There’s Nothing “Banal” About Bris-”bane” … Oh Yeah!!

Brisbane begins, as all Australian tourist destinations apparently do, with a painful hike uphill in thick heat carrying heavy bags. By the time we get to our hotel, I’m drenched in sweat, and have all too little interest in exploring Australia’s third-largest city. But a quick Internet check of my credit card balance fixes that. Every moment must be seized for all that it is worth! (Approximate worth of each moment: $61.11)

Now, I’m not normally one to go all gooey about architecture, ragging on a city for having ugly buildings and praising another for its beauty, but Brisbane really does have some nice buildings. Overall, it seems this city was built with very careful attention paid to its aesthetics. A wide variety of interesting, clean, colorful towers; quirky little urban art installations around every second corner; and the water fountains all require puzzle-solving skills to get them to work.

It has a reputation for being a very laid-back city, and it’s deserved, if our first stroll is any indication. Neither Toronto nor Seoul ever have such empty streets downtown, except during a blizzard or Chuseok. And nothing’s really open, because it’s evening and it’s Sunday (also, probably, a factor in why it’s so laid-back), but we get in a nice stroll, and at the end we find a charming little garden area near our hotel, with fountains and flowers and some birds walkin’ around, but by then I just don’t have the energy to lift my camera, so you don’t get any pictures of that.

Pictures abound the next day, many of which I’ve positioned up above, to give the illusion that there were pics from the first walk. Another, longer walk through the less-laid-back (but still relatively laid-back) Monday afternoon Brisbane, including a lengthy walk along the Brisbane River, made all the lengthier still when we realize we’ve passed all the bridges for a long while and have to turn back to get to our side of the water again.

And we find a toy store, and in the toy store, I find this bad boy:

That’s a 1:1 scale T-800 statue, with crushed-skull-decorated base and Big Ass Gun, going for a measly ten grand. For ten thousand dollars I expect it to actually travel back in time to kill people of my choosing. I forget to ask the clerk, so I don’t actually know if it can do this or not.

On our last Brisbanian day we hop a bus and head over to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (formerly the “Twin Pines Koala Sanctuary” until the 1:1 scale Marty McFly statue inadvertently travelled back in time and killed one of Old Man Peabody’s breedin’ pines). No shortage of adorable critters there, let me tell you. I take lots and lots of photos of these cuties, from the dingos to the wombats, the turtles to the titular koalas. The most amazing part is: the animals can all talk. If only there was someway to capture it in a photograph, it’d show you. But there ain’t, so you’ll just have to take my word on it: all the animals in the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary can talk.

There’s also a big, open area where all the (talking) kangaroos hang out, and you can mosey right in and hang out with them. It seems these ‘roos aren’t so interested in looting; they’ll let you come right up and pat them, feed them, and look at their balls:

After that it’s back over to the hotel for a bit of a rest, then downtown again to take the City Nights bus tour, as advertised in the Lonely Planet guide book. Well Lonely Planet needs a talking-to, because their instructions on where to go for the City Nights tour are a smidge out-of-date. So, instead it’s more downtown-walking, and in this we get to witness one of the more unexpected things about this major Australian city. There’s a big tree in one of the downtown’s outdoor plazas, one we had walked past a few times already during the day, but this is our first time by at night. First we hear the loud squeaking, then we see a pair of big black wings flap by overhead, and being a pair of (on average) 40th parallel-dwellers, we just assume “man, they’ve got themselves some big birds down here,” but then we come to this tree and see that it’s holding about a dozen bats. The third largest city in Australia has a downtown tree that houses bats. (The first largest city in Australia apparently also has a bat-tree, though we never see it while in Sydney.) Though again, you’ll have to take my word on this, as taking clear photos at night ain’t easy.

Byron Bay: Australia’s Cool Table

Byron Bay is a hip little town. My mother chose it over giong to the the Gold Coast because, in her skimming of the Lonely Planet guide, it struck her as a quieter, less-crowded place. Wrong again, Mum (the previous instance of Wrong being when she turned into oncoming traffic).

