The flight arrived on time on a brilliant day, the sun sparkling in the sapphire Pacific. The
Uber ride to the hotel, unfortunately, took rather longer when the driver missed an exit, and
the U-turn far down the road converted a twenty-minute ride into an hour and five.

One last box remained to check, per the travel guides: Manly Beach, a quick twenty-minute
ferry ride I could have done without. I had carried a mental image of a rugged shore —
towering cliffs, towering trees guarding pristine coves. Instead, it was another beach town of
the Southern California persuasion, a busy tourist trap. Well, you have to see it to know it.

I squeezed in a quick forty-five-minute workout this morning, and now it is time to hail the
Uber one last time. Then binge television and some wine across a fourteen-hour flight —
looking forward to a bit of levity and libations.

Bakersfield, here I come back.

– brij

Well, I have been tardy. Actually, I packed a lot of travel in those three days. I drove from the Thala Natural Reserve near Port Douglas to Cairns, returned the rental car, and flew to Sydney on Aug 1. In Sydney, a three-hour layover stretched into more than four hours, causing minor stress for a rental car pickup in Hobart, Tasmania. 

The gentleman sitting next to me on the plane turned out to be an Australian immigrant from San Diego, and the car rental guy had a girlfriend in Bakersfield before moving to Australia in 1993. I guess it is a small world after all.

I got into the hotel late and left early for my trip to Coles Bay with an educational stopover at the Bonorong Animal Sanctuary, where I got to meet the local marsupial celebrities. It was fun to hand-feed the kangaroos; not sure they would remember, but I have a few videos to reinforce my memory. In Coles Bay, in the Freycinet National Park, I stayed at the Freycinet Lodge. The preferred Wineglass lodge was sold out. The drive from Hobart to the Freycinet Lodge took about 2.5 hours. It is a single-lane highway coiled like a snake ready to attack, with a minimum of four bends per mile. I found the speed limit to be too aggressive for the highway. It left me in a constant state of alertness, making sure I wasn’t being an old coot slowing traffic for the more productive humans. I made up for lost time by hurrying up the hike to Wineglass Bay and squeezing in a visit to Honeymoon Bay before heading for my slightly late 6 pm dinner. The lookout for Wineglass Bay was majestic, but a walk down a thousand steps was more intimate. The hike up the steps earned an appetite. Monday morning, Aug 3rd, day 9; I enjoyed the dawn at Honeymoon Bay and the Sunrise at Friendly Beaches, with not a soul around. It was a special and memorable experience. By 8 am, I had run out of things to do in Freycinet. I stopped by the Freycinet Marine Farm Restaurant for the “best seafood in Tasmania” and headed back to Hobart. I am staying at The Tasman again, a Marriott property. I walked around the city a few times, had local fish at the hotel, and packed for the flight back to Sydney in the morning. I am not sure if anybody is interested, but I am keeping the count: two 15-hour flights, five domestic flights in Australia, three car rentals, and seven hotels. I feel fully rested and ready to start working the day I come back to the US.

– brij

I must confess that the experience itself was underwhelming, perhaps a victim of heightened expectations. We have all seen Discovery Channel documentaries, but the visit didn’t live up to that expectation. In retrospect, the reason is obvious: we visited a very small slice of this mammoth structure and then had to extrapolate its true size.

Now, the facts: The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth, growing for thousands of years. It hugs the Queensland coast for more than 1400 miles from a little distance, creating a buffer lagoon from the Pacific, sparing Queensland some of the fury from tsunamis and cyclones. The Dutch are bioengineering dikes with bioreceptive concrete to create a synthetic option that emulates reefs, aiming for a more viable way to ward off rising oceans. Nature threatens, nature lends a cure.

The Reef supports a rich biodiversity, with over 1,500 species of fish that live peacefully within its massive structure, which provides food and shelter. The fish have different food habits and habitats, eliminating the need for destructive competition, at least to an innocent bystander. Under the cover, predation abounds. They float around amicably, just like humans do.

Despite some buyer’s remorse, this is one box we have to check. Seeing threatened turtles is exhilarating. The schools of fish passing by a plethora of species and minding their own business is instructive, in more ways than one.

Tomorrow Tasmania.

– brif

I flew from Uluru to Cairns and drove to Oak Beach. What a transformative experience, thoroughly rewarding, with extremes from a cold, red desert to a tropical, lush coastal habitat.

Lemme be honest, the driver’s seat is still on the wrong side, and the indicator functions as a windshield wiper, especially when I am in a rush. But I make do.

Cairns is not meant to be a transitional city; it ought to be experienced with the clock at a standstill. I was there for all of 15 minutes, longing for 15 days.

The drive to Oak Beach is a slow, sinuous coastal road with frequent roadwork interruptions. It is gorgeous, though, if I had a skilled driver, I would love to enjoy it.

The sunlight fell to the floor, writhing between the wildly swaying trees that densely canopied the road. The light and shadow dance vied for attention, but the heavily trafficked road, with frequent blind spots, demanded full attention.

