The Snowy Mountains

The web site for Australia's largest ski resort beckons visitors to come and "touch your first snow." But there's no snow on the mountains this time of year. Gosh, too bad I missed it!

Now that we're rounding into April, I'm getting pressed for time. Instead of dawdling all the way around the coast from Melbourne to Sydney, I took an inland cutoff through the Great Dividing Range and Kosciuszko National Park (pronounced "Kozzy-osco").

Kosciuszko is the highest peak in Australia, and while it doesn't compare to the Rockies, it's got about 1,000 feet on Mt. Washington. The national park protects an enormous area of wooded highlands all around it. I found a great camping area on a meadowy flat by a pretty river. The place was just stuffed with kangaroos.

FIGHT!

This is how they spend most of the day. They're as docile as livestock.

Lil joey

I also spotted a platypus swimming in the river, but they're extremely shy and too fast for photos, even with my new camera.

Unfortunately, it rained on and off through the two days I was there. I managed to get in a walk and some quality wildlife-watching, and the clouds cleared long enough for one spectacular sunset over the range.

Foggy dawn

Kookaburra near the river

A pair of crimson rosellas, ridiculously common parrots

"Do You Want Us to Take a Picture of You?"

No.

Do not take a picture of me, kind fellow tourists. I know I'm alone, but really, it won't be pretty.

When I take a picture of myself, I have to take about 45 shots at varying lights and angles to get one that doesn't make me look like a half-done potato.

You are so nice. Don't do this to me.

Melbourne

Edit: See additional photos.

Melbourne is Australia's second-largest city, falling behind Sydney, but most Melbournians will defend their town as the cultural Number 1. It has a hip reputation on the order of San Francisco or Portland, while Sydney's flashy, mainstream wealth is more like L.A. or Dallas.

Melbourne actually reminds me of Brooklyn. It's the first town I've seen in Australia that has what I would call grit. The buildings are old; cafes and storefronts are stuffed into sticky alleyways; graffiti and street-art are somewhere between tolerated and actively encouraged.

This is just a small sample of the street art I found within a block or two of the place where I'm staying.

Similar to visiting Brooklyn, a local guide is a must. Luckily, all of my contacts in Australia (mostly friends of friends) are in Melbourne. I got together with another AirBnB host, a really nice New Zealander named Geoffrey. His place is in Fitzroy, the coolest of the main suburbs (not really a "suburb," just a neighborhood outside the city center, like Somerville). My room has a balcony overlooking one of the busiest, coolest streets, which is awesome--I've walked to every amazing meal. Geoffrey has been at work for much of my stay, but he's a big foodie and enthusiastic traveler, so he gave me tips on where to go. Plus he's got cats.

My view up Brunswick Street in hip Fitzroy

 An Amherst/Planworld acquaintance, who also happens to be a chef, has walked me around and given me tons of tips on where to find the best coffee, tastiest gelato, and most authentic Thai food. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with a friend of a family friend, who also promises more hidden coffee spots and eateries.

Cool light fixtures and ironwork in a hidden alleyway shopping area

Some old municipal building converted into residential housing

Street art and flannel-clad citizens.

Many Australian buildings, including the place where I'm staying, have lovely ornate ironwork balconies.

There's lots of cool signage, too. I don't know if you can see the "Extreme Gelato" sign down the block. It's made with liquid nitrogen, and it is awesome.

You're noticing a theme by now. Australian food is having a renaissance after its meat-pie dark ages. In most of the cities, especially Melbourne, there's a familiar emphasis on local produce, craft brews, and slow, authentic techniques. "Local produce" happens to include incredible seafood, passionfruit, avocados, and the biggest, juiciest mangoes grown in an English-speaking nation. Massive Asian immigration has resulted in a wide range of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese spots in every town. Despite having access to a real kitchen and a real fridge, I'm happy to eat out for pretty much every meal.

I'm in town for one more full day, so I'll probably update this post with more photos, especially if I stop stuffing my face and go get a new camera.

The Great Ocean Road

I passed right by the cliffs of the Nullarbor Plain. But the Southern Ocean carves breathtaking shorelines all along the coast of Australia, so it's not like they were the last of the sweeping scenery. The Great Ocean Road runs between Adelaide and Melbourne, and it's a tourist trek on the order of Route 1 along the Pacific Coast of California.

A view from a random pulloff. Scenes of this caliber went on for miles.

I'd argue the GOR is even more beautiful. There are dramatic cliffs, sheltered coves, headlands, and many stunning beaches. While the road is windy and harrowing and crammed with Chinese tour buses, the stops are so plentiful and spaced-out that you can always find a perfect spot all to yourself.

The Twelve Apostles, the most famous sets of sea stacks

The Grotto

An unnamed collection of islands

Eventually, I had to give up stopping for scenery and just drive. If you got out at every dramatic overlook, at every pristine beach, at every adorable resort village, you'd never leave.

