Australia 2012

Monday we got up at a reasonable hour, packed up, and headed back to the Cairns airport and onward to Sydney. We took a taxi to our next Airbnb site, a room in a 2-bedroom apartment, a 3.5-story walkup with our 50-lb suitcases. There was just enough time to shower and then to walk to Quay, the most stunning restaurant of the entire trip. Despite its being a view restaurant (the Sydney Harbor bridge and the Opera House were both visible from our table) and its having been around eleven years, it was really, really good. There was a choice between an eight-course tasting menu and a four-course ala carte menu. With each of us picking four courses, it became a less expensive but equally tasty eight-course tasting menu. The sommelier picked wine pairings for each course as if we’d ordered the official eight-course menu, and she explained each one and why she chose it. The most memorable dishes were the pig cheek with shiitake and scallops on top, the wagyu beef in a chocolate black pudding with crunchy grains on top, and the eight-texture chocolate cake. Their menu changes every so often, but there are many dishes which were made famous by their appearance on Master Chef, a very popular reality TV show — many clients come from South East Asia to have those dishes specifically, so they can’t remove them from the menu.

We noticed that Sydney was having a Biennale of Contemporary Art, so we decided to check it out. We started Tuesday at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which had Biennale exhibitions on two of its levels. On our way to the next venue, we stopped at the State Library galleries to see the World Press Photo winners for 2011. We continued on the free ferry to Cockatoo Island, Sydney’s equivalent to Alcatraz (it had contained a prison) where many pieces of industrial equipment and many empty industrial rooms were adorned by various pieces of whimsical art. One contained chains and other objects made of white Styrofoam in a rather colossal scale, reminding us of the room-sized Thomas Rentmeister piece we’d seen in Perth — we’ll have to send him pictures. One contained colorful circular paper constructions; at the end of the gallery you’d see how these could be folded up and would have the appearance of a machine gun, a handgun, or a bullet. One space was littered with letters, which the audience would arrange, refrigerator magnet-style. Eventually the sun got close to setting, and we caught the free ferry back while the catching was still good.

Architecture and industrial design are the true arts and nowhere is this more apparent than in a contemporary art exhibit in a factory space. Diligent people spent thousands or tens of thousands of hours imagining and designing these spaces and hundreds of thousands or millions of hours constructing them and populating them with beautifully proportioned machines; and some gal waltzes in and reversibly defaces them with a few yards of store-bought fabric (whose manufacture itself is a long art story) and writes three paragraphs about how she is exploring the space between Heidegger’s withdrawaland the Collective Mantra which challenges the Discrepancy of Art and Ideology in Aesthetics and Politics of Freed Time, and we are expected to pay attention to her and not to the room.

There weren’t any post cards at the shop. Art is not serious unless there are post cards. I took instead, some free post cards advertising an entity I had never heard of, and whose line of business was completely unclear, even upon long examination. That’s really the best use of advertising dollars, isn’t it?

We met up with our friend Brendan from the old Opcode days, who took us to Vini, an excellent Italian restaurant in his old neighborhood which has a “regional dinner” every Tuesday. This week it featured the cuisine of Basilicata: the most memorable was the aroma of the braised pork, and the strength of the hard cacio cavallo cheese. Brendan sent us home on the train, and recommended not going to Kings Cross, the closest stop to where we were staying. The next day we read a news story about a murder there, so I’m glad we didn’t go.

We returned to Fiji for three more days relaxing with our friend Siral. We slept, found the one place in the area with an espresso machine, slept, snorkeled, slept, and saw a small zoo with pettable iguanas and brightly colored birds, including a peacock which was presenting. And did some shopping and more sleeping, and a bit of eating. Our flight back leaves at 10:30 on Saturday night, arriving at LAX ten hours later at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, and then at SFO at 6:30.