I stopped at a viewpoint, Rex Lookout, to enjoy a majestic panorama looking at the bay. The feisty winds have stirred the waters that swallowed the shoreline sand and assumed its color.

The Thala Beach Reserve Resort is a doozy. It is a tropical paradise that one would expect in Kauai.

I came here intending to hike; however, the receptionist laid out the lay of the land, and the snakes on the trail were an effective deterrent. I have been not only coaxed but coerced into decadence; the Great Barrier Reef it is.

Walking on the beach, part of the resort property, I befriended a rather forward older beauty. At 12, she retained amazing agility and insisted that I keep throwing her the wooden stick, which she would unfailingly catch in an acrobatic jump. She didn’t tell me her name, a canine and kind one.

I enjoyed the dinner at the resort restaurant, admiring the changing colors of the setting Sun on the tropical jungle, embroidering a tumultuous sea.

The retreating Sun’s blush crimsoned the mountainous clouds on the far horizon.

All in all, a fairly decent day.

Barrier Reef tomorrow.

– brij

A Journal of Winter in the Southern Hemisphere

The Decision

The decision to travel to Australia bore all the classic hallmarks of my decision-making
process: a spontaneous impulse followed by an afternoon of furious logistics. By
dinnertime I had airline bookings, six hotels scattered across the southeast, the Red
Centre, and Tasmania, multiple car rentals, and a lattice of domestic flights. And voilà —
I was ready to trade the baking heat of Bakersfield for the winter of the southern
hemisphere. An Australian summer has never tempted me; an Australian winter, on the
other hand, is my kind of season.

Sydney — Arrival

I landed in Sydney at seven in the morning and, defying jet lag with the stubbornness of
a man who has paid for the day, dedicated it to the city: the fabled Opera House and a
climb up the storied Harbour Bridge.

The Harbour Bridge was completed during the Depression for about six million pounds,
and it exemplifies the unyielding resilience of the Australian people — a chapter of lore
embedded deep in the national psyche, much as the Empire State Building, another
child of the Depression, stands as testament to American grit.

The Opera House, famously, was conceived by its Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, who
arrived at those soaring shells while contemplating the segments of a peeled orange.
Now, I am from Kern County. I have seen my share of oranges, and a fair number of
their peels, and not once have they whispered architecture to me. I don’t know what
Utzon was smoking, but it was mighty good stuff. The ledger tells a more familiar story:
a budgeted seven million dollars ballooned to over a hundred million, and the planned
four years of construction stretched to fourteen — a virtual certainty in today’s
construction business, where timelines and budgets are rough estimates deployed
chiefly to bait the investors.

The Park Hyatt, a perennial stomping ground for British celebrities, offers pretty
exclusive views of the majestic Opera House, while the ferries below continually shuttle
enthralled tourists to the surrounding attractions.

The Blue Mountains — Katoomba

Early the next morning — technically Day One in Sydney proper — I headed to
Katoomba, a town of natural beauty nestled in the lap of the Blue Mountains. A
pilgrimage to Katoomba mandates three rites: viewing the Three Sisters, carved by wind
and water from the sandstone escarpment; admiring Katoomba Falls (the name itself
derives from an Aboriginal word for shining, falling water); and an up-and-down on the
Giant Staircase, some nine hundred steps descending nearly eight hundred feet into the
Jamison Valley. My quadriceps registered a formal complaint on the way back up; it was
overruled.

The two-hour train ride back to Sydney became a minor adventure when, halfway
through, the train stopped dead — a “network failure,” the announcement said. Such
failures, I am told, are not unusual, a product of aging infrastructure and long-running
labor disputes. Every country, it seems, has its own version of deferred maintenance.

The Red Centre — Uluru

After a two-night stint in Sydney, I boarded a three-hour flight to Ayers Rock in the
Northern Territory. The 2,500-kilometer journey offered a monotonous, mesmerizing
view of the land below: a Mars-like surface, red and cracked and inhospitable to life.
Then, descending, I caught my first aerial glimpse of the sacred behemoth the Anangu
people have revered for some thirty thousand years. Uluru rises about 1,140 feet above
the plain, runs nearly ten kilometers around, and continues for kilometers more beneath
the surface — an iceberg of stone in an ocean of desert.

I rented a car at the airport and drove to the hotel with a fair amount of trepidation, this
being my inaugural attempt at driving on the left side of the road. The rental car and I
reached an uneasy truce somewhere around the second roundabout. That evening, the
desert rewarded the effort with a spectacular sunset at the Dune Top viewing area — the
rock smoldering orange, then crimson, then a bruised purple as the light died.
Early the next morning I drove some fifty kilometers to Kata Tjuta for the Valley of the
Winds, a hike of a couple of hours through domes of conglomerate rock that make a
man feel agreeably small. On the way back, I paid my respects at the base of mighty
Uluru and took in its majesty up close — a thing photographs flatten and presence
restores.

Tomorrow, I head to Cairns, Queensland, as the adventure continues.

– brij