down under

With Malaysia sitting atop our list of countries to revisit (we'd made the most new friends there, spent the second shortest time - just a week - there, and of course, there's the fucking Thaipusam festival still to see), Maya and I headed off for a week in Australia. Arriving in Sydney felt at once comforting after the last 3 months of Asian insanity (we can actually drink the tap water?! No squat toilets?!), but also strangely anticlimactic. A safe western city - yawn. (An opera house shaped like a bunch of big clam shells - double yawn.) And after Southeast Asia, shit seemed really expensive (and even compared to the U.S., it is). The next day we were flying down to Hervey Bay, and from there we were renting a car to drive to Bundaberg and Bargara Beach, where we'd be spending 4 days, visiting the Great Barrier Reef, among other activities; so we spent much of our afternoon in Sydney looking for CDs to listen to during our forthcoming drive - the new Serj Tankian solo album and the new Dillinger Escape Plan album. There were tons of record stores near our guesthouse (which was in a trendy, Village-like area called Newtown), but we couldn't find the Serj album for less than 20 Aussie dollars (which is just about 20 U.S. dollars!) and the Dillinger for less than 30 dollars(!) (so we bought the former, passed on the latter - both are really fucking good, by the way; a warning from Maya about the Serj CD: "The songs might get stuck in your head and drive you insane!").

But if Sydney seemed anticlimactic after everything that has come before it on our trip, once we got down to the coast and started driving around "the bush," as the Aussies call it, the great Down Under did not disappoint. First, there was just the view from the plane of the coast, the ocean, the islands, and the Reef - simply stunning. We couldn't help but be filled with anticipation.


Then there was the driving - my first time driving on the "other" side of the road, which has been a bit of an adventure but not nearly as difficult as I had feared (my biggest problem is that I keep turning on the windshield wipers whenever I try to turn-signal). And the landscape has been amazing - wild, wide-open countryside; vast, dramatic skies; perfect clouds...

...and, we were particularly excited to come across, the occasional kangaroo-crossing street sign.

Most of all, it has been all those crazy Aussie animals that have made our time here so outstanding - in the last 5 days, we've had run-ins with technicolor fish, 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world, hungry crocs, suburban kangaroos, a ginormous nesting turtle - and a little dog named Buddy (who belongs to the owners of the B&B, Golden Cane, we're staying at) that even Maya (who's generally terrified of dogs) can't help but like...

Technicolor Fish: On our first full day along the coast, Maya and I woke at 5am, had our "brekkie" (as the Aussies call breakfast), drove an hour and a half through the bush, and went on a 9-hour trip out on the Great Barrier Reef. First, there was a 90-minute boat ride bouncing over the high waves - we saw at least two other passengers puking from motion sickness - and then, once above the Reef, Maya and I snorkeled and even scuba-dived (our first time doing the latter) in the midst of the most ridiculous menagerie of tropical fish - I don't know any of their names (parrot fish? Long, thin tube-shaped fish?), but it seemed like basically every species in Finding Nemo, other than the sharks.

4 of the 5 Most Venomous Snakes in the World: Another day we went to this place called Snakes Down Under, where this crazy Steve Irwin-esque Aussie dude, Ian Jenkins, runs a little reptile zoo, where he handles 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world (all 5 hail from Australia). Visitors aren't allowed to handle any of those, but they are allowed to handle a big python - and since I had just gotten a snake tattoo before Maya and I left the States, and since this trip is, in some ways, supposed to be about gaining new strength and facing old fears (a fear of snakes being one of mine), I felt like I had to partake. And you know what, I really wasn't freaked out at all - it's been so long since I've actually tested my supposed fear of snakes that, it seems, the fear has faded away without me even realizing it.

Hungry Crocs: At Snakes Down Under, this Jenkins dude also feeds what turns out to be an absolutely humongous crocodile. We had no idea of the beast's proportions as it was laying at the bottom of a small muddy pool in its holding pen; then Jenkins - holding a fresh, fully feathered chicken wing in his hand, and wearing a Santa Claus cap on top of his Paul Hogan hat - slapped the water with a long bamboo pole and the croc, which must have been 10 feet long, exploded out of the surface, sending water everywhere as if a bomb had gone off. The creature then crawled after him and snapped the wing from his fingers with an awful crunch. That's one powerful motherfucking beast - and one crazy motherfucking Aussie.



