My Time in the Land of Captain Cook

There Will Be Tropical Stopovers

The ending of my last blog on Bali did not include the actual conclusion of my trip there, mostly because it seemed appropriate to end the story with a situation that matched my sentiments towards Bali: sickness. But traveling is not just about what happens at your destinations, it is also the journeys between those places.

By Wednesday, my last day in Bali, I was feeling much better and tried to book a day-tour that would have had me visiting monkeys, riding elephants, white water rafting, and taking in a sunset over a Hindu temple. Unfortunately, the tour was full by the time I was well enough to book, so I bought a book and sat by my hotel’s pool all day instead until it was time to fly. At the airport, I will always remember the fun I had searching for the one ATM (placed in a dark corner outside of security that no one seemed to know about, which I supposed was supposed to make the dozens of rip-off “Money Change” booths seem more appealing) to pay the “tourist exit tax” of US$15. I did a pretty elaborate dance as I passed through what I was sure would be the last custom check – I was done with that shitty country!

I was off to Darwin, via a red-eye of sorts that was due to arrive at 3a. On the flight I shared the spacious exit aisle with an Australian couple and we shared our many Bali tales on the way. The Darwin airport is a surprisingly modern setup, with wireless internet and the whole bit. It even had two express entry ports for Australian passport holders, who must provide their full biometrics to obtain the document. I remarked to the other schmucks in the “other passport holders” line that such a system was pretty grown up, and wondered, “If the machine takes a bad reading of your cornea or you have a bad fake thumb print pad, does it shoot you in the chest?” Someone responded that a trap door opens and you just fall through to feed the crocs! So much comedy, so early in the morning. Despite all of these creature comforts, as always, it still sucked to sleep the rest of the night away on the chairs in Arrivals.

I took the airport shuttle in to town, driven by a very chatty British expat who shared his thoughts on Darwin with me. He mentioned that he was looking forward to the business that would be brought by the 3,500 American Marines scheduled to be stationed in Darwin – apparently those already stationed in the city enjoy taking shuttle serviced back and forth from the base to Mitchell Street. He had some funny stories of American getting blackout drunk and making a mess downtown. He also said that he was looking forward to retiring in Noosa, Queensland, which is the best place in Australia so far as he is concerned (I will be missing it on this trip, but have heard others cooperate this). We took the Stuart Highway on the way into town, which was the first glimpse I had of the mighty north-south central highway since I had bid it adieu on my way out of Port August all the way back in January on my cross-country road trip. I arrived at my hostel downtown to find that, of all the planes, trains, buses, hostels, and tours I booked from May to August 13, my room in Darwin was the one thing I had forgotten to do. This meant that I had to stay two nights at a one hostel, and my last night in the YHA. My fault! From there, I tried to find my second wind to start exploring Darwin.

Day One – Lay of the Land

Darwin is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, which joins the Australian Capital Territory and the other six Australian states. Named for the scientist who developed the theory of evolution, Darwin was called Palmerston in its early days when the South Australian government was first attempting to set up a white, British establishment on its northern shores. South Australia, the “Free State,” originally held what today makes up South Australia and Northern Territory, which itself was briefly broken into “Northern” and “Central” territories. South Australia and the British sought to settle the wild, remote “Top End” of Australia in the mid-1800s both to discourage the French from nosing around and to hopefully cultivate what many were sure was a very rich, fertile area of earth. It took a while before the “Palmerston District” of South Australia could stand on its own two feet – as you can imagine, it was difficult back then to encourage white people from the cool climate of the British Isles to migrate thousands of miles to the tropical north. And never mind that it was (and remains today) the area of Australia with the highest density of Aborigines, the theory that crops could be easily grown or gold was waiting for them up there was a hard argument to make.

Even today, the entire Territory only has 200,000 people in it, with the large majority located in Darwin. And they have not by any means had an easy go of it. Modern Darwin is necessarily understood through its trying history: a series of devastating tropical cyclones (the Southern Hemisphere’s equivalent to a hurricane) and the Japanese bombings of WWII have kept Darwin’s carpenters very busy over the city’s 150 years. Easily the worst event occurred on Christmas Eve, 1974, when Cyclone Tracey blew 90% of Darwin’s building stock flat to the ground. The density of brand new, shiny buildings in downtown Darwin, if not the sheer scale of the city’s recovery, is reason enough to be impressed as a visitor.

It was HOT the entire time I was there, and I was informed it was positively moderate in comparison to summertime. Darwin has a tropical climate, with a long wet season interrupted by a dry, cooler season during the winter. My visit fell well within “the dry,” but I sure was glad that Darwinians like their buildings to be heavily air-conditioned. I discovered this at my first stop of the day: the Northern Territory Parliament Building and Library. There I took advantage of 100MB free internet before venturing back out to explore Civic Square, where the Territory’s Supreme Court and Modern Art buildings also are located. Where the current concrete Parliament stands, the former Post Office and civil offices stood before Tracey came through. Many signs throughout the city acknowledge what formerly stood on a certain spot, it is interesting and a bit haunting too. Across from Parliament is Government House, which among a handful of other structures, actually managed to make it through all that has been thrown at it.

Darwin at the time of WWII was still a small town in a very remote part of Australia. Indeed, the population of all of Australia was a third of what it is today (less than seven million people), and Darwin was just a small port town in the “Top End” that was most significant for being where the international telegraph cable came up from the ocean onto Australian territory. Some military and naval forced were transferred there when it became clear Japan was a rising aggressor, but the British were already stretched pretty thin and this left Australia ridiculously vulnerable. And attack they did; in 1942 Japan began to bomb Darwin. To keep national morale high (and avoid a panic over Australia’s suddenly desperate situation), news outlets were censored to keep the severity of the bombings from reaching people in the south. Royal Australian Air Force resources were relocated inland from Darwin, and the navy, or what was left of it, retrenched as well. The national government thought it would be a good idea to commence a massive civil works project to move Darwin’s strategic oil reserves underground into tanks below the city, which mainly sits on a bluff about 20 meters above sea level.

Tunnels and tanks large enough to hold five million liters of oil were eventually dug below the city of Darwin, at a tremendous cost to the federal government – a few people even died in the construction. In the end, the tunnels were not finished in time for use during the war itself and were never used (except one time they tried storing jet fuel in them after the war and found the walls to be too leaky to avoid contamination by water, whoops!). Today, you are allowed to walk through the tunnels and tanks for the cost of just $5, so of course I did! An old lady gave us a quick verbal history of the engineering feat before we headed in to, what I considered, to be a hugely dangerous environment. It was really cool, but seriously people probably shouldn’t have been allowed in there. Take a look at some of the photos, all that rust!

Just across the road from this hidden attraction is the sparkling new Darwin Waterfront Precinct that combines offices, residential, retail, and entertainment in one large complex connected to both the port and the city above by a clever pedestrian bridge. I had a little lunch by the wave pool before I bothered an old lady to take my picture on a statue of a duck (I have a history of doing this – of taking photos on ducks, not bothering old ladies).

Apparently it still rains during the dry season, as a flash storm began shortly after that. I took refuge and then carried on back up to the town to see the British Australian Telegraph building, where wireless magic between Australia and Java occurred for several decades. It was an old stone building that looked totally out of place among the other modern apartment towers that now line the Esplanade (which is not really that accurate of a name, as there is a large cliff between it and the inaccessible waterfront).

I walked the length of Centennial Park, which runs along side the Esplanade. This is where the essentials of any Australian city were kept, including war memorials, city playgrounds, homeless people, and drunken Aborigines, etc. By this point, I was thoroughly out of energy, and I just walked back to my hostel. Darwin left a good first impression on me – it seemed clean, safe, and interesting. I was eager to see more the next day.

Day Two – A Taste of Culture

I returned first thing to the Territory Library the following day to once again take advantage of my serving of internet (geez mate, kinda strict with the 100MB limit). But I was mainly there to sit in on what was just one of dozens of events going on throughout the city as part of an annual writer’s festival. I am not quite sure who he was or what he wrote (the person who introduced him did that stupid thing when a speaker basically puts the microphone in their mouth, and can not be heard at all), but he had a lot of interesting things to say about Darwin and Northern Territory that I hadn’t ever thought about before. He was born and raised in Tasmania, and moved to Northern Queensland to take a professor position at a college there a few decades ago. He pointed out that Darwin, unlike towns in Northern Queensland or Northern Western Australia, is not provincially dependent on a capital in the south. It is a northern capital of its own area of Australia, and therefore acts as both a unique center for Australian activity and a gateway to the Asian countries (Darwin is actually closer to Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, than Canberra). He pointed out that population turnover in Northern Territory is very high – 30 percent of people who arrive leave for another part of Australia within five years – and therefore, there is a constantly churning society that is unlike the entrenched European-like cities of the south. The large number of aboriginals, who together actually have land rights to 40 percent of the Territory, also have a significant impact on life within Darwin and its surrounds. All very interesting to think about, as Darwin will be my only, brief, stop here in NT while I have spent so much time in the west and southeast powerhouses.

For the rest of the afternoon I walked back past my hostel to shed the weight of my laptop and continue on to see a different part of the city. The oldest part of Darwin lies within the gridded streets downtown, but the area just to the north of the city center is nearly as old and in fact contains several attractions of interest to a visitor. Cullen Bay is an old port that was destroyed by Tracey, but has been completely reimagined with cyclone-resistant apartment towers and a modern marina that has a lock to keep its boats safe from Darwin’s dramatic tide fluctuations (sometimes over eight meters within one cycle). It was a hot walk down and back up from there in the midday sun. I walked back into the city via Smith Street, which at its northern most end is public housing-central. With so many examples of attractive modern architecture around, it was kind of shocking to see such a large cluster of dilapidated concrete bunkers for the poor people of Darwin. My only explanation was that the government was probably the first one to start rebuilding after Tracey, and today’s poor are getting the then-fortunate’s hand-me-downs.

Smith Street has always been the center of commercial activity in Darwin, and today a large section of it has been sanctioned off as a pedestrian mall (as is so common across Australia). Virtually no buildings lining Smith Street today are older than 37 years, with the two exceptions being the old Victoria Hotel and the Star Theatre. Both have been heavily rehabilitated since the storm and aren’t that true to their originals, but are still interesting insights into days gone by. The Star in particular, parts of which have been incorporated into a small alley for shops, was preserved very well. The theater, with its covered seats and exposed outdoor screen, was once the premier venue in Darwin on Friday and Saturday nights. Today you can see the balcony and pillars of the old building that was ravaged by the cyclone. A really cool photo from an audience attending the first “talkie” to arrive in Darwin shows one guy who hung his hat on the rifle he propped up on the seat next to his, as well as several audience members covering their faces because they still thought seeing the screen would “allow their soul to escape.”

After this, I visited Darwin’s old Town Hall, or what’s left of it. It was used for a variety of things over its century of service, including housing naval operations during WWII (it is quite close to Darwin’s port). Across the street, the façade that Tracey left behind from old Darwin Christchurch is incorporated into a new modern church. And lastly, I visited the extremely aged “Tree of Knowledge.” Even from its earliest days, Darwin has always had a significant Asian population and before the WWII bombings, the area around the tree was the site of a large “Chinatown” district. No more; instead today a large civic library is built ridiculously close to the tree.

With the educational part of my day behind me, and it being Friday, I walked briskly down to the Stole Hill Wharf. Containing a bunch of takeaway food shops (fully sanitary, I am confident, after Bali), the Wharf is built out on a long jetty, which is built, in my opinion, precariously far out into the harbor – the city has a history of losing fights with category 5 cyclones right? There, I enjoyed some chicken curry (I intended to get it to go, but I guess he misheard me) while looking over the harbor and the sun setting over Darwin. Then, I hurried back past the Waterfront Precinct to a long-standing Darwin institution: the Deckchair Cinema.

