Bucket list: Sunset at Uluru/Ayers Rock

Dorothy and I just finished an 30 000KM+ 10 month trip around Australia. We find ourselves sitting on a 747-400 codeshare United/Air Canada flight. These United flight attendants are some of the most obnoxious people I’ve encountered in the entire travel industry. Ugh. But this is about Australia not the disgruntled curmudgeons of the sky.

We drove the entire way around Australia and right across the middle of the outback. As a Canadian I’ve found that Australia is a land of remarkable polarities and extremes.

Upon arrival in Sydney we purchased a 1988 Toyota Hiace Van. She came with everything including camping gear, fishing gear, cooking gear, a queen size bed etc etc. You name it, she had it, including giant blue hippie flowers on the side! We bought the entire setup for only $4600 AUD.

We chose the Hiace because they’re the most common and reliable vans on the road in Australia. And she didn’t let us down even with all the abuse we put her through including off-roading, driving on beaches, the salt water/air, and the most extreme heat. She only broke down once and we just had to replace a cheap little part on the contact points. Other than that she went and went and went some more. Other backpacker vans we’re left on the side of the road to die but not our van. Her name was (and still is) Gerty. We just sold her the other day for the same amount we paid for her.

Australia has the most remarkable culture. An interesting oddity of their culture is that Aussies seem to have a somewhat affectionate animosity toward people in Australia. “Oh they’re from so and so that place sucks…” Or the “heat has gotten to their heads” or it’s “just sand there”, or “those damn city people.” I even heard one guy say they should burn Melbourne to the ground. I couldn’t imagine saying that about any city in Canada. It’s sort of shocking because many times there is downright disdain for people from other geographic regions within the same country. Most of the time it’s just lighthearted but it’s certainly odd.

Speaking of geography, boy do the Aussies know their local physical geography. Talk to an Aussie and within two minutes he’ll be drawing you what’s known as a “mud map” on the ground or in the sand. They’ll tell you how to get to place down the the tree by the river or whatever. It’s awesome because most of the time we lose track of what they’re talking about in the first few seconds but we always just let them go out of the sheer entertainment value. Watching an Aussie draw you a “mud map” is quite a treat but I think I’ll stick with Google Maps and my GPS! They’re so connected to the land, so present.

Something else I now know is just how geographically vast Australia is. If you haven’t driven around Australia you have no idea how big it is either, you just don’t. The guys who are cycling or walking around the nation would say the same to me though. Driving it is the lazy way! Australia is absolutely staggering in size. There is something like 60 000 KMs+ of coastline alone. If you overlay Australia over the united states it covers the entire thing easily, well except for Alaska…

Sometimes you’d swear Australians don’t even speak English. Dorothy and I would often get left behind in conversation when locals would speak to one another. Dor and I would look at each other and shrug our shoulders. We have no idea what these people are saying and they’re supposed to be speaking our language! It’s awesome. They have entire books full of Australianisms that you can use to decode what they’re saying if you’re so inclined. To make matters more confusing the slang varies wildly from place to place but that’s all part of the fun. Dorothy and I just tried to learn as many of the sayings as possible.

You get the feeling that around every corner there is a guy with a Landcruiser who is just itching to use his winch to save someone who is “bogged”. And boy do these guys know their off-roading. Our friend Rex once did the Canning Stock Route which is like 1900 KMs+ of off-roading through the most remote part of Australia with no gas stations or any support at all. Oh and he did it alone with no sat phone or EPIRB. Kind of crazy if you ask me but certainly extreme!

Another friend we met named Pete road a horse across Australia from East coast to West coast. Take a look at a map of Australia to scale and you’ll know how mission impossible that is. He almost died of dehydration doing it. He did it to raise awareness for sexual abuse and he’s a freakin champ! Good on ya mate!

Some Aussies can be so entirely full on awesome and yet others are well just flat out lazy. There just isn’t much middle of the road. They’re flat out intense or flat out um, not intense. I’m getting tired and this is way too long… Bear with me…

Take some of our other friends who’d regularly polish off about 15 stubbies (beers) between the two of them every weeknight. That and the smoking certainly made for a very unhealthy lifestyle but that’s just who they are. Who am I to judge when they’re ‘happy as’?! In Australia you don’t have to finish your comparisons, you just say that person is “lazy as” or it’s “hot as”!

Another ‘extreme’ example was an Aussie friend of ours who casually mentioned he’d go for a bike ride. Many hours and 120 kilometers of peddling later he returned. Did I mention he’s over 60? As I said the Aussies are FULL ON! They make us Canadians seem positively docile.

