gone living

when i was buying some travel gear from flight 001 in san francisco before leaving on this trip, i found a half-broken sony ICF-SW12 in their clearance rack for 80% off. after the helpful girl working at the store swapped it with one that actually worked, i threw in in my backpack as a travel alarm clock, and i figured that if i used the radio at all, that would be a nice bonus.

lesson learned: any product where the floor unit is already partially broken means that the same breakage will probably happen to you too. when i pulled out the radio at our campsite in the flinders ranges to try it out, the clock/alarm part of the gadget were already broken. but a quick test revealed that the shortwave radio part of it was still functioning, so i started randomly scanning the shortwave stations that we could pick up.

there is nothing like standing in an extremely isolated place and hearing fragments of indian pop music, british-accented newscasts, and voices in every language coming out between bursts of static. we finally settled on one of the indian pop stations as a new day dawned over our campsite, and reflected on the "real world" which seemed so far away that morning.