OZ: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Lazy Days
Mike and I both agreed that our time in Exmouth, or rather the Cape Range national park was the most relaxing time that we have had in Australia. It was the fantasy come to life. We originally went to the Cape Range National park to hike, and just happened to snatch the last available camping spot there for the day. Once we made it in, we realized that they don't really have trails there, but they do have a lot of snorkeling. Mike and I bought wet suits while we were still in NZ because we saw ourselves surfing up a storm.

Wetsuit Superheroes

That has not happened due to weather, hectic schedule, lack of waves, etc and we were feeling a little angry about shelling out the money for the suits but we finally had a use for them. Also, Glenn and Judi brought snorkeling masks with them and left them to us when they left. All we needed to snorkel on our own were flippers and for the amount of days we stayed and snorkeled - they paid for themselves.

Snorkeling the Ningaloo reef was really something special. I want you to imagine as I write this. Imagine that you wake up in a remote campsite. The day will be hot, but it's not uncomfortable to sleep in a little bit. You lay around for a while reading and getting ready to greet the day. When you are ready, you get out of the van and boil water for coffee (french press thanks to the Livschizes). As the coffee is brewing you make breakfast. If you are feeling lazy you will have cereal otherwise it will be eggs with Canadian bacon. You eat at a leisurely pace and drink your coffee for over an hour - something that has always driven your father crazy and something you don't often get to do in the real world anymore. You get in the car and drive to a new snorkeling spot every day. On your drive you will change into your bathing suit which was drying on the dash from the day before. You listen to dirty, gritty, raw rock from the 70s that will make you nostalgic for a time you never saw because you are too young. You sing American Woman at an unhealthy volume and stick your feet out of the passenger window.

Once you have arrived at your snorkeling destination of the day, you will get into your wetsuit and laugh at your husband who is laughing at you since you both look ridiculous trying to put the suits on. Once they are on, you realize that you both look like superheroes and joke about this. You will not want to leave your flip flops at the beach, so you will hobble to the water and try to put your flippers on in a way that will not leave any sand in them. Then you are really snorkeling. You are not worried about running out of time, you have all the time in the world. Sometimes you swim holding hands and pointing things out to each other. Sometimes you separate and do your own thing. Your favorite thing is to swim right over the sea turtles. They are slow swimmers and if you are over them and slightly behind, it feels like both of you are flying through an alternate universe. You get out and have lunch and then maybe go in again. You might tangle in some coral as the tide is getting low, or you might lose your husband and freak out for a second, but overall it's the most peaceful time of your life. Once done with snorkeling the two of you might just lay in the van and listen to music or you might "hike" for an hour in your bathing suits.

Bathing suit hike

You will go back to the campground and your husband will make you dinner. You will both go to sleep early because you are exhausted from swimming against the current and the excitement of seeing reef squids and an octopus and sea turtles and starfish and even dolphins out in the distance. You will repeat this for 4 days and only leave because you still have a lot of Australia to see, but you know that this will be one of your all time favorite experiences in OZ.

I can't finish with Exmouth without talking about a restaurant called The BBQFather. I will start off by saying that I don't like ribs and I don't like BBQ sauce, so we went into the restaurant for Mike, but it ended up being the best BBQ I have ever had. I ordered brisket and forgot to tell them not to put sauce on it - but the sauce was good and the brisket fell apart at the touch of a fork. It was absolutely delicious (yes we were also very hungry when we went there). It was so good that we even told the owners and they told us that they studied smoking techniques in Texas and even bought the smoker from the Texans. No place in the US that either of us have eaten at can hold a candle to this BBQ. It was that good.

Karijini National Park
Our next destination in Western Australia was Karijini National Park. Mike was super excited about this since he has known about this place even in the US and has been waiting to come here for a while. The drive up was absolutely beautiful. As we got close to the park we were driving through mountain ranges with colors that I have never seen. The earth there is blood red. Imagine seeing grass and shrubs of the palest green as they have almost been turned to a burnt out yellow by the sun, but are holding on by the faintest of margin to the green they had at the end of the wet season. Imagine trees with white bark showing through and giving the mountains fuzzy borders. Imagine all of this on the background of blood red earth and blue sky. It was quite a drive.

