We're at Kim and Jake's

     We arrived at Pat and Mark's friend Kim's house Monday evening, met son Jake and dog Beau, were warmly welcomed and heartily fed.  On Tuesday we got a tour of the farm and got a lot of prep work for the LC taken care of.  More on all that later.  For now, a couple updates.  As is usual, the more recent entries are at the top, scroll down for older daily posts.  Three days are covered here.

Thursday 9/13

Camping in an aviary

     The bird sounds at dusk were incredible. Caws, squawks, kookookoo's, trillings and hoots. By dark most of the birds settled down and during the night we heard mostly frogs singing except for one long high pitched howl that I thought might be a dingo.

    At dawn the “aviary” reopened and the birds resumed their conversations, discussions, presentations and arguments. At the top of the pecking order, so to speak, are the cockatoos. As large as ravens but pure white, they flew about the tops of the tall white skinned gum trees in groups of 5 to 10, screaming at each other in loud hoarse cawing voices. They would land in the trees, quiet down, and then they or another group would take off, yelling at each other again.

    Many other varieties of birds took part in the morning chorus. Of course, I didn't know what any of them were, but I can say this about them; for the most part, except for some small shy birds that kept to themselves in the brushy undercover they were loud, raucous, and non-melodius. The air was fairly ripped apart by their cries. It was exotic and glorious.

     We ate our breakfast of plum jam and bread and headed into town to continue filling the LC with new stuff.

More shopping

     We stocked our food pantry at IGA, looked for thrift shops to build our camp kitchen, and hit a Bunnings, similar to Lowes, where we bought a, tarp, rope, and soccer chairs, and a set of mechanic tools , and talked to two workers who advised us about outback 4WD travel, including a woman who took her five kids (3 to 17) out of school for 6 weeks and made the drive up the wild York peninsula in the far north of Queensland.

Back to the same aviary campground, and an alien night sky

     We ended up back at the same primitive (and free) campground we had stayed at the night before. We decided we didn't need to put the fly on the tent as it hadn't rained yet since we arrived in Oz, and it was a clear evening. Of course about two hours later I was out in the rain in my underwear and boots throwing the fly on as quickly as I could, shivering and glad to dive back into the tent when I was done (we had frozen droplets of ice on the LC in the morning).

     A couple hours later I ventured back out of the tent for a nature call and looked up to see the brilliant southern night sky. Although Sydney cast a faint glare to the east I could see thousands of stars and the Milky Way. Looking for anything familiar, I noticed Orion, and then realized he was upside down, due to the fact that I was looking at him from the Southern Hemisphere.

     Imagine looking at a star pattern at night and beginning to walk south towards the equator. As you progress it will rise higher and higher in the sky until eventually you cross the equator and you either have to crane your neck way back to still see it, or more comfortably turn around 180 degrees, at which point it will be upside down. I'm curious to see if Australians have the same pictorial representations for the constellations as we do. Of course we can't see any of the constellations that circle the North Star, such as the Big or Small Dippers, Cassiopeia, or Cygnus. But the twelve constellations that make up the Zodiac, as well as the other planets in the Solar System, are visible from here, and it will be interesting to watch them as the seasons change. I need to get a star map to learn those southern constellations I haven't thought too much about before.

     While I'm at it I'll mention the singular peculiarity of having the sun to the north. For my entire life I've depended on being able to use the sun as a rough guide to finding my way around. If the sun was out I could get a pretty good idea of the four cardinal directions. Of course that's still true here, but now I have to think about it as I position myself towards the sun and think “if the sun is in my face and it's near noon, east is to the right, not the left”. In a way it's easier than we Northern Hemispherians have it, because now you're actually facing the same way as the map, with north being up.

     With all that going through my head I jumped back into the tent and cozied up next to Diana, falling quickly back asleep.

Wednesday, 9/12

We finally leave Sydney

We had breakfast with Michelle (the usual, corn flakes, raisins and milk, then a cup of instant coffee and two slice of toast with honey). She was being moved out of the double room on the ground floor that she had somehow lucked into getting and into a four person dorm room on the fourth floor. I helped her move her stuff up there and as I left her there in the room she was cheerily introducing herself to the hungover boy and girl there.

We packed up all our stuff, then said goodbye to Michelle, who didn't have the $40 to pay the key deposit and one night's rent for the room. We gave her $20 for, as we told her, teaching us how to travel with panache. When we got our stuff on our backs and in our hands and said goodbye we breathed a sigh of relief, knowing the someone else would now be riding the Michelle whirlwind.

Getting the LC

We took the train out to Lindcombe and called Joey. He arrived several minutes later in our new car, and promptly ran our of gas. We waited while his brother brought a gallon, talking about Australia's immigrant problems, and the causes of the crazy weather and tsunamis. We finally got to the dealership and exchanged cash for the paper work. It took awhile for Joey to say goodbye to us, but

left and drove the short distance to the state office where we had to register the transfer of ownership. Wuhaatt??? We have two weeks to get the proper documentation, but it is a bother. I'm sure we were just unfortunate to get a small minded bureaucrat that wanted to throw her weight around a little, but it does have Diana worried. I mean, thousands of people come to Oz every year and buy a car. We'll just have to figure out a way around the legal crappola.

