gone living

after trying on a variety of silly hats here in adelaide (photos coming soon), we settled on a couple of akubra hats to keep the sun out of our eyes while hiking in the outback. we picked up our 4wd toyota land cruiser yesterday complete with power fridge and rooftent (see the picture if you aren't familiar with the rooftent concept. it's not something you often see in the United States) from our excellent rental folks, and are now fully loaded with supplies and ready to head up north into the flinders ranges, entering the australian outback for the first time. our 1-way drive from adelaide to darwin will take us over 2,700 kilometers right through the middle of australia. (that's 1,670 miles for all the good folks not using the metric system)

our plan is to spend a leisurely three weeks heading north across australia on the stuart highway, with extensive detours at australia's national parks along the way. then we return the car in darwin, where i hop on a flight 1-way flight up to brunei to begin the southeast asia portion of the trip.

thanks to the wonderful weird circumstances of this trip, i'll be picking up my dive mask (fitted with prescription lenses) at the post office in coober pedy, which is about as far from any diving as you can get. i'll explain the circumstances of this one another time, and leave figuring out why i'm doing this as an exercise to the reader.

as part of our tour through the outback, we took our trusty land cruiser up into the flinders ranges to do some camping. (and took photos of quorn along the way) we arrived at wilpena pound in the late afternoon to check out the info from the visitor's center and drove out to check out a couple of campsites, before we settled on our camp at the "koolaman" campsite, where we happily found a spot in the 4wd section of the camp.

we setup camp easily thanks to the rooftent (which has been serving us well... i don't know why we haven't seen this handy invention before in the states), and Jean cooked up her usual camp delicacies for dinner (that night's dinner: lamb sausage with curry powder). my ipod provided some background downtempo music for us from the land cruiser's stereo, and we watched the night stars and made up constellations. while we slept at night, our camp was tromped through by what could only have been many kangaroos and/or emus.

we also did some great hiking here, where also witnessed the beginning of the "cloud of flies" feature that seems to increase in intensity the further north we travel (so far, at least). in addition, there were a decent number of large spiders in the trees every few feet, but they seemed content to stay in their webs and feast upon the flies that were pursuing us on the trail. but no kiler snakes, which was a good thing.

we regretted leaving the flinders after only one night there... i've got to return there again sometime in the future. it reminds me of arches and canyonlands national parks in utah, but without the massive crowds. a very well-maintained, well-preserved, and attractive park, with excellent facilities. if you're thinking about camping in australia, consider visiting the flinders ranges.

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.

the first encounter started innocently enough -- an old newspaper we picked up at the cafe to read while we waited for our flat white and long black coffees. the easy-to-read format of the tabloid size drew us in, and the delightfully opiniated headlines and bad puns (such as "MEATWORKERS TASTE VICTORY"), kept us there.

unlike US-based tabloids, these are not focused on far-fetched stories about the Bat Boy or front-page celebrity gossip (well, not purely focused, at least). instead, they're a highly editorialized view of the day's news with.

while i wouldn't subscribe to one as my only source of daily news, they make for very entertaining reading at lunch or in the car during our long stretches of driving, where we read each other stories about a baby Meerkat kidnapped from the zoo, and giant tuna.

so Advertiser, Courier Mail, Daily Telegraph, and Herald Sun, thanks for all the tabloid fun. i'll miss you when i head up to southeast asia at the end of this month. until then, i'll be enjoying every page of infotainment.

we're in alice springs for a few days. the days are intermittently sunny and beautiful, or overcast with dollops of warm rain coming down in irregular intervals. now that we've entered the northern territory, the beer of choice is Castelmaine XXXX (instead of Coopers in South Australia). Jean and I both became Coopers Pale Ale fans, and we miss seeing it in the pubs up here.

alice is the first "big city" we've been in since we left adelaide -- being able to restock at large supermarkets, find camping supply stores, and get fast internet access has been excellent. after this we'll be back to camping and small towns for the next week or so until we reach Darwin, so we'll be putting our new gear to good use. in addition, being able to find breakfast menu items like pancakes and french toast again (instead of the famous "Toast And ..." breakfasts that have followed us through the otuback) is a major plus.

after spending some time decompressing from our last run of camping, and taking care of necessary things like burning our photos onto DVD, downloading the latest episodes of Lost onto Jean's Video iPod via the iTunes Store, getting additional camping supplies (it never hurts to actually have mantels for your propane lamp), and so forth.

after another day or two here of seeing the sights, we'll proceed either south or north to start doing some more camping, and begin slowly making our way north to Darwin.

found at the carnival in alice springs:

jean also got a great video of the same carnival game.

we just drove back a few hours ago from three days of driving, camping, and hiking. starting off in alice springs, we then drove over to hermannsburg, and then over on a corrugated (and VERY rough) dirt road to king's canyon, and then up on the same road to the west mcdonnell ranges.

camping in king's canyon was run by one of those fancy "resort" campsite companies). as people tend to do when catering to the backpacker/camper market, the term "resort" is used very loosely. the wasp's nest inside the bathroom stall was a nice surprise, though.