With the sun fully down by now, I joined an audience in watching an outdoor double-feature. The first movie was called “Toomelah,” a thought-provoking and (hopefully) purposefully shocking film that was set on an Aboriginal reservation in northern NSW. The main character was a school-aged boy whose parents were both abusing substances, and an uncle who was a drug dealer. It really clarified a lot of my thoughts about Aboriginals here in Australia. The second movie was hands-down the worst I have ever seen: “Meloncholia” starred Kirsten Dunst and Kiefer Sutherland. Wow, what an awful awful piece of film. I thought I would feel awkward at the movies alone, but luckily I had a couple of possums join me throughout the night, and they kept my mind off of the crushing loneliness.

Day Three – A Day at the Museum

I had intended to take the free tour of the Parliament Building early Saturday morning, but to be completely honest I forgot. I feel really back, as I had taken a tour of every other Australian capital’s Parliament and now I won’t able to complete the set. This oversight meant that after relocating to the YHA, my first stop of the day was a residential home to the north of the CBD. One of four homes on this plot of land that wasn’t destroyed by Tracey, the building was designed by an architect who tried to make tropical living as hospitable as possible through his housing designs. He used glass and wooden louvres all throughout the elevated houses to promote cross-ventilation before electric fans were widely available in the 1930s. I have to say, it was pretty cool in there. The house is part of the Historic Buildings Trust and is well taken care of through funds raised by a weekly tea held at the house on Sundays.

It was there that I learned that once a few examples of this type of well-ventilated home were built, it became the industry standard for construction in Darwin. By the 1970s, tens of thousands of elevated homes with slatted walls were built and occupied all throughout the city and its new suburbs. In hindsight, putting ventilation and comfort above structural rigidity was probably a bad idea – Tracey tossed these flimsy tropical homes around with ease, leaving nothing but concrete pads and sheets of corrugated iron scattered in her wake. I read an article at the home in which the author lamented the modern housing stock that was being put up all over Darwin. He pointed out that Darwin now looked like any other city in Australia, and relied heavily on electricity-hungry air conditioners, whereas the old Darwin homes gave the city a distinctive character. Good point, but…

After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon in Northern Territory’s Museum and Art Center. There, the highlights were a full exhibit on Cyclone Tracey, which included many photos and a sound studio where you could hear an audio recording taken by a Darwin resident from the night the storm passed through. It was really, really loud. In particular, two photos really brought home the sheer strength of this storm; one was (not pictured) of sheets of corrugated iron that had been ripped off of roofs and crashed into trees or telephone poles, only to be bent into a “U” shape with the force of the winds. The other was an iron telephone pole (which are popular in Outback Australia, as termites eat wooden ones too quickly) that had been twisted and bent around in the the wind like a cork screw – any storm that can do that to an iron telephone pole is one to flee from! The exhibit stated that Darwin had 50,000 residents on December 24, 1974. By New Years Eve that total had fallen to 14,000, after 26,000 people were airlifted to safety and another 10,000 got in their cars and drove away.

There was a large collection of Aboriginal art, as well as a collection of taxidermed animals and insects indigenous to NT – none of which I would like to meet outside of their glass cases. There was even a huge, stuffed crocodile named “Sweethart” who had been collected from a local river…it was more than two yards long! It really gave scale to the fact that the longest croc on record is more than seven yards long. In the basement there was a collection of boats, many of which floated up on Australia’s shores full of refugees. And the final gallery I found interesting contained entries from local high school students to a Territory-wide art contest – some of the students were really creative and talented!

Across the street was Darwin’s Botanical Gardens, which I have to say paled in comparison to the gardens of other Australian capitals. I decided to finish Darwin on a high note, and returned to Stole Hill Wharf for a kangaroo burger dinner and another enjoyable transition from day to night.

My time in Darwin was far too short, and after all of the changes to my plans as a result of Bali and taking that last job with SRS, became more of a stopover on the way back to the east coast. Originally I had intended to spend a full week in the Top End, seeing the sights mentioned in Darwin before heading out to see two of Australia’s most arresting national parks: Kakadu and Litchfield. These join a trip to the Kimberly and York Peninsula on the growing itinerary for my next trip to Australia.

There Will Be Bali Hai’s

Hot. Humid. Filthy.

All the way back when I was on the farm, my friend Alister Campbell planted the seed of an idea for going to Bali, Indonesia. Bali, he said, would be a way to save money (as Indonesia is so cheap compared to Australia) and an interesting side trip during my journey. Indeed, I discovered that taking an excursion over to Bali from Australia was a popular thing for backpackers to do. In fact, it is also common for Ausssies of all ages to pop over to Bali for holidays, bachelorette weekends, and school vacation. Or, simply because they worked out the Australia beer price – plane ticket cost equilibrium.

Three ways people described Bali before I booked my trip there: cheap, fun, great beaches.

Since it is so easy and inexpensive to skip over to Bali from both Perth and Darwin in Australia, I planned myself a trip to go up the west coast of Australia to see Coral Bay, Broome, and the Kimberley Region, before making it to Darwin for a stop there and an excursion to Bali. Unfortunately, time and money constraints later forced me to narrow my trip to just do Darwin and Bali. I booked my flights and got excited for visiting Indonesia! Somewhere in between all that, however, I exclusively met a series of Bali-naysayers who enthusiastically disliked the previously-described island paradise.

Three ways people described Bali after I booked my trip there: full of drunken Australians, tons of obnoxious street hawkers, not worth it.

Now that I am here in Bali, I have chosen three adjectives of my own for describing Bali (see line one) and would like to throw my hat in with the naysayer lot.

Day One – The Odyssey

Like salt in an already-painful paper cut, the sheer effort it took to get there made Bali’s lackluster appeal as a destination all the more irritating. As I mentioned, my intention to already be in Darwin meant that I booked a return trip out of that city’s airport. However, when I finally worked out that I would not make it there and instead would be departing from Kalgoorlie (1000s of kilometers south of Darwin), I had to find a cheap way to get to my international flight. I wound up being in transit for just shy of 24 hours, altogether utilizing three airlines and five airports. Amazingly everything, including the van from my hotel in Bali itself, went perfectly (which probably means I should apologize if you have had a relative die at the end of April).

By the time I reached Bali, I was pretty much in the mood for two things: a shower and a large pan pizza from Pizza Hut. No so fast. I had to go through Indonesia’s Denpasar Airport, which I heard was as crooked as the tower of Pisa. The first thing you must do is purchase an entry visa, which, similar to Turkey, is basically a tax on visitors that is low enough to deter positively no one from coming but high enough to collect an obscene amount of revenue from each year. The visa booths only accepted US Dollars in cash or Mastercard for all other currencies. I was clever and purchased some US Dollars in Darwin for this purpose – there is nothing lamer than buying US Dollars at an inflated cost with a US Passport in your pocket. Once you have your visa, you must pass through customs to have it authorized and your passport stamped. My helpful customs official began humming “Hail the Chief” upon seeing my passport and quizzed me on some of the questions about America that came immediately to his mind, including “Would you ever go to a soccer game as an American?”

With that behind you, I read that you must make a solid effort to collect your baggage from the carousel before an informal “porter” (apparently it’s cool for people to wander into the international terminal and do this) takes your bag and refuses to return it to you without a tip. I found my bag to have already been removed, but left among other bags in a pile on the floor…OK whatever. Lastly, you must have your bag X-rayed for declaring a list of items that customs have determined aren’t allowed into Indonesia – they are primarily looking for drugs, and a sign stated that if they found any substances that it would be grounds for the death penalty. Yikes, glad I accidently left all the meth back in Kalgoorlie.

Outside, despite it being a few hours after sunset, it was still impossibly hot and humid. My driver was standing outside with my name on a sign, like in the movies! He, however, did not speak English very well and the entertainment on the ride to my hotel was provided by the exciting views of a new country outside the windows and, of course, narrowly escaping a horrific car crash at least 25 times over the 5km drive. A lack of people familiar with English (like, more so than in any other country I have been to before – including Australia HAHA) and senseless driving patterns are very commonplace here in Bali, as I learned in the days that followed.

I had booked my first two evenings in Bali before arriving, so that I would be sure to have a place to stay before finding a cheaper room (of the type that usually cannot be booked online prior). Suji Bungalows was a simple hotel typical of Kuta, the heavily-touristed area of southern Bali. I had booked a room with a fan and hot water at a price of US$28 per night. The muggy weather was so gross that hot water wasn’t actually necessary, which was positively lucky as there was no hot water in the hot water-included room! This was forgone for a showing of Bruce Willis’ “Armageddon” on a 14” TV receiving a sputtering signal.

By the time I had myself all sorted out it was at least 10p, but I was still on the hunt for my Pizza Hut. Bali has been a destination for white Westerners since the 1970s and a large number of US and European ideas have infested the island in turn; Pizza Hut, Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Burger King (not Hungary Jacks!), Ralph Lauren, Rip Curl, Nike, Paul Smith, Coldstone, Circle K Convenience Stores, and even DUNKIN DONUTS are among that come to mind right away. My hotel was in between Poppies I and Poppies II, two streets that have become ground zero for tourists with heaps of cheap accommodation, restaurants, and souvenir stalls. Besides two or three main roads and these two Poppies Lanes, the rest of the roads in Kuta and Seminyak to the north are a complete jumble that no cartographer seems to have mastered on paper. I was on the prowl through these tiny winding streets and alleys for the better part of an hour before stumbling on the correct road for Pizza Hut. I also picked up some bottled water (as the tap water in Bali is not drinkable) to return to Bruce Willis, who quickly put me to sleep.

Day Two – Around Kuta and Seminyak

I read a large amount of material on the island of Bali and Indonesia before even leaving Australia so as to be well prepared before stepping off the plane in a very exotic destination. I learned that Bali’s population is predominantly Hindu, whereas the rest of Indonesia is Islamic. I also pinned down that 1945 concluded more than three centuries of Dutch colonial control over the country. With that recent of an exit, I kind of thought Indonesia would be further along in its slide towards industrialized modernity. All together, Indonesia is the forth-most populated country and geographically borders Malaysia and impoverished Papua New Guinea.

And from that due-diligence, one of the facts that rang in my ears as I explored the area immediately surrounding my hotel on day two was that Bali is the wealthiest of Indonesia’s islands. This seemed accurate as I sat in one of Kuta’s many well-air conditioned Starbucks, but certainly made less sense as I walked past homes made entirely of plywood sitting on dusty trash-filled dirt lots. At the national level, Indonesia’s average yearly income is somewhere around US$3,000, or lower than even China.

To supplant the limited number of gas stations available, I discovered that petrol is widely sold by the liter (oddly, it is usually stored and displayed in Absolut Vodka bottles) outside the independently run convenience-type stores that are ubiquitous here. The first photo I took that day perfectly illustrates not just the state of modern Bali, but also how I personally related to the very foreign surroundings. To Balinese, a rack of vodka bottles full of gas roasting in the sun is an everyday sight – to me, this was a fascination. Some videos and more photos below will go a lot further towards understanding what Bali is like than I could communicate in writing.

The weather in Bali is such that anything faster than a saunter’s pace of walking will cause profuse sweating. I would be interested to apply my Dad’s theory on hot and cold temperatures (You can always put more clothing on if you’re cold, but there comes a point you are naked and still really hot) on the reason countries closer to the Equator tend to be poorer and less productive while those further away tend to be more industrious and advanced. Even so, I did a fair amount of walking around and saw lots of Kuta, which unbelievably used to be a small fishing village, and Seminyak.