It’s not all puppy dogs and ice cream though, Australia can be downright backward in some places. There is almost no “design thinking” in many parts of the country. To make an awkwardly forced comparison, Switzerland is like Apple products of the world, you’re constantly impressed by their incredibly elegant designs. Things run like clockwork, Swiss clockwork if you will. You’ll find yourself thinking ‘wow someone really spent some time on that’ more often than not. The story is quite different in Australia where you’re more likely to be frustrated by something poorly designed. This is the case from the simplest things like public toilets all the way up to major infrastructure.

For example who thought it would be a good idea to build roundabouts on freeways? They’re called overpasses (or underpasses)! You’re clickin along on the highway and all of a sudden there are roundabouts!? You often have come to a complete stop. One area had 17 roundabouts in a row! To be fair there are no good beaches in Switzerland. Why spend time crafting the perfect design solution when you could be surfing or fishing with your friends like many people do in Australia? They’re not behind, they just have it so good they don’t care.

This may very well be an actual problem for Australia. They have it too good! I wonder if they’ll fall behind other nations because they’re just having too much fun? They don’t have that hustle that you see in other countries. That fire. Once the exports to China are run out, what then?! Or maybe they just have a better work/play balance than we do in Canada and the United States. That lack of design thinking is totally irrelevant if you’re camping or surfing. So who has their priorities right? Only someone like me who has been thoroughly indoctrinated into the protestant work ethic of American culture would even care about any of that at all but I digress.

Where I come from it’s totally normal to go to a cafe and spend a couple hours reading, or having a conversation with a friend on a weekend. Not so in Australia. You get your coffee and you go do something else. Coffee is not thing like it is where I come from. Not to mention good coffee is few and far between in many parts of Australia. There are some fantastic coffee places in the major cities but leave town a the quality goes downhill fast. When you come from the Pacific Northwest of North America like us, you get spoiled with great coffee. The fact that we we’re in Italy and France before Australia didn’t help either. Our standards we’re pretty high…

The climate of Australia is also quite something. In some places the climate is quite volatile and it influences everything. Serious flooding occurs practically every year in the North during the rainy season. There is so much flooding up north during the rainy season that most guys’ vehicles have snorkles on them so water doesn’t flow into their air intake. There are often depth indicators in the highways to denote how deep the water is flowing over the highway during floods. We have seen indicators that go up to 4 meters! Imagine 4 meter deep water flowing over a national highway…

You can literally follow the summer around inside the country and that’s just what we did. We weren’t alone either. There is an entire group of people called the “grey nomads” who drive around the county following good weather and staying at their favorite spots. They have reunions with friends all over and seem to have a really fun lifestyle. It is a great lifestyle because we just did the same thing, the same thing minus the flash landcruiser, the massive caravan, and the grey hair.

Australians are the most hospitable people I’ve ever met. One evening Dorothy and I found ourselves at a rest area on the side of the highway hundreds of kilometers from anything. We we’re done driving and decided to just stay there overnight. (rest areas in Australia are often more like campsites than the drug and prostitute ridden rest areas of north America). A guy rocked up and we got to chatting. We casually mentioned our electrical problem with an auxiliary battery. Before you could say kookaburra he was in our van fixing it. When he was done he said “let’s have a roast” and walked off. We looked at each other as if to say “is this guy for real”? He then proceeded to literally cook us a roast with potatoes, veggies and everything. He had known us for less than ten minutes. This happened to us a few times so there is statistical validity to this claim! Thank you Bendigo Chris!

Many Australians have this personal charm that is seriously laid back and disarming. Strangers coming up and talking to us at length for no apparent reason often sketched us out. We probably weren’t that receptive at first because as “city slickers” we had defense mechanisms in place to avoid the “crazies” of the world that would come up to you and just have a conversation. Pretty sad that big cities do that to you eh?!

I’d love to go on and on about Australia but suffice it to say if you haven’t been you should go. I will remember our adventure in Australia for the rest of my life and we will certainly be going back to Australia in the future.

Thank you to all our friends who invited us “call in” to see them. Thank you to all the drivers who put up with our slow van. Most importantly thank you to Marie, Ken, Pete, Michelle, Rex, Craig, Lisa, Chris, Phil, Trish, John, Shirley, Steve, Di, Tony, and everyone else for your friendship, your hospitality, and all the adventures!

Thank You Australia

Oh and I would like to send a passive aggressive message to the guy who is sitting beside me on this 13hr+ flight who literally smells like vomit. I hope you fall into a sewer. Is there karma for people with bad personal hygiene? I’ve often wondered what is more rude, being the super smelly guy or telling off the super smelly guy?! Thank god this is over soon. LAX here we come!