold to really swim in, but I did some reading (Gravity's Rainbow, which is now my only book left--remind me to write about the others), worked on my tan (hopefully not too hard) and, as they say, people-watched. Sydneysiders are an attractive bunch in general, I'd say (yes, it is a topless beach). There were also an amusing number of Argentinians/Uruguayans.
A note on Australian prices: a 20oz soda costs at least $3 from a convenience store, and fast food is a couple of dollars more, except for the soft-serve cone, which is 50-60 cents, and which I'm going to go ahead and declare the Best Value in Australia. Also, I got a ticket for HPVII.1 tonight that was $18, which is maybe not that much more than you'd pay in, say, Manhattan, but surprised me a bit since the snack prices seem on par with the US. And the movie theater has reserved seats, which is funny as hell.
Since I have a bit of time waiting for dinner here, a note on driving. Driving on the left is overall quite easy, though there have been a few times, mainly when making a right (or left)turn out of a driveway, that I was little slow to remember the correct lane. The biggest problem is remembering that the turn-signal lever and the windshield-wiper lever are reversed--I've turned on the wipers before making a turn countless times. The most disturbing thing about the roads in NZ, which I think may be true in Australia as well, is that when the centerline on a road is dashed, to indicate passing is allowed, it's colored white, not yellow, exactly as the line between two lanes going the same way is indicated. (A solid centerline is yellow as usual.) This means if your cruising along and not paying attention you might think the lane to your right is just another travelling lane, which didn't actually happen to me, but was still disturbing.
12/5/10, 8:02pm South Australian Time (which is, get this, a half-hour off from New-South-Welsh/Victorian time). A long time since the last entry, for no very good reason, so let's get to work. First: in Australia, *all* the lines are white. All of them. But before I found that out, my last day in Sydney. (Incidentally, wanking in the woods is much more entertaining on the screen than on the page, perhaps just because it's so much shorter. Also, callbacks sound much wittier in an Australian accent.) The next morning, I did the Bridge Climb, going up the arch of the Sydney Harbor ("Harbour") Bridge, which seems to be a Sydney institution despite only having existed for fifteen years or so, This was entertaining, but probably not worth the $200 I spent on it. (As a side note, the Australian dollar being at parity with the US dollar is apparently an unusual high for it, unfortunately for me.) I learned that the Bridge Climb people had to overcome a lot of resistance from the owner of the bridge (i.e. the state government) to get approval, which I fully believe because of the amazingly extensive amount of safety and environmental gear we had to don, the process of which took an entire hour. After that I was going to see the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it was closed except for a special exhibit I didn't care to see, so I wandered over to the botannical gardens. There I went on a tour of Government House, which was until a few years ago the residence and office for the Governor (i.e. viceroy) of NSW. Yes, apparently each state has its own royal representative, as well as the Governor-General for all of Australia. The house was nice, and toward the end of the tour we were told about this crazy Australian piano-maker who makes pianos that have more than 88 keys and a different striking mechanism, and are considered by some to be superior to Steinway et al., although they're basically unknown to the rest of the world--the first and possibly only one to-date to be outside of this continent is owned by Rowan Atkinson. Yes, all very random. Afterward I continued wandering the gardens, and passed what was evidently an important historical culvert (Australia seems even more desparate for historical significance than the US), but it started to rain, so I was trapped in a gazebo for a while (your own joke here) before making my way back to the hostel via a wine bar I'd wanted to try.