In covering a lot of ground, I determined that Bali is really smelly. Garbage, sewage, and a burning leaves smell are nearly everywhere, with the latter particularly prevalent. A custom for Hindus in Bali is to weave palm fronds into small dishes, fill them with four types of flower pedals, place a lit stick of incense on top, and place them on the ground outside their home or business. That this tradition has persisted despite the trampling feet of millions of careless Western tourists is really cool, but the smell that comes once the incense gets to the flower pedals and roasts them is omnipresent and quite unpleasant. Burning piles of trash join these every once in a while too.

At a certain point in the afternoon I had reached my threshold of tolerance for the sights and smells of Kuta and became weary of replying “no, thanks” to Balinese people on the streets – everyone and their mothers here are trying to eek out a living by selling souvenirs, massages, trinkets, and transportation to tourists. In fact, I have never seen a place so wholly dependent on tourism and devoid of any local business. A place like that is not one to be walking around in too long, so I decided to try out a walk on Kuta Beach, which is world famous for ideal surfing conditions and volcanic black sand. After elbowing my way through the line of people aggressively try to rent out surf boards and other gear at the entrance, I found the beach to stretch for as far as I could see in either direction.

Walking along it for a few hundred meters, unfortunately, I also found it also to be very dirty. There were several spots where it seemed from all outward appearances that sewage was running across the beach and directly into the water, which in some places had a yellowish color to it and bubbles floating on the surface that weren’t popping (in all cases, a bad sign). It also seemed like a large ship carrying nearly empty toothpaste tubes had recently sunk just off the coast, as the beach was littered with an abnormal number of them (abnormal number in my opinion being more than one, and there were dozens visible…). What a shame, as it could have been a very nice tropical paradise. The worst part was that people were still swimming, I couldn’t watch for too long without feeling sick.

The beach’s saving grace was that it had a supreme western view of the sunset that evening, which was really quite beautiful – this was one of only two nights I saw a decent sunset while in Bali, the rest of the evenings were too cloudy. With most of my pizza left from the night before, I went back to my hotel to have dinner and polish up my Kalgoorlie blog post on the surprisingly fast wifi connection there. This evening’s movie: the latest and most painful of “The Mummy” series.

Day Three – Depasar

The next morning I once again had the included breakfast at my hotel, which I supplemented with an omlette that only cost US$1.50, before clearing out my room and moving down the street to a new hotel that was cheaper (but, as it turned out, had far crappier internet). This place was smaller and didn’t have that “bungalow” look that so many Bali hotels strive to achieve, but it seemed OK. Later I discovered that it had far crappier internet, and on Saturday night the entire hotel lost power for the night. I am not sure whose fault this was, the town of Kuta or the Kubu Hotel, but I definitely showered by candle without a smile on my face.

What happened next, I can’t quite say. One of the hotel employees asked me what I was doing that day, and I told him that I had planned to go to Denpasar, which is Bali’s regional capital. He told me he could give me a ride to town on his motorbike for US$10 round-trip. This seemed like a more than reasonable price so I dropped my bag off in the hotel’s luggage hold and hopped on. I must not have really thought this through all the way, because I suddenly found myself on the back of a motorbike rushing through the tiny laneways of Kuta, narrowly missing collisions with tourists, oncoming cars, and racks of bottled gas.

The small backstreets gave way to larger roads and eventually a four-lane highway that took us all the way to Denpasar. These roads were far scarier, as there was an incredible amount of vehicles and motorbikes, and positively no observation of traffic laws. Even in a five-star crash-rated car, I would have been extremely scared! I have come to realize that traffic and roads are a huge problem here in Indonesia. With almost no public or mass transportation, the country’s ancient roads are completely overwhelmed by the number of cars and motorbikes that the past decade’s income rise has allowed many people to suddenly afford. The fact that the national government offers a 40 percent subsidy on gasoline (a gallon of gas costs about US$2.50 here, and people are outraged at how expensive it has gotten) does nothing to encourage transport efficiency, and in fact has made APVs, SUVs, and other large vehicles very popular.

Far worse, however, is how the increasing number of drivers use their vehicles. Whereas we complain about bad drivers in the US, what we are really saying is that people are being rude by not following the rules and customs that we all learn about before obtaining a license. Here, rules and customs seem to either not exist, period, or are completely un-enforceable and therefore not at all understood by the majority of drivers. Whichever the case, the typical street in Bali is a situation of total chaos, in which people will do anything they can to advance their journey. Motorbikes jumping the curb and driving on the sidewalk is not uncommon. Nor is it unusual for a group of drivers to temporarily turn a two-lane road into a four-lane one for many miles of driving. There are very few traffic lights, but they seem to mean little to drivers, especially those on motorbikes.

As nerve-racking as the wild west mentality is for drivers, it is even worse for pedestrians. You take your life into your own hands in crossing the street, as there are no crosswalks or traffic lights to provide an interruption in the flow of traffic to cross within. Walking on the sidewalk, when there is a sidewalk, does not guarantee you safety (Mom, this is the first place I have been in my entire life where you cannot rely on this ultimate guarantee. You may officially remind me to watch out for cars and motorbikes on the sidewalk HERE, but nowhere else). And perhaps the most interesting thing is that Balinese people do not get mad or offended when they must get out of the way of a fellow Balinese driver using the sidewalk to expedite their motorbike journey. Can you imagine, excluding the police in NYC, how people would react in the US to a person jumping the curb and driving down the sidewalk just because they were tired of waiting in traffic?

I made it to Denpasar unscathed, somehow, only to be greeted by a reoccurring problem for me here in Bali. There are no unbiased tourist bureaus (“tourist information centers” are just sales offices for shuttle buses and tours) or publicly displayed maps. I had a list of places I wished to see and visit, but absolutely no idea where any of them were. My friend from the hotel, who likely did not have my best interests in mind, took me first to the large central market in town called Pasar Badung. Housed in two multi-story buildings on opposite sides of a river than ran through the center of town, Pasar Badung was very intimidating as it was not like the large, open markets I had seen before in places like Melbourne and Italy. These buildings were like dark grungy mazes, with no obvious exits once inside. Also, there was no other obvious people that shared my language or skin hue. This was really cool, because it meant that real Balinese people shop there to buy things such as food, textiles, and just about anything else you can imagine.

But it also meant that I was a walking target for aggressive sales pitches. Like in Morocco, for some reason people interpret “no thanks” as “no, that is too expensive, but offer it to me at a lower price because I am definitely still interested in buying a raw chicken.” I again found myself thinking of how different this place is from home as I was talked into buying a packet of Saffron for the equivalent price as one night’s stay at my hotel. I don’t think my driver understood why I laughed extremely hard when he asked what Saffron was; I clearly expressed my interest in buying a packet of spice that was typically used for cooking in Bali, and his unfamiliarity with Saffron meant that he and the spice saleslady were just interested, like most Balinese, in getting money out of a tourist.

After that, I told him to leave and come get me at an agreed upon spot in six hours, or I would find my own way home because I wasn’t about to be dragged around town to spend money on things I didn’t want. He agreed to return, which I appreciated, but my next stop, the town’s largest Hindu Temple, didn’t go much better than the markets. I had read before coming that it was common when visiting temples that, like when visiting churches, that a small donation was expected. After a marginally interesting tour around the temple, which disappointingly was built just over 50 years ago (Notre Dame has Body of Christ wafers older than that), I was bluntly asked to purchase some “hand drawn” Balinese calendars. This back and forth I never requested almost came to blows between the guide and me – my stubbornness did manage to cut the price from US$70 to US$10 before I simply stopped talking until he gave up. By far the best part of the tour was the conclusion, in which he directly asked to be tipped (“people usually give me US$20, US$10…). I told him after spending way too much on spices I did not want earlier in the day, I was left with just US$1.20 in local currency. He told me to put the equivalent of 20 cents in the aforementioned donation box, while he took the equivalent of one dollar for himself. Now, the ridiculousness of wrangling over US$1.20 was not lost on me, it was far too hot out to be going through those paces. But I did find it shocking that he would take the larger amount for himself – Hindu gods, I hope you are taking notes!

My next stop was the town’s largest art gallery, which filled just two rooms of a building and located 5km away from the city’s center. Totally bogus. I stopped on the way back into town for a haircut – why not? For just US$2.50, it may be the second best haircut I have ever received (behind only the one I got from Dino, the old guy in Florence). The barbershop was remarkably similar to any you would visit in the US, with one exception. This place had mirrors in the front and one behind mounted on the wall at an angle, so that you can see exactly what is happening on the backside of your head – genius! The day peaked when I finally found an ATM that would allow me to withdraw cash from my Australian bank account to purchase a bottle of water with…so thirsty! It was in a convenience store and I did a pretty embarrassing full-body hurrah move when I heard that sound ATMs make when they are going to dispense bills. The story of a dancing, water-chugging American impressed with a working ATM was definitely shared that night at the dinner tables of the two clerks working there.

My cash also allowed me to purchase lunch. I had read that “Bakso,” a type of soup with meatballs and noodles, was supposed to be quite good and easy to find here in Bali. I found a food cart selling them on the way back into town from the art museum and was glad because I was really hungry by that time. I guess I didn’t really anticipate this problem, but my takeaway Bakso was served to me in a baggie, with no fork or spoon. The only way I could practically see consuming my tasty Balinese soup was to slurp it out of the bag. I was sure to find a private spot before I essentially made out with my bag of soup. I later discovered that bags substitute for a a few types of containers here in Bali, including juice boxes.

I spent the rest of my day back at the markets, taking some really cool pictures and doing my best to avoid eye contact. A full-scale open-air market had sprung up since I had last been there, and this one was dominated by fresh food. The one item I did buy was a bar of anti-bacterial shower soap, a product that cannot be found at all back in Australia. While I waited for my ride to return, I sat on the edge of the only urban park I ever saw in Bali watching the people in their natural environment. There were people jogging and doing undignified calisthenics, a brass quartet practicing (I hope they were just practicing, and perhaps picked up their instruments just that afternoon, because they were awful), a couple of games of soccer happening in a very small area so that at times they were all playing the same game, a playground off in the distance totally full of kids, people flying kites (they love kites here), and a kid learning to tend a soccer goal (unfortunately, the ball his friends were kicking at him went sailing past his head and into the brass quartet more often than not, but his poor goal-tending skills still do not excuse their unabashedly talentless public performance).

The harrowing ride back to Kuta left me in the mood to lie in bed with a cold bottle of water, but somehow I made it out to get some semi-authentic Balinese food that evening. It was osteria-like in that it only had a few options to choose from, and food was on display out front in a way that seems to indicate authenticity here in Bali (stacked plates).

Day Four – See Day Two

I did pretty much the exact same things Thursday as I did Tuesday, not because I enjoyed them so much the first time but because I didn’t have anything else to do. Without public transportation, seeing things around the island of Bali requires the services of private tour operators and, having spent the day before in Denpasar away from the internet, I did not have time to coordinate something for the day. At night I did get the chance to try a new restaurant, which had the best peanut satay sauce I have ever had before!

I also took a short walk after dark on Legion Street, which contains a long strip of nightclubs and bars aimed squarely at Westerners. Going to Bali to surf and drink, and maybe do “magic mushrooms,” is the plan of so many Western tourists that practically the entire town of Kuta is oriented towards those activities. Legion Street didn’t seem as fun as I had heard it would be, but it certainly was a wild scene of lawlessness and disorder. On Saturday, I returned to visit the “Ground Zero” monument, which sits on the corner where the nightclub that Al Qaeda terrorists blew up in 2002 used to stand. Ten years on, it is weird to see so much careless debauchery occurring on a nightly basis all around the site, as if it never happened. The only evidence that a lesson was learned is a 10x10 pop-up tent across the street from the monument, where police occasionally perform random checks on people with bags.

