It's been cold and, presently, rainy here in Korea. This weather sucks, and it sucks a lot more than it normally would since I went on vacation to Australia. I was planning on getting off the plane in the morning, checking into my hostel, and going directly to the beach to lie in the sun, but it was cloudy and gray in Sydney, so I wandered around downtown instead. The sun came out in the afternoon, but I had already decided I was too lazy to get to the beach that day. I still got a sunburn, lying in the shade in front of the ANZAC war memorial in Hyde Park, which had until then been just a memory and a few photos from my first trip. I had just finished reading "Anxious Pleasures" which is a thoroughly worthless book. It is a sophomoric retelling of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" via the perspectives of Gregor Samsa's family and others around him. It is lauded by some unknown clown as "the book Lance Olsen was put on this planet to write", which, if true, is a very disappointing motive for existence.
Fortunately, I had found "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", by Edgar Allen Poe, in a used bookstore. This was a happy coincidence, as it's one of the few major things of his I hadn't read, and because Paul Theroux wrote so much about it in "The Old Patagonian Express", which I had recently finished reading. This was the book I spent the next few days staring at as I spent hours on Bondi Beach in the sun and heat. In fact, by the third day of laying out on the sand, I had almost finished it and picked up another book since I knew Andy and I would be moving around a lot when he got here.
I was glad to get out of Sydney the day after Andy arrived, since we were staying in a hovel of a hostel, a massive place aptly named Maze. It was in an old building and it looked the the carpets were original. There were no outlets in the rooms which smelled liked wet towels at all times. The showers' pressure range ran between a constant leak to a rapid dribble. Maybe I had just forgotten what it was like traveling cheap, or at least trying to, since a lot of things were ridiculously expensive in Australia. Eighteen dollar six-packs of domestic beer is what first comes to mind.
Our place in Adelaide was much nicer. More expensive at $30 per night, or something like that, but the rooms were new and orderly. Unfortunately, there was still an element of incompetence in the employment pool, as we found out on our return trip to Adelaide that someone had deleted our reservation and the hostel was booked full. But on our first stay in Adelaide, we ate cheap pizza in a beer garden while some Aussie whined along with his acoustic guitar, rode bikes to the sea where the wind was pelting us with sand, and then back, at least until Andy popped his tire trying to get some air. Later, on the balcony, a French girl was gushing about how amazing Alice Springs and the Red Center were, which was good, apart from how she wouldn't shut up, since Andy and I were driving up there.
I brought my MP3 player's car pack specifically for the drive up to Alice Springs and back. It was two days through the desert, each way. By the time we had cleared the congestion of the city alive, with Andy and I both focusing all our attention on making sure he stayed to the left, I put my music on. Because I was so looking forward to listening to my own music for two days straight, it was only fitting that my fucking Zune broke as soon as we cleared the range of all radio signals. Even though Andy and I are both masters of conversation, two days with no music, not even pop, blows. I hit the scan button and it didn't stop searching until we were about 30 minutes outside of Alice Springs.
This is what the road looked like for two days:
We stayed two nights in Coober Pedy, opal capital of the world. With just about 3500 people living in this "town", they produce about 60% of the world's supply. That's pretty good, and I guess it's the only reason people live in the middle of nowhere in dugout homes in the dry, red earth. We slept underground, too. It was cooler for sure, but hard to wake up when there is absolutely no light and we were never fully confident as to what time it was, due to the fact that some states in Australia are on daylight savings time, some are not, some have one hour differences, and some have 30 minute differences. One full day is about fine for Coober Pedy. We took our Yaris for some off-roading to check out the sights of the outback, which turned out to be some small, ancient, well-eroded, breakaway mountain range called The Breakaways, and the world's longest fence which keeps dingoes from the north from fucking shit up in the south. We met a German girl working in one of the opal museums/shops, and she said she had been living and working there for four months. I felt awful for her.