The next morning I was up reasonably early to acquire my rental car, which process was excruciatingly protracted because of the queue I found myself in. But eventually I got it and headed north out of the city (across that same Harbo(u)r Bridge, in fact, which fortunately is tolled only southbound) to the Hunter Valley, Australia's first important wine region (I think), and the birthplace of Australian shiraz (definitely). They also grow semillion, a grape used in France only for blending but which as a varietal has a wonderfully sharp mineral character (at least in that terroir) which I think would make a supeb match for oysters. I had promised myself, however, that I would absolutely not buy any white wine in Australia, having bought four bottles in NZ (now down to two, incidentally), and being much more of a red wine drinker at home (which fact, I must say, my time in NZ may have had some singificant effect on). But I did end up with three bottles of shiraz, two from 2006 (Bluegrass, by Saddler's, and Mudgee Reserve, by Rosemount, which latter you may recognize from their value US releases), and one 2000 (Hunter Regional by Wydham Estate, the original Hunter Valley winery). I'm amazed both that the wineries will hold on to their bottles so long before release, and at the depth that the reserves pick up ([] this ain't). Admittedly the 2000 and the 2005s I'll get to later were all decribed as being at their peak, so it's not like the aging potential is enormous here, but it is delicious. And as another side note, I find myself much more suited to the winery (or Wine Taste) method where you taste 20-40 wines in an afternoon, get one or two mouthfuls of each and basically make a snap judgment of dislike/indifferent/like/like enough to buy a bottle/like enough to have a case shipped home and/or subscribe to the mailing list (which last I have, as you might guess, never actually done, though I remain hopeful), as opposed to e.g., the wine dinners I've been to in the past year, where you have a whole glass of three or four wines, and must consider them in more depth. Maybe that means my tastes are shallow, but what can I say: I like Bordeaux more than Burgundy. At any rate, after several wineries it was time to head back around Sydney to make a start towards Melbourne. At this point I'll observe that more than just having monochromatic lines, the Australian road system (at least in major metropolitan areas) is terrible. I was coming into Sydney from the north on a freeway, and trying to get to the Sydney-Melbourne freeway, but (a) there is no freeway connection between them, only a warren of surface streets and (b) all the signs are completely unhelpful to someone who doesn't already know where to go. Just in general, freeways turn into highways and back again at random, streets change name every 5km (like if there's a rode from Aville to Bville, then in Aville it's called "Bville road" and vice versa, changing over at some random place in the middle), and even if a street has a number as well, that's no guarantee it's any kind of major road, or will connect with major roads in any reasonable way. (Unless it has a letter in front of it, but those roads don't exist in major metro areas.) Of course it doesn't help that I only have the barely-adequate Lonely Planey maps, which for some reason only give the names/numbers of about a third of the roads they show. Nevertheless, I eventually did find the road I wanted, and went on to a random motel somewhere around the exit for Canberra. I should mention it wasn't until that night/the next morning that I decided on a specific route itinerary to Adelaide. I should also mention that this motel cost $70, which I immediately established as my baseline price for Australian motels.
So the next morning I headed south to Canberra. After stopping at a random winery (about 10 minutes after it opened--as a side note, I could easily have gone to winery every day along the route I'm taking, they're that dense), I got to the capital, which is arranged basically as D.C. would be if it had been planned after everyone was driving cars. The capitol iteself is underground, with the only visible part being a strange tent-frame structure with a giant flag. I parked at the National Portrait Gallery, then walked over to the National Gallery, with the idea of looking at the former after. The latter was very nice (Australia, as it turns out, had a very strong Surrealist movement, one of my favorite styles), then I went out by a different (more convenient, according to signs) door than I had come in. I went toward the next building over, which I thought very odd-looking for an art gallery (the parking garage being underground, I hadn't really gotten a good look before), one gigantic room with a big ramp, sort of like a rectilinear Guggenheim, except there were not portraits I could see. As I went in I saw on the door "High Court". "Oh," I thought, "This must be the 'high court' entrance", which made sense more or less, as it was clearly not the main entrance, there being no information desk or coat-check, and I had come from an elevated courtyard, more or less. A couple of guards standing by the entrance asked if I was "just there to look aroud", to which I gave a suprised affirmative--what else would one do in an art museum. It wasn't until I had strode purposefully a third of the way up the giant ramp that I realized I was, in fact, in Australia's High Court (i.e. Supreme Court), which is located, yes, right in between the two art museums. So I continued striding purposefully up to the landing, then turned around and strode purposefully back down and out the door. The actual portrait gallery was interesting primarily for its emphasis on portraits of contemporary famous Australians--including, say, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett. So after a rather fancy lunch which was notable for an amazing appetizer (or "entree") of spatchcock chicken and foie gras with peanut butter and jelly, I hit the road again southward. While Australia is a pretty enough country, it doesn't for the most part have the Stendahl-syndrome gorgeousness of New Zealand. The forests of the southeast are an exception. Like much of NZ, a fairly open canopy with a fern-based ground cover. (Farther west the canopy is even more open, with grass replacing ferns in areas, and farther inland it's basically savanna.) Around seven o'clock I was stopped going through a small town for a random breathalizer, the first time that's happened to me in any country. It had all the hallmarks of a bored small-town cop flexing his muscles, based on his manner, and since I can't imagine 7pm on a Tuesday is any kind of high-risk period. I should mention here that although Australia has a very strict .05 drunk-driving (or as they call it, "drink driving") limit, they (and NZ) seem far more concerned about sleepiness: there are signs every few km about how you should pull over and take a nap if you're tired, and the rest stops seem more about, well, rest (insofar as they don't always feature a bathroom, much less info center, gas and food, although some ceratainly do). Not long after that I stopped at another well-priced motel.
