An Inland Visit

We flew to Adelaide so we could pick up the The Gahn. This famous train runs through the center of Australia between Adelaide at the south end of the continent and Darwin in the north. Named after the Afghan camel trains that were the only way to transport goods across the center of Australia in the previous centuries. It’s an up-scale sleeper train with all inclusive food and drink. In the photo above we are stopped in the middle of the desert at sunrise to get a look at the morning star, Venus (actually a planet), rising as you rub the sleep sand out of your eyes. You get a good feel for the vastness of the empty center of the outback.

There’s lots of time to sit in the lounge car with a wine or a cider and read or do some emu spotting. We got off The Ghan in Alice Springs and had a good look around the town made famous by the book/movie “A Town Called Alice”.

Gotta love the bird life in Australia. Here's he resident, noisy, Galahs on an Alice Springs street.

Next day we headed out to Uluru, aka Ayer’s Rock. On the bus ride out to catch some sunset colors on the rocks we pass this feral camel that was totally destroying this tree.

Along with tree destroying camels thy have people destroying flies. Without the fly net I would have packed it and watched CNN on the hotel TV.

These are the Kata Tjuta rocks glowing for us at sunset.

Next morning we got up before sunrise (to be precise, at some god awful time) so we could walk the 10.5kms (6.5 miles) around the base of Ayer’s Rock and catch the sun on it just as it rises. Pretty impressive. These aren’t mesas like we have in the desert Southwest of the US, these are actually huge boulders that are ‘floating’ in the desert sand, like icebergs what you see is only a small part of the entire rock.

We saw some hidden rock paintings, each still telling their own story. This is officially Aboriginal land and these are sacred sites.

After Ayer’s Rock we flew to Melbourne. What a great city. Lots of new construction along with some interesting history. The city has to have the best restaurants in Australia. We stayed in the CBD (Central Business District) and got around on the free street car trollies.

Melbourne is a nice town to walk in, but I sure wouldn’t want to drive here. I wouldn’t have a clue which of those 12 traffic lights applies to me. Then there’s the how to turn right if you are driving in Melbourne. Remember the country drives on the left. If you look at the picture above you can see the right-hand turn lane is on the left side of the on going traffic. So you are driving down the road and you want to turn right. You move over to the left lane and make a mad dash to right when you think you have some chance of living through it. The locals claim it has something to do with the trollies going down the center of the street.

Can’t stop in Melbourne without visiting the famous Victoria market.

There’s also lots of great street art in Melbourne carefully sprayed in select alleys in the CBD.

---

After our inland tour of Oz we flew back to Bellingham (via Vancouver) to get our grandkid fix. It was well worth it, although I had to endure many dragon attacks.
If you are flying across the Pacific, fly Air New Zealand if you can. They are head and shoulders better than Air Canada.
Chris is back working with her consulting project in Kathmandu while I do boat projects. As usual I am adding items to the list a little faster than I am checking them off.
Next week we fly down to Sydney for the day to get our extended Indonesian visas. Then we start the 1,200 mile trip up the Queensland east coast with plans to sail to Indonesia in August.
Keeping with the apolitical nature of this blog, thought my dedicated reader might relate to this thought:

Wuerker, Politico

Paul