We had 43 hours of Saturday. We spent the first part of Saturday driving around Nadi and going to Siral’s house where they spent the afternoon drinking kava. It is always wonderful coming here and having the delicious Indian food cooked by Siral’s mother, but we always are the only ones at the table because everyone else is drinking kava and doesn’t feel like eating. Our flight left at 10:30 on Saturday night, arriving at LAX ten hours later at 1:30 Saturday afternoon. Customs coming into the U.S. was retarded but I’m not going to say anything more about it because it’s too easy to get on lists that instruct officials to hassle you. When we emerged, we found out the value of “reconfirming”: our flight to SFO had been renumbered and rescheduled for an hour later. Whatever: we got there at 7:00 Saturday evening.

Adam and Jenny picked us up at the airport and took us out for hamburgers. It was a fun trip, but it was nice to be home.

The original plan included three nights in Port Douglas, snorkeling each of the two days. The replanning added two days onto the front; the place we’d reserved no longer showed up on Airbnb, so we’d reserved at a different place for the extra first night. Thursday we got up to Port Douglas, and went to the Port Douglas B&B, a delightful place filled with peaceful knickknacks, press-pot coffee, lots of books (and no time to read them). We discovered a birdwatching tour on the Internet, and signed up by e-mail for a full day on Friday. We walked three miles up the beach to town, which seemed awfully windy. We headed towards the office of the company we’d reserved snorkeling tours with for Saturday and Sunday, and had a chat about the weather. A high pressure zone around Sydney, with a low over Indonesia, was creating 30mph winds, and was expected to continue for several days. They expected that they would cancel our tours, and in fact both were cancelled as it turned out. Then we got to our hosts’ and TripAdvisor’s favorite Port Douglas restaurant Salsa at 5:30 pm and despite being fully booked they were able to squeeze us in.

The original plan was that we wouldn’t need a rental car. The new plan was that we would rent one, and when we were planning there were tons of cheap cars available. Unfortunately we didn’t get one at the time — by the time we got around to it, just a couple days before we arrived, they were all booked by people who had flown up for the winter school holidays happening from July 3-10.

The birdwatching trip was promising. Del Richards of Fine Feather Tours picked us up at 7:30, and picked up another guy who’d gone with him eight times previously. He had checklists printed out of all the birds in the area, and we saw many species right around Port Douglas. Then we headed northwest towards some small mountains and saw many more, just stopping in seemingly random places along the road and watching something on a wire or the top of a bare tree, or flitting around in a rainforest. By lunchtime we’d already seen over 60 species. And then Del got the message that his wife, who had been chronically ill for four years, had just died.

(Here’s how messaging works there: The other guest on our tour, who had been on eight of Del’s tours before, got a text message from Del’s daughter; and a barmaid running into the parking lot where we had just pulled up for lunch, simultaneously gave him the bad news. Modern communication has made the world a small town and Port Douglas was a small town to begin with.)

So that was the end of the bird tour, and we returned to move two blocks from the B&B to the place we’d originally reserved on Airbnb. It turned out to be a room in a 3-bedroom apartment rented by a young couple with a 3-month-old baby. I was wondering how much sleep we’d get, but it turned out the mother and baby were away visiting her folks, and we visited with the young dad who is a dive instructor for one of the local tour operators. Secure in the new place, we returned to town and went to Bucci, an Italian restaurant which squeezed us in around 5:30, and had a nice dinner of creatively executed dishes. Except that the barramundi was “off”. It tasted fishy, and not in a good way. Like freezer burn. We ate about half of it, and let the waiter know, so they wouldn’t serve bad fish to other customers. They adopted an attitude, saying that it was completely fresh and couldn’t possibly be bad. They didn’t actually taste our pieces to form their own opinion of what we were tasting — it was a little offensive when one of them suggested that we didn’t even leave enough of it for them to do that. The whole thing was kind of unfortunate — no effort was made to not charge for the fish, to comp dessert or anything like that. Americans are about the only ones who tip in Australia, so I took it upon myself to leave only TASTE YOUR FISH as a tip in this case.

Since the Saturday trip had been canceled, and we couldn’t find a rental car, we arranged a day tour up to the Daintree rainforest. It was nice enough — a drive on the road through the dense forest, a cruise up a river through mangroves with a few saltwater crocodiles sitting around as contracted, a walk on a nature trail incorporating both mangroves and rainforest. Lunch, ice cream, a swimming hole. Dinner at On the Inlet, a seafood restaurant which had good sashimi and a whole baby barramundi. That tasted just fine. We enjoyed talking to all the young waiters on Working Holiday visas from around the world.