We didn't spend much time in Alice Springs beyond starting and finishing a three-day tour to Uluru and Kata-tjuta. And that tour didn't go too well for Andy who was a bit too hung over at 5AM in the morning when we left in the van. We walked around Uluru in the baking sun that first day, which is risk enough of dehydration and heat exhaustion for someone who is feeling healthy and hydrated, but just kicked Andy's ass since he was already dehydrated and feeling bad from drinking. Our van held about 15 of us, and a bunch of the others were German. My whole time in Australia, I met more Germans than Australians. It's ridiculous. We also had 4 French, 4 British, a Canadian, and a Spaniard. We camped out in swags - canvas sleeping bags with a thin, built-in mattress - both nights, and our guide, apart from being really knowledgeable about the local aboriginal culture and history, cooked us some amazing food. The meal we had the second night - boiled vegetables, bush bread, and rice with chilli - cooked over a campfire and among coals, was by far the most delicious meal I had in as long as I can remember. We did a fair amount of hiking beyond the loop of Uluru. We hiked through King's Canyon to a swimming hole bordered by vertical red cliffs after watching the sun rise over the rim, hiked through the Valley of the Winds and among the domes of Kata-tjuta, and gathered our own firewood, careful not to get splintered with the poisonous wood. Andy slept in the van mostly, with only the small consolation of seeing the immediate aftermath of a goanna that had killed some venomous snake down by the parking lot.
For the drive back to Adelaide, I bought a five-disc compilation of "101 Beer Songs". It turned out that the songs had nothing to do with beer at all, it apparently just seemed like a good name for a mix-album spanning the last 40 years. We stayed again in Coober Pedy, ate at the same pizza place, getting a satay chicken pie instead of the spinach and feta we got the first time. We watched some preliminary matches in the Australian open and talked with an elderly British woman who was quite out of place in a dirt-hole motel in the Australia desert and an Irish guy who was far more pleasant than his countrymen we had the misfortune of riding with on a day-tour of wineries outside of Adelaide.
From Adelaide again, it was a couple of hops on Australian budget airlines to Hervey bay, via Sydney again. If you think Southwest is budget, wait until you try Tiger Air or Virgin Blue. Seven kilo maximum weight for your carry-on luggage, all checked luggage will cost you an extra $25. There is no complimentary juice and snack, you have to pay for everything, including water. They don't even provide you with a magazine.
In Hervey Bay, Andy and I checked into the hostel/tour company that we booked our Fraser Island safari with. We were told to be at the bar at 3PM for an information briefing, and then went to the beach, which was long, and mostly empty, and shallow and warm. Later, on the porch of the bar, everyone that was going on the trip was divided into two groups. We were in the truck with only 7 people in it, the other truck had eight. Our truck had the two cutest girls, the other truck had the Irish girl who was a little too friendly, and the 18 year-old English kid - "the Baby", according to one of the 19 year-old German girls in our truck - that talked too much. That night everyone bought their groceries and booze together, and I went for a nighttime swim in the warm water.
The next morning we were given a final briefing on the island and how and when to use the various four-wheel and two-wheel gears in the trucks. This part, in particular, was a disaster. Our "instructor" was a fat guy named Naru whose first, maybe even second, language was definitely not English, and whose comprehension thereof was highly in question. Someone would ask a question and he would answer with a disorganized circumlocution, leaving everyone who listened to him thoroughly confused and even more unsure of what to do and how to do it. At one point, the English Baby asked him about a contradiction between our printed, recommended itineraries and what he was saying we should do. He answered by asking, "Where are you from?" and then ridiculing him for being so young with insinuations that his balls hadn't dropped yet.
Naru's incompetence was overwhelming. It was exactly what two truckloads of kids who have never driven a four-wheel drive truck didn't need just before they spent three days on a sand island driving themselves around. I knew what he should've said because I had been on the same trip before, and I am not a complete moron. It could've been this simple: "Drive to the ferry in 2-high. Once on the ferry, lock your hubs and put the truck in 4-high. Use 4-high the entire time you are on the island, unless you get stuck in the sand. Then, use 4-low until you are unstuck. Once that happens go back to 4-high. When you are back on the ferry to return to the mainland, return the truck to 2-high and unlock your hubs."