For the next day I had three goals: sunbathe on the Ninety-Mile Beach (just what it sounds like), try some wines in the Yarra River region, and acquire lodging in Melbourne. The first of these was easily accomplished, although the beach was the most bizarre I've ever been on. This beach, though long and sandy as one would like a beach to be, was completely covered in two things. The first was what I later discovered to be cuttlebones (I thought this was a possibility at the time, but somehow didn't think that cuttlefish could be so plentiful that they could carpet a beach with bones at a rate of one per twenty square feet.) The second was dead birds. Yes, one half-decomposed bird carcass per hundred square feet, on the entire beach. No, I have no idea why either. And yes, there were a few other people on the beach, who were acting normally and not freaking out about being in the denoument of a Hitchcock film. So I found a relatively dead-bird-free area and sunbathed for a little bit (the water being as cold as in Sydney). Then onward northwest to the Yarra Valley, another of Australia's more important wine regions. (Melbourne itself is on the Yarra, near its mouth.) Here I acquired two wines (and indeed only stopped at two wineries, my best ratio so far), both from 2005 as promised, one Tin Cows shiraz from TarraWarra, the other the Cattleyard cab/merlot from Long Gully Estate. Well pleased, I headed into Melbourne just after 5pm (as one would expect from usual winery hours).
I checked into a hotel at roughly 12:30am. Aside from the obvious (my refusal to book ahead), I blame this on several factors. First is Melbourne's road system, which is as confusing as Sydney's and more crowded to boot. Second is the flaw inherent in travel guides: they tell you some subset of the accomodations which they think are the best (for the price), and these are of course the only ones you know the locations of. But by the very nature of (a)being the travel guide and (b) being the best, they are naturally the first ones to fill up. I think there should exist "The Last-Minute Person Who Is Flexible on Quality Travel Guide", which lists the places that are least likely to be fill up (without being so totally awful or overpriced you'd rather sleep in your car). The point being that I went to four LP-listed hostels in different parts of the city and all were full. I then tried to locate one of the major roads back into the city, which I did, in the hopes that there would be motels along it, which there were not. So then I just started making turns at random, which led me to a place whose reception was closed (with no answer on the after-hours phone) and then to this conference-centery place at $100, which I took gratefully, it being 12:30am. Bear in mind that at this point I had absolutely no idea where I was in relation to the city center.
The next moring I discovered I was relatively close thereto, and tried to extend for two more nights, but could only get one. Insanity. (Do I need to point out here that it is not an economic equilibrium for most accomodations to be booked out for most of the time?) I then took the train downtown, where I saw the Museum of the Moving Image (very cute) and the Art Museum of Victoria (or something like that--also good). I then went across the street to a tapas place recommended by LP which was excellent if pricey. (Incidentally the Antipodes are very very big on tapas for some reason.)
I should now mention that this was day two of what I'll call the Victorian Meteorological Anomaly. There are thousands of places which claim "If you don't like the weather, wait half an hour", but I have never found this to be literally true until this three-day period. One example: when I went in to this tapas lunch, it was bright and sunny, partly cloudy at worst. When I came out, it was raining, and in a few minutes more it was raining torrentially, with some thunder. So I just sat under cover in the plaza with the museums and used its free wifi for a while. (New laptop is still performing flawlessly, by the way.) When the rain stopped I wandered the botannical garden for a while (if there's a major city in AU or NZ without a botannical garden, I've yet to visit it), then went back to the hotel to change for dinner with Katie, another former Princeton astro grad student now doing a postdoc at Cambridge but spending a few months in Melbourne. She's doing her own road trip of New Zealand in a couple of weeks, so I gave her some advice on that. She also suggested that hostel/hotel congestion might be due to the 60,000-person, two-night U2/Jay-Z (or something like that) concert going on. Apparently I have terrible scheduling luck in large Australian cities.