The Sunday trip was canceled as well, and we whiled away the day in town. We thought we might take a little tourist steam train which only runs on Sunday; we didn’t quite find the south end of the line in time, and I imagine it would have been completely full anyway of people taking round trips from the north end. We walked along the track, and saw several cute birds and an impressive spider on its web. There was also a weekly junk market selling handicrafts, snacks, and a few other services like massage and fortunetelling. We walked up to the ocean lookout, walked past the super-expensive neighborhood containing mostly vacation rentals, bought some souvenirs, and arrived at the next restaurant, Zinc, slightly before it opened. We took advantage of their happy hour specials, and their early bird special that included a free bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. The food was good, and the Working Holiday waiters were friendly.

Thursday was pretty stupid. It got off to a bad start when the airport shuttle tried to actually pick us up at our hotel, instead of a block and a half away at the place their brochure and telephone agent stated pickups were supposed to happen. We called them and they got us in the nick of time. We got to the airport, checked our bags (there was a charge for the third bag which we didn’t expect), and flew to Alice Springs. Once there we made the incredibly bad decision to take the airport shuttle to pick up the camper van, instead of a taxi. We just missed the shuttle that was filling up, and had to wait until the next one filled up; after it left, it stopped at every place in town, leaving me off about two hours after the process started. And Alice Springs is a small place. So we ended up getting to the Ayers Rock Resort at 8:45 pm, well after dark. We saw one pair of kangaroos go bouncing across the road in front of us on the way, but fortunately night driving on that road wasn’t like near Exmouth, where some little kangaroo would hop in front of you every 10 meters.

Friday was much nicer. We got up a little late, went into the park, and spent most of the day walking all the way around Uluru, the name for Ayers Rock in one of the nearby Aboriginal languages. The rock is quite interesting close up; it has a couple of gorges you can walk into, and the entire surface all around has a variety of holes in it, many of them shaped like lips. After all the penis-shaped geology we’d seen on the trip, it was interesting to see something which was a little more female. Like lemmings we followed everyone to the Car Sunset Parking Lot, and took the official photographs of the west side as the sun set. There were no interesting shadows at all, and the colors didn’t really get intense red, they basically just faded.

There are some stretches of Uluru which are designated “sensitive sites” where you aren’t supposed to take pictures: the shapes of the rocks tell stories which are not supposed to be viewed anywhere else in the world. Also, you aren’t supposed to climb it. The government has announced that when fewer than 20% of the visitors to Uluru climb the rock, they will ban it for everyone.

This is a precis of civil liberties in a democracy. The government say they will develop Other Attractions. I am actually surprised that as many as 20% do climb it. The day we were there, the trail was closed due to high wind. We were well on our way walking around it, in the Buddhist-wise direction, before they opened the trail. We didn’t go back, but found our own ways to violate religious sensibilities.

The practice of advertising one’s weakest point continues. The posters in the bathroom at Ayers Rock Campground and Resort advertising camel rides twice describe their camels as friendly and once as good natured.

Saturday was also really great. The other geographical point of interest in Uluru-Kata Tutja park is Kata Tutja, also known as “the Olgas”. Unlike Uluru, which is an immense sandstone rock sticking out of the flat desert, the Olgas are a series of conglomerate domes. We took the Valley of the Winds walk, which went between several of the domes with great viewpoints. We stopped constantly and took lots of pictures of rocks and plants, and watched flocks of zebra finches with their clownlike orange beaks. As we got back to the starting point, a honeyeater got about a meter away from Ray in a tree, completely oblivious or uncaring, and just posed for a few hundred clicks of the shutter. It was intermittently being chased around by another bird, who didn’t want his picture taken. I don’t know what they were fighting about since the other bird didn’t look the sort to be sipping nectar from a Grevillea.

Another walk went into another gorge between two of the Olgas, which had a pond which happened to reflect the moon rising into the gap between the two, which hopefully will turn into a nice picture somewhere someday.