Suburban Kangaroos: Another day Maya and I drove to this small beach town called Woodgate, where, according to our B&B owners, kangaroos are known to roam the streets and backyards. As soon as we got there (around 12:30pm), we spotted three kangaroos bounding across the road ahead of us, but when we asked a grizzled old local when/where was best for 'roo-watching, he told us that the "nasty pests" are "like Mexicans" during the midday, spenting it just "sleeping in the shade," and really only come out in the afternoon. So, with some time to kill, we decided to go swimming - the beach was virtually deserted; the surf, high; the ocean, bathwater-warm. We didn't have any towels or our swimming suits on us, so we just stripped down to our undies and jumped in.

After a few hours and a quick lunch, we drove slowly through the town, looking for kangaroos - and they were fucking everywhere! Whole crowds of them - huge adult males, cute little ones, and even mothers with babies in their pouches - hanging out in people's yards along Woodgate's perfect suburban lanes, just lounging, sitting, standing, grazing, and staring back at us! It was bizarre and amazing, everything we could have hoped for - and yet as we repeatedly stopped our car, gawked, and snapped endless pictures, the locals just continued with whatever they were doing, almost oblivious to what was to them an everyday presence. Maya and I could only conclude that if monitor lizards are Bangkok's squirrels, then apparently, kangaroos are Woodgate's.



A Ginormous Nesting Turtle: Perhaps our most remarkable animal encounter was later that same day, when we went to the Mon Repos Conservation Park, a turtle rookery where visitors can see endangered loggerheads laying their eggs during their late fall/early winter nesting season. Maya and I got there around 6:30pm, and along with a group of maybe 40 other visitors, we were led by down to the quickly darkening beach, where, we were told, a turtle had been spotted crawling onto the beach. As we approached, however, we saw that the creature - which was huge, 3 or 4 feet long, and maybe half as wide - was making a U-turn back toward the water. The female scientist leading us explained that the turtle must have seen us and been scared off, but she said that another turtle was up on the beach not too far away and had already begun digging out her nest. Unfortunately, when another scientist went to check on this turtle, she discovered that it was a very young female who didn't seem to know how to properly dig her nest, and she had already abandoned her first attempt and was on to a second; the researchers didn't want us to disturb her in the middle of her struggles, so they told us to all sit on the sand and wait. As we were waiting, we spotted a dark shape emerging from the water directly below us; it was, most likely, the original turtle re-emerging from the ocean. The first scientist told us that we would have to all shuffle over while keeping low to the ground to get out of the way of the turtle without her seeing us and getting scared away again, so, in a truly absurd scene, all 40-plus of us crab-walked and crawled through the sand as the loggerhead lumbered out of the water and up onto the sand, seeming to follow us the whole way, forcing everyone to crab-walk and crawl even further. (Our undies were still wet from our earlier swim, so Maya got to do all this in a skirt without any panties on! Don't worry - the skirt was long and rather tight, so there was no free show for anyone.) Then we sat frozen for a long time as the turtle set up almost right next to the group and started making her nest. We ended up watching her for over 2-hours (till 10:30pm or so), as she meticulously dug out her egg chamber with her two back flippers, as she lay 129 eggs, as she filled up and buried over the nest with sand, and then, as she crawled back into the ocean. It was a ridiculously arduous process; big loggerheads are clumsy on land, and this one was clearly exhausted by the end. Plus, the turtles expel the salt that accumulates in them during all their time in the ocean through their eyes in what are known as "turtle tears," which meant that as this loggerhead labored through the night, she appeared to be crying. What made the experience all the more powerful and poignant was that this turtle, like many others, had misjudged her nesting spot, placing it below the high-tide mark, which meant that, if left there, her eggs would all drown. In such cases, however, after the turtles return to sea, the scientists move the eggs to higher nests that they have made themselves; and in this case, Maya and I got to help carry the freshly-laid turtle eggs into the new nest. Unlike snakes, I've always loved turtles - I had many of them as pets as a kid, and there's something about their solitary nature, the way they carry their homes on their back, their slow-and-steady approach to life, their old, craggy, wizen faces that really resonates with me. As Maya and I watched the massive loggerhead crawl back through the darkness into the ocean, knowing that her species is facing possible extinction, and that for all her hard work, the nest she had just made would have been doomed if it had not been for the scientists here, I realized that I had discovered another thing I like about turtles: their persistence in the face of futility, fighting the good fight even when defeat seems assured. Which is really what it feels like sometimes, trying to live a good life in this world of ours.