Day Five – Monkeying Around in Ubud

Bali is an island of villages, the vast majority of which remain untouched by tourism. The village is central to Balinese culture, with each one required by ancient law to have at least three public Hindu temples (in addition to the traditional family/home temples). Nowadays, it also seems common for villages to have their own school, a number of those hodgepodge convenience stores, and maybe even a small roadside place to eat. The village will be surrounded by agriculture activities, how most Balinese make their livings, with wet rice farming seeming to be the most popular. And in the village, at least a few citizens produce crafts and art for sale.

MOVIE – Driving on the way to Besakih

One particular village in Bali, Ubud, has a longstanding tradition of producing such crafts and art (like Hindu statues, baskets, or tin decorations). As a consequence, Ubud has become a magnet for wealthy tourists attempting to locate “that perfect Hindu demon statue for the front yard.” Also, to the south of Ubud lies “Monkey Forest” where you can pay to walk through a grove of trees that small monkeys live in (so many people do this now that the monkeys are completely unafraid of humans and can actually be quite dangerous). At one point, when I came out of Bali’s only free public bathroom, a monkey jumped off the roof in front of my face; luckily I had nothing left to scare out of me. To the north are some aesthetically pleasing wet rice paddy farms (you can arrange to have a farm stay at one of these, but why would you want to?).

To get to Ubud I purchased a ride on one of the hundreds of “tourist shuttles,” which are just old eight-person passenger vans that they cram nine people into per journey. The driver picked up people from four separate locations throughout Kuta before we started off for Ubud, and he actually managed to get the van to the front step of each hotel. This was no small accomplishment, the backstreets of Kuta are TINY and he often had to maneuver the van around anther parked or oncoming vehicle, while also dodging pedestrians and motorbikes. I am still not sure how he physically did it; it was a pretty big van.

Anyways, Ubud was kind of boring. People shouting from their storefront to get you to buy stuff was mercifully less common, and some of the crafts I saw for sale were actually quite nice (not that I had room in my bag!). Indicating the extent tourism had replaced the town’s traditional culture, there was a Starbucks overlooking the water garden of one of Ubud’s central temples. This seemed pretty sacrilege, but I still ordered a venti and enjoyed looking out over the admittedly-beautiful scene.

From there, I took a tip from the guide books I read before arriving and walked up one of the town’s streets heading north to see some rice paddies. This was probably the highlight of the day, as it was something I had never really seen before. Along the way up to the farms, the street was lined with cement blocks that visitors had written on before the material had dried. It was really cool to see all of the messages they had left, from as far back as the 1970s to as recent as 2010. The rice paddy farms were beautiful and completely peaceful in comparison to the crowded streets in town. Something I became aware of at this point was the number of Asian tourists there were in Ubud. I met several along the way to the rice farms and then back in town there were many tour buses full as well. I pondered whether it was more bizarre for me or them to consider Bali a vacation destination; I flew more miles and this was really exotic, but aren’t there rice paddys and spicy noodles in most of Asia? Why fly all the way to Bali when you can look out your back window, or whole in the wall, as the case may be?

The last thing in town I wanted to see was a suspension bridge installed by the Dutch a couple hundred years ago, and that was kind of cool. Before I had to get back to the bus, I wandered off the town’s main streets to have lunch at a tiny food stall – I keep wanting to call them cafes, but really that would be inaccurate. Eating alone is always awkward in small places where you stick out for being from somewhere else; here, the owner wanted to chat with me as I ate but didn’t seem to know enough English to understand the responses to his questions. I really felt bad and tried to use as many hand gestures as I could, but we just weren’t making it happen.

Back in Kuta that night, I discovered that I had forgot to buy a European-style plug converter (which they use here, presumably a legacy of the Dutch) before leaving the US. Though deep down I knew better, I saw that one of the stalls on Poppies I had a bunch of converters on display. I did that thing where you slow your pace (but not stop or make eye contact for fear of engaging in a conversation that will inevitably end with you buying a “Nuts for Butts” sticker, or whatever) to simply affirm the merchandise is in fact what you want, and not just, say, the shopkeeper’s lunch leftovers or a giant tropical fly. I visually confirmed that it was a plug adaptor, but I had taken too long and the stall’s owner was all over me like an untrained dog when you walk into someone’s house. He informed me that the one I wanted was going to cost me US$20. I attempted to logically walk him through how the same adaptor would cost me, at most, US$3 back home, and that for me to purchase it for more than the cost of one night at my single-occupancy hotel room was lunacy. I offered to pay him the equivalent of US$3, and he told me he could sell it to me for US$15 instead. Big mistake.

What happened next is undoubtedly my favorite memory from Bali. I told this financially-motivated entrepreneur to please excuse me for three minutes, as I wanted to withdraw some cash from the ATM down the road. I then busied myself with visiting three or four of the commercial convenience stores along the same Poppie I tourist strip (Circle Ks and the like) to see if they sold simple plug-pin adaptors (plastic, some copper, probably cost all of 30 US cents to mass produce and ship). When I found one available for sale with a price of US$1 clearly marked on it at Circle K, whew, that was a nice moment. I asked the clerk there to print me out a receipt and on my way back to the hotel, I popped back to see my friend on Poppies I. “This is for you,” I said, as I handed the receipt to him and walked away singing along with some rap song from the US that was playing loudly in a restaurant across the street. BLAMO.

I planned to stay close to the hotel that night after the long day I had, but that big win gave me the energy to track down another off-the-beaten path restaurant for dinner. I stumbled on another one of those food stall-type places with a few people already dining (in the hopes I could just eat alone in peace, after lunch that day). I placed an order for pepper-beef and rice (which is definitely not what I received, but what I did was quite good) in English, and this gave the father and son sitting behind me the tip off. These two engaged me in a conversation about Bali, as they too were from somewhere else (Hong Kong). They were related to the owner of the food stall, who was also in Bali from Hong Kong, and the owner’s nephew, who was an 18-year old from Indonesia’s Java Island. We all wound up having a really lengthy chat over what it was like to live and work in a foreign country, which was really interesting. The owner moved to Bali from Hong Kong to start his restaurant because there was too much competition back at home, while the father was here on assignment from a Japanese firm to help export exotic oils and spices for cosmetics. Both kids were trying to master English and one hoped to find an Aussie girlfriend to marry and move with back to Australia. Even though it wasn’t what I hoped, I was glad to have met and talked with some more-permanent residents of Bali.

Day Six – A Tale of Two Temples

For those visiting Bali and not wishing to spend their entire trip in “The Engine Room” doing shots of arak, you must leave Kuta and head north. I had read before arriving that a visit to the Besakih “Mother Temple” was well worth doing, so I attempted to join a guided tour of Bali’s most sacred Hindu spot on Saturday. Apparently there were no other people interested in that tour, so I discovered that actually hiring a car and driver would be cheaper than paying a 50 percent single-travellers markup on the tour itself. Saturday morning, my very own three-row APV pulled up with a driver in front of my hotel, impressing precisely no one even though I was sure it would, and we were off.

The thing about hiring a car and driver as a single traveller is that it is really awkward, the entire time. I did get the sense, however, that he was kind of on my side when it came to protecting me from being taken advantage of around Bali. Our first official stop was the Besakih Temple itself, so we could avoid the crowds of tourists and worshippers later in the day. It just so happened to be the day of the full moon, which meant that nearly every person in Bali would shuffle through the temple at some point in the next 24 hours.

You must wear the proper clothing when visiting Hindu temples, and so I rented a sarong from a lady selling and renting tablecloth-like skirts in the parking lot. Of course I was pressured to buy one because her sarongs were “good quality” but I declined; as those who know me are aware, I already have far too many sarongs.

All bundled up, we then walked over to the entrance of the temple where I was to pay the site entry and parking fees, and hire a tour guide. I had read before that hiring a tour guide is the best way to maximize your immersion in the holy Hindu site, but that the cartel that controls visitors' access to the temple grounds may strong arm you into paying several times the normal rate. For this reason, when I was told that a guide was available at the "special rate" of US$70 (roughly seven times the rate my driver had told me in the car on the way up) I was happy to drag my driver over to explain what he had previously told me. Suddenly a US$10 rate was acceptable.

I was assigned a guy named Phuir (probably spelled wrong) who took me around and utilized the entirety of his English skills to speak with me about the temple, the importance of Hinduism in Bali, and even some non-temple related subjects such as Indonesian politics and economics. It was a terrific two-hour experience that was undoubtedly the closest I came to getting to know a real Balinese person.

He informed me the temple was originally just a shrine to honor the man from India who traveled to Indonesia in the Seventh Century and founded Hinduism. The temple is built into the side of one of Bali's active volcanoes, and the fact that it has survived with little-to-no damage for centuries of eruptions is a fact of great significance to the Balinese. The temple is more accurately described as a complex, housing three public temples of worship that anyone in Bali may use to pray and 44 additional temples that are divided among Bali's 12 family clans. These family clan temples are used and maintained only by members of there respective clan. Family clans, my guide described, are akin to the castes that divide India's society, though here in Bali they are less like vertical classes and more symbolic.

As I previously mentioned, my visit to Besakih coincided with the monthly full moon festival (though it was much less crowded than I thought it would be). This is one of three types of festivals; the other two include a large ceremony every 10 years, and the largest type of festival held every 100 years, each fall on the full moon. The 100-year festival is a month-long event that every Balinese Hindu participates in. It involves ritual sacrifices, a processional from Besakih to the ocean and back (140km round trip), and a lot of praying. All of that is done to thank the gods for a peaceful, prosperous previous 100 years, and to beg them for an equally joyous coming 100 years.

My guide explained that regardless of which festival you are attending, you must bring an offering to the gods to be placed at their (symbolic) feet. The gods are represented by three statues underneath colored umbrellas, with white, yellow, and red symbolizing the devil, the god of the oceans, and the creator, respectively. Offerings tend to reflect the importance of the festival, with people bringing the most elaborate gifts at the 100-year ceremony. He also said that people usually brought gifts that relate to their labor in life, with farmers bringing bundles of rice, etc. This got me thinking: I asked him whether Balinese were like Westerners in one-upping each other in the eyes of god and their peers. For instance, did one person bring one chicken for the gods at last decade's festival and the person praying next to him saw it, and decided to bring five chickens to next decade's festival? My guide smiled and said yes, of course, that is human nature.

After this we ducked under a temple's roof to avoid a sudden rain shower, and to talk about the events of the last 100-year festival. The last one was scheduled, according to the Western calendar, for March 1963. But, wouldn't you know it, the volcano in the back yard picked February of that same year to violently erupt. This natural disaster caused the entire island to fall into civil war for several years. It was 1979 before Hindu leaders were able to reschedule the 100-year festival, and oh what a festival it was!

We then got to talking about modern Bali. This is when I learned about my guide's opinion on the current government in Jakarta (not favorable, nor was my driver pleased with the elected national government), and I learned of the government gas subsidy that has allowed so many motorbikes to appear on Bali's roads over the past decade. He also mentioned that guiding foreigners around the temple was not his life's ambition, instead he wanted to be an accountant. With Indonesia the 17th-largest economy in the world and quickly rising among its ASEAN peers, I hope that such jobs come to the country and he is able to obtain one before too long.

I really felt like I got a sense of the symbolism and traditions of Hinduism in Bali through my tour of the Mother Temple, with my guide's help. It was a really interesting experience, and the cloudy overcast weather gave it the type of mysticism that I always picture when I think of exotic religious destinations! I had a feeling that my guide wasn't going to see much of the money I had given to the Godfather at the entrance, so I was sure to give him roughly the same amount on my way out to genuinely thank him.

