Ocker Quiz #1 -- Answer

Hey Gang,

Thanks for playing. I must say, the participation of the first quiz was pretty poor. The winner of the most quizzes will win a special prize!

Before we get to the next quiz, here's the correct answer to Quiz #1 (provided by a very elegant and eloquent local):

"ROAD PLANT AHEAD -- This is a spelling error on the Council sign, should read ROAD PLANNED AHEAD, which loosely interprets as don't be surprised if you hit gravel for a while - as they haven't got round to finishing the road seal work from last June, cause it's far to humid to do any real work up here."

Thanks, gnuheller (you are awesome, whoever you are) and Dad for playing. gnuheller was closest, so he gets 0.5 points. Dad was wrong, but very creative, and he did help raise me for all these years (and I still don't know who gnuheller is--- if it's you, Mom, sorry) so Dad gets 1 point. Thus the standings are:

Dad 1
gnuheller 0.5

yay.

Beach hopping

Finally left Mission Beach yesterday morning, three days after my intended departure. There's absolutely nothing to do there, but I got caught up in it nonetheless. Something about the relaxed atmosphere of the town and the friendliness of the hostel was infectuous. The fun culminated on Sunday night with a beach BBQ hosted by all the hostels in town -- a perfect evening playing ball, chatting and drinking on the shore.

Spent last night in Townsville, there's not a terrible lot going on there. The most interesting thing was the Great Northern Hotel where I stayed. My room was spare, the bed uncomfortable and my neighbor had his TV on at ungodly hours and volumes... still the place was completely charming. With nothing else to do for the evening, I sat with the other gents in the downstairs bar, drinking VBs and watching a TV show on Australia's Top 20 TV Comedic Personalities or something. I took lots of notes on Uncle Arthur, Con the Fruiterer, Sir Les Patterson and Collin Carpenter to name a few. In all, a solid evening of Australiana.

So now I'm in Airlie Beach, the sailing captial of the east coast and the gateway to the famed Whitsunday Islands. I'd like to explore the Whitsundays, but if I do it, I'm going to take a 3 day sailing course. Just cruising around on a big party boat doesn't sound as appealing as going out with 5 other students on a smaller boat and learning amid the scenery. The boat doesn't leave until Thursday, so I have tonight to think about it.

My hostel, The Backpackers by the Bay, is quiet, clean and has a lovely view of the harbor from the pool deck-- and free use of their gas grill, upon which I think I'll grill up something tasty tonight.

Oh, and the Panny is doing much better on fuel. I'm up to about 15mpg on LPG and 20mpg on Petrol. Based on their relative costs, the price per kilometer is about the same. LPG can get a lot cheaper than I've been finding it though, so it seems like the right choice.

Oh, and why do Australians insist on using the word orientated?

Something to look at

This should tickle your optics, chockloads of pictures freshly uploaded and commented.

Sorry about the delay. Getting socked in by rain today (and the next few days is likely, as well) has given me lots of time to get this done, even with a dreadfully slow uplink.

One more night here in Mission Beach, and then heading south some more. I'd like to stop in at Ayr to dive the Yongala, but the weather might not be cooperating and I certainly don't want to wind up in Ayr with nothing to do. We'll see.

Ocker Quiz #1

Leave your answer to the quiz in the comments.

1) While driving along, you see a sign on the side of the road that says:

CAUTION:

ROAD PLANT AHEAD

What should you be looking out for?

There will be more quizzes to come. The winner gets a kookaburra flavoured lollie.

Back in the sweat

Well, the Tablelands are behind me and I miss them already. Blaž and I left the Wallaby this morning. Speaking of the Wallaby, I forgot to mention a big thanks to Rich for pointing it out to me in the first place. It seems rare that everyone at a hostel has an inviting smile and "hello" for you when you walk in, the Wallaby was a glad exception.