On Sunday, after going into the park briefly to get some sunrise shots of Uluru, and returning to the Car Sunset Parking area in the middle of the morning to take pictures with nice shadows, we drove 300km or so to the Kings Creek Station caravan park and settled for an unpowered site as it was all we could get. This meant we couldn’t use the microwave or charge our phones, pad, and computer, and camera and GPS batteries. We did contract for a powered site for the next night.

Monday we visited Kings Canyon, going on the Kings Canyon Rim Walk. The canyon doesn’t cover a very large area, but it is impressively deep and narrow. We walked up along what we thought was one side of a box canyon, but it turned out to be a “box ridge”: the canyon actually twisted around the end of the ridge. One short side trail led to a viewpoint at the end of the ridge. Ultimately we crossed a bridge to the “outer” rim of the canyon, and another side trail went down into the “Garden of Eden” to a waterhole, which is the only water that currently constitutes Kings Creek. We’d already seen hundreds of pretty Crested Pigeons, but this waterhole had even prettier Spinifex Pigeons, which were just as crested but were a nice brown color. This part of Australia doesn’t really have wet and dry seasons, it just has cold dry and hot dry seasons. This season is the “winter vacation” season for schoolkids, and every place has been booked solid since the beginning of the weekend.

The plan for Tuesday was to drive back to Alice Springs in time for our flight back Wednesday afternoon. At Kings Canyon, a guy suggested seeing “Serpentine Canyon”. We investigated a little, and discovered a whole chain of places just west of Alice Springs called the West Macdonnell Range. We ended up going to Standley Chasm, a beautiful little private gorge and camping area about half an hour out of town. We arrived at sunset, quickly checked out the gorge, and then fixed dinner.

In the morning we had time to go on another walk in the area, and to see the sun shining in the gorge we’d seen the night before. We ran into the same entire tour bus of kids from Nazareth College in Melbourne that we’d seen in the Olgas. Returning the van was moderately uneventful, except that they pointed out that the ATM card I’d been using declined the refund of the deposit because it was expired. They manually typed in an expiration date for three years later, which worked. This time the shuttle was great — it was on time, and there was only one other pickup. At the airport, we watched a magpie lark flying around inside the terminal, and setting down in front of the door sensor in order to fly outside. We flew to Cairns, went to the Shangri-La Hotel, a super-nice place by the beach which had a last-minute cheap room on Expedia, and had dinner at Ochre, which had a reasonably interesting seafood platter. The waiter talked to us a long time about his work travel visa adventures. They all have stories to tell.

Friday we headed to the Pinnacles Desert in Nambung National Park. There are a few sandy square miles there covered with small pillars, most between two and twelve feet high. It was a very photogenic area. We continued on to Perth, trying to locate a good place to eat, with some difficulty because every place was packed on Friday. We targeted a “modern Japanese” place which turned out to be completely full, but had a really good “modern Thai” dinner next door.

Saturday we returned the van, and took the MacBook Pro (whose screen had gotten slightly cracked early in the trip) to Perth’s large Apple Store, which was mobbed. It turned out not to be possible to get it fixed because it would have taken a couple days and we only had one day. We walked around downtown for awhile, and headed to the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art. An artist named Thomas Rentmeister had a small exhibition (“Objects. Food. Rooms.”) which was just opening; the most brilliant work was a six by thirty-foot area entirely covered with Nutella. German Nutella, which is thicker than the Australian variety. Another work was a huge pile of various white things; several people asked us to pose in front of it with our white beards. Yet another was entitled “Found Mop”. We posed in front of it American Gothic-style, and the artist took pictures of us there. We walked past the town carillon, a very stylish modern building, and back along the river.

The #1 restaurant in Perth on Trip Advisor was Amusé, and its website said there were no Saturday reservations available until September 3. We put ourselves on the waitlist anyway, and miraculously they called us back (on our US mobile) and offered us a slot. So we went there for dinner. It wasn’t cheap ($125, $75 for wine pairing, various extra optional plates). But it was stunningly good. About sixteen small plates were served to each of us, with interesting combinations of ingredients. We’d hoped to learn more about Australian wine, but much of their wine was European. It was all good. Our favorite was Australian, though, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Margaret River area south of Perth, served with delicious lamb (chunks of tongue, something braised, and a medallion of some other part.)

