Toughen up Mate

Well I made myself not cry, but I wanted to cry. Travelling I have found is a series of hellos and goodbyes. Thing is, Stephen would have just said "toughen up mate" anyway. Mount Isa was my last stop with Stephen and Yuka. They stayed all day there with me. They could have dropped me off at a hostel, or a hotel, but instead we kicked around together. We went to a tourist trap, tried to burn a CD, drank a beer, caught a footy game and watched the sunset from "the lookout". All the while I watched the hours tick by. After sunset we found a beautiful camp spot, made dinner ( pesto pasta) and then laid on our backs in silence. Yuka and I looked for shooting stars. She's good at spotting them, if you can imagine she's a bit more patient than I. She saw three. In the early morning we packed up our camp and headed to the Greyhound station. We had our morning breaky ritual in the parking lot while waiting for my departure time. When I had to go, Stephen and Yuka walked me to the bus and said goodbyes. I got on the bus but I didn't look up. I got ready for a long ride. The bus took some time to do the same and it was 15 minutes before it left for the coast. As we pulled away I watched the anxious passengers looking out the window for their last exchange. One older woman moved from one side of the bus to the other to wave goodbye. I looked at the bus station, the info sign, the picnic tables; all the inanimate objects I could find. I looked at the parking lot where we had parked for breakfast; the spot was empty. As the bus turned for the coast, I saw a red van, and two people waving. My two people. They waited. I jumped up and gave them big smiles and big waves but I could no longer "toughen up". After I passed them, I sat down and cried.

F'in Desert

You guys know how I feel about the desert. It was easy though to romanticize about the OUTBACK. All the hype,the allure, the adventure and the F'in sand. All the pictures of the beautiful barren landscape, dotted with graves, dead cattle and anthills. Oh yeah. I have a haiku. Flies. Flies and more flies. Flies in my eyes. Flies. WE did get to search for fossils in this barren sand filled, sandstone sand pit once, for FREE! Yes, I opted to drive for three days with Stephen and Yuka to the "Outback" then take a 12 hour bus ride back through the same F'in desert. One evening before I left on the bus I was having a F'in desert fit. I was stamping my feet and they were laughing about how the outback had been a bunch of nothing really. Nothing but sand ,flies, graves, anthills, and hype. And I was going back through all of it all over again. And I had volunteered for it all. The east coast is a great deal more interesting than the outback. Let there be no more romanticism about the F'in desert.

More days.

Poor Stephen snores. Or I should say poor Yuka, Stephen snores, she sleeps in the van. Not even I am spared. Outside the closed van in my tent I hear him sawing logs. Yuka and I share over brekky how much he snored the night before. He laughs saying " Its nauwght my fauwlt". Space is limited but not really. The three if us are living out of a van not any bigger than a walk in closet and we have everything we need. We could have used one more seat belt I guess but otherwise we have it all. We can stop anywhere, anytime, cook and call it a day. Food is stored in plastic bins in the back underneath the sleeping platform. We have the brekky box ( my favorite), the dinner box and a tiny cooler ( no ice ) for the cold stuff. Yuka I found, is not afraid to break into Stephen's world and cook. At Wallaman falls we had Udon noodles in Miso soup with eggplant, carrots and zuccini compliments of Yuka. Wow they both can cook. I cooked once,(thankfully Yuka saved my dish from blandom) and only once. Our clothes, shoes, oil for the van and other misc. things are stored underneath the middle of the sleeping platform. Stephen and Yuka's bed clothes make the back seat. In a small basket in the front are some CDs, (that are played over and over and over), our cameras, the lighter and a few good books. That's all. That's our material world.

Another slide show!

OK, after much genuflecting to the techno-spirits the technical difficulties have been overcome. Yea! So here is another slide show for you all from Tracy's latest delivery. You can click on the slide show to go to the web album if you want to see the pictures longer or bigger. Enjoy!

p.s it may take a minute for the slide show to load.