The next day I checked out (I note again that travelling with wine in summer is pretty annoying) and went to the Melbourne Museum, a sciency place which was packed with schoolchildren (side note: all the Antipodal schoolchildren seem to wear uniforms; Samoa too), and and extensive exhibits on the human body and on mental illness, inter alia. Then lunch, featuring kangaroo steak, which was absolutely delicious albeit heavily seasoned. (Side note: a surprising number of restaurants don't have separate lunch and dinner menus. They might have a section of lighter, more lunchy dishes and a section of heavier, more dinnery dishes, but both are available at both times, and there none of this business of paying less for the same dish because it's lunchtime. Also they're very stingy with the carbs (NZ too), with less than half of restaurants giving free bread.) I then headed out of town toward the Great Ocean Road, the Austalian equivalent of the PCH. I ended up in a coastal town at the near end, and, in a stunning reversal from Samoa, haggled a room from $150 down to $100 (through the simple expedient of starting to leave), which was yes, more than my baseline, but I had been prepared to pay that rate for that night at the Melbourne place, and it was a nice room, complete with suede fainting couch. I went out to get dinner, and as I sat at an outdoor table reading the New Yorker as is my wont (incidentally you can get the New Yorker in Australia, albeit it does cost $12.50), I heard the word "rainbow" from a neighboring table and looked up to behold the most perfect rainbow I've seen in my entire life, by far. A whole semicircle, double rainbow going into the sea, and really, really bright. Like cartoon bright. It was insane, and I didn't get a picture because I didn't have either of my cameras on me.
12/6/10, 10:13pm. Continuing. So the next day I went to see a nice waterfall; there were a couple of hiking trails going out from it, which were marked with warning signs about the rough terrain, poisonous snakes and (this last indicated as the most deadly) tree branches falling on you. I found it hard to believe that falling branches were a major threat until one actually did fall close to me. How can you have a forest if branches are falling off all the time? I then headed westward along the G.O. Road through several more little surfing towns and several interesting coastal rock formations (see photos). This stretch of road is also covered in signs reminding one to "Drive on the left in Australia"--I understand it's a popular route for tourists, but considering you have presumably gotten there from Melbourne or Adelaide or whatever, they don't seem very useful. In the late afternoon I turned inland toward the Grampian Mountains, intending to stop for the night before I got there, but I didn't see any likely places so I just kept going, and as night started to fall I saw several wallabies along the side of the road (but none in it, thankfully). I got to Hall's Gap, the main tourist hub of the region, and found, mirabile dictu, an LP hostel with space available.
So the next day I did a two-hour hike in the morning, came back to town for lunch, then a three-hour hike in the afternoon. These were good, particularly the second, which had some interesting gorges (see photos), although the vegetation was sparser than I'd like. I then headed out of town to the NW, discovering a kookaburra and what seemed to be an injured or sick wallaby along the road (see photos). Unfortunately not having a cellphone I couldn't call the Injured Wildlife Hotline, which is advertised all along the roads in rural areas. (Side note: I have seen kangaroo/wallaby, wombat and echidna crossing signs so far.) I stopped for the night in the charmingly-named Bordertown, just over the South Australian border, and went to the local Chinese place for dinner. This was reasonably similar to, but different in signifcant ways from, an American westernized Chinese restaurant, with the most notable difference being that I had to ask for rice with my main dish, and was charged for it. I told you they were stingy with the carbs here. The first motel I stopped at wanted $109 and would't budge on it (indeed, the guy got rather snippy), but the second one offered $70 straight off.
This bring us to today. I continued northwest and came to the McLaren Vale wine region, which was disappointing in the sense that none of the wines rose to the level of "like enough to buy a bottle", although in a couple of cases that was due mostly to price. I also had a rather disappointing meal at one of the wineries. Then after a little nap on the beach I came into the city, where I am now in a nice little $75 place complete with pool.
12/10/10, 7:51pm. So the next day I was in Adelaide. In the moring I went to the Penfield winery, one of the most famous Australian wineries, but wasn't that impressed. I mean, their wine was okay, but not spectacular. Then for lunch I went to the Central Market, a mall-like place mostly focussed on food. I ended up having a nice bi-bim-bap (there seem to be a lot of Koreans in Adelaide) and a honey-flavored milkshake, which tasted bizarrely like cake batter (in a good way). It was now 12:30 and I had to decide whether to spend the afternoon at the beach or in the Barossa Valley wine region. I chose the former option, which went well for about an hour and a half, and then it clouded up and started to rain (that damn VMA had followed me into South Australia). So I sat in McDonald's on the internet for a while, then had an early dinner at an organic pizza place (which was really good--duck pizza and lamb salad) and headed for the airport. The flight was delayed half an hour or so because of lightning and shifting winds, but I eventually made it to Perth, where I was picked up by Anita and spent the night at her place.