The Indian Pacific Express is a train which goes from the Indian Ocean in Perth to the Pacific Ocean in Sydney. We took it to Adelaide, which is a two-night trip. It left on Sunday at noon, and was scheduled to stop in Kalgoorlie from 10pm to 1am, during which we thought we’d investigate the authentic Australian pub experience. There is also a tour there, advertised as 45 minutes, of the world’s largest open-pit gold mine, called the SuperPit. We figured we’d have plenty of time to have dinner in some pub, or the 24-hour restaurant, after the tour. It turned out that the train arrived late (though it still planned to leave on time), and the tour ran long. So there was no time whatsoever for dinner in town, and we really should have had it on the train. Except it isn’t really very good there. Probably wouldn’t have been in town either.

The signage in the dining car was kind of confusing, and we ended up missing breakfast as well. Remind me to send back the feedback form citing Paul as making a rude remark to me, the customer, in the context of complaining that they wouldn’t serve us breakfast. They would serve us prepackaged meat pies, but I wasn’t really in the mood. The peanut butter and honey sandwiches in our room were better anyway. The next afternoon we stopped in Cook, an “abandoned” town which serves as a fueling station for the train. The only other thing which happened on the train was that a pair of singers, Dave and Kathy Townsend, who also played accordion and banjo entertained the other travelers each night with traditional Australian songs. Some weren’t so Australian: they didn’t quite get the chords right for Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

The songs give cause to reflect on the casual gender pigeonholing that is still present in Australia and other non-Woodside places: Dave Townsend said he was going to sing a song about sheep shearers; “Everyone makes jokes about sheep shearers, you all know some right?” and some Australian made an affirmative response; and Mr. Townsend said, “Well let’s hear it, then,” and the audience member said, “There are ladies present,” which got the laugh it was intended to get, but I thought, Roy or Callum or Dennis would know what that means and be able to decipher it, but it would be deciphering the way they would read a street sign in an unknown Romance language, it wouldn’t be this immediate laugh-inducing recognition that it gets with a person in an older culture. I leave the Romanians out of this assessment; Romania is still that way and so is Colombia. Likely so is Tibi. It serves him well, in bed.

Hearing pre-feminist jokes is a matter of deciphering, by now, I hope.

Apparently there was some medical emergency in the middle of the night in Port Augusta where someone was taken off the train, but I slept right through it.

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Adelaide. On Tuesday we had a nice breakfast, saw some astronomical photographs at the adjacent science museum, bought some chocolate, and then visited the art museum and saw lots of art by European Australians, and a bit by Aboriginals. We also went to the Central Market and got some cheese and salami for the upcoming continuation of the road trip. And in the evening we had dinner at Press* Food and Wine, where we ordered the “tasting menu” in which they would bring you whichever items off the menu they felt like bringing. It was an exceptional value: for $65 each we got six “small plates”, two mains, a side, and dessert. Of the nine savory courses, three did not involve red meat: the six that did were chorizo, merguez, anise sweetbreads, pork hock terrine with pistachios, hanger steak and pork belly. They also brought us several glasses of wine, and we were probably the most full that night of any night on the entire trip.

Wednesday we went on a tour of the McLaren Vale wine area just south of town. It was a cutely conceived tour, a “progressive lunch” with one course at each of four wineries: Maxwell, Wirra Wirra, Hugo, and Rosemount Estates. As usual, all of the reds were very young and just-opened, so they weren’t really so drinkable. I was feeling pretty sloshed by the end of the day. For dinner we went to Andre’s Cucina and Polenta Bar, where we could have had a similar tasting menu, but instead just had a few things. The most successful was the polenta of the day, with mushrooms and taleggio.

