Why travel in Australia?

The first question most travelers ask is, “How long have you been traveling?”  The second question is, “How long will you travel?”

I once met a guy in Oaxaca who had been traveling for three years.  He’d spent some time as an engineer in Minnesota, put aside a chunk of money, and decided to start off one day.  He went to Southeast Asia, China, Mongolia, Russia, and parts of Africa.  In the year before we met him, he had flown down to the tip of South America and started working his way up.  It took a year.  He learned Spanish and acquired a Spanish-speaking girlfriend.  He told me one thing that really stuck with me, “You can live for $5000 a year in Southeast Asia, if you’re frugal.”

Being a savvy budget traveler, he never did come to Australia.

I, on the other hand, did a lot of research about Australia, but none of it on how costly it is to live here.  Not only can you expect to spend $20 on a very basic breakfast out (I don’t, I buy muesli and yogurt and eat it at home), but travel through WA, where the population density is something like .9 people per square kilometer, is either very expensive, or simply impossible without your own car and extra canisters for petrol.  But whatever – you find creative ways to do what you need to do.

So, why Australia, and why the west coast of it?  This is the question some of you have asked me.  Others have asked, “You moved to Australia???!!!”  The answer to the latter is easy: no, I haven’t moved – that’s just a glitch in Facebook.  The FB profile asks you for your “current city”, but translates that upon publication to “city where you live”.  The former question, on the other hand, has a couple answers and I’ll give you the short-ish one here.

After four years in front of a computer from 9 to 5, or 9 to 6, or 8 to 6, or any combination thereof, I felt like a de-tox was in order.  I’m not talking 30 days eating only mung beans, or lemon water with maple syrup.  No, I was thinking more like a master cleanse of the psyche: go somewhere with lots of outdoors and very few people.

Australia fit that bill well.

To give you a sense of the size I’m talking about, because our modern maps don’t do it justice, when you compare the land mass of the US to the land mass of Australia, and adjust for bodies of water, which Australia has paltry few of, the two come out fairly equivalent.  The internet generally thinks Australia comes in at 7.69 million kilometers squared, while the US is at 9.83 million kilometers squared.  So not exact, but they are the eighth and sixth largest countries respectively.  The crazy part is, Australia has less than 10% the population the US has.  It’s at only 22 million or so, right now.

Metropolitan Australia isn’t a far cry from California in its sensibilities.  The food is all lovely-salads-with-light-vinaigrettes and pan-roasted-seasonal-veggies-with-baked-ricotta-and-mint-parsley-dressing kind of food.  They also like to wrap bacon into and around stuff.  And you can always find a poached-eggs-with-asparagus-and-toast for breakfast.  Subarus are quite popular here, as is gluten-free, organic, and yoga.  Really, the only thing they seem to be missing is the Prius.

Most foreign countries you go to, everything is so odd and different, you can’t help but laugh and write home about kooky misunderstandings.  Here, the greatest challenge is trying to figure out when to use the phrase “That’s alright.”  Seemingly innocuous, once you probe into it, you realize that it means almost the exact opposite of what it does in America.  But more on that later.

So, why Australia?  It was partly a matter of planning backward.  I had a dream of riding the Trans-Siberian Railway, and even put it on this “By 30” list I wrote with a friend several years ago.  The other two items on my list were: write a novel; and, learn French fluently.  I’m sure at the time we thought the lists were a silly joke, a fun exercise in friendship or flirtation or whatever, but then mine crept into my being and made me take it seriously.

So I was looking at a map one day and thought, Hmmm, the Trans-Siberian line I want to take starts in Beijing.  Maybe I could go to Shanghai before that.  Then I noticed that Vietnam isn’t too far from Shanghai, and that prompted the whole “Why not just explore Southeast Asia by bus first?”  Upon examining Southeast Asia more closely (I think Stephanie was in Bali at the time and I had no clue where Bali really was), I noticed that the bottom of the Southeast Asian countries – Bali, effectively – was actually quite close, surprisingly close, to northern Australia.  And there was a city there – Darwin.  Never’d heard of it before.

Further research revealed the existence of two train lines that cross the Australian continent: the Indian Pacific and the Ghan.  I thought, “I really liked Australia when I went to Melbourne and Sydney two years ago.  It was kind of like a mash up of LA and San Francisco, except the cars kept coming at me from the wrong direction.”

Well, why not try out this whole train thing on the Australian continent first?  Then just fly to Bali when I’m done.

That’s effectively how it started.

In further researching Western Australia, I found out that it is quite bare of people – less than 10% of the country’s population actually lives in the state of WA.  What a marvelous place to write, was the logical next thought.  The learning French can wait for later.

And there you have it.

When I count the days I’ve been in this country, they only come to 13.  The first time I did this really simple math, I assumed I’d done it wrong.  In 13 days, I’ve hiked the Blue Mountains, ridden a motorbike (don’t tell Mom!), laid on at least five different beaches, some multiple times, crossed a continent, and took a first crack at steering a sailing ship.

I didn’t open my computer for at least a week.  I’ve been outside every day, except those train days, and am making up for those now.

I’m in Perth, and I love Fremantle.  It’s 26 degrees out consistently (which is something like 75 Fahrenheit), and I’m starting to feel office life leach from my pores.  It’s time to go get settled on the coast and write for a bit.

Toodles.