Karijini National Park on the other hand, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Let's start with the fact that to get to the camping portion of the park you need to drive down a dirt road for like 14 km. It was literally the worst dirt road I had been on in Australia till that point. I was the one driving or else I would get very nauseous, but I was nervous and the driving was slow. Construction was being done on the road and dust was everywhere. We didn't let this bother us too much, because we were very much looking forward to a nice long hot shower at the campsite inside the park. In fact, Mike could barely contain himself when he thought about this. When we finally made it to the camp we paid for two nights in advance (and at $40 dollars per night it was not the cheapest of places) and then rushed to get to the showers.

This is where disappointment truly set in. The camping in this particular location is set up in different loops where the facilities are somewhere in the middle of the loop. There were over 20 sites in our loop and only two toilets and two showers. Worse yet, in one case the toilet and shower were in one enclosure which means that only 3 people could use the 4 facilities at a time. This meant that there was a line for both by the time it got dark. We waited it out, and finally Mike left to enjoy the shower he has waited for... Only to return again angrier than I had seen him in a while. Apparently the water in the showers was heated using solar power and no battery. This means that the water was barely lukewarm by the time he got to it after dark. Add to that the fact that it gets quite cold in the area and you get a sad, angry, and not very clean Michael Livschiz.

We were so angry that we tried to cancel our second booked night in the camp and leave early, but the camp was only willing to give us half of the money for the second day, so we stayed. The next morning we went for a hike (we managed to do all of the walks in our area in less than two hours which added to Mike's annoyance) and got back before dark to take showers. This time I managed to get in early enough, but the water was still not warm. My goose pimples had goose pimples. It might have been the quickest shower that I have taken in Australia, although even if the water was fine, I would have hurried since the facilities were not enough for the campers in our area and every additional minute I was in the shower made me feel more and more guilty about being a shower/toilet hog.

The next morning we left and actually did a proper summit of a mountain called Mt. Bruce. I might be spoiled by NZ, but the hiking path and the view from the top wasn't worth the climb for me.

At the top of Mt. Bruce

Maybe I was just angry because the road we took into the park was closed and it took us 1.5 hours to get out of there, or maybe I was just a little heat stroked, but this was not my favorite hike. One thing made me smile though :). When you get to the top of Mt. Bruce there is a map of all of the different peaks at Karijini with their associated heights. I looked for the tallest and found that it was called Mt. Meharry. Let's pause here for a second and sound it out: Mount Me Harry!!! I may have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy, but this really made my day.

After our hike we actually went back to a town that we passed on our way to Karijini and finally had the shower that we deserved. It was glorious. I also celebrated by making us apple pancakes for breakfast in the morning. Finally the amenities that we wanted were presented to us.

Venus of Willendorf

Before I go on, I must tell you about the termite mounds that Australia has. I don't know if you have seen any of the pictures Mike posts but they are huge. Depending on where you are in Australia they will be a different color, and in Karijini they are the same blood red that the hills are. I don't know if it's just me, but all of the mounds look kind of like the Venus of Willendorf to me.

Australian termite mound

We left the town of Tom Price (I love town names here) and I drove most of the way. This was the day we saw fires in the area. The burning was pretty close to the road and it was quite a sight. We had to stop driving at around 10 because we were low on gas and the gas station we stopped at was closed for the night. The fires we saw weren't too far away, so we parked as far from the fuel as we could and went to sleep.

The road to Darwin
The next part of the story makes me angry, but Mike is more forgiving :). We were still in the van in the morning when there came a very authoritative and scary knock on the van. It was so loud that I basically jumped out of my skin. Mike was slow to respond so the guy told us that we are trespassers and if we don't move our van immediately he has a forklift that he will use to push us off of his property. Mike told him that we ran out of gas and we were waiting for morning to fill up and then we would be on our way. The man didn't care and told us that the gas station opened at 7am and it was already 9 (there were no business hours posted on the door, I know this because I checked the night before). I really wish that we had other options for gas and didn't have to buy from him. As it was we filled up almost a full tank. We also ended up having to eat our breakfast on the shoulder of the road as we had to leave the gas station ASAP. Up until this point the people of OZ have been really friendly, but this guy definitely fell short of the friendly laid back manner that we had gotten used to.