The drive down was very pleasant, got some sausage rolls at the "Highest Bakery in Queensland" -- no they don't make pot brownies, the town of Ravenshoe sits at the highest elevation in this fair state. After that we checked out the short walk down to Little Millstream Falls, which provided a lovely view and a bit of fun rock hopping along the banks.

Cruised back down to the coast, through the town of Innisfail-- and spent an hour there stretching our legs, doing some minor shopping and admiring the rare (for Australia) Art Deco architecture. Innisfail also made me realize a real benefit to Australia's lack of freeways: a thriving downtown. Innisfail isn't a tourist destination, but the town centre was all a buzz with locals doing their shopping and going about their business. This is what most of the USA must have looked like 40 years ago.

Finally rolled into Mission Beach and found that our intended hostel was all booked up, but the Treehouse, up the road had plenty of beds. The Treehouse is a YHA hostel a bit back from the beach in the rainforest, constructed open-air style like a treehouse. It's very pretty, but a little aged around the edges. A quick dip in the pool when the lack of welcoming smiles made me decide to head into town to find some dinner and some solo time. A prawn, bacon, mushroom, garlic pizza later and some ginger beer later, I'm at the internet cafe-- again trying to write down everything before they close up.

Got my general plan down now, I'm much happier about my ability to stick with the good weather. It goes from here clockwise around the country, all the way around, until I hit the northern road to Alice Springs, at which point, I strike south again, winding up my trip in Melbourne where I'll sell my car (what's left of it) and fly out.

Uplinks really suck here, it might be ages before I get to upload my pics.

Oh, and Lou, you can bite me.

Oh, and Mike, you can bite me, too.

Oh, and Mom, yeah, that porn thing, just kidding.... he he....

Hanging in the Highlands

Spending most of this week in Yungaburra, in the heart of the Atherton Tablelands. About 1.5 hours west of Cairns, the Tablelands sit at about 3000' elevation comprised of rolling pastures and beautiful lakes and waterfalls. It's also much cooler and less humid than Cairns, with no mozzies either. The best part is that the region is also largely devoid of the mania touristica of the coast.

So I've been happily staying at the "On the Wallaby Backpacker's Lodge", an immaculate and intimate hostel in here in Yungaburra. The proprietor, Paul, leads various local nature trips, and I've been canoeing with him twice so far. Last night, we went for a night paddle on Lake Tinaroo, sublimely gliding along under a perfect starry sky. Using our torches, we spotlighted animals in the adjacent trees-- I managed to bag a very rare tree kangaroo. Awesome!

Got the car mostly kitted out now, waiting on the metal shop to finish fabricating some brackets so I can install my surfboard shelf in the cargo bay. I've got the mattress and linens all sorted out, so I slept comfortably in there last night for the first time. The car is great, the only downside being that it seems to be getting only about 10mpg at the moment. I'm going to have to keep an eye on that.

Each day, a small group comes to the hostel for the various tours, spends the night and leaves the next day. Each night has been spent with a different set of interesting people, sitting around, drinking beers and chatting about our various adventures. I've befriended one resident, Blaz the Slovenian, (pronounced Blosh), he's been here for some nights as well. We both want to head down to Townsville via Mission Beach, so he's going to hitch a ride with me and we'll go down there tomorrow.

Still have lots of pictures to upload, sadly the uplinks here aren't very good. I promise to get them up soon.

Oh, and there's been some requests for amateur porn. Working on that.

The pools at the base of Alexandria falls are lovely. . .

. . .at least according to our guidebook.

The guidebook also mentioned that the falls were inaccessable in the wet season (i.e., now). Undetered, Mike, Anthony and I endeavored to reach them last Wednesday.

We drove up to Port Douglas on Tuesday in my new '95 Ford Falcon LongReach GLI Panel Van. It is bitching. Port Douglas was a welcome quiet respite from the tourist-prepackaged schlockfest that is Cairns. It gets quite busy in the dry season, but right now it was hot and damp and peaceful. Dinners were spent at the local community club overlooking the river, eating steaks and fish and drinking pitchers of VB (despite their boozy nature, Australians brew generally horrible beer). Evenings were spend lazing in the hostel pool and chatting with the other guests into the evening (Anthony got crushed on a cute but cold Dutch girl).