Back on the road, my driver suggested that I have lunch at a restaurant that overlooked Mount Agung, the volcano the temple was built on, and a large rice paddy farm. I joined several dozen other Western tourists at this lunch spot, where the view easily outperformed the menu 10:1. Looking out over a sheer drop of at least 200 feet, you could see over acres of rice paddies down in the valley between us and the volcano, which was coming out from behind the clouds finally. It was quite special.

My driver had also suggested that we stop at a spice and coffee plantation, the location of which I totally misunderstood - it was directly across the street from the restaurant, not miles away. I was taken on a personal tour through the garden of the family that owns the restaurant, and what a garden it was! Every spice you can think of was growing, including real vanilla and cinnamon among many others. They also grew their own arabica and indonesian coffee (not the same thing) as well as cacao, which I recognized because I have a cacao pod in my bedroom at home. I got to see other family members roasting coffee beans over the fire in preparation for grinding, and traditional Balinese cake being made too (it was kind of like flan).

After this extensive tour, I was invited for a free tasting of some of the teas and coffees they produce from their garden. These included regular coffee, ginseng coffee, chocolate coffee, lemongrass tea, ginger tea, and pure cocoa. Each was quite tasty, but the ginseng coffee and lemongrass tea in particular were my favorites. The pure cocoa drink led me to telling the group (including a father/son team, as well as my driver), of the time my first grade teacher gave us all baker's chocolate to teach the lesson that appearances can be deceiving; they really liked that story.

Then I was offered the chance, for US$4, to try a very special Indonesian product: Luwak Coffee. Now, first, as far as coffees go, Luwak was pretty much in the top three that I have ever tried. Having said that, it was pretty hard to swallow due to knowing how it is produced. On my flight over to Bali I read in the seat pocket magazine that very recently an old coffee tradition has returned to Indonesia, one that has an interesting history. Apparently the well-travelled Dutch traders originally brought coffee to Indonesia for production as a cash crop, as the climate was just right. However, they made it illegal for Indonesian natives to pick the beans for local use. This meant, as Indonesians enjoyed coffee as much as anyone else, that they were stuck for where to obtain the stuff. One way they found was to simply pick up the beans that naturally fell from the tree - this was not illegal. Another way they discovered they could get access to a particularly delicious type of bean was to pick out the partially-digested beans from scat of the native meerkats! Apparently, the meerkats only eat the ripest red beans, and their stomachs do away with the outer layer of the coffee pod, leaving the beans in their poop ready for roasting and consumption. So...yeah...it was pretty awkward when I met the garden's resident meerkats.

I thanked everyone at the garden profusely for such an interesting experience, and we were back in the car to reach our last stop. Combining the first two stops within the last, we visited the American Temple of Coffee: Dunkin Donuts. I was so disappointed that this Indonesia-fied version seemed to have dropped the hot drink aspect of the menu almost entirely, but the donut selection was the broadest I have ever seen. And cheap! Each donut was 50 US cents.

An intense amount of solid traffic lay between us and my hotel after that, and it took us a good hour to travel 20km. When we got back, I was ready for some Cinqo de Mayo action. After discovering a restaurant called "TJ Mexican" earlier in the week I had planned, despite there being no reason for Mexican food to be good here in Bali, to go there for dinner and drinks or the increasingly popular (in the US) Mexican holiday with the hopes of finally meeting up with some english speakers! I was so tired of walking around alone, talking to myself! This was not remedied that night, however, as when I walked in I was greeted by at most 20 people dining at TJ Mexican. Apparently this holiday has not left the North American continent yet. Accepting it would be Cinqo de Mayo con uno, I enjoyed some mediocre Mexican food and explaining to my waitress that I wanted two margaritas put into one glass.

One my way home, it began to pour down rain with an intensity that I have rarely ever seen. Though surely my double margarita wasn't helping, I discovered that for some reason, Bali streets and sidewalks are paved with the slipperiest material available for civilian consumption. Seriously, everyone attempting to walk around looked ridiculous. My patience had finally worn out.

Day Seven - A Day Off

I decided to sleep in and relax on Sunday morning, which slowly included the afternoon too. I finally got out to go for a walk around 3p, and I found myself heading south along the beach, which is a direction I hadn't gone before. Along the way I stopped at Coldstone, which I found to be exactly the same as home in every way except for being offered a menu at the door and ordered for by the holder of that menu. Maybe ordering at Coldstone is too large of a challenge for the common person here in Bali.

I kept walking south and eventually couldn't go any further when I hit the fence around the island's main airport, where I flew into on Monday. It seemed really close in comparison to the ride it took to get me from there to the hotel. I watched many locals wading through the water in search of...actually I don't know what could possibly be edible out of there...and even more playing soccer on the beach. There was also a couple dressed up and being photographed in a traditional looking boat, I couldn't tell what that was all about. The best part were the naked children running around on the beach, 50 meters away from the airport's runway.

When I got home, I started to not feel very well. This carried in to the next two days, which kept me pretty much in my hotel room drinking water and taking pills. The thing about Bali is, again, that you can't drink the water that comes from the tap. Easier said than done, as even a little bit of water in your mouth during a shower, or water in an open cut, can start the bacteria growing in your body.

These were not fun days! But, deep down, I did appreciate the free pass on having to go back outside and experience more of Bali. As I said at the start, I am totally unimpressed with Bali. I would absolutely not recommend that people come here, the small discount you receive by paying for things with a stronger foreign currency does not come anywhere close to making up for all the drawbacks. It may be that I just didn't "do" Bali correctly, and coming here without a friend certainly didn't make the trip better. But I am having trouble finding a circumstance in which this place would be enjoyable. It is not the 1970s any longer, and other destinations should far outrank Bali if you are searching for a tropical oasis to visit.

...I am sorry, this blog would not let me post videos of the size that I have from Bali. I will find an alternative place to post them for you all to watch, because it is pretty hard in words and still photos to describe what it was actually like there!

Originally I wasn’t going to post a piece on my week in Kalgoorlie, WA. Another job with SRS was the only reason I was brought back against the wake I had left traveling earlier this year. This time we would be relining some mills for the Kanowna Belle Barrick gold mine in Kalgoorlie, which has been the undisputed gold capital of Australia ever since the precious stuff was discovered there in late 1800s. For perspective’s sake, modern-day Kalgoorlie is one of those second-tier destinations that sound cool in guidebooks but most travelers (should they make it to WA at all) quickly allow it to drop off their lists to save time. And, in fact, that is probably a wise decision on the part of those travelers’, but I am so glad I made it to “Kal” that I decided it merits a short blog post.

Kalgoorlie-Bolder, the town’s full name after amalgamating with the neighboring community, is like no other place I have ever been to before. This is a remarkable thing, as I have both been to a lot of places and that such a place is remotely located 600 dusty kilometers east of Perth, in the middle of the Outback. The only way I can concisely describe Kal is to call it a “mining town.” Unlike Mount Keith, which was simple a mine with a small company-sponsored and temporary village nearby to house and entertain workers, Kalgoorlie is one of the largest cities in Western Australia. It’s ENTIRE economy and society revolves around the mining industry, with the city itself being wholly circumscribed by mine sites and the massive “Superpit” open-cut gold mine in danger of engulfing the northern-most streets.

Just imagine, in 2012, a community with a lengthy history of mining culture; for me, it was difficult to do so until arriving in Kalgoorlie (after an 11 hour drive through some pretty random areas of WA). The town was huddled around the central street for about a mile’s length, with a continuously lined with federation-era building containing non-chain stores and bustling hotels. If I wasn’t mistaken, Hollywood directors have aspired to re-create Kalgoorlie for any and all Western-type movies – it was impeccable! Luckily our hotel was located on the southern end of this strip, ensuring we would have quiet and decent accommodation.

The job wasn’t all that different from Mt Keith, except this time I had a bit of experience behind me and was able to make a more meaningful contribution to the project. Peter Nelson was along to supervise this job, as it was the first time SRS had worked for Barrick at Kanowna, and he entrusted me with a lot more responsibility. This particular processing plant had very limited deck space surrounding its two mills and so two sets of liners (old and new) could not possibly fit all at once. I was to coordinate all the plates and hardware going into and out of the mill via the liner handler for day shift – a perfect job for someone with “the OC disorder”! Inside the mill, a man named Colin (who the crew decided was one of the coolest dudes the world has ever seen!) was managing the actual process of relining the mill, which was terribly tedious in comparison to Mt Keith.

A flight out of Kalgoorlie-Bolder Airport on Sunday, April 29, precluded me from joining SRS on another job starting that same day south of Perth, which left me with a full day after we finished the reline Saturday to explore Kal. It was kind of weird, finding myself back in “travel mode” after remaining in Geraldton for so long! Sunday morning I planned myself a long walk to see Kalgoorlie’s biggest (literally!) attraction: the Superpit.

The Superpit is one of those sights that most people only ever see in their 7th Grade science textbooks or out the window of an airplane, but never witness in real life. One of the largest open-cut mines in the world, it is truly a modern wonder of the world. History brief: Kalgoorlie’s gold mining history has occurred in fits and stops over the past 150 years, with activity reflecting many socioeconomic factors (such as a labor shortage after WWI). Originally people arriving in the gold fields leased a plot of land to prospect, and somewhere along the way underground mining began to pursue deeper deposits. However, by the 1980s underground operations were no longer cost-effective. A man named Alan Bond decided that the best solution to continue mining gold in Kalgoorlie would be to amalgamate all of the smaller individual leases held on land north of the city and blast out a massive hole in the earth, thereby creating a “super pit” for open-cut mining. He failed to complete this plan himself, but several large global gold mining companies liked the idea so much, they banded together to do so themselves. Today, the Superpit is nearly 4km long and 500 meters deep (nearly a third of a mile deep!). It is continuously operating, with 21 house-size Caterpillar dump trucks hauling ore from the bottom. Standing at its precarious precipice, you cannot react with awe.

It was a long walk through the Bolder section of town (which is an extremely grim looking short line of businesses) to get to the Superpit. I wasn’t looking forward to the walk back down when I reached the observation deck, but to my surprise I bumped into a group of my SRS friends! They had also decided to take in the views of the sight, and I was glad to see they had one of the company’s Troopers that I could ride back down in!

Next, Colin took us to the town’s Mt Charlotte Reservoir. Water has an important place in the history of Kalgoorlie, as the town is thoroughly in the middle of the desert with no obvious sources of water nearby. Gold prospectors, arriving by the thousands in the mid-1800s, quickly discovered this inconvenient fact. Early solutions included importing water by camel from the coast (again, 600km west from Kalgoorlie), and boiling bore water, which was extremely salty and difficult to obtain. Then, in the late 1800s, WA’s Head Engineer C Y Young determined that the problem required a permanent fix: a pipeline that would bring water all the way from Perth overland to Kalgoorlie residents and mining operations. As such a feat had never before been accomplished, and because it was projected to cost fully the equivalent of one whole year’s worth of WA’s government budget, people outside of Kalgoorlie were outraged. Nevertheless, with so much of the state’s revenues (and prestige, as the Perth Royal Mint depended on Kalgoorlie gold), Young’s pipeline was built. Amongst much pomp and circumstance the valves of the pipeline were turned open and…nothing came out. Devastated by what looked like the most “epic fail” of all time, and facing an angry mob of thirsty gold miners, Mr Young quickly determined that suicide was his best option.

What makes this one of the best stories filed in the book of Australian lore is the twist in its prologue: as previously stated, such a pipeline had never been attempted before. Mr Young had not anticipated that, despite nine pumping stations along the line, water still had to travel 600kms from Perth to get to Kalgoorlie. Just XXX days after his untimely death, water finally made the full journey and burst out from the eastern end of the longest successful pipeline in the world. More than a hundred years later, C Y Young remains a local and national hero for his engineering feat, and the all-powerful Water Corporation, which now controls the Kalgoorlie pipeline, is the foremost expert in pipelines technology.