I was back to driving after lunch and had my first random pulling over by the cops. This was the first time that we had been pulled over since Melbourne so it was very exciting. The cops were clocking speed and doing random license checks. They were the first cops to pull us over that didn't also give a random breathalyzer test. I felt almost cheated out of that wonderful experience. Mike and I keep wanting to ask if we can refuse the breathalyzer, but keep forgetting.

We arrived to Broome pretty early and it was too tempting to relax there for a few days. There is nothing really noteworthy about the town, it's just a quiet resort town with palm trees, restaurants, and beaches. While there we had some good food and drank chili flavored local beer (which is excellent). We also saw a lot more of the Aborigines. We have been seeing more and more of them as we get further and further from large cities and into less and less populated areas and as a people, they are not doing well. We noticed a lot

On the Beach in Broome

of homeless and drunk people, all of them were Aborigines. These past couple of weeks have been very enlightening for us in the way that the original Australians live.

After Broome we headed for Darwin and ended up spending the night in a town called Halls Creek where we needed to get an oil change. Again, the town had a large population of Aborigines. We had to go to a grocery store while in town and that also turned out to be enlightening. The food that is available for purchase in Aboriginal areas is really really bad. There was a whole freezer full of meat that was clearly spoiled and priced to sell fast. This is also where we saw roo tails in the freezer. Even the meat that was not past due was suspicious. The prices for produce were outrageous but we bought some tangerines to snack on in the car and tide us over till Darwin. Those tangerines were close to spoilt and we ended up having to throw away half of the bag.

The town also showed evidence of the Aboriginal community not doing well. Most of the businesses had serious guard dogs, and some of the houses that had people living in them looked condemned. Most of the children we saw were not wearing shoes and wore dirty clothes and had dirty unbrushed hair. It also looks like the older Aborigines are the ones doing the worst. The people we saw that were about our age or younger , even though unkempt, looked relatively OK, but the older ones are the ones we often saw lying down on the curb or staggering around drunk. I will get to what I think are the causes of this a little later.

On a lighter note, we also saw a restaurant called Russian Jack's that we wanted to eat at while our car was being worked on in the morning. The hours on the door stated that the restaurant was open from 7am, but of course as with most NZ and OZ places of business this is not written in stone. The restaurant was closed. There was a story of the name painted on the outside that I found interesting. Russian Jack's name was Ivan Fredericks (I assume that the last name changed when he came to OZ from Arkhanglelsk and it was probably Federov or something along those lines) Ivan's claim to fame was that one of the other pioneers got sick and Ivan put him in a wheelbarrow and carted him 300 miles through a dessert to the nearest town to get medical attention. There is even an entry for Russian Jack in Wikipedia.

The other Aborigines related story I wanted to share happened the day we left Halls Creek. We were low on gas again and came into a small town where I saw something called the Community Store that looked like it had gas pumps out front. In OZ the word Community is most like what we think of as a reservation in the States. We stopped at the community store, but before we could even get out of the van, the man that pulled in right in front of us got out of the car and came over to us. He told us that the roadhouse where we could get gas was 1 km up the road. (We didn't ask him, this is how he started the conversation). I asked if there was no gas at the pumps I saw up front, but he just repeated that the roadhouse was up the road and so we turned around and went there. The man was not mean to us in any way, so we are not sure why he sent us away. Maybe he thought we would not be comfortable at the Community Store or maybe there is some kind of a rule that we can't shop there because we are not of Aboriginal decent. He was not the proprietor, so he didn't really refuse us service, but we knew we were not to go in based on his actions. I think this is the first time I was ever refused service. Neither Mike nor I were mad about this, more like confused. We are not sure if we broke some kind of an unwritten rule by even trying to get gas there, but it was a strange and an unfamiliar experience for us.

We made it into Northern Territory without further incident. So far this area has distinguished itself with its high speed limit (130kph) and its completely atrocious monuments. We did not take this picture, but I am including it as exhibit A, the Beef Road Monument.

Exhibit A - Beef Road Monument

I think the Northern Territory gives exactly zero fucks about tourists if this is that they give us as a photo op. I don't think you can see in this picture, but the "monument" is also heavily graffitied. This is also an opportunity for me to give you a look into some of the tourism lameness of Australia in general.