The trip was mostly fine once we were under way. I drove to the ferry and did the first leg on the trip on the island, barely making it up an incline that bogged down the truck behind us, and making everyone behind them wait. Unfortunately, the truck that was bogged down was the other truck from our tour company, and one of the Canadian guys in our truck had made the bright suggestion that we travel and camp together the previous night. That seems like a nice, sociable idea until you realize that everyone will be getting stuck on their own schedule, and waiting for other people to dig themselves out, or stopping to help every time it happens, is supremely annoying, especially when each truck is capable of fending for themselves and may want to pursue a different itinerary or just simply prefer laying on the white sand in front of a crystal clear lake with the sun overhead to sitting in a truck on a sand track while looking back around the corner with everyone saying, do you think they made it up? they're probably OK, right? should we wait longer? maybe we should go back.
This method didn't hold out too long as, after spending hours at Lake McKenzie, we stopped to try to find ice at Central Station, and the other group just drove past us. The Canadians were worrying about them and wondering what we should do, when I finally suggested that we not worry about them and do our own thing or else we'll be waiting the entire trip. This met with some sharp, "Fine, if that's what you want to do"'s, but no one actually said anything otherwise, which was fine by me.
One of the Canadian guys, the Italian guy, and myself did the majority of the driving. Andy drove briefly, but didn't put much interest in it. We camped both nights on the eastern beach, behind dunes. I was the first one up both days, and got to see the latter parts of some beautiful sunrises, and be the first to be assaulted by monster horse flies, which came out in the morning and evenings. Despite the early annoyances of trying to stick with the other truck, and undercurrents of people thinking they were more capable drivers than everyone else, the trip was great. We visited the rusty skeleton of the luxury liner Maheno half-buried in sand since the '30's, spotted a small shark and some rays from the top of Indian Head, floated down shady Eli Creek, and hiked across dunes to Lake Wabby where we whipped the giant catfish into a frenzy by tossing them the horseflies we killed and were nibbled by little fish that ate the dead skin off of us.
On our final day, we were making to visit Lake McKenzie again before we had to get back on the ferry. I suggested a shortcut which looked obvious on the map, and was behind the wheel when, on that route, I got us stuck at the foot of an incline that was beyond the capabilities of our truck. We couldn't go forward, even in 4-low with deflated tires, and we couldn't really go back because our reverse was fucked and had a nasty and extremely reliable habit of popping out of gear, regardless of how badly we ground the bastard. Everyone was in a tizzy saying we were fucked, and would have to call a tow truck, and the old couple that was in a small truck off to the side watching all of this because they couldn't get up the hill either said that they'd only seen locals make it in the last hour by absolutely flooring it from way back, and we thought we were in the worst possible spot and so on and so on. After sweating and swearing and digging for maybe an hour, we finally got ourselves out by listening to the Italian guy and making tracks with logs and branches instead of just jamming them under the tires to give us a quick jolt of leverage, and by reversing slowly, at low RPMs so the gear wouldn't jump out. Unfortunately, after all the time spent doing this, and having to backtrack, we missed out on our second visit to Lake McKenzie, but we did have plenty of time to cook and eat the rest of the pesto pasta while waiting at the ferry ramp.
That was basically the end. I had arranged to get a ride to Brisbane the next day from the Italian guy in our truck. After waiting for him to run around town and register his newly acquired van, we drove down, stopping to eat lunch in Gympie, where I devoured an entire large thick-crust pizza. There were some cool people at the hostel that night, but there was also an supremely annoying Canadian guy whose company I could suffer only so long. I went to the airport the next morning with a Korean kid who was heading back to join the army, and another trip that I had looked forward to for so long was over and now here I am in Daegu again, and it's chilly and gray, and it's been drizzling for about three days.