king's canyon itself was a beautiful day of hiking, and i've posted up some of my favorite king's canyon photos from the hike.

the next day we drove up to the west mcdonell ranges proper, and jean made an amazing chicken tikka masala dinner at our campsite (in an actual national park campsite, which was well-maintained as usual for the AU park system), which i'm looking forward to eating the leftovers from for dinner tonight. props to woolworth's australia for having amazing off-the-shelf premade chicken tikka masala sauce, chutney and roti. (this fared much better than the 'el paso' taco shells that we'd purchased from another woolworth's to make tacos with.)

at this point we're nearing the end of the time in australia with our land cruiser. we're due in darwin by the 25th, so we're planning to head out of Alice tomorrow morning and start driving north, hopefully stopping in Kimberley for a few days to do some hiking and camping.

while it's exciting to be flying to Brunei in a week from now (thus kicking off the Southeast Asia portion of my trip), i'm going to miss the long 4wd excursions with jean, playing fatboy slim and downtempo music at volumes high enough to overcome the constant rattle of the corrugated roads, and seeing how much of the car we can cover in water by hitting that next deep mud puddle at top speed.

next stop, tennant creek!

we stopped here enroute from alice springs to darwin based on the advice of the moon handbooks guide to australia and camped for a night.

outside our tent last night we heard, in addition to the usual mumur of traffic, the sounds of shouting, screaming, obscenities, whistling, and barking in the evening air. sounding like a riot in progress, the volume ranged from faint to about a block away. the one sound we never heard was a police siren.

the noise continued until late in the night, and didn't let up until moning. we never did find out exactly what the source of the noise was. we left tennant creek and started driving north shortly after dawn.

after a long night in tennant creek, we decided to bypass the recently flooded catherine gorge at just drive the 1000km straight through to darwin.

we arrived tired, sweaty (cutting down on the a/c usage in the land cruiser to avoid having to buy too many $200 AUD gas fillups), and ready to rest. we booked a room at a backpackers called Melaleuca On Mitchell who had a few reasonable-sounding sentences describing them in our australia guidebook.

after a sleepless (and noisy) night spent trying to sleep in a tent on top of a land cruiser, and a long day of driving through the outback, there is nothing like checking into a room with large beds, air conditioning, fans, a private bathroom. except when you go upstairs and find out that there isn't just a pool, but a pool bar as well.

so today there are no grand excursions to report, no crazy experiences or canyon jumps, just uploading photos and videos, catching up on blog entries, and lying out in the sun with a cold cooper's pale ale. vacation rules.

as i sit here in my hostel using the internet and wondering how much i'll read of neal stephenson's phonebook-sized the system of the world (luckily i'm reading the british edition, which has a much better cover, as is usually the case with british paperback books) today, while increasingly stronger and louder winds of cyclone monica batter our building from the outside, i thought i'd post some cyclone factoids for all of you:

1. cyclone monica is a tropical cyclone, which is the same thing as a hurricane.

2. according to the caption on this photo from yahoo news, it's now only a category 2 (Australian Scale) cyclone. (On the US hurricane scale, this would rank it as a "tropical storm").

3. all stores on my street in darwin (mitchell st) are closed, aside from the grocery store which is open. however, the liquor store attached to the grocery store is closed.

4. speaking of beer, the bar in my hostel is on the roof next to the swimming pool, and therefore closed. (the drawbacks of a pool bar... looks like it will be a dry cyclone party.)

5. this is not the headline i need to read before i've had coffee: "'Perfect cyclone' bears down on Australian city - Darwin, leveled by winds 32 years ago, lies in Monica's path." (from yahoo's frontpage, accompanied by a picture of a big ominious cloudy spiral). this then changed to "Cyclone threat eases in Australia" when i dug deeper for a more recent headline.

stay tuned to your favorite news sources for details about cyclone monica.

cyclone monica ended up missing darwin and losing enough strength that it is now a tropical depression.

today in darwin ending up being a day with lots of rain and wind, and hanging out indoors. this meant reading trashy sci-fi books that i found on sale the day before, and working on blog tweaks and enhancements.

two technologies that helped out today: wikipedia for their great news coverage on cyclone monica, and apple's ipod radio remote which let me tune into local radio news on the cyclone.

today, besides visiting the amazing crocodylus park just outside of darwin, we returned our trusty land cruiser after 3 weeks of camping and roadtripping our way from adelaide to darwin. this ended up taking us over 6000km across australia.

returning the car marks the end of the portion of the trip with jean, who will be staying in australia for a while before heading home, hopefully to rejoin for a while later this year. i'll definitely miss travelling with jean, but i've done solo travelling before, so i'll continue forward the around-the-world goal. this means that i only have a few days left in australia before i fly to brunei and begin my tour around southeast asia.

australia, i'll miss you, especially given that you are the only country i've been to that is as completely simpsons-obsessed as i am.