The GOR also winds its way through the rumpled Otway Mountains, which are covered in dense eucalyptus forest. I chose a camping spot in a crook of the mountains. On the way in, I had the place entirely to myself, including a beautiful "private" beach with some of the weirdest rock formations and best tidepools I've ever seen.

The campground filled up with Germans as evening came on. Australia is packed with German tourists.

Spooky-looking eucalyptus forests. Full of colorful parrots and cockatoos.

A rocky bay with beach

The honeycombed rocks were full of tiny snails.

Some of the best, most unusual, and most colorful seashells, too.

After setting up my tent, I was about to make my way down to the beach when another truck pulled up. A guy with a backpack hopped out and immediately disappeared down the path. There's a multi-day hiking trail all along the Great Ocean Road, so I figured he was headed off for a "bushwalk."

When I got down to the beach, I stumbled upon the same guy, now with headphones on, having a serious solo dance-off with the waves. At first, I backed off, knowing how I'd feel if someone walked in on me groovin' with the universe. But the dude waved and just kept on rockin' while I hopped around the rocks and watched the surf. Eventually, we said hello and had one of the easygoing, travel-story conversations that seem like second nature to Australians.

Australians are a well-traveled bunch. Just about everyone has been to the States, and usually through much of Asia as well. This guy, Cameron, had been to the Bay Area for a UFO convention (presumably, not of them), but he'd also worked in Papua New Guinea as a geologist, and now he lived in a little off-the-grid spot just outside the national park. He made the standard friendly Australian offer for me to stop by and visit. I thanked him, but I usually think of these invitations as hypothetical. I'm generally not the type to drop in on someone I don't know well.

The next day, I got up early and went on a short hike on a section of the GOR trail. What started as clouds and sprinkles eventually turned to a steady downpour. Eventually, I gave up, and went back to the Princess to dry off. Rain pounded down, and looked like it wasn't going to let up for the rest of the day. On about my third deal of solitaire, Cameron drove up again to check on me, and said he was about to light up his wood stove. This time, I was eager to take up the offer.

He had a cool little hippie joint in the hills, run on wind and solar, and covered in homemade art. He was a kook, but perfectly friendly, and we chatted about yoga and music and whatnot, and he gave me the address of a friend who had a guest house in an area I plan to pass through between Melbourne and Sidney. By evening, the rain quit, and I headed back to camp, grateful for the break.

The next day was nicer, though it had turned chilly, and I wandered to various spots in the national park. I went through one rainforest walk covered in moss and tree ferns.

I also took Princess on a tour along some mountain roads that my guidebook recommended. After a few kilometers, the dirt road became a track. In a few more, the track became a swamp, washed out by yesterday's rain. It was too narrow and forested to turn the Princess around. So for once, halfway through the trip, I actually put the gal in 4-wheel-drive, and we blazed through the mud, no problem. Now I can say I didn't waste the expense of the 4x4 rental.

After dark, I returned to another rainforest nature walk. Following signs by headlamp, people stopped at a spot where a trickling river carved steep banks into moss-covered rocks. We turned off our flashlights, and a constellation of blue glow-worms appeared. They looked like little fairies. (Far too dim for photographing, unfortunately.)

At some point, my camera got sand in the lens and gave up the ghost. Most of the above are cell-phone photos; I'll have to get a new (new) camera in Melbourne, where I am now. Melbourne is the Brooklyn of the Southern Hemisphere, vegan cronuts and all. I'll report from there next.

Adelaide Is Nice

I was thinking of visiting Adelaide merely as an overnight stop, since it doesn't have the "cool" rep of Melbourne. But after the Nullarbor, I was eager for a couple of days in a city hotel, so I parked here for a bit. I'm glad I did. Adelaide is one of the most pleasant places I've been to so far.

The city is small, just over 1 million people, and while it has sprawling suburbs, its center looks like this:


That entire green figure-8 is all parkland. Some of it is grassy and landscaped, while some is naturally scrubby and covered in eucalyptus. It's all criss-crossed with bike trails, waterways, and features like the beautiful Botanical Gardens and the Adelaide Zoo. It's also surrounded by low mountains, which makes for a more pleasing backdrop than the usual flat-as-a-plate Australian topography.

In the Botanical Gardens

A shady lane of fig trees

A fig tree in a nearby park

Bicycle for scale

My hotel was on Melbourne Street, in the heart of North Adelaide (the top part of the 8). I lucked out, landing on a street full of excellent cafes, restaurants, and shops.

Central Adelaide, about 10 minutes away by foot, is an easy-to walk grid, also full of restaurants and cafes and markets. Near the center are the Adelaide Central Markets, which are overflowing with vegetable stalls, bakeries, gourmet stores, and sweets shops, including the famous "Stinky Cheese Shop." I walked around for nearly 15 minutes just being overwhelmed before buying the next month's worth of cured meats, hard cheese, roasted nuts, and produce.

A mix of old and new architecture and parkland in downtown Adelaide.

The "Balls on the Mall," a public sculpture in one of the many pedestrian areas.