It’s like spring break here. Backpacker’s hostels abound; trendy shops line the street (that’s singular, “street” — it’s popular, but small); and things here actually stay open up to — and sometimes beyond — 10 pm. We spend our first evening walking the beach in the dark, though pretty far from the main beach area because that’s where all the young people have congregated, with their loud music and their drinking.

The next day, armed with towels and swimsuits, we head down to take our first actual swim in the ocean (actually, it’s just the bay, but it’s salty enough to pass). We swim in shifts, naturally fearing for our possessions in this thick crowd of young people. It’s a good time, battling those dastardly waves, and I know my mother enjoys it too, though I don’t really see her enjoying it, distracted as I was by the line of topless sunbathers situated between myself and the water. I didn’t even choose this place to set down, my mum did.

That’s all you need to know about Byron Bay. Topless sunbathers.

I Am Still An English Teacher

Let’s recap what we’ve learned thus far:

1. “Unsealed” means “unpaved”
2. “Tyre” means “tire”
3. “Kerb” means “curb”
4. And “sparrow’s fart” means “dawn” for some reason

Here’s one more quirk to add to the list: it seems one needn’t have found gold in a mine in order for it to be advertised as a Gold Mine. Because the story our tour guide tells us about George’s Gold Mine concludes with the Shyamalanian twist that no gold was ever actually found there. And it’s not really that big a mine, either. Like a shorter, roomier version of the DMZ tunnels the North Koreans dug to infiltrate the south, and less propaganda-filled.

If the actual mine is a disappointment, the demonstration of the battery more than makes up for it, thanks to George. This isn’t the same George as the one the mine is named after, but rather the George that currently runs it. I guess there’s some kind of local statute enforcing George ownership or something. But this George, a fellow certainly into his eighties, gives us a nice little half hour speech, explaining a few of the techniques used in the older days to separate the quartz from its precious, precious gold, and I don’t understand a word of it.

He’s speaking English, and up until now I haven’t had any difficulty at all penetrating the Australian accent, but with George, not too much gets through. Still, force of personality prevails, and ol’ George’s got that in spades. When a couple of the kids on the tour are talking, he (I assume) tells them to be quiet or get out, then later, during the panning demonstration, when one of them excitedly announces “I’ve been panning before,” George comes back with “You weren’t listening to me, so I’m not listening to you.”

As soon as I realized how awesome a character George was gonna be, I covertly began filming him with my digital camera. I got almost 20 minutes worth, so I shan’t be posting it. I’ll arrange private screenings at a later time, for a reasonable fee, of course.

A day later we drive the winding dirt and gravel roads to Dorrigo and its lush rainforests (“lush” being the only adjective legally applicable to rainforests) and its “Waterfall Way.” We spend an hour or so walking the rainforest paths, and if you’ve never been to a rainforest before, let me describe it for you. First, picture a regular forest. Make the trees taller, and put all their leaves up at the canopy. Add some vines and winding branches. Done.

I suppose you can add the animals we see, too. There are some unfamiliar birds flying around (but then, what the hell do I know about birds? Maybe they do have all these in Ontario). That lizard climbing the tree is sure big (and that bird whose nest the lizard is going for is sure agitated). And of course, there’s the one animal you’d expect to see in a rainforest — the Brush Turkey. The glorious Brush Turkey.

We return the car, and I tell the guy that all the dust is from using all those unsealed parking lots down by the beach. I don’t care if he believes me.

It seems that even Australia is vulnerable to the scourge of Engrish.

Roads, Sealed and Otherwise

Folks ’round these parts sure are friendly. Case in point: my mother and I arrive at the Coffs Harbour train station and head over to the Caribbean Motel, only a couple of blocks away. A guy sees us with our heavy bags and maps and such and actually stops his car to see if we need help finding our destination, even offering to drive us there. But the Caribbean is in sight, so we thank him and send him on his way. This kind of casual courtesy, along with the neighbourly “Hellos,” “Good mornings,” and, in one glorious case, an actual “G’day mate,” makes Australia a refreshing change from the standard xenorainbow (running from xenophobia to xenoenthusiasm) a whitey in Korea gets.

And it turns out we should’ve taken that fellow up on his offer, because it wasn’t the Caribbean Motel where I booked our room, it’s the all-the-way-up-the-long-hill-on-the-other-side-of-town-and-along-the- highway-a-bit Premier Motor Inn where we’re staying. The Blue Mountains have nothing on this walk.