Just north of Port Douglas is the Daintree Rainforest, a World Heritage site and a very diverse and unique biome. We drove up there Wednesday from Port Douglas looking for a good bushwalk to get us some rainforest action. In perfect style, nothing quite worked out the way we would have planned. Acorrding to the book, the trail starts on the grounds of a forest resort, you're meant to check in at the front desk for clearance to get through their property and onto the trail. No dice. "That's being changed in the next guidebook, besides, the trail is blocked," said the proprietor. Instead, we're told to go back a bit down the road to a pullout, drive down to the creekside, park there and hike up the stream past their property and back to the trail.

What followed was several hours of slow daylight progress, sloshing up the chest-deep-at-times creek, following side trails into nothingness (save deadly brambles, mosquito clouds and leech breeding grounds). After having just too much fun and not enough progress, we realized that we'd never make the falls before dark, much less before we got hungry. We sloshed back down stream, happy to return to our car and find some grub.

We managed to explore a bit more of the Daintree from our car, including a few deserted stormy beaches.

Internet cafe is closing now. Pics will be up when I find a good uplink. Just got back from a 3 day overnight scuba trip, probably leaving Cairns tomorrow for the Atherton Tablelands. More to come. . .

S.F. memories

One of the reasons I love S.F. so much is the license to be silly. It's a feeling I don't get anywhere else, and maybe why I don't feel as attracted to NYC.

Case in point:

Cairns if you do, plans if you don't

February 11, 2006
Internet Cafe and Didgeridoo Shop
Downtown Cairns, actually
~ 11:45am

Sydney finished up just fine. Hit Bondi Beach on Wednesday (easy on the eyes in every respect). I really liked Bondi. Good natured attitude, not too touristy, beautiful beach. Thursday, I went over to Manly Beach, supposedly more authentic for the locals and a bit more upscale. Instead, I found it to be much more commercialized, due in part to it's proximity to the tourist center in downtown Sydney. Getting to Bondi is a haul on the train and a city bus, but you can hop over to Manly on the scenic ferry ride.

Thursday night I met up with Mike back in Bondi and we stayed up till 5am at the Bondi Hotel drinking, carrying on and dancing. Met Fizz and Deed, two lovely British sheilas who kept us on our toes all night. They were still going strong when we limped out to catch the last bus back downtown at 4.

I also Spent Wednesday learning about the buying a car, in preparation for a purchase soon. It's pretty daunting at first, but I think I'm getting a feel for the market. The scary bit was the Kings Cross Auto Market in Sydney. The market is really just the second underground level of a parking garage in Kings Cross. Descending into the gloom, your eyes adjust to see a mini community of grubby backpackers sitting in the darkness, tossing frisbees and hackysacks, waiting for fresh travelers to come down and take their vehicle off their hands. Apparently it works, but the whole affair is pretty dodgy. You get a lot of folks sitting down there for days with their visas' expiration and flights home looming. Not a fun looking way to end your trip. The thought of ending up like a Gollum/car salesman hybrid nearly put me off from buying a car completely. Coming to Cairns yesterday, however, has convinced me that I need my own wheels.

Our hostel is clean, it is not expensive, it's not even too rowdy. It is however glossy with the backpacker culture. Prepackaged tours, "specials" at the bar designed to ply more money from you, pub crawl busses to the hottest nightclubs in town.... well and good, but not why I came here. It also occurred to me that I haven't actually been traveling solo the way I wanted. Between being back in NY, down in the DR and Haiti with Lou and Sydney with Mike, I've had the luck to travel in good company. Time to go it alone for a while.

