Australia (Part 1)
Loch Ard Gorge, Great Ocean Road
I kept seeing postcards in Australia with pictures of things like the opera house and a few koalas right next to each other, under the heading, ‘Australia: land of contrast’, and they’re not kidding. It’s a strange place. In so many odd ways, Australia reminds me of the US, especially after living in the UK for so long. The massive six-lane highways full of automatic cars, the sheer size of everything, the buffet restaurants, the space. These things all scream America. It’s a young country with a some similar problems (the treatment of Aboriginal people in particular reminded me of the issues that Native Americans face in the US). However, as Oz is still part of the Commonwealth, British influence shines through here and there.
But the Aussie attitude is ever more laid back and the culture more eccentric than that of the UK or US (in a good way, naturally). Australia is truly its own place. It’s very far away from the rest of the world, both in distance and culture, and this seems almost immediately obvious upon arrival. You get the sense that you’re in a familiar place that’s been flipped on its head. Perhaps because it’s so hard to grasp that you’ve made it all the way to the other side of the planet and yet people are still carrying on as you might expect them to outside your own door. It seems right and wrong all at once.
Grapevines at the Wine Centre of South Australia
Australia, while absolutely massive, is largely uninhabitable. Humans have put things in place to make the land live-able, but they still have to battle it out with nature, who clearly is not interested in helping out on the ‘sustaining modern human life’ front. As my friend Lauren who lives in Sydney said, ‘We shouldn’t even be here.’ The country is in serious drought and has been for a long time. It is dry and hot and dry and apparently never rains (we saw otherwise, so hooray for the farmers!). This leads to, among other things, massive water shortages, to the point of the council sending every home a shower timer, and raging bushfires, as we’ve seen quite recently. There’s also the gaping hole in the ozone layer that hangs out just overhead, causing major sunburn in almost no time at all if you aren’t a good friend of a thick layer of sunblock. Despite all of this harshness, the land produces some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables and the nicest meat I’ve ever tasted, and the lifestyle in general is very outdoor-oriented.
And the size of the country itself is something almost too amazing to wrap your head around. On the second in a chain of four flights carrying us back home to the UK, I managed to bag a window seat in the exit row. From so many miles above the earth, I could see quite clearly the expanse of Australian outback we were flying over on the way to Singapore. I felt like this view really tied up the Aussie experience. I’m glad I got to see it from above. And let me tell you: It. Is. Enormous.
Kangaroo at Australia Zoo
I mean, I knew it was enormous, but… it’s HUGE. I’d been seeing nothing but red desert for ages and I assume, being that far above the earth, one can see pretty far. And it’s all just red nothingness. Even the air at the horizon is red. The sun was on its way down and the desert seemed to fade into a lighter orange, then yellow, then magically into blue as if there were no actual horizon and the desert was just part of the extensive empty sky. Occasionally there would be a sort of track in the dust below, but I had to wonder where these tracks were going to or coming from because I hadn’t seen anything remotely like a point A or B for at least an hour.
I spent 3 weeks in Australia seeing something completely new and different almost every single day, and I still haven’t seen the bulk of it. This just serves to remind me that the variety of experience I have had here tips the balance in terms of value for money in a holiday. It also reminds me how impossible it is to experience everything I’d like to in one lifetime. There are billions of books to read, recipes to try, songs to hear, places to see. I’ll never pack them all in, but hopefully I’ll be working my way through them at the optimum speed–slow enough to relish the experience but fast enough to see as much as possible.
It’s hard to sum up such an epic vacation. And it’s been a while since we went. We took the trip in September and October of 2008. We saved for nearly a year and were probably planning it for longer. It’s hard to get over such a significant chunk of leisure time, even six months later. Our itinerary was ambitious, but not so hectic that we’d need a vacation from our vacation. We started in Melbourne and drove the Great Ocean Road and the Limestone Coast to Adelaide. We flew to Sydney and then to Brisbane where we spent some time with Scott’s family. Then it was off to New Zealand for a week, which is an amazing country deserving about ten books’ worth of reflection on its own. We didn’t have nearly enough time there.
(I’ll be posting about each leg of our trip over the next few weeks. Once those posts are up, I’ll link them here.)