The next morning I was up nice and early from the time change (2.5hr; Western Australia doesn't do Daylight Savings either), and we headed south for the great forests of the Southwest. These are composed mainly of various species of eucalyptus, which go by the names of marri, karri, jarrah, red tingle, and yellow tingle, inter alia. One of our stops was a winery (meh), and another was at a "climbing tree", which is a karri tree with pieces of rebar stuck in it to make a spiral ladder up to the top, where there's a platform that people used to keep watch for fires from. And bear in mind that the karri trees are on average twice as tall as normal trees, 70 to 90 meters tall. So this ladder went up a good 50 meters; there was a wire mesh to keep you falling off the side, but nothing to keep you from falling backward. As I said to Anita, I can hardly believe that this was in the same country where I had to spend an hour getting suited up for the BridgeClimb. But we made it up and down without incident. We eventually made it to Walpole on the south coast, and checked into our very cute country chalet, complete with blazing woodstove.
Then yesterday morning we went on this "eco" cruise, which really consisted of going around on a boat while this guy Gary (who was in fact garrulous as all get-out) expounded on why Walpole is the center of the universe, including a cache of Tolstoy's papers recently found there, the building of boats used to break the record for youngest person to sail solo around the world, and one of Alfred Dreyfus's lawyers moving there. He did also point out lots of birds (there were some black swans and a pelican, among others), and there was a hiking portion and some lemon cake. Altogether very entertaining, if not exactly what I was expecting. After that we headed over to the Valley of the Giants, home of the red tingle trees, which are the largest eucalptus in diameter; indeed, the largest you could park two cars inside--and you actually could, because the middle, dead parts of the trunks tend to burn away in the forest fires, and the outer shell tends to divide into several "buttresses", so you can easily walk into or through them. The VotG has a ground-level walk and a treetop walk, where you get up to canopy level, 40 meters of so for these trees. (According to Gary, he was in NorCal recently consulting on their plans to build a similar thing there). The walkways and platforms are designed to sway gently in the breeze/with the impact of people walking, which indeed they do; somehow the resonant frequency seems a little higher than one would like, though. Anyway, after that we continued east to the town of Denmark, had dinner there then returned westward to a campsite near Walpole (did I mention that Anita brought camping equipment?)
This morning we continued west and north, stopping at several points to do little hikes. In the town of Pemberton we had smoked trout for lunch and climbed the Gloucester Tree, the most famous of the climbing trees, with the platform 61 meters of the ground. We came into the Margaret River region in late afternoon, and had time for a snorkel off the beach at Yellingup, where our campsite is.
12/20/10, 11:27pm. Finishing up. The next day was early beachoff, followed by six wineries (with only one bottle purchased, the cab/merlot from Xanadu, which was the priciest purchase of the trip at $64; I also liked the reds at Gralyn, but not $110 worth). Then back to Perth. Sunday we went down to Fremantle, Perth's port, where I pretty much just lay on the beach while Anita taught her tai chi class. Then we went to a barbecue birthday party for Anita's friend's sister, which was great and reminded me of the Fourth of July barbecue my family does. Monday, my last Australian day, I went into Perth itself, but just had time for lunch and one museum (which had a cool piece of Aboriginal art featuring a wall full of severed ears) before it was time to head to the airport. Thus began what could accurately be described as three redeyes in a row. I left Perth at 6:50pm and got into Auckland at 5am (local time). After six hours of sleep in the airport I went downtown, wandered around, had lunch, went to the maritime museum (featuring the 1995 America's Cup yacht), and got a Christmas present to my cousing. The next flight left at 11pm and got into LA at 2pm (local time). At this point my luggage contained six bottles of wine, which I believe is twice the duty-free limit, but somehow I ended up through customs without dealing with this issue. I may have gotten into the wrong line at some point, I'm not sure. Anyway, after failing to find the inter-terminal shuttle for far too long, and changing my clothes, I got on the last flight at 9:30pm and arrived at JFK at 5:30am. Then just a quick four-train journey back to Princeton, where I had time for a nice nap before yoga class and Pub Quiz.
PS. Web photo album is now complete as well (though not quite in order).