I spent the rest of the day on my own, enjoying Kalgoorlie on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. If Kalgoorlie was known for just one thing, then of course it would be gold. But among the more familiar, Kal means three things: gold, booze, and skimpies. Recall that “skimpy” is Australian for “stripper.” Being a mining town to its core, Kalgoorlie is said to have “a pub on every corner” to support the bad habits of its well-paid residents. Drinking is a problem in all of Australia, but is especially acute in Kal. Personally, I don’t understand it; after a 12-hour shift in the desert’s heat (or chill on night-shift), how does anyone have the stamina to go out to drink a dehydrating beverage instead of sleeping? But nonetheless, that is not an attitude shared by residents of Kal. One evening, we were stopped at a traffic light in town on the way home from day-shift around 7p, and I saw a person fully dressed for work in high-vis clothes, passed out cold on the sidewalk. More than once, our bus observed fights between white bar-goers on the streets at a very early hour of the evening and once, we saw a fight among Aborigines too. Kal is such a mining-oriented place that bars even accommodate the drinking habits of those working night-shifts, with hotels open and skimpies performing in the early morning hours!

I took some really cool photos on the way up Kal’s main street that help illustrate all of the above. Eventually I made it to my last destination in town: the WA Museum of Kalgoorlie. This branch of the state museum focused on the local history of Kalgoorlie, most of which I have mentioned already. One highlight was the group of preserved historical buildings that were kept behind the museum. It was pretty cool to walk through a couple of early single-family homes from Kalgoorlie, when it was just an outpost with a couple thousand residents. There was also the building the housed the first Western Australian Bank (now Westpac, one of the largest banks in Australia). Out front, the museum had preserved a large tower that was used to brace and lift cargo and humans in and out of an underground mine once upon a time. You were allowed to go to the top and look out over the town that gold built, what a view!

I resisted climbing down from there, as I realized that doing so meant the end of time with SRS and the Geraldton-WA phase of my trip to Australia. It also meant that I would be starting the next leg of my journey, full of uncertainties and risks that I felt not-completely prepared to handle. From up top, I could see all the way back to the hotel where my giant backpack was waiting, the Superpit, and the reservoir. I knew which direction was which, and I could see the airport to the south where I would be later that night. I would not enjoy another crystal clear perspective over my situation such as this for many more weeks.

Here’s the thing about the two and half months I spent in Geraldton, WA: it was so unremarkable, that it was actually quite special. Unremarkable sights, unremarkable nightlife, ordinary people, and even-keeled weather all added up to be a very unique experience for someone used to living and working in Manhattan.

Return from Mt Keith

It was the start of March when I returned in the dead of night to Geraldton from the job at Mt Keith. We left one evening earlier than planned, after finishing the job quicker than scheduled, and that left me without a home for the night! I won’t tell you how this problem was solved here, but it was certainly one of the most bizarre sleeping arrangements I have endured yet.

I awoke the following morning with a large desire to get to the library (ranking higher than showering at this point), as I had been without internet and phone access for the past two weeks. After catching up, recharging my phone plan, and calling my mom for her birthday I was just enjoying the air conditioning when two of my favorite members from the SRS team walked in to the library! They insisted that I join them for drinks and dinner back at the house of the one who lived here in Geraldton. We had a grand evening sitting out on the patio of his home, which sits at the top of a hill looking over all of Geraldton and Champion Bay.

I returned to the Foreshore Backpackers at the end of that evening to settle in for a typical weekend at the hostel. And Monday morning, I vowed to begin looking for another job to fill the time between projects with SRS, as they had not guaranteed another one in the immediate future (in fact, it would not be until late April that I would go out with them again).

Room Renovations

After a slow first week back, I stumbled upon a number of ways to stay busy and make money here in Geraldton between jobs with SRS. The first option I pursued was work with my own hostel. Local couple (Terry and Glenys) has run the Foreshore for just over one year, and they have found bringing the property up to snuff is harder and more involved than they originally imagined. With just three of 17 rooms renovated completely and common areas still waiting, I offered to help them out with their massive DIY project. We started with Room Seven, which Glenys wanted to do in a retro theme. We painted the entire room, ceilings and all, over the course of four long days. There was a fireplace that proved to be a bit of a challenge, as it had been closed off for a long time and Glenys wanted to open it back up to fit a in refrigerator. The building is nearly 100 years old, so issues like cracks in the ceiling and broken window hardware also were difficulties. The biggest issue was that two people were checking into that double room on Thursday afternoon, leaving us with a tight schedule! I think everyone was very satisfied with the results.

In the same way, I spent two other weeks working on Room 18, which was done in an “LA Heat” theme, complete with a mural done by a local street artist.

And Room 3, in a slightly ambiguous theme of “Cream and Black.” Repainting the armoire in black enamel paint proved to be the largest challenge in that room. I snapped a photo of a manufacturer’s stamp on the back of the old piece, which stated proudly that it had been produced using “white labour only.”

Zeewyk Contracting

Luckily, just as we finished the first room redo, a local contractor posted at the hostel that he needed the help of a handyman/painter for the day. I gave Neale a call and the following morning we were off to complete a painting project that he had in a rental home. We then spent the afternoon working on a garden at an apartment complex. Neale works for himself, after hanging up his chef’s cap last year (chefing in Western Australia is too frustrating, as compared to what he was used to in his native Queensland). He obtains work mostly by word of mouth, but is usually busy with one thing or another.

After we finished up for the day he took me back to his home for a beer. He lives meters from the beach, which is convenient as he is both an avid surfer and fisher. In fact, his project for the following week was to completely overhaul his boat’s motor – a complicated task that he was totally psyched to accomplish on his own using spare parts from a junkyard motor he bought and the original instruction manual of his own motor. We talked for a few hours after work and I enjoyed sharing my thoughts about Geraldton and traveling in Australia. He told me about his recent long-term trip to the US (he has a daughter studying in South Carolina) and his partner, who works for the Geraldton City Council and has played a critical role in the transformation of the foreshore area. It was really great to meet and get to know a local!

I joined up with Neale several more times between my jobs with SRS to help with his reoccurring gardening contracts and even for a larger project where we refit a soon-to-open clothing store downtown. For that one, we constructed dressing rooms and a false wall for a storage room. Though he definitely had the laid-back demeanor shared by all Australians, he was brilliant at carpentry and creatively solving problems on the fly. You could tell that owning his own contracting business suited him quite well!

A Day of Landscaping

One of the most shocking things about my trip to Australia, a land of rare species that is full of nature loving and conscious people, is the amount of time I have spent (and money I have made) killing said nature. And if thistle was my natural enemy over in Victoria, than it was certainly the grass-weed that I have come to despise here in Western Australia. The grass-weed is inaccurately named – grass-vine would be more correct, because it is actually a vine that just looks like grass when it reaches the surface. Underground, it forms a chaotic tangle of root systems the can go for yards horizontally and vertically. Once you have grass-weed, it is nearly impossible to eradicate without a bulldozer.

I spent many hours with Neale digging out grass-weeds from people’s gardens. That is why I nearly declined when my Irish friend Declan asked me to join him one Sunday out into the country, where we would help one of his coworkers (he works at a local steel fitting shop) to dig up grass-weeds from a backyard. Further stretching the spectrum of things I will now do for $100, I agreed to go with him. And I am glad I did!

One Sunday morning around 8a, we drove out 20kms to reach his coworker’s cottage in Nabawa, which was maybe the smallest town I have ever seen (a Google Image search returns only pictures of long, straight roads and open fields). My first thought upon arriving was, perhaps the scope of the project could have been better defined to me. We were Sherman’s army, marching to the Atlantic in the backyard of this gentleman, whose name was Butch. As Mr Casey used to say when set strikes were stretching into the late PM hours: “Thrash and Burn.” We were informed to use hoes (a skill I hadn’t ever called on before), to watch out for snakes and blue-tongued lizards (Declan was not successful at this, he spiked one clean through with his hoe!), and that we could consume as many cold beverages as we wished throughout the day (it was actually not that hot that day, for Geraldton).

Butch was a really friendly guy who had formerly worked as a financier in London before picking up and moving to Australia to quit the rat-race and live the quiet life. I have my doubts that he is truly enjoying this decision (he seemed a bit lonely all the way out in the middle of nowhere), but he certainly was keeping himself busy with his cottage. Originally built in the 1800s out of limestone blocks, it has many authentic furnishings and brand new verandah that Australians are fond of for providing shade. Our day of devastation in the backyard was phase one of his plan to install an elaborate multi-tiered garden and patio. Using my mind I zoomed out on his small parcel, again, in the middle of nowhere, and wondered what sense there was in creating a green oasis at Chez Butch. An island, surrounded by native plants waiting to reclaim it. But, his dream earned me a delicious lunch, a real Pepsi Lite (so few and far between here), and $125 all said and done at the end of our day. Die grass-weeds, die!

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at Theatre 8

My other hesitation for joining Declan for a day of landscaping in the country was that another activity I had enlisted with here in Geraldton had me booked that Sunday evening. Within the two weeks I was gone from the Foreshore Backpackers to work for SRS, a large number of new people had arrived that I had the pleasure of getting to know upon arriving back. One of those people was a Canadian girl named Chloe, who was on a gap-year and in Geraldton visiting her Aunt while hoping to find work as well. While attending a party her Aunt was hosting, she met Lachlan, who was the director of an upcoming show at the community theater. She agreed to work on the show and wound up telling me about it one night soon after we met. I offered to come help out with technical stuff if they needed it, though I wasn’t sure how involved I could be if I was asked to go out with SRS again.

True to form, I wound up neck-deep “Stage Managing” Theatre 8’s fall play: the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The show itself is a thick slice of Australiana: set in 1950’s Melbourne, it tells the story of two men who go to Queensland every winter to work the sugar cane fields, then return to Melbourne each summer to cohabitate with two ladies and live the highlife off their earnings. The play centers around the seventeenth summer of this arrangement, which, like the characters, is beginning to show its age – everything falls apart and the summer ends in a huge fight that causes the men leave and never return.

The group performing this play belongs to the local Theatre8 organization, which has its 50-year old venue on Eighth Street right here in Geraldton. Upon arriving for my first rehearsal, my suspicions were quickly confirmed: this was about as off-Broadway as one can imagine. Community Theater has a whole new meaning to me! Lachlan, directing for the first time, had previously been in heaps of Theatre8 shows. Natalie, the house manager, was dating Tim, who played Barney in the production and is a British national here to manage Geraldton’s local prison. Mary, an eccentric old lady who was typecast as Emma in the show, was married to Robert, who was also here from a European country and did the lights/sound for the show. Clare and Shakey (not Stirry, tee hee) were a mother-daughter team, both appearing in the show. And then there was James who, if Theatre8 was on 42nd Street, would have a star next to his name in the program denoting him a member of Equity.

This was an authentic community theater experience. Everyone involved thought they were the most important part of the production, if not fully in charge of it. If the theater had one of those motivational posters that say, “Organization is Key,” (with maybe a cat standing on a huge, messy pile of keys) it would have been papered over in newsprint (from another time period than the show’s setting) and pictures of past productions. And, of course, no one seemed to particularly like each other…even the people who were romantically involved.

OK, maybe all that wasn't strictly true. Theater is stressful and people react to poor rehearsals in weird ways. So having said all that, I was very grateful to have the experience of working on a production in Australia. It was interesting to see what theater principles are universal, and which may be still on their way over from the States. I am also glad to have met and interacted with more of Geraldton’s locals who made it clear how much they appreciated my contribution to the show. I won’t soon be forgetting my first summer of the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll!

