Welcome to the Land Down Under

Ahhhh, the First World. It has a certain je ne sais quoi that's just comfortable, familiar. There's a smell in the air that says, "welcome to a country where laws exist and are actually enforced." Orderly traffic, clean public bathrooms, and supermarkets serve as daily reminders that civilization has arrived. The first time I saw a Subway, my heart sang...

I began my journey through this land of vegemite and didgeridoos in the city of Darwin. It's the capital of the Northern Territory and the most northern city in Australia. The reason for coming here was not by choice. It was forced on me by the discount airline that runs between Bali and Australia; Darwin was the only city I could fly into on the day that I wanted. However, I'm glad I made it out here because it offered a little glimpse of the "real" Australia. It's a relatively small city (about 80,000 people) and fairly isolated from the rest of the country; it's either a two hour flight, or a 40 hour bus ride, from the next closest major city. As such, it gets only a fraction of tourists that come to Australia. (The main tourism route, particularly among backpackers, is to start in Melbourne or Sydney and travel up the east coast to Cairns. Check the map if this is all Greek to you.) The people in Darwin are very friendly - almost too friendly. I encountered enough genuine smiles and "g'day mates" to fill the Pacific Ocean. At the same time, the citizens of this fine town are a little rough around the edges - it's not uncommon to see people walk around barefoot and shirtless and a little dirty. Drinking starts at breakfast, goes through the entire night, and begins again at breakfast. The fact that it's Sunday night doesn't matter - the pub next to my hostel was raging at 3:00 a.m. Yes, a man could get used to this kind of place.

All that being said, though, there's not a whole lot to do in Darwin itself. Darwin has a nice waterfront area which is good for people-watching, and the central business district - a whopping 4 square blocks - is good for just hanging out and drinking. It's a nice place, but nothing remarkable. I think that the most interesting thing about the town is its history. On December 24, 1974, a massive cyclone ripped through the city with gusts measured at over 200 mph. It destroyed 95% of all buildings. The city has rebuilt itself nicely and, as a result, everything is modern, clean, and well-organized. (Because I'm a tool I even ventured into the Supreme Court building which is one of the nicest courthouses I've ever seen.) The one thing I really liked about Darwin was this tiny art museum which housed a decent collection of aboriginal art. I know nothing of aboriginal art but the museum did a good job showcasing both old and new styles and explaining the meaning of common symbols and patterns. I secretly snapped a few photos (which I wasn't supposed to do) of some pieces that I really liked:


















Modern aborignial art is apparently a hot commodity in Australia. And, it provides aboriginals with at least one means of becoming financially successful. Which is good, because one thing that's noticeable about Darwin is its significant impoverished aboriginal population. I was told that aboriginals tend to live in the far northern and western areas of Australia, i.e., away from the main "white" area of the east coast of the country. I got the sense that there's a bit of an unspoken tension between the whites and the aborginals. A lot of the aboriginals were - how to put this nicely? - drunk vagrants, and the whites seemed to politely, but begrudgingly, ignore this fact. The government financially supports aboriginals (I'm not sure about the specifics of this arrangement) yet - according to many white people - the money the aborignials receive tends to go to alcohol, and like many Native Americans, the aboriginals have had a rough go with the introduction of alcohol into their lives. It feels like the whites feel guilty about what they've done to the aboriginals over the last 200 years and, as a result, turn a blind eye to the alcoholism (and the resulting crime) even though deep down they're frustrated by the whole situation. Just an observation.

Ok, that's enough armchair sociology for one blog post. The main reason tourists come to Darwin is its proximity to several national parks in the area, including Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks. Kakadu has a footnote in cinematic history as the place where the Crocodile Dundee movies were filmed. It's rugged terrain but not what you typically think of in terms of the Australian wilderness. It rains here all the time (because it's close to the ocean and between the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn) so there's a decent amount of vegetation and plant life. As you can see from the picture, it's not barren outback; it reminded me a lot of some camping I did in Utah long, long ago. I decided to rough it a little so I signed up for a three day, two night hike through Kakadu to explore the landscape, admire the aboriginal cave paintings, and cool off in some waterfalls. The waterfalls are a godsend because it's crazy hot and humid here. Like 95 degrees and 95% humidity. And the flies - holy cow! There are so many flies in Kakadu that the tour company basically demanded that all hikers use insect repellent with at least 80% DEET - the stuff that's banned in the U.S. Without it, you'd have 100 flies sitting on your face alone, not to mention the other 500 flies crawling over the rest of your body. At times it was hard to talk to the other people on the hike because a) if you opened your mouth, flies were guaranteed to come in, and b) it's hard to pay attention to people when they've got 50 flies on their face... Oh well.