Gypsies, moons and mokies... (and a melonie or two if you wait long enough)

Every day

The music is playing, the windows are open, and we are on the road. There are three of us now, Stephen, myself and Yuka; a Japanese woman Stephen met at the Big Mango in Bowen. The other gypsies sadly, have gone on to other travels. As we drive, we pass cane fields, banana farms, tropical rainforest, beef and dairy farms.Yuka is in the front, feet up on the dash. I am in the back sitting on a sleeping platform, my feet in the cuby hole for the sliding door, my elbow and head out the window. Stephen drives staring, mesmerized by the miles and the music. Janis Joplin or Bob Marley are usually playing with Stevie Wonder taking his fair share of play time. We are silent, all in our own little worlds, taking in the sights but not sharing our interpretations. We stop when something interests us. A beach, a bush walk or lunch. Stephen cooks, we clean. We often succumb to "napo'clock" after lunch. We usually end up at a pub in the evening. We drink a few beers, talk to people of all different nationalities, then head to our "spot". This is how our days go. No hurry, no goal, no place to sleep at night. We solve the sleeping problem shortly after dark and then Stephen cooks again. He calls dinner "Tea". Stephen is a good cook. I would say a chef. His favourite meal is pasta with mushrooms and onions in cream sauce and beer. The beer is never in the cream sauce. If it is not pasta it is some vegetable dish always mixed with some herbs or sweet chili sauce for tang. After dinner we clean,set up sleeping arrangements and go to bed. I love our morning ritual. Stephen makes coffee and sets out brekky. Nutella and bread or peanut butter and jelly. We eat, talk a little and pack up for the day. Right now we are on Mission beach listening to the waves and Bob Marley and watching some sky divers land. Stephen's cooking again. Soon it will be "napo'clock". During lunch Stephen smashed a bananna through his teeth for Yuka and I to see. It is hard for our humor to get any more complex than that when we don't have language or culture to back it up. Still he is funny. Yesterday we did a rare thing and went to a tourist attraction. It was a castle, or the remains of one on 13 acres of "park" land. It was a bit weird as the castle was broken down and delapitated but not quite a "ruins". The grounds were in the same shape. The castle was used in the 1930's like a Kings Island water park only the slides and pools were all natural. Up to 500 people a day come to gaze at this place. I don't know why. The neatest thing there was a colony of bats in a tunnel. We were able to walk right up to the bats and see them all huddled together for their daytime sleep. Last evening we stopped at one of those free coffee stops along the road set up by the Red Cross. We had been there for just a bit when two dodgy blokes came to the kiosk as well. We had cautious conversation. I was leary of them. As darkness fell we all decided to camp there for the night. Stephen suggested we cook dinner together and they agreed needing some company after a long haul. Chicken, sausage, pork chops,potato pancakes, pasta and beer. And beer. And beer. They were full on Aussie's with many stories of hard living in the bush. We stayed up way past our bedtime entertained by these two. In the morning we all shared brekky and then went on our way happy to have met each other and shared the time. Tommorrow or the next day we will do these same kind of things. We are however always on the lookout for Smirnoff's and Bunnies. The Big Mango
The kitchen

So small! So frigg'in cool.

It took two hours of sitting still, not talking, and not falling asleep. A nearly impossible combination. I must admit we moved once. Okay, we did talk some as well, but mostly we were silent and mostly we were still. It happened for Yuka and Stephen first. I was jealous. I had to work on being happy for them. I wanted it to happen for me. I was nearly desperate. This was the only time in my life I might be at this spot and have this opportunity. They saw it again! How did I miss it? Chit! Yuka and Stephen were trying to help me but I seemed to be looking the other way each time. It took another fifteen minutes but then it happened. First, all we saw was the rustling of weeds along the bank, and then a ripple as it went down. Then, it popped to the surface long enough to eat it's catch and was gone again. Amazing! It was so small, the size of a guinea pig. I was shocked.I thought they were as long as my arm and as big as a cat. It popped to the surface again with another catch; they need to be at the surface to chew. It continued this behavior for about ten minutes; searching for small crustaceans and larvae, bringing them to the surface to eat and diving again. Then it did not return. We sat in silence. After awhile Stephen said " I can die now , I have seen a duckbilled platypus". At that moment, I had to agree.

Soon

I am going to blog soon. I am really.

new batch of photos coming

Hey all, Tracy sent me a new batch of photos but I'm having a little technical difficulty getting them all posted at the moment. So, here are a few to whet your appetite. Tracy is back with her personal gypsy Stephen and a Japanese woman (her name escapes me at the moment) and they are traveling the coast again doing bush hikes and the like. She has not had a chance to get to a computer to post her blog yet. She is set to leave Australia all together on Oct. 2nd for Tokyo and a drastic change of scenery.