When you combine a small, green, prosperous city (in one of the world's great wine regions to boot) with friendly people who all go the speed limit, the result is an almost offensively pleasant place to hang out. I spent two long days just wandering around by foot and bicycle, visiting markets, restaurants, wine cellars, and coffee shops.

Plus, they got cool birds.

A punk pigeon

Rainbow lorikeets are everywhere, but they're fast and they stay in the treetops, so this was the first shot I caught. It's screaming. They do that. A lot.

 I greatly enjoyed my days in Adelaide. While not overly exciting, it was lovely and refreshing. Now, I'm off for about a week of relatively easy camping between here and Melbourne, where I'll have more urban adventures.

The Nullarbor Plain, or, What Traveling in Australia Is Really Like

Right now, I'm in Adelaide, the cozy, pretty capital of the state of Southern Australia. My tummy is stuffed with prawn and couscous salad, topped with a shamefully rich chocolate tart and some of the local chardonnay. My hotel room has artwork on the walls that could be a Duran Duran album cover.

All this feels unbelievably luxurious, because I've spent three grueling days behind the wheel. The journey from Esperance, Western Australia to Adelaide, South Australia, passes through nearly 2,000 kilometers of utterly uninhabited wasteland called the Nullarbor Plain. (Sorry, no pictures from the windshield this time; I was booking it, and rarely stopped for photos.)

Except this one.

"Nullarbor" sounds like a lot of the silly Aboriginal place-names down here (Woollomoolloo, Bungle Bungle, Chappaquiddick, etc.), but it's actually derived from "null arbor," or "no trees." All descriptions pointed to it being two relentless days of treeless, flat, featureless nothing.

The reality was much different, which ended up being both good and bad. For the first part of the journey, it looked a whole lot like all the long drives I've been doing across Australia (and I've been doing a lot of long drives). Wide agricultural fields that almost look too dry to grow anything; broad pastures dotted with sheep; occasional lanes of eucalyptus. Outside the cities, the population density drops off incredibly quickly. You immediately feel like there are no buildings other than distant farmsteads, and the only other vehicles on the road are similarly rugged, packed-to-the-gills Land Cruisers on their way to distant and difficult places.

Then, more natural country started to mix in. There were still plenty of trees--low and scrubby, but trees nonetheless--and the ground was covered with shrubs, bushes, and undergrowth. In fact, under high clouds, it was quite lovely. Most of the plants had a pretty blue-green color, giving the scene an almost icy glow. By the end of the first day's drive (over 10 hours) I hadn't stumbled upon anything that could be described as "treeless." I even found a perfect roadside camping spot with shade and privacy, not far from other determined travelers.

The next day, I entered what was supposedly the "real" Nullarbor. It was, in fact, very flat and treeless. I drove through something called the "90-mile straight," which is nearly 100 miles of road with no turns, no elevation changes, nothing different at all. It was like a video loop.

There were a few overlooks where the Plain meets the Southern Ocean in dramatic cliffs. When I stopped at the first overlook, a nice couple there said the cliffs got taller the farther east you went. So in the interest of making time, I skipped the next few overlooks. Before I knew it, the flat plain gave way to dense bush again--full of trees!--and led away from the coast. It turns out, the actual treeless Nullarbor only encompasses maybe 3 hours of a more than 18 hour drive along the Eerie Highway. When I bypassed the overlooks, I'd completely skipped the only scenic attraction of the entire trip! So that was bad. But it was also good, because the road itself was far more pleasant than its reputation made it out to be.

The other thing in evidence on the Nullarbor was the extreme niceness of the Australian people. On the Nullarbor, people wave. I mean, I'd already figured out that campervan drivers tend to wave at each other. Australia is so vast and so sparsely populated that on rural drives, passing another car is kind of an event. I make a point to wave at anyone who rents from the same place I did. (Men nearly always wave. Women wave about a quarter of the time. Bitches.)

But once you get on the Eerie Highway, everyone waves. Sometimes, the passengers would all wave simultaneously, like jazz-hands at the end of a big Broadway number. Now that I'm in the city again, I almost resent that people don't wave.

The only permanent habitation on the Nullarbor is roadhouses. Roadhouses are a kind of all-in-one Australian travel stop. They usually have a gas station, a convenience store, a restaurant, a motel, and a caravan park under one management. Some of them aren't much more than truck stops. Others are quirky, adorable spots with display cases full of homemade desserts and plump, grinning family members who joke with you and ask you where you're from as they ring up your diesel purchase. The roadhouses on the Nullarbor were almost universally the latter. I haven't actually spent the night at a roadhouse yet, but I won't mind when I do.

So the biggest, longest, toughest drive of the trip is done. Even with ample warning, it's taking me longer than I thought to get from one place to another down here, so I'm thinking of leaving the coast and cutting inland in the next week or two. Along the way, I might squeeze in a part of the trip I'd thought I'd miss--the Great Dividing Range, the only mountains in Australia worthy of the term.

In the meantime, FOOD AND WINE AND COFFEE.