Once we’ve finally collapsed in our room and have had a bit of a breather, we stroll back along the highway into town to run a couple of errands, and find it’s a ghost town. Seems everything closes here at 5pm, aka 10 minutes ago.

Things are a bit more lively down by the water. You know, where the Caribbean Motel is. There’s a carnival filled with rickety rides and gruff carnies, restaurants far too expensive for me to ever consider patronizing, and the shops down this way seem to stay open until the wee hours of 9pm. Plus there’s another one of those beaches, with its endless sand, crashing waves, and some birds n’ people hanging around. You know, beach shit. So that’s all nice.

We were warned before we came that all the touristy things we want to see in this area all require a vehicle to access, so we were counting on tours, like the ones that took us to the Jenolan Caves, to get us where we wanna go. We find pamphlets for these tours in the motel lobby, but when I call their “Transportation Availability Inquiry” numbers, the response my inquires get is “No transportation available.” We’ve got two nights here, and the beach ain’t that big. So we rent a car.

 

Yes, Australia is one of those countries that drives on the other side of the road. And yes, my mother turned onto the Canadian side at an intersection. And yes, she panicked and freaked out when she did so. And yes, her mistake caused a school bus to go careening into a ravine. But she eventually got the hang of it.

The only rule the guy at Thrifty gave us is this: Don’t drive on unsealed roads. “Unsealed” means “unpaved” in Aussie. Our first destination is George’s Gold Mine, and George’s Gold Mine is pretty isolated. Some 15 km of dirt-road-through-mountainous-woods driving gets us there, and then once we’re on the property we still have to drive from tour point to tour point: Up a steep, muddy hillside path it’d be a stretch to call a “road”; down a dirty hill, in something of a ditch two feet deep, and surrounded by cows; through a damn creek. Nary a seal to be found. It’s a good thing we didn’t really care about Thrifty’s rule, or else we would’ve been just racked with guilt.

I’ll pause there to let the pre-Gold Mine tension build. Did they strike it rich? Will they ever return from paradise? Or did the mine collapse upon them, forcing them to cannibalize their fellow tourists? Did Thrifty refund their deposit? Tune in next time, same Bat-stard channel.

Here are two bonus fun Australian road-related quirks to tide you over: they spell “Tire” with a ”y” — “Tyre” — and “Curb” they spell “Kerb.” Wyld!

(Observant types will notice a bit of a change to this section, if you find reason to read it again. Keep it to yourselves, would you. It’s embarrassing, such a mistake.)

Therefore His Name Was Called Perez

Snide people like to say in the offhand: “The Bible is a great work of fiction,” with that extra bit of emphasis on the last word to let it be known that they’re smarter than the troglodytes. Now that I’ve actually started reading it, I have to say I disagree: it’s really not that good a work of fiction. It has its passages here and there, grand poetic lines on occasion, especially at the start, but mostly it just goes on and on and on. It tells the history of a man or a society over a chapter or two in a drone, like a child improvising a story, starting each sentence with “And then … And then …,” inserting all sorts of tangents and irrelevant details.

There’s very little of the grandeur/glory/profundity to the language that I was expecting. Jose Saramago’s “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” had much more beauty to its writings (though granted, that’s New Testament, this is Old), and before you jump on me with a “The Bible was translated from a dead language, heathen,” Saramago’s good book was translated from the Portuguese. And Portuguese is also a dead language, for all I care. Screw Brazil. Soccer sucks, too.

But strip the Bible of its divinity, of that sense that it must be good because of its Author, and I think Harry Potter would have a real shot at surpassing it on the all-time best seller list. Speaking of best seller lists: what’s the number one selling book in all the Australian book stores I’ve seen? Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.” How about that.

“Swimming” “With” Dolphins

There’s a bit of a problem with riding the rails up the east coast of Australia: there aren’t all that many trains. Departure options are limited, and the train out of Sydney we need to take to get to Forster left half an hour before we got to Sydney from Blue Mountain. And the next train, leaving in 4 hours, won’t actually be transferring to Forster. That’s fine; we can take a taxi from nearby Taree.