Foreshore Backpackers

Without a doubt, my time in Geraldton has been measurably better (and worse, at times) because of the terrific (and awful, at times) people at the Foreshore Backpackers. Well, for $20 per night, you are bound to get a mixed bag. But by and large, the long-term patrons of the hostel were a good group of people who were welcoming, friendly, and fun-natured. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was lucky enough to be accepted by the Irish cohort and really enjoyed getting to know all of them. When I returned from Mt Keith, the group had grown to include a couple over from Ireland who actually got engaged at the Foreshore! Terry proudly mentioned that their engagement joined “at least one successful conception” in life-events that have occurred within those four walls since they took the business over. Gross!

In addition to the Irish, there was a handful of Australians, Chloe the Canadian, several Germans, and of course, the hoard of French. The Australians at hostels in Australia are always the most interesting, as they usually have the most unusual reasons to needing half-star accommodation in their own country. One long-term Australian tenant named Andre provided us with a great deal of entertainment, as he had a propensity for getting very drunk and then turning belligerent. In contrast, another Australian girl was here for one month to do a field study in labor movement as she prepared to submit her dissertation for a Doctorate Degree. Terry and Glenys also reserve a couple of beds each weekend for “emergency shelter” in the event someone in town has domestic issues with a spouse or situation like that.

Sometimes, staying at the Foreshore felt like a return of freshman year – or, perhaps, what it would have been like at a real university. You are hardly ever alone, which made me conscious that finding time to visit the library, go for a walk, sit on the jetty, or – most critically – occupy the TV lounge during those sweet hours every morning when no one else uses it, was very important to keep sane. But at the same time, you are grateful to have those friends. I am also grateful for all of the Sunday afternoon debriefs after hazy Saturday evenings of fun, friendly people to share movies and trips to Maccas for coffee with on weeknights, and caring owners who tried so hard for us to realize the Foreshore’s motto, “Living the Dream.” And I am grateful for Ginger the Cat as a mascot (Red Cat!).

St Patrick’s Day

St Patrick’s Day certainly would have been different without my friends at the Foreshore. To be honest, the day sort of snuck up on me as I lost track of which day was March 17th! I spent most of the day following my usual Saturday routine: library, Coles, laundry (lCl haha). But I soon figured out that Saturday was actually St Patricks and required my immediate attention. Glenys spent all of their day putting together an Irish Stew for all of us and I was asked to retrieve the Irish kids, who had already fallen off the wagon at the Camel Bar by dinner time, when it was finally ready. Terry was ready out back with close to every can of Guinness in Geraldton, if not the shire. And so, the evening began. I painted my face, twice, then eventually settled on a green fuzzy beard before the whole group went out to celebrate at the Freemason’s Hotel. There, a full-on Paddy’s Day party was well underway and we were photographed (unbeknownst to us) by the local Geraldton newspaper. After that stop, as most Saturdays do, the group decided to end the night at Geraldton’s only nightclub: Vibe. I was not on board with this, however, and I convinced Chloe it would be a bad life decision as well. We instead headed back to enjoy the cool breeze coming off the water, complain about Vibe, and wait for kids to return one by one as they were kicked out of the club (as they usually are).

Easter

Easter was a more relaxed affair. Australians take both Friday and Monday off around the holiday and I was surprised of the lack of seriousness surrounding the whole thing; it almost seemed like as big of an excuse to party as Christmas! Nonetheless, Easter morning at the hostel Glenys and Terry arranged for each door to have a bag full of chocolates on the handle from the “Easter Bunny” and some of the highest-achieving Irish kids put together an Easter dinner for their group. I had theater in the afternoon and returned to catch up with everyone in the evening. Easter Monday, when nearly everything in town was closed, I took a long walk all the way up the northern coast to see part of town I had never been to before. The beach was terrific!

Last Day

Perhaps the one day I will remember most from my time in Geraldton was also my last. It was a Saturday, and so it began like many of my other Saturdays in Gero: a trip to the library and then to the Northgate Shopping Center, where I normally visited Coles. But this is where the day began to jump the normal tracks! It was heritage week in Geraldton, which meant many of the local landmarks were throwing their doors open to visitors, and this included the Victoria Hospital Complex and Old Town Gaol, which are right next to each other. I made the quick decision to take the 230p tour of these buildings, as they are some of the oldest in town. Before the tour began, as I was slightly early, I had one last pensive rest by Geraldton's harbor - my favorite place in town.

The tour was lead by an old lady named Helen who took us around the outside of the Hospital Complex, which was built according to then-state of the art hospital design encouraged by Florence Nightingale. It remained a hospital for a fairly short span of time before the influx of people to the region pursuing gold to the east or the local fishing industry. At some point, it turned into a low-security prison...very low security. The fence around the compound was easily jumped by any of the inmates held their; what kept them from running away was both the harsh conditions outside the boundaries of the town and the pleasant life they enjoyed while at the jail. The jail was decommissioned in 1966 but the next stop on our tour, the high-security prison next door, was kept in service until 1988. Today the former high-security prison is cleverly, and weirdly, used as a craft market; each cell is rented by a different local artisan and the market's contents is surprisingly varied. The history of the jail was very similar to the story of Fremantle Prison, in that the conditions - up until very recently - were shockingly poor.

Back out of striped-sunlight hotel, the rest of my day went by in a flash. I chucked in some laundry as I had lunch and said my good byes to Glenys and Terry. By the time this was done, I had to dash out to join Chole and Lachlan at my last performance of "Summer," which nearly everyone at the hostel suggested I skip. I was very glad I did not take their advice, as I was able to fulfill my commitment to the cast, teach Chloe a bit more before leaving her with the reins in hand, and enjoy the surprise of an abbreviated cast party. At the usual gathering in the lobby after the show, Lachlan raised a fuss over my imminent departure and contribution to the show. The entire organization playfully signed the styrofoam banana that I had stolen from the prop fruit bowl for the show and made a tradition of hiding in various places around the set for each show. Lachlan also generously bought me a 40-proof gift for my work! It was a very nice way to conclude what very well may the most meaningful experience I have had since traveling around Australia.

Chloe and I had to leave early, however, to get back to the Foreshore for a planned goodbye party. Three of the usual Foreshore suspects, including myself, were due to depart the hostel in the coming week and people decided this was cause for bon voyage - or celebration. We arrived around 1030p to easily the largest party I have ever seen at the Foreshore. With a breath test 8 hours ahead, I decided that I would enjoy the evening as an innocent bystander. In any case, I was so glad to have one more crazy night with my good friends at the backpackers - they even made a huge banner with my name on it to send me off! I made it to bed by 2a, which was not ideal for a 530a wakeup call. It wasn't all bad at that wee hour, however, as people were slowly returning from Vibe to continue making poor decisions at the hostel.

Around Town

A few other things happened here in Geraldton that are worth mentioning. In addition to my shameful St Patrick’s Day face being immortalized in the Geraldton Guardian, I was asked by Glenys one day to be interviewed by the Western Australian news network. GWN7 was doing a story on backpackers in WA, specifically on the availability of beds during the current mining boom. Though I hadn’t thought about it really, the Foreshore was fully booked nearly every night, as was the hostel I stayed at in Perth. A lot of people are taking up long-term residence at hostels in the State, thereby creating an accommodation shortage for short-term visitors.

And in my last few days in Geraldton, I finally got myself over to the local Crayfish Factory to take a tour of the largest crayfish operation in the entire world. Crayfish, or lobster, contribute millions of dollars to Geraldton’s economy each year and have been collected off the coast here for more than a hundred years. We took a tour of the facility to see where they receive shipments from the fishermen, sort them by weight and quality, and then the packing plant. Several people staying at the Foreshore work for the Crayfish Factory, so it was interesting to get a tour of their workplace after hearing all about it secondhand. Particularly cool was the way that the company can ship live lobsters; they “stun” them by submerging them in near-freezing water for five minutes, before loading them into Styrofoam containers. We were told that crayfish are big business in Asia, and that a live lobster can go from the ocean floor to a plate in Beijing within 30 hours (they are driven to Perth to be flown to Asia every other day). Never has one dinner had a larger carbon footprint!

I did eventually get to Vibe, or, affectionately, “The Vibe.” If there was ever a business opportunity, it would be to open an actual nightclub in Geraldton…because Vibe is just the worst. The best part of Vibe: the thrill of possibly being beaten up by drunken Aborigines outside when you leave. The worst part of Vibe: the music, the staff, expensive drinks, disproportionately expensive cover charge (in that it exists at all, we’re in Geraldton, right?), and the people who frequent it.

Final Thoughts

What can I say about my time in Geraldton, WA? I was supposed to be here for two nights, it turned into a three-month stay that I will always remember fondly.

It is clear from the moment I arrived that this was not a high-brow town. Every other person is wearing fluoro-colored clothing, and there were a tremendous number of huge SUVs scuffing around the semi-revitalized downtown. Drinking and violence are huge problems among residents here, perpetuated by the three-weeks on/one-week off lifestyle of miners and tradesmen.

Nonetheless, I was impressed with the number of people I met who owned their own businesses. Peter Nelson built SRS into a multi-million dollar operation from the ground up; he started with one client when he walked into BHP’s offices at Mt Keith sometime in the 1980s and asked for the chance to reline their mills. Neale Zeewyk was sick of the restaurant scene in Western Australia, bought a Land Cruiser and some tools, and launched his own contracting company that keeps at least one, if not two people busy around town every day. The clothing store Neale and I refitted was being launched by a housewife in town looking to bring in new designs for “larger women” here in town (there are very few options for clothing here in town, and Perth is a four hour drive). Terry owns his own property management company and joined his wife in realizing their dream of operating their own hostel in Geraldton. All that is to say, either I was very lucky in who I met here in Geraldton, or a large number of people here in Geraldton (if not Australia) are entrepreneurs. It made me wonder, is the culture here very conducive to ingenuity and self-employment? If so, is it a Western Australia/frontier mentality, or something that is common to all Australians? Or, a question we stress over frequently in the US: is the legal system and economy here encouragements or burdens to new businesses?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, but what was clear to me was that those people were all very happy to be in their lines of work. I remember speaking with Italians in Italy, particularly people my age, and they felt so depressed about their lives and future prospects. Very recently, there is certainly that sentiment among young people in the US as well, like their generation will surely face a harder life than their parents. But here in Geraldton, people are cheerful and optimistic by and large. Even people going out on casual labor jobs to reline mills in 46-degree heat are stress-free and confident that everything will turn out OK for them. It is refreshing, and a pleasure to be in such a place, if only for just a while.

Thank you to my friend Jack in Geelong for pointing out that Woolworths here in Australia is not the same at the now-defunct Woolworths chain of the US. Woolies originally started as a market in Sydney between the world wars and has grown to be the largest supermarket chain in the country. Sorry Kate, but Tasty Cheese tastes exactly the same as Cheddar Cheese, which could be described as tasty.

Politics

If there was any area of everyday life here in Australia that tidily sums the place up, it would be its politics. Government exists on four levels here, including the Federal, State/Territory, Regional (usually a “Shire” whish is like the US county) and Local (City). The smallest towns will be administered by the regional councils at the Shire level. And do not forget, Australia is still technically in the British Commonwealth and they recognize the Queen of the UK as their own Monarch. Therefore, each State and the Federal has a Governor-General who reports directly to Her Majesty.

While those Royally-appointed Governor’s must remain fully non-partisan, the elected officials underneath them typically identify with one of Australia’s many political parties. The Labour Party, which sits at the liberal left-hand of the political spectrum, is currently in control of the Federal Government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard. They are currently in power as part of a coalition government with the non-mainstream Green Party. The main opposition party in Australia is the Liberal Party, which sits at the conservative right-of-center on most issues. That is pretty confusing for Americans! There are also a handful of independent members of Parliament.