Speaking of Haiti, I noticed that Rene Preval is in the solid lead in the election counting, but might not get the 50% required to avoid a runoff. Already, business-interest candidate Charles Baker is asking for an investigation into fraud. I'm all for clean elections, but there's definitely people with an interest in maintaining confusion. Preval is the popular candidate with the nation's poor and we saw lots of people on the streets campaigning for him in Cap-Haitien. Many Americans look at a poor nation like Haiti and blame the Haitians for their plight: "If they just wanted it bad enough, they could have peace", "If they just worked hard enough, they could have an economy", etc. What they don't realize is that for the past century, the Haitian people have been desperately trying to get themselves together, only to be undermined at every turn by the policies and direct action of the USA-- beholden to the industrialist minority elites that benefit from Haiti's poverty.

pardon me.

Up in Cairns now, the central city on the north Queensland coast, Great Barrier Reef country. I'm looking into booking a 3day/2night liveaboard diving trip out on the reef. You stay out on the boat, they prepare all your meals and provide all the gear. While I'm out there, I want to score my PADI Advanced Open Water cert, which includes a whole slew of specialist dives like photography, naturalist, bouancy control and night diving.

On top of that, I think I may have found my car. It's a 1995 Ford Falcon Panel Van. There is only one word and that word is bitchin'. $3995 and it can be mine. Oh, and Lou, it has an extra fuel tank-- that takes LPG!! I'm going to sleep on it.

A brochure for a 5 night liveaboard sailing course crossed my path lastnight also. Curiouser and curiouser.

A long time gone

Feb 8, 2006
Internet Cafe
Chatswood, Australia
~9:35AM

This isn't exactly roughing it.

Late Sunday, before heading to SFO to fly down here, Mike emails me to say that he's in Sydney on Cisco business for the week, he's staying in a 4-star hotel north of town, and he's got an extra bed I can crash on for the first three nights. Maybe it's not in the backpacka spirit, but this sure beats a hostel.

The flight was dead easy. Departed around 10pm, I slept overall about 7 hours or so and I was out of customs by 8:00am feeling pretty well rested. So far jetlag hasn't been a problem.

On the flight, the first of several odd thoughts began to sink in. Normally, on a 13 hour flight, I find myself thinking about the second ordeal that the flight back will present. This time, my thoughts on that line stopped when I realized that I don't have a flight back anywhere. It is entirely possible that I won't be back in the US for at least 6 months. That much time changes my perspective in interesting ways.

Since Mike was working all day and wasn't checking in to the hotel until the evening, I had the whole day to kill. On the way out of the terminal, I asked a fellow passenger, Lisa if she knew of a good neighborhood I could visit just to chill and get settled. When I asked about King's Cross, she laughed and said "Nah, that's where all the tourists go!" Instead, she recommended the suburb of Balmain, a relaxed upscale community two harbors west of Circular Quay (downtown, by the Opera House). Further, she recommended that we share a cab together and that I get a shower at her place to freshen up after the flight. Done deal, thanks!

Lisa and I headed back to her place and we cleaned up, chatted with her roommate and played with her spunky dog, Cougar. After the shower, we went into downtown Balmain for a coffee and long chat about travels and lifey stuff and then parted ways. The trip was off on a good omen.

Spent the next hour or so in Balmain attending to the logistics of getting an international phone card, calling home and eating lunch. Ready to move on, I walked down to the Balmain East ferry terminal where I met a nice British couple and their son and grandson who live in Balmain. Together we took the ferry to the Rocks, providing a beautiful view of the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House as we came in; a right proper way to enter Sydney.

Phoned up Mike and by his suggestion, I decided to get a cell phone. Took the excellent city train from Circular Quay to the Town Hall stop on George St, a central business and shopping district in the heart of Sydney. I was looking for a travelers' centre that supposedly would let me ditch my heavy bag for a few hours as I walked around. When I eventually found the travelers' Checkpoint, I stayed only a minute before deciding to give up and suffer with my bag for a few more hours. The place was packed with young travelers from around the world clamoring for package travel deals on backpacker busses and free email checks. Ever since I started traveling in NZ 6 years ago, I've always sort of disdained the organized backpacker culture, not sure exactly why. Too contrived I think. Not in the spirit of a proper wander. I did get some good info from the travel medical clinic next door, I may stop in there before I leave Oz to make sure I have the right vaccinations for Indonesia, etc.