A $100 damn taxi. I’ve never seen a meter tick up so quickly.

I’ve already booked a Dolphin Swim Cruise for the morning. This company is apparently the only licensed Dolphin Swim Cruise on the east coast, and one of only 15 in the world. And when we get there at 6:45 in the morning the swim’s been cancelled due to weather. But with a 7:00 start time, we can try again tomorrow and still make our train outta town. For today, we wander the beaches

And the first thing we see, walking along the jetty at J Holland Park — dolphins. Just hanging out, swimming around and popping up, as dolphins are prone to do. That sight seems to make my mother pretty happy, while I, my heart cold as steel, feel nothing. But making my mother happy, that’s all this is really about, isn’t it?

For the sake of clarity, please note: These are not dolphins. These are pelicans on the hunt for fish guts.

Forster’s beaches are long and sandy with water and waves and some people swimming and — well, they’re beaches. We all know what beaches are like; Forster’s just happen to be of the nicer variety. So picture a beach; now make it a bit nicer. There you go.

The weather’s good to go the next day, so off we do go at 7. It’s about a half hour’s cruise to our pod’s stomping grounds (though neither “ground” nor “stomping” should be taken literally), and along the way we spot plenty of other, lesser (because they don’t want to hang with us) dolphins cavorting as dolphins are apt to do. Now, when I think “Dolphin Swim,” I picture that Hawaii two-parter of Full House, with DJ and Stephanie in the pool, nuzzling the curious porpoises, holding onto their dorsal fins for a short ride, before everyone joins the Beach Boys on stage for an energetic performance of Kokomo. That’s not quite what we get.

Instead of a relaxing dip in calm waters, we’re given a snorkel and a wetsuit and a rope to hang on to, as they steer the damn boat through the pod’s feeding area, instructing you to make loud, high-pitched noises to catch the animals’ curiousity. The boat goes slowly, but it sure doesn’t feel that way with the high waves smashing against my face and the salt water pouring down my snorkel as I squeal like an excited Ned Beatty. I did see a few of them swim by, but the water’s so murky that even with a mask you can’t really call it a “good” look. Maybe you could, if you weren’t so focused on not drowning.

My mother wisely passes on the swim part. Which is wise, because the view from just staying up in the boat is much, much better anyway. Dolphins bein’ all playful and swimmy at the boat’s side, and in its wake. Those that swim right up at the surface for a few seconds can be seen much more clearly than those who buzzed me underwater (possibly to offer assistance, as dolphins are wont to do). So it’s hardly a bad time.

So today’s lesson is: do a Dolphin Watching Cruise, not a Dolphin Swim Cruise. Unless you like vomiting salt water over the hull.

It’ll Be A Blue Mountain Without You

Hey, all the in-post picture posting is complete! Up until this entry, that is. And this entry describes events of three stops ago. Whoo boy. Anyway…

The Blue Mountains are a couple of train hours West of Sydney. Renowned for being mountains and having many of the properties of mountains, they’re very popular among elevation enthusiasts. We arrive like a couple of backpacking hippies, without a place to stay or a clue what we want to do there. But it’s a tourist town, so getting a room–in a Korean-run guest home, with frilly curtains and a damn teddy bear on the bed–isn’t hard. What is hard is the hike from the train station to the guest house, carrying our bags up and down the steep slopes you’d expect in a charming little town built on a mountainside.

After some exhaustion-inspired down time, we take a stroll to nearby Echo Point. Reading that name now, I realize that nobody was shouting into the ravine. Why the hell didn’t I shout into the ravine? I guess no life lived is without regrets.

From the lookout platform at Echo Point we take a walk on one of the paths that runs along the cliffside. Lots of perilous peaks and dramatic drops and vast vistas and other sources of alliteration. And there’s a nice stream and a little waterfall, too.

The next day we’re up and ready to go with five minutes to spare before the cave tour van leaves. It’s a long drive across the weavy, hilled countryside — not too different from weavy, hilled countryside back home, only more weavy, with bigger hills, and a greater likelihood of seeing a kangaroo smooshed at the side of the road.

