rezendi

Sydney, Australia: Remembrance Day

All good trips must come to an end. And so in a few short hours I will
fly from springtime in Sydney to the brooding gloom of London.

Yeah.

(At this point the author pauses for a brief interlude of
uncontrollable weeping, wailing, kicking, screaming, gnashing of teeth,
wearing of sackcloth and ashes, and a Richter 9.5
fists-beating-on-the-floor tantrum.)

Ahem. As I was saying. Right. Leaving Australia. Going to England.

(Repeat above interlude. Calm is only restored by a tag-team
combination of trauma counsellors, Zen masters, and powerful
antidepressants.)

At least I'm leaving on a high note. Yesterday I went out for a day of
canyoning in the Blue Mountains, which was all kinds of fun. The day
kicked off with a fifty-foot cliffjump into water, followed by donning
a wetsuit and going crosscountry down a steep river ravine so narrow it
nearly turned into a spelunking expedition. The water was absolutely
freezing, but the sun was warm. A little light rock-climbing out of the
canyon was followed by an afternoon of swimming and rappelling (aka
abseiling for some of you) down cliffs. I cruised back to town on an
endorphin wave.

But let's get chronological. Since my last report, in Cairns, I spent a
couple of days pottering around the coast doing a little sea kayaking
and such, and then decided to embark on a cross-country expedition from
Cairns to Alice Springs, across the so-called Dead Heart, to get a
sense of the size of the country.

Unsurprising answer: big. Slightly more surprising corollary; extremely
weird. We're talking middle of nowhere here. We're talking towns with a
population of 1 (human) and 6,000,000,000 (flies), 200 km away from
anywhere else. We're talking local yokels straight out of an Aussie
DELIVERANCE. Twenty-foot-high termite mounds. Cattle ranches the size
of Wales. Pet emus. And life-size plaster dinosaurs. Lots of them, all
over the place. What can I say? The outback is a strange place.

After a brief stopover in the civilized oasis of Alice Springs, I spent
another few days roving through canyons, bushfires, camel ranches, and
finally to The Rock. I speak of neither the People's Champion nor the
bad Nicolas Cage movie, but of Uluru, aka Ayers Rock. And wow.

The rest of the rocks and canyons are a bit anticlimactic to anyone
who's been to the American Southwest, but Uluru really is something
else. And not just because it's a cool big red monolith. There's
something majestic about it. I could have spent all day just walking
around it, watching.

I had dialed my cultural insensitivity up to maximum and was fully
prepared to climb up the rock, but it was closed due to high winds.
Instead I went for a run around the 10k trail that circumnavigates it.
This turns out to be a) one of the world's most spectacular runs, b) an
excellent way to add to one's collection of very strange looks and
half-heard mutters of "bloody stupid madman" from pedestrians one
passes en route.

From the Red Centre, Qantas flew me through the smoke of a dozen
bushfires back to Sydney, where I've been lazing, chilling, gorging,
and watching a strange and mesmerisingly slow game named 'cricket' for
the last couple of days. As far as I can tell, this particular game has
not yet ended, and is not expected to end until sometime next week, if
ever. And the Australians are thrashing the English. That part, at
least, is not so strange.

I must go; only a couple of hours to H-Hour, when I begin the long
journey to the land of the soon-to-be-defeated Brits. I go with a whole
heap of regret. It's a good country, this. I'll be back.