Back on the street, it was time to start learning about cellphones. Things are very different on this side of the pond. Instead of minutes, you get dollar credits and you have to calculate the amount of minutes you get based on the cost-per-call. After researching through several stores, the nice guy at the Telstra store told me that I would actually get a better deal at the Vodaphone shop down the street. Indeed, Radhika took good care of me. She explained their service plans, answered all my questions and after a short trip to the internet cafe to research my phone choices, I wound up with a Sony Ericsson K300i, SIM card and $30 credit for AUS$189. Calls cost $0.40 a minute, very pricey compared to the US, but a pretty good deal for my needs. Unlike the US, though, I don't pay for incoming calls. I don't in tend on talking that much anyway, but for making reservations and getting in touch with climbing/traveling partners, it will be invaluable. If you would like the number, just send me an email, as I don't want to publish it out here in the open.

Phone in hand, it was time for a break, so I walked back south along George St. to one of the only pubs in the neighborhood, The Three Monkeys. Julie, my bartender was very nice and helped me choose a good NSW brew, the Tooheys New, which is my favourite so far. Some garlic bread and spicy wings and an hour of relaxing later, and it was 5pm and I was ready to go out again until Mike called. Julie helped the cause immensely by agreeing to hold onto my pack in the bar's office for me until I was done with my shopping. Load thus lightened, I set out.

Shopping in Sydney is good. The best part is that the clothes fit me here. In the US, shirts and pants are cut so big, that unless I shop at a fancy store, I'm either swimming in or stretching out most clothes. Australian fashion follows the European style with a much slimmer cut that suits my body a lot better.

So I need a good polo shirt, something that is easy to care for and that I can dress up or down. There's been several candidates so far, but I'm just not convinced yet. Either way, it was fun going from shop to shop, chatting with the clerks and trying on nice clothes. Gerard, the owner of "Urban Myth", was particularly friendly. We chatted a bit about his planned trip to the USA and style trends in Australia. He recommended his friend's shop for a haircut, which I took him up on and wound up with a great cut for AUS$10.

Finally Mike called and I took the train up to Chatswood, a posh suburb 25 minutes ride north of Sydney. We met up at his suite in the hotel, took a quick swim in the hotel pool and met up with Sal, one of Mike's buddies who I've met a few times before back in Cali. The three of us hit the streets of Chatswood looking for a good dinner, but the town was asleep so we took the train back down to Sydney and wound up eating at an Italian place along the Darling Harbor strip. It was a lovely evening, sitting outside, eating and drinking and looking out over the water and hotels. With one more beer in us, we walked over to George St, had a drink at the quiet but boring Cheers pub and caught the last train back to the hotel.

Slept fairly well, got up and I've got heaps to do today. I'm on a mission to get my daypack fixed-- the zipper of the main accessory pocket came undone on Sunday. I've been bounced around this morning, but I've got a good lead for a shop in Sydney proper, so I'll head there after I'm done with here. I also have to call some dive shops up in Cairns. Mike is planning on flying up to Cairns on Friday for a week and I'd like to join him. My only concern is that the weather and box jellyfish (or boxies as I'm calling them) are supposed to be bad this time of year. If I can't dive or swim in the ocean, and it's pouring the whole time, I'm not too psyched about going up there just yet. Still, I could start in Cairns and start working my way down the coast back to Brisy (Brisbane).

Oh, I'm also considering the best way to acquire a car. I think bussing/training it about is going to get old.

If I get some time the afternoon, I'm going to try the 2 hour coast walk from Bondi Beach down to Coongee. Time to jump in the water.

Flying till Tuesday

About to leave for the airport. Next post will be from Oz.

Haiti pics are up and uncaptioned.