Monday, March 19, 2012

Australia - part 2

Where a lot of things told here happened: 


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The second week on the country-continent, the "land down under", saw us road-tripping through New South Wales and Queensland, at the time both badly hit by flooding. As we left Sydney, we had 24 hours of virtually uninterrupted rain which forced us to spend most of that time inside the camping van we had rented. It is one of the best ways to travel Australia, allowing maximum flexibility and autonomy in one's travel plans, and avoids the hassle of buying a van and having ti sell it in a hurry when you leave. The back is made of storage docks that transform into a comfortable mattress in the evening, and it comes with a small fridge, a water tank with a sink, and even a retractable gas stove to cook anywhere.
Jucy Rental "campa" van! from left to right: water tank, fridge, gas cooker, and amazing cook!

The rain stopped when we got into Queensland, Brisbane's state. We got a chance to reconnect with Susan, an Australian friend from Aiesec who had spent a year on the National Committee in Paris, and shared a wekk-end brunch with her and her friends at the recommendable Simpatico café. It is invigorating to be doing something "normal", i.e. something that feels like at home!
We then went on to drive a few hundred kilometers more to the North, to the Carnarvon National park, a millenia-old gorge carved by the Carnarvorn river through the Great Dividing Range. The Great Dividing range is a chain of moutains "dividing" the East coast of Australia from the rest of the country.

Carnarvon river. in the background, a little bit of the Great Dividing Range of mountains, where epic battles against Aborigines took place only a few centuries ago.

Recent floods in Queensland "may have displaced rocks or made them unstable. Visitors are advised to be cautious!"

 On the way to the National park, we stop at small "wildlife center" where koalas, kangaroos, dingos, spider monkeys, and a few other very exotic species are looked after. Feeding time is an opportunity to take a few sleepy koalas from their branch and have them receive cuddles from the public. They have a very thick fur, look and feel like teddy bears, and sleep 18 hours per day, normally waking up only at dusk to eat eucalyptus leaves, their only food.

These buddies are SO cute it's unbelievable. It's like "live teddy bears" :-D

Kangaroos are a lot of fun, their simple look an exotic mix of a rabbit head and a race dog rear-body.... but even that is not such a good comparison. A female was carrying its baby in the front pouch, the cub peering out from time to time and chewing unconvincingly at a few strands of grass.
hop hop hop... always jumping like a spring!

Taking a nap in the mommy's front pouch.
Miss a turn and you end up in Jurassic Park! this one looks like a surviving dinosaur...


The rest of the trip to the Carnarvon gorge feels a bit like we are laving civilization behind: there are progressively less and less radio channels, the last ones are all about country music, until you are left with just static. By the time we wonder how to let people know where we are going, mobile networks are long gone. And indeed... how to cover such an immense territory with mobile networks, when there are only 20 million inhabitants concentrated in urban areas on the coasts? Internet was never available outside of the major cities anyways, and fuel price increases a good 30% as we go inland.
We make a call to the "base camp" at the entrance of the National Park prior to starting our last ride of the day, already at the end of the afternoon. A very distressed woman explains that with the night coming, water still covering parts of the road, and cattle and animals crossing all the time, she strongly feels we'd be better off crossing the next day. Thus, we end up spending the night on a red dust area used by trucks ("road trains" as they are called, with 3 wagons and 60 tires each... could be "road monsters"), on the side of a road, in the middle of nowhere.
Not my own picture, but you get an idea!

When the night comes, by 7pm, the sky is clear and we probably never saw so many stars in our lives. Away from any other light source, all the dim rays from all the stars in the sky reach our eyes. They are everywhere. Even in the darkest parts of the sky, you can always find a tiny, flickering light showing that there is a star, or maybe there was, in that direction too.
The next morning, the last part of the way holds the camp woman's promises: flooded roads, abrupt crests, cattle squatting the road and kangaroos playing in the tall grass a few meters from us, when we were careful to approach them silently. A tough ride to make at night. The Carnarvon National Park is a huge playground for serious trekkers, the longest "walk" is a one-week circuit going around gorgeous sights and exploring the landscape from plains level to some of the close mountaintops.
Wait.... did we walk here? is this the way back to Ranger camp or is it the start of the week-long trek? argh. :-S

We leave that for the pro trekkers, and get to see traces of Aboriginal art: shapes of hands and objects, marked by the projection of pigment around the shape on stone. Aboriginal people have live in this area for almost 20.000 years.
No kid's business: cave art was the work of grown men. Aboriginal tribes lived in this area for about 19.000 years.