OZ is a young country, everyone knows this, there is no reason to put on airs. Everything here is "historic". In any other country the "historic" buildings and sites that we have encountered would long ago have been knocked down. I wouldn't be surprised if we stumbled upon an outhouse marked historic because Charles Darwin pooped there once. Knowing OZ though, it would actually not be the same outhouse, but one reconstructed later to celebrate an area where Charles Darwin may or may not have pooped. It's becoming a bit of a joke for us. I groan every time I see the brown photo op or historic tourism sigh. It is never interesting and never truly historic :). It's kind of amazing, because people have lived in OZ for over 65,000 years and only a small portion of that history is on display, what is mostly on display is "history" of the last 150 years of the white people that came here and didn't do anything particularly interesting outside of committing atrocities and disturbing lives of the natives - something that they have done in a lot of other lands that they have colonized.

Darwin
Darwin is another resort town that we needed a break in. Both Mike and I are pretty tired of driving and we know that the weather won't get any warmer than it is here. On our first full day here, we decided to go to the Darwin international film festival which is held outdoors at a place called Deckchair cinema. On this particular night there was a double feature that celebrated a 20 year anniversary screening and both movies were Australian classics. I was very excited and we made sure to come early. The first movie was called "Storm Boy" and was a classic Australian film from 1976 about a boy and his pet pelican. It was cute but the thing that I found memorable was the reaction to the movie of a little boy sitting directly in front of us.

At the end of the movie the pelican is shot by poachers and dies. The kid in  front of us was hysterical. He was not quietly sobbing like some of the other kids that were in the vicinity, his heart was breaking. He held on to his mom and she had to carry him out while he was convulsively crying. I think I remember that feeling at the end of a little Russian childhood movie called Beliy Bim Chernoye Uho where the dog, after having the worst life of any dog on earth, dies. Would any of you let your children see that movie?

The other very memorable experience with "Storm Boy" was that this was the first time I had seen David Gulpilil - the famous Aboriginal movie actor. This is not really true, as he had a role in Crocodile Dundee, but I don't remember him there. David Gulpilil is a presence and one of the trailers that we saw after Storm Boy was for a current movie of his that was out in regular theaters and that we vowed to see.

The second movie in the double feature was called Nostradamus Kid. If you ever want to make time stand still, and for some strange reason also torture your friends, have a screening of this 1992 classic at your house. No one that you will invite to the screening will ever speak to you again. There were some clues that the movie would be terrible:

• Almost everyone left the theater and no one new showed up
• The director's intro to the movie was very slow and boring. (Mike and I were considering running back to the car and getting some tomatoes to throw at him)
• The food catering company left after Storm Boy as if they knew that the business they would get from the second wave of moviegoers wouldn't be worth the torture of staying there.

This last clue also caused me to bring apples from the car and periodically fight possums for their possession during the movie.

We made it through - barely and called it a night, but we did go and see David Gulpilil's new movie Charlie's Country a couple of days later when the thought of sitting through another Australian movie no longer gave us hives. This was a very heavy movie that tackles the subject of the current situation between the Aboriginal people and the white people of Australia. Both Mike and I wished that we knew someone who could explain some of the nuances of the movie to us, but we think that between what we have seen so far on our own, and what we could understand from the movie, we have a pretty clear picture of how it is. I highly recommend watching it if you are curious about the current state of affairs in Australia in relation to the Aborigines.

Mike and I thought a lot after seeing the movie and tried to talk it all out. Bill Bryson, in his book on Australia, writes about the practice of Australians taking Aboriginal children out of their homes and placing them in foster homes. It's really the only topic that he discusses in relation to the Aboriginees. This practice occurred from 1910-1970 in this country. I looked it up and there is an estimate that between 10 and 30 percent of all Aboriginal children were taken out of their homes and put into foster care at that time. Think about that and what that would do to people. Consider that you are doing this to a people whose culture is very community oriented. If you want to research the topic more this is referred to as the "Stolen Generation".

It made me think of the social issues blog entry I had about NZ and this last month has shown me that the Maori lead a charmed life in comparison to the Aborigines. It's a topic that has not gotten much attention and I had not known how bad things really were here. I know that I am leaving off on a heavy note, but this is what I learned about OZ this month and I wanted to share. OZ is not just snorkeling and emus and kangaroos. I am telling you the good, the bad and the ugly. That is all (for now)