Spending some more money

     I drove out onto the main road, repeating the mantra 'drive on the left, drive on the left'. About a mile past Joey's is a large outdoor shop like Dicks or Gander Mountain, without the guns and ammo. Checking on the web they seem to have the best selection and prices for outdoor gear in Australia. We stopped and bought a LPG two burner stove, two 2 kg. gas tanks, a Coleman cooler, and two soccer chairs.

     In rush hour traffic we drove up the road to the first little town in the Blue Mountains, where we bought some food at a small grocery store. Then as dusk fell we found our way out to the campground, glad to have a manual transmission to navigate the fairly steep hills, both up and down. 

               

     Along the drive in a couple kangaroos (or wallabies) greeted us in the road. Then as we approached the camp site we saw a flock of cockatoos eating grass at the side of the gravel road. It was a nice welcome to the Aussie countryside. We quickly set up our tent and had dinner of bread, cheese, cucumber, onion and wine. And went to bed.

Our first camp dinner

Tuesday, 9/11

Michelle, ma belle

     We met Michelle Morrison-Hellmann at breakfast. She's a 65 ex airline stewardess (that's how long ago she worked, before they were called flight attendants) who can travel anywhere United Airlines goes for only $85 and was in Sydney to place some of her pilot husband's ashes in a planter at the Sydney airport. He died seven years ago, they divorced many years before that, but in honoring Jim's wishes Michelle has traveled the globe depositing a bit of Jim in his favorite places.

     But now she's stuck here. Something about identity theft and loss of use of her credit card, and a fat female Gestapo UA rep that wouldn't accept cash for a ticket and difficulties figuring how to figure out a financial solution with her best friend back in Palm Springs, California who she suspects is in early stage Alzheimer’s. She was having a breezy chat with one of the young French guys when we came into the kitchen. She then moved on to talking to the front desk clerk spelling out all her problems, but soon noticed us and swooped in. My whiskers trembled with the aura of flimflam.

     Before long however her exceeding charm and endless stories won us over. Her list of friends includes an 80 year gay man living in Nice who has been her guiding angel for a couple decades, a pilot who flies private plane the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a Hollywood movie producer who is planning a reality show of her life, the owner of the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville North Carolina where she would conduct real estate business on a veranda overlooking the formal gardens, and on and on. On this, the 11^th anniversary of 9/11 she teared up slightly when she recalled having missed the funeral of one of her flight attendant friends who had perished that day.

     She has dined with poets and actors in posh hotels in Paris and Beverly Hills, had tea with the old nanny of Prince Ranier in her house overlooking Monaco and had her fortune foretold by a famed but slightly disturbed neurobiologist in the Sierra Mountains (“you will be in a plane and some Arab guys will try to hijack it, but you will save the lives of all on board if you say the following words in Arabic and do the exactly proscribed hand motions”, she even showed us the piece of paper where she had transcribed the life saving words). Her tales poured out of her. But she also seemed genuinely interested in our stories, as mundane as they were compared to hers. She proudly claimed to be suffering from ADD and said that the 'squirrels' were always showing up to distract her attention.

I don't think she is mentally ill, though. Her memory is photographic and she is extremely well educated, knowing literature, history, cinema, and current affairs much more extensively than I. She would be an engaging companion if you could keep up with the twists and turns of her stories.

      But it all kept coming back to her dilemma of leaving Sydney. Obviously she had no money with her and couldn't make the contacts to get her problem taken care of. Maybe she doesn't really have much money anywhere, relying on friends to constantly bail her out when her financial situation gets out of hand. She always seemed upbeat and cheerful, but we detected moments of desperation. She reminded me of Blanche Dubois from Street Car Named Desire, depending on the kindness of strangers. Except she has Town and Country an Vanity Fair magazines stashed in her bag.

The Sidney Art Bienniale

     Every two years Sydney has a huge modern art exhibit that fills several museums and other governmental sites. Michelle told us that we could take a free ferry from the downtown ferry dock known as the Circular Quay to Cockatoo Island about 20 minutes away in Sydney Harbor where some of the installations were in the old shipbuilding yard there. Sounded like a good way to spend the day since our LC wouldn't be ready until late that afternoon. We had decided to go pick it up the next day as there was shopping to be done in the same area as the car dealer.

      We took a nice stroll through the extensive Royal Botanical Gardens. Spring flowers were in bloom, we say fresh water eels in a small pond, and began to learn the myriad names for all the kinds of gum trees here in Australia. Gum trees are also known as eucalyptus trees.

     After a short wait at the quay we boarded a two level ferry and steamed out into the harbor, passing the Opera House and going under the Harbor Bridge. Most of the shore of the harbor is lined with modestly sized but exquisitely finished private homes with there own docks.

     Cockatoo Island is about a mile long and less than a half mile wide. Over the years it served first as a prison then during WW I as a shipyard where quite a few warships for her majesties navy were built. Shipbuilding operations continued there until the 1970's, when the facilities were abandoned and left to ruin. Now the empty hulks of the shipyard sit abandoned and open for visitors to wander around in. For the Biennale large art installations exploring the sounds and visions of undefined modern life fill the empty buildings. We only had an hour to explore the island, but it was fascinating. Definitely a place to go back and spend more time in when we return in January.

     We went back to the hostel and I fixed penne with feta cheese, sundried tomato, and asparagus, which we shared with Michelle on the terrace, listening to her fascinating stories.