Oh yeah ,I can do this!

Over the first two days on the ocean I have completed all the underwater skills, passed the test, and am now a certified diver. Thank you, thank you very much, hold the applause. Now we have to dive without an instructor. Yes! But always with a buddy. Yes! We also have to use our navigational skills to get back to the boat once we have explored the reef. Oh yeah baby, I got this! So my buddy and I set up a plan. Decide on a course to follow; 150 degrees north then a reciprocal reading of 300 degrees back. Easy I've done this before. My buddy and I jump off the boat, give the old "OK" sign and descend. I am excited, I have begun to settle down while diving and this dive will only build my confidence. I can navigate. I am so confident in fact that we have decided to only leave 70 bars of air for the return trip. That is only 20 bars of safety, at fifty bars you MUST surface. So really we have left 20 bars for the return. No problem. We take off. I am reading my compass, and I am holding a bearing. We hit the reef and play around for thirty minutes. The reef is spectacular. I can hear fish eating. I am enveloped in schools of fish. I make clams 2 foot across close up by waving my hand and making a current. There are fan corals and sea stars, sea slugs, and sea worms. There are big fish,little fish,skinny fish and fat fish. Colors and more colors; on the fish, the clams, the coral, the crabs. The reef is huge! It is over one hundred feet tall. We go to the bottom and see different fish than we did at the top. We find Nemo! We see sharks! It is another world down deep.I could have stayed all day but we noticed we were at 70 bars and needed to go back to the boat. I was excited. I was going to surface port side stern. I had my bearing and we were following it without deviation. Sixty bars left, okay that gives us a few minutes more. We continue on our course. Fifty bars. We have to surface. I am smiling. I know I got this. We surface. I cannot see a thing. No boat, no other divers, no nothing. I start thinking about sharks. We saw two down there. I start panicking. I think about the movie Open Water. I think about being lost at sea. I think about my elevated, breathing and heart rate attracking sharks. I check my bearing. I check for sharks. I check my panic. I turn around. I see the boat. Holy Chit! We are so far from the boat the people on it are wee little. I feel the same. They send a boat. I don't know if this diving thing is for me.

Not in Kansas anymore!

I was in a pool my brain was sure of that. But there is something dead wrong with breathing underwater. My brain was sure of that as well. As soon as I went under the surface my brain started screaming at me: "What the F are you doing??? Get that thing out of your mouth and swim for you life!!! Swim for your life! Go for the surface! You're going to drown!" I was having my own little panick attack while everyone else looked so calm. I was fighting the urge to explode and go to the surface(6 inches above my head).I was questioning if this was a good thing to do. Instructor? What bloody instructor? I was the only one in the pool (except for seven other people who were going to stare at me if I surfaced in a panic) and I was going to die. And so it went; my first day of scuba training. I spent the day fighting the urge to swim for my life.I think the only reason I stayed that day was peer pressure. I was NOT going to be the older, weird ,wussy woman who could not take the heat. I came back the next day. More fighting against instinct. It is so weird to breathe under water, it's just all wrong. I can't compare it to anything. Any ideas? Third day of training,we are in the ocean three hours from shore. We all get ready, get in the water and begin our descent to a depth of forty five feet. I am very busy telling myself not to panic. When we hit the bottom we are supposed to fully DE-flate our Bouancy device so we can stay at the bottom. Instead of hitting my DE-flate button, yes , I hit the IN-flate button. The more I go up, the more I press the IN-flate button in a panic. Kind of like the elderly that hit the gas instead of the brake and end up going through their house. I'm looking down between my fins at seven people looking up at me. My bouancy device is so full of air I look like a blimp. And of course I am screaming. (Remember sound travels well through water.) I am struggling and kicking and flailing my one arm, the other arm is busy pushing the IN-flate button. Just as my head pops up to the surface I realize what I have done. Chit! I quickly hit my DE-flate button and sink,slowly,ever so slowly, in front of everyone, back down to the group. My instructor tilts his head to one side and gives me the " Are you okay sign". I sign back "Of course, yes of course" just a little mix up guys. Just a little mix up.