The park is home for more exotic species than we care to remember, including platypus and 2 of the 3 most venomous snakes in the country. Actually, on the way back, we spot on of them from the car, slowly moving on the side of the track.
One of the most venomous snakes in the world... This one was in a glass cage at the wildlife center, but we saw his twin brother on the side of the road. We went away very fast!

 Throughout the journey, we get to confirm our impression of Australians as friendly, smiling, helpful people. The urban youth tends to care more about fitness and food, balanced lifestyle, while in the remote countryside it seems to be about the comfort of life (often that means a 4x4 to get bread from the supermarket) and about the protection from natural threats, since insects and storms can be extreme hazards in those regions. Countryside houses only have one level and are very well-maintained, so you get this sense of modernism and cleanness.
All of that makes us both nostalgic of Europe and hungry for more discoveries!
Moving on to Santiago de Chile now!













Saturday, March 17, 2012

Australia - part 1/2

Australia
I had very few expectations when arriving in Australia, except the one of finding a country somewhat similar to home, and somewhat exotic. The familiar side is there, definitely: Sydney and Melbourne streets are bustling almost night and day with white, caucasion people, all the major food, fasion, and retail chains from the Western world are here to make our stay incredibly easier than in South-East Asia. Everyone speaks English, like they should, but the local accent is very hard to understand for us since many syllables are pronounced in a different way.
As for the exotic part... I have not found it yet: White people, again, though most would be very tanned; English names for streets and places, quite reminiscent of London and its burroughs; staple food looks a lot like meat, rather than rice; downtown architecture is a blend of classic Victorian style and modern glas-and-steel office towers; etc.
We learned that Melbourne is the largest Greek city outside of Greece, with 800.000 Greek citizens established there. Turkish, Indians, Japanese and to some extent Chinese are the other significant foreign groups there.
Sydney is obviously a more cosmopolitan, diverse city. It concentrates tourists, air traffic, and, in season, rainy weather like no other place in the country, or so it seems. Walking its streets, we encounter a multicolored crowd talking and laughing out loud, very prompt to start a conversation with you at a traffic light if you wear a funny hat or an unusual amount of luggage, or walk with crutches... well, very chatty, for any reason, really. And very nice and helpful towards the lost tourist peering at his tourist map.
History tells us that Australia was build by convicts, fugitives, and self-made tycoons. Today, road signs tell us that the Australian was also partly built on a large consumption of alcohol: the CBD is a formal "alcohol free zone", and regulations over consumption of alcohol are numerous. The latest book I swapped in a Bali hostel, "compulsive viewing", telling the tale of the TV industry in Australia, is filled with jokes and anecdotes of drunk executives abusing their staff and making alcohol-imbued decisions. Brisbane has a "drinking consultants" pub to make it clear that it's a business and you need to learn how to drink!
The sheer size of the country makes its 20-million-odd population very spread out, and transportation options always expensive. The location of the main cities on the East coast is based on the first commercial counters setup by the British, and on the West coast, on the late gold rush.
We take the train from Melbourne to Sydney, suffering high delays due to the flooding of large parts of the way. In Melbourne Southern Cross station , before the return train arrives, an Australian woman with dark skin tells us that she is going to Sydney to see her four children and eleven grand-children, and that it is the very first time she takes the train. She might be the first Aborigenal person we meet in the country.
As for the economy, industry is a major sector, with mining leading the pack. Environmental damage has become a concern in recent years, after international NGOs denounced un-sustainable corporate practices. Some of the large mining corporations try to wave off critics through facade CSR programs, while others genuinely engage stakeholders communities to make their operations more sustainable.
In the end, the white dominance of Australian society, and the underlying taboo about the Aborigenal population, is what strikes us the most. A duo of young entrepreneurs have identified a neighborhood where many Aborigenes live in Sydney, and is setting up "alternative" tours to raise interest about that community and fund local projects. But there does not seem to be that many other Australians with such commitment to making the society progress...