I’ve toured a few caves in Korea, and now having seen Australia’s Jenolan Caves, I think I’m enough of an authority to say that the inside of the Earth has a lot less variety than its outside does. Don’t take this as a sign of disappointment, though — caves are always very cool regardless of the language being spoken by the surface-dwellers above. But unlike Korean caves, we’ve got tour guides guiding us on our tour through these caves, and they share all kinds of amusing little stories about the caves’ histories. But I won’t repeat any here, because the last thing I want to do is amuse anybody.

Fun with aperture settings.

On the way back to town, our van driver takes us on a detour, to an isolated little park where he says he has some “friends.” At first we don’t see anything, but as the van gets further in we notice up ahead: a pair of kangaroos, just hanging out in the wild. They see us too, and sit up to stare at the strange outsiders. Then someone says “look over there,” and though they weren’t actually speaking to my mother and I, we do look, and there are a few more we hadn’t noticed, sitting in the shade of a tree. And then to the other side, from the woods come hopping a few more, one with a pair of legs sticking out from her pouch, presumably attached to her young (unverified). And then a few more. Before long we’re surrounded, and we all have a nice little moment together. That’s when they strike.

Kangaroos have powerful legs, so they have little trouble in both chasing down and taking out any of us who tries to run. They’re good boxers, too, and they’re smart enough to go for the big guys first, as I can attest, and to aim for the balls, as I can attest. Once we’ve all been subdued, the tour van driver orders his trained army of ‘roos to take our wallets and cameras and passports and he rides off into the forest on kangarooback, cackling all the way. It isn’t too much of an inconvenience though, because we’re able to sell the van for enough to buy first-rate forgeries of all of our documents and such.

Nerd Quiz

In honour of finally getting some pictures up, I offer a quiz:

What do these Sydney locations have in common?

If anyone can give me the correct answer in the comments below, I will smuggle you an honest-to-God dead kangaroo that I found at the side of the road. Get thinkin’!

Here’s a hint: I don’t really expect any of you to get this, but if you were me, you’d totally get this.

Dwedgie Goboogki

First on my list of tasks for today: get a new camera. The digital camera I brought with me still takes nice pictures, it just takes about 5 minutes of sweet talk and gentle petting to get it to do so. Who would’ve expected so much trouble from a trusted brand like Dixcom, a subsidiary of Shinyoung Electronics. So I grab something by a new upstart in the camera industry, Kodak. So get ready for some 7.1 megapixel glory, and also get ready for some 3.5 megapixel glory from my old camera, whenever I get the pictures up.

Today, we’ll get in some real Australia — we’re going to the zoo. Well, not actually a zoo, we’re going to the animal display cases at the docks. But it’s nice; lots of icky bugs, snakes and fish, and of course, koalas, kangaroos, and a platypus.

Plus a giant crocodile and … A PIG-NOSED TURTLE! Yeah, but I don’t need to come to Australia to see no pig-nosed turtle. I GOT ONE AT HOME, BITCH. The one they had was about twice as big as mine, and he kept his damn head buried under a log the whole time I was there, which I can’t really blame him for it, since they stuck him in a tank full of these freakin’ gigantic fish. I’d hide under a log too.

All in all, a solid day of animal-looking-at and building-wandering-amongst. Tomorrow we get on the train and flee the city, do some mountain-train-riding-over. And by “tomorrow” I really mean “almost a week ago” since that’s when this actually happened.

“They stamped it, didn’t they? Those Damn Gideons.”

I figure since there’s gonna be a Bible in a drawer in every hotel I’ll be staying at, now’s a good opportunity to finally read the god damn thing, and as an added bonus, I won’t have to carry it around with me. I started with Genesis, because really, how can you start anywhere else?

I always knew the Old Testament God was supposed to be mean, but I figured that meant there’d be a lot of smiting of, and child-sacrifice from, murderers and adulterers and blasphemers (like myself)–but that’s grade school meanness compared to how This Guy really is. When these people in Shinar start building the Tower of Babel and God decides their accomplishment is a bit too impressive, he fixes it by spreading humanity across the Earth (or across EurAfricAsiAustralasia, since God didn’t know about the Americas yet) and giving them a bunch of different languages. So now they can’t understand each other, and can’t work together, and therefore can’t pose a threat to his rule. That’s a real dick move there, God.