Tuesday we headed towards our next intended attraction, Shark Bay World Heritage Area. It was a fair distance away, and turned out to be mostly a driving day. The highlight was the town of Carnarvon, which had a NASA tracking station which was used in the Gemini days. We asked if it had a museum, and the answer was interesting: “Yes, but it doesn’t open for a couple days. Buzz Aldrin is coming out to preside at the opening. We’re spending $50,000 to fly him and his entourage out here.” We poked around the museum where things weren’t all quite set up, and looked at really old computer tapes and communication equipment that dated to before the invention of User Interface. There’s a little panel on some giant box that has a red light that says “CALL”, two quarter inch plugs with the label “TEL SET”, and a switch that throws between “CALL” and “BUZZ OFF”. This is where rocket science got its reputation for being hard. My iPhone has 34,000 times the capacity of the computer that took Buzz Aldrin to the moon, and it’s a couple of generations old.

There were also various objects which had fallen from space into the Outback, including a small Gemini fuel tank. Carnarvon Steel Supplies has built a replica capsule for kids to sit in and have their picture taken. Bob and Keith Brown from Carnarvon Smash Repairs generously donated the painting of the space craft, according to the sign.

The people who speak to you in the tourist industry moderate their dialect, but many of the others you meet can’t be understood, unless they are foreigners. Irish, Dutch, German accents, these can all be deciphered, but beyond Crocodile Dundee and GEICO lies an unintelligible wilderness.

There are benefits. The problem, for example, of going to sleep in a noisy environment is not the noise but the information. You hear one shoe drop and you want to hear the other. This is only a problem if you speak the language. Listening to loud, drunk, heterosexual Australians in a tavern immediately adjacent to a trailer park is not any more of a problem than sleeping in a stamping mill.

After our visit at Carnarvon, we continued driving and got close to Shark Bay, but stopped at dark at the Woomeral Roadhouse.

Wednesday we proceeded onto World Heritage Drive and went to the Hamelin Pond area to see the stromatolites. These are rock formations in the tidal area which, they tell us, are created by cyanobacteria. I was entranced by a bird call, three or four notes descending repeated endlessly. After an hour or two I was lucky enough to see the bird who was making the call: he had a distinctive crest. That made it easy to look him up: the chiming wedgebill, who was described in the book as making exactly that call. Continuing up towards Denham, we stopped at Shell Beach, a beach covered with millions of identical white coquina shells — a tiny bivalve. We also stopped by the side of the road to see various plants: what looked like a scattering of yellow tennis balls turned out to be some kind of squash growing wild. One of the things we’d hoped to do in this area was to see the dugong, the Australian version of the manatee. And by the time we got to Denham, it became clear that it was very unlikely that that would happen. The only other attraction there was dolphin feeding: despite the name Shark Bay, there weren’t really tours that take you snorkeling with the whale sharks like the ones we didn’t go on in Exmouth. So we turned around, drove back down World Heritage Drive back to the North West Coastal Highway, and continued south. We drove as far as we could before it got dark, which turned out to be a rest area with “24-hour stopping”. This was pretty cool, because it was free. It had a toilet, but that was all: no water, no showers, no electricity. Despite its rusticness, it was quite popular: there were probably thirty vehicles parked there.

Thursday we drove out towards Kalbarri National Park, which hosts various gorges on the Murchison River. We decided on an interesting destination for the evening, so we didn’t have time to explore Kalbarri as fully as one could: ideally one would have a 4WD vehicle to take on their 30km dirt road to the Window on the World. We didn’t, and settled for some nice roadside views, and a coastal walk along some incredibly eroded rocks. There were areas of “positive/negative”: a square foot would have one-inch “nubs” on it, and several adjacent square feet would have one-inch pits. Several formations looked like small stalactites: they turned out to have been formed by worms. It was a fascinating landscape. But it became time to press on to the Western Flora Caravan Park, whose owners are avid botanists and can tell you the name and detailed life facts about just about every plant on their large property. They host guided walks daily. At night we set up the telescope and had fun looking at various celestial objects like nebulas and globular clusters and just little star clusters. It was a delightful place to stay.

If you go to the Western Flora Caravan Park, don’t forget to slam the toilet seat down. It makes the most profoundly resonant boom you have ever heard a flimsy plastic toilet seat make. The bathroom itself is mission style architecture, real adobe.