Our hiking group consisted of 11 tourists, all under the age of 30, and a guide who was a spitting image of Crocodile Dundee, right down to the hat and the knife. The group of hikers was like a mini-United Nations: two Americans, a Canadian, an Aussie, three Germans, two Danes, and two Italians. It ended up being a great group of people and we got along swimmingly. The first part of our journey through Kakadu was a brief river crossing. Normally that's no big deal and nothing worth writing about. Oh wow, a river crossing?! David - tell us more!! But in Kakadu, any river crossing brings with it the spectre of crocodiles. And crocodiles there were a plenty. Crocodiles, as I learned, hunt based on vibrations in the water. So when you've got a boat that's being propelled by an engine, the crocs start heading straight for it. With their heads peaking out of the water and making a bee-line for the boat, they're not hard to spot. (The one pictured below left - 16 feet long - is named Michael Jackson. Any guesses why? White face, dark body.) At 25 yards they're interesting; at 10 yards they're cool but slightly terrifying; at 2 feet - right next to the edge of the boat - they kinda make you pee in your pants. It's not enough that these crocs are anywhere from 10 to 16 feet long; it's not enough that they circle the boat just hoping that a passenger will lean over while taking a picture so that they can bite down on an arm and drag the person into the water. No, what's really scary is that they jump from the water in the hopes of catching something. Yes, say hello to jumping crocodiles. When the guide tells you to keep your hands and arms in the boat, he means it.

We made it across the river without any lost appendages. Thus began our 3-day hike in earnest. The terrain is generally flat except for the occasional plateau where the best waterfalls are located. We visited several sights of aborginal cave paintings. Our guide explained how a single painting that consists of only a few figures can depict a story that would take hours to tell. I'm not sure how that works, and at times I think he was just bullshitting us, but what the heck do I know about aboriginal cave paintings? So we hiked around, enjoyed the landscape, and drank a ton of water. That was the three days in a nutshell. Of all if things things we did and saw during our three days, I think my favorite part was the barbecue we had on the first night. The guide opened up a cooler with the largest amount of raw meat I've ever seen, including kangaroo and crocodile. For 11 people, he brought 25 pounds of meat. Crocodile meat is a bit tough, but kangaroo is delicious. It's tender and juicy and a little sweet. Of course, there was plenty of beer to go around too. (I've learned that Aussies don't drink Fosters, at all. The preferred beer is called Toohey's New.) Fortunately, most of the girls didn't feel like drinking anything, which left plenty of beer for the five gents. It's the little things in life that really get me going: meat, fire, beer. My testosterone level was off the charts. I'm getting hot and bothered just writing about it. Sure, us guys all smelled rank, and our clothes reeked of something unholy. That probably explains why the girls all went to bed early. But the menfolk didn't care. For a guy who's closest experiences with nature usually involve watching the Discovery Channel, it just felt right.

Another interesting part of the hike was when we came across a patch of gigantic termite mounds. These mounds are built up over decades and are designed to be a ventilation system for the termites that actually live under the ground. This one has long since been abandoned, but the mound remains. I was soooooo tempted to charge into this thing in order to bring it down. But the guide mentioned something about it being in a national park and protected by Australian law and that it was included in a UNESCO World Heritage Site and that there would be fines and jail time and blah blah blah if I destroyed it. Fine, ruin all the fun, Australia. That's one thing I miss about Southeast Asia - the lack of rules and oversight. Not that I would destroy a termite mound in, say, Indonesia, but at least there was always the background possibility that I could do such a thing and get away with it. But not here. Oh no, we have to protect the precious termite mounds... even though we go around killing termites the moment they take up residence in our homes. Whatever. Anyway, the Kakadu hike was a very fun experience. Aside from the heat and the flies, it made the unplanned trip to Darwin totally worthwhile.