Increasingly reliant on China’s voracious appetite for raw materials, Australia’s economy has in turn fared well over the past four years when compared to its peers. Unemployment is not a statistic fetishized over by Australian MPs and, after a steep rise over the past decade, the “Aussie” has plateaued near parity with the US dollar. Australians’ purchasing power has nearly doubled in the past ten years, making everything from oil (sold in USD worldwide) to items bought on US websites like Amazon and Apple much more affordable.

That all is to say that the dialogue in Australian politics is over a much different agenda than back in the US. Without the economy to dote on, Australians have carried on with business that has been of concern to them well before the global financial crisis. The foremost issues include climate change, immigration (particularly illegal immigration), and the proper administration of Australia’s tremendous mineral wealth.

The climate change issue came to a head in 2010 when some areas of the country experiencing the worst flooding in Australia’s history. This ended a decade-long draught, with just the year earlier seeing hundreds killed and significant chunks of the country devastated by bush fires so intensely hot after years of no rain, that the eucalypt trees of Victoria’s southeast forests didn’t burn. They simply melted, like giant candles. Then-very popular Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Queensland (not-coincidently the state worst-hit by flooding) introduced a taxing scheme to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions, which are among the highest per-head in the world. This one piece of legislation brought down a flood of anger even greater in size than those in Brisbane, and Mr Rudd found his government scuttled by the loss of a confidence vote taken within the Labour Party (Australian’s elect Members to Parliament, the party with the majority of Members creates a government and selects a PM, therefore they may remove that person if they believe the party’s re-election fortunes would be higher with someone else at the helm).

This loss brought to power Australia’s first female Prime Minister ever, and the first coalition government in nearly as long. Ms Gillard won the position by promising Australians that “there will be no carbon tax under my government.” Just a few months later, she had gone back on this and shoved a scheme nearly identical to Mr Rudd’s through Parliament (while he watched from the “Front Bench,” holding the position of Foreign Minister). It is thought that the carbon tax will significantly increase already sky-high electricity costs here in Australia, and will hurt corporate bottom lines as well.

The final episode of the Julia-Kevin show occurred this past February, when Mr Rudd, still a Labour Member of Parliament, challenged that Ms Gillard had become a liability to the Labour Party after she slapped Australians in the face with her carbon tax lie. He believed, ironically, that he would once again be the best person to head the national government. There was a brief campaign period, then a vote in which Ms Gillard won by a wide margin. Australia is clearly over the whole lot of them, but of the two, Labour Party seems to wish Julia to be the one to go down in the next national election.

Illegal immigration is another issue at the fore of most Australians’ minds. Though the days of the “White Australia” policy are long gone, there seems to still be a sense the “Australia is full” and that there is no more room, nor no need, for immigrants. Particularly troubling to Australians are those illegal immigrants floating over from Papua New Guinea on rafts seeking political refuge or simply a change of scenery, as they are most likely to fall under the costly custody of various government agencies after landing. Racism almost certainly plays a role in this discussion, as Australia is not very multicultural outside of its 10 largest cities.

The current government has suggested its solution to the illegal “boat people,” termed the “Malaysia Solution” (which seems oddly similar to the former Howard Liberal Party’s Government’s plan). This option would see Malaysia and Australia enter into an agreement to trade refugees, with Malaysia taking the next 800 people to float up to Australia’s shores. In return, Australia would receive 4,000 bonefide political refugees from Malaysia over the next four years. If this seems counterproductive, it is, and isn’t. A significant share of “boat people” are actually victims of human trafficking, as a result of trying to pay their way to Australia and jump the “citizenship queue” (a term were aware of in the US). This solution, proponents argue, would reduce human trafficking violations and encourage people interested in becoming Australian citizens to wait their turn. This “Malaysia Solution” and others proposed in aid of the same problem, are extremely controversial for various reasons, depending on whom you are talking to.

With the carbon tax put to bed, however, of rising importance is the administration of Australia’s unimaginably large mineral resources. The Gillard Government has introduced a hefty “minerals tax” that is meant to reclaim wealth from the mining companies, which they derive from reclaiming resources from Australian territory. The tax would deposit directly into Australia’s superannuation fund, a complex government-overseen kitty that Australians depend on heavily for their retirements. Julia’s Labour Party has hailed the new mining tax (not the first slice to be taken off the top of mining firm’s profits) as a “major reform that would deliver a ‘fair share’ of the resources boom for all Australians.” Opponents of the tax, which is likely a popular majority of Australians, describe the tax as a reason for mineral firms to take their business elsewhere. It will likely pass, but become yet another nail in the Labour Party’s coffin.

Calendar and the Seasons

After my first few weeks in Sydney (back in September, the start of Australia’s spring season), questions regarding several seasonal-based activities started to occur to me. With just a small portion of the human population living in the Southern Hemisphere – where seasons are opposite to those of the Northern Hemisphere – how did things such as the school calendar, regular holiday calendar, or even clothing sales work? Below are some answers I have since learned while here for nearly seven months in Australia!

Most recently I have had a mind-blowing thought. The Summer Olympics are held every four years in accordance to the Northern Hemisphere’s Summer. This means that the Sydney Olympics of 2000 were still held in August, Australia’s equivalent to February up north. It was quite chilly for things such as the marathon and rowing competitions, and some have suggested that weather conditions actually influenced the outcome of some of the events!

School calendars: this one is the easiest to explain. A school year for all years and tertiary school start in late February (with some variation depending on when the summer heat ebbs, as we do in the US). The first semester for college kids goes through the middle of June, with a “winter break” occurring in the later weeks of June. Second semester starts back up in July and runs through the end of November or start of December. Also like in the US, school-aged kids go longer, often ending just before Christmas, which kicks off their summer. This means spring break is in fact at the start of November or thereabouts. WEIRD.

Holiday calendar: this one is a little weirder. People in the Northern Hemisphere all have fond memories connected with Easter signaling the start of Spring, while Halloween and trick or treating usually occur just before we plunge into winter temperatures (that is, Northern Hemispherites who happen to celebrate Easter and know what Halloween is!). But you can see what I mean, summer clothes start to crowd out winter ones on the shelves sometime in April, while you can observe back to school sales ramping up in August and the many fall traditions we observe usually occur in October.

Here in Australia, it is the exact opposite. The day I landed in Sydney, September 4, was Father’s Day here in Australia. Halloween (though not for me) was a balmy night at the end of a school year when most were looking forward to summer’s arrival. Christmas, of course, occurs nearly on the summer solstice when the sun stays up till after 9p. People enjoy beach time and barbeques after Christmas mass the same way we do when we wake up on July 4th. Valentines Day is as big of a deal here in Australia as back home, but occurs in the dead of summer when couples can dine outside instead of ice-skating with their dates. Easter candy was already on the shelves by then, too, but bunny and chicken-shaped candies make far less sense as the climate is sliding towards fall’s cooler temperatures. ANZAC Day, the equivalent to Veteran’s Day in the US, will occur similarly late in the fall – here, in late April.

This all is to say that Australians experience the holidays that bring together friends and families in a totally different way than most do in similar-minded parts of the Northern Hemisphere. And if you are like me, and strongly associate music with the time and place you first heard it, then remember that Australians also know all of our “greatest summer hits” as tracks they listened to during their winter.

Clothing sales: This one is possibly the hardest to figure out. It is hard to tell how retailers that sell in both New York and Sydney coordinate their seasonal styles. Do Australian’s get our leftovers from the previous summer? Or do Australian’s act as guinea pigs for fashion, to see what people will like the best before retailers do a full run for the larger markets? From talking to Australians about this topic, they have concluded that it may be a bit of both. There are actually a fair number of Australian-only clothing stores, who in turn must study their American and European counterparts to make decisions for what to import the following Australian summer, or whatever. Given the small size of Australia (and even adding New Zealand’s 4.5 million people), it must be very difficult for retailers to justify designing full product lines every year while keeping costs down!

And I am pretty sure zippers/buttons for male and female clothing is opposite down here…hard to tell.

Television

I have mentioned TV in previous posts, but some of the peculiarities of Australian TV are worth mentioning to emphasize how lucky we are in the US.

Unlike in the US, bunny-ears are still a popular living room feature as so many Australians live dispersed in rural areas. The basic channels available to Australians (such as NBC/ABC in the US) include a handful of numbered channels a la Britain basic television. This is confusing to an American (even though it isn’t a hard concept) when Australians talk about show X on “Seven” and show y on “Nine.” These channels also have spin-off channels on paid cable, such as “Seven Mate” that make things even harder to sort out. These basic cable channels can bid for any American shows willing to sell itself overseas, so “Seven” may have shows from the US stations including Fox, ABC, and HBO – a real hodge podge! Furthermore, shows do not follow the normal September-May schedule they do in the US, making it hard to know when seasons start.

Beyond that number stew at the bottom of the dial, a number of other channels on paid cable sound familiar to American ears: FX, Discovery, Comedy. Careful though, it is not guaranteed that these channels will carry the exact same shows as they are known to in the US! Other channels have different names, for example “Bravo” is known as “ARENA” here, but will in fact have many of the same shows as their US counterpart. To top it all off, the length of commercial breaks in Australia is different from either Britain or America, meaning that shows often stop and start at totally random times (Law & Order, for instance, which fills an hour with commercials in the US, will start at 1053a and finish at 1149a here). The use of a DVR and channel guide sorts this out in 2012, but I can imagine this system being even more stupid 10 years ago.

Australians look to America and Britain to supply about 70 percent of their television programing. The remaining 30 percent tend to be reality-type shows that are either endogenous to Australia or versions of US/British reality shows that are Australi-fied.

Other Shits and Bits

Australia seems to have integrated the Metric System to a greater extent than the UK. In fact, though nearly everyone from Australia that I have met has a grasp of common Imperial Measurements (miles, gallons, pounds), it is rarely used in everyday life. People would say, alternatively, “Glenelg is just a couple of Ks (kays) away from Adelaide” or “He weighs 60 kilos.” But if you said the same using miles or pounds, they would get the concept. Temperature in Fahrenheit is a totally foreign concept to anyone younger than 65, don’t even try it. Having said all of that, many things in the construction/industrial world still tend to straddle the Metric/Imperial line as so much was built and installed before the conversion. This is to avoid major costly miscalculations and so, for simplicity sake, standard 4x8’ sheets of plywood are still sold, but labeled in their Metric measures, which are weird numbers in millimeters. Similarly, 2x4” boards are something like 300x500mm, but everyone still calls them “two by fours.” Haha I have gotten to know Celcius and the Metric System quite well down here, having even measured materials in Metric at the mine site! In other realms, the do use the Dewey Decimal System, but use the A-size system for printing paper.

One of the most revered organizations among Australians is the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The RFDS was launched to provide major medical services to rural and remote areas of Australia. You can see collections being taken to help this non-profit nearly everywhere (in shopping malls and rural rest stops are popular spots). There was even a TV drama based on the organization’s real-life rescues. It is a HUGE deal here.

A similarly admirable, and very Australian, solution to the vastness-slight population problem here relates to the schooling of young children in remote locations. If you are a cattle rancher with a plot of land larger than some European countries (that is a real circumstance here), and you have children, it is understandably difficult to get them to class each morning. Ah ha, but there is a solution. For a small yearly tuition, you will be given a wireless internet connection (formerly, two-way radio) and schoolbooks for your child to participate in the School of the Air. Lessons with a remote teacher last about an hour per day and you are expected to work with your children for additional hours on their studies. I am guessing that there are a lot of "Bueller" moments.

And that is all for now. If there are any specific questions on everyday Australia please let me know! And if there is anything you Australian’s reading along think I need to know (or got wrong) please also let me know, I am still being educated.