After hiking through Kakadu, I travelled to the city Cairns (pronounced, for some odd reason, Cans). It's the most northern major city on the east coast of the country. Unlike Darwin, Cairns is about as touristy as you can possibly imagine. Virtually the entire city is built around tourism. The reason: it's one of, if not the, major gateways to the Great Barrier Reef. I walked around the city for a few hours trying to find something else worth seeing... and found nothing. If the reef weren't close by, my guess is that Cairns would be irrelevant to most visitors. So I hopped on the bandwagon and took a boat trip to go snorkeling at two different sites at the reef.
(These are actual pictures taken by me with an underwater camera. I figured it was time to document what I've been seeing instead of ripping off pictures from other people.) The portions of the reef that I saw are impressive in two main respects. First, the overall size of the reef - it's gigantic. It's one thing to know on an abstract level that the reef can been seen from space, but it's quite another to be dropped into the ocean and look around in all directions and see nothing but endless stretches of coral. Unlike the coral I saw in Southeast Asia, it just never ends here. Second, the depth of the coral is hard to comprehend. One second you're snorkeling above coral that's just a few yards below the surface of the water, and then all of a sudden it drops off like cliff. The coral has been built up so high in some areas that there are vertical drops of nearly 70 yards. In addition to the size and depth of the coral, the animal life is pretty damn impressive. I saw lots of different kinds of fish and rays, and some of the schools of fish seemed to go on forever. But, all that being said, I'm going to say something that might be a bit heretical: I wasn't all that impressed with the actual substance of the coral. I thought that the vibrancy of the colors and the diversity of shapes and sizes of the coral was less impressive than I found in Indonesia and the Philippines. It's entirely possible that I just didn't see a good part of the reef. But given that I took the standard tour from Cairns, I'm guessing I saw what most tourists see. That being the case, I think most people would be disappointed if they could see what I saw in Southeast Asia. I'm planning to snorkel (and dive) in other parts of the reef, so hopefully - fingers crossed - things will be better.

I had planned to explore the reef at another point near Cairns (at a city called Port Douglas, about 30 miles north of Cairns), but due to some crappy sea conditions, that didn't work out. Fear not, for all turned out well in the end. I signed up for a full day white-water rafting trip down the Tully river, about an hour outside of Cairns. I opted for the "extreme" rafting trip, which means two things: I'm a sucker for slick marketing, but also, and more importantly, I got to experience the nasty sections of this badass river. Due to some recent storms in the area, the Tully river was raging strong. For the "extreme" portions of the river, it was listed as a Class 5 rapid. (Rivers are categorized on a scale of 1 to 6 - 1 being "row, row, row your boat gently down the stream", while 6 is "you'll probably die.") Basically, Class 5 means your boat will almost surely flip over multiple times. Of the 82 people on the river that day, only six - the six in my boat, including me - were on the "extreme" trip. Our guide - a super mellow Aussie - explained to the six of us that the class five rapids "will be as unkind as a pissed-off girlfriend." Well said. The Tully river was angry that day, my friends. It was not happy to see us riding on top of it. We flipped over multiple times during our four hour ride, and even when we didn't flip over, people got bounced out of the boat with alarming frequency. On the rapid shown below, I tried to help the Dutch guy stay in the boat, but as you can see, I was too late.

Even when we weren't getting tossed out of the boat because of the rapids, we were never dry for more than a few mintues. The six of us became fast friends and somehow that friendship meant that it was incumbent upon each of us to try to push everyone else in the water whenever possible. Fun? Absolutely. But the water couldn't have been more than 40 degrees, so it was a freezing four hours on the river.

That was my first week in Australia. I'm doing the true backpacker thing here - staying in hostels, riding the bus (more on that in my next post), and so on. Let me tell you - Australia is f**king expensive. On my first day here I walked into a minimart to get a soda and saw a sign advertising Sprite for $2.25. I thought, "That's not bad for a six pack." Nope. That's for a single can. A Snickers bar is $2.95! Screw you, weakening American dollar! But, one of the things I like about traveling as a backpacker is the variety of people I've come across while slumming it in hostels. Some people are nice and interesting, others are assholes, and still others are just plain weird. Like this dude in my hostel in Cairns. He might be the weirest guy I've ever "met." ( I say "met" because I didn't actually say a single word to him.) The weirdness was palpable. First, he looked like he was about 40 years old. I don't want to discriminate based on age, but that's a wee bit old to be living in hostels. Second, just look at him - he looks like he's been bunkered in that corner of the room for a month. Hey, buddy- how about putting away the dirty laundry?; or hanging up your wet towel?; or throwing away old KFC wrappers? Seems like a good idea to me. And Cairns ain't Syndey or Melbourne, where it might make sense that he's been there for a while. Cairns is the kind of place you go to, stay for a few days, then leave. Third, he made strange noises. Like a wimpering combined with a sneeze. He sounded like a wounded animal. He made these noises all the time, and I mean all the time. Part of me was mystified and part of me was entertained. (But, just for the record, no part of me was concerned for his health or safety. That's his problem, the weirdo!) Fourth - and this is the real kicker - he never seemed to move. Not once in the three days I was there did I see this guy anywhere but sitting in his bed in this position. On my first day I arrived at this hostel, I checked in at noon, then came back around 3pm, 6pm, and 9pm. He was in the exact same place. And can you guess what he was doing? You can't, because it's just too stupid. He was - wait for it, wait for it - watching DVD reruns of Knight Rider. Yeah, the 80's show with David Hasselhof. So that made no sense... Welcome to backpacking 101 in Australia.