19 June 2015

It’s the start of our big trip.  This time no passports, visas or queues to get through body scans.  No avoidance of international roaming and checking international rates for currency conversion.  We have a general idea of where we are going but we are having lots of rain and the country is looking very wet.  It’s a guess whether some of the roads we want to travel will be closed due to flooding or wash outs.  Here goes for the first couple of days:

 

• Today it was the torturous last  minute packing when you are constantly wondering what have I not packed and what will I need over the next 3 months.  Airlines do us a favour when they say you can take one bag of a certain size and weight.  When you have a car and van the limits know no limits.
• It’s also very hard to leave a warm and dry house and head off for a camping adventure when is cold and wet.  That wood fire looked so inviting – we left home why?  To quote our friends in the middle of the Gobi desert ‘What for’?
• The road we travelled today is also a stock route.  It’s the main highway between Sydney and Adelaide but we were lucky enough to come across a herd of several hundred steers being driven along the road.  The steers fell into almost two groups; those that walked on the left and those that walked on the right.  Of course there was one free thinking cow who walked along the white line, right down the middle, regardless of the cars creeping past.  The cows on the right occasionally looked over at the cows on the left.  There was a hesitation about changing sides but then they would stay on their side.  The cows on the left did the same.  A quick glance to those on the right, hesitation and a hint of changing sides.  I am sure the cows were mooing ‘cross the road and join us’ but there was very little crossing of the road.  At the back of the herd was a drover on a quad bike.  I am sure he thought he was in control but I am equally sure the cows set the pace and decided who walked on the right and who walked on the left side of the road.
• The cows seemed to be an allegory for politics.  There is always those that walk on the left and those that always walk on the right side of the road.  Never the twain will meet.  There is also that free thinking non-member of the herd who insists on walking the white line.  The guy on the bike is the one who thinks he is one of those up front influencing the cows but really they’re at the back following the butt end of the herd and the one cow they are worried about is the one following the white line.  Dam those independent thinkers!
• The Australian bush is supposed to be hot and dry so days of wet and cold with creeks running in flood and the paddocks all flooded is almost an out of body experience.
• Day Two:  We drove from Hay to Renmark.  Along this road we saw something that many would assume were huge bales of cotton.    Do not be confused, they were in fact enormous, evil witchetty grubs crawling across the landscape.  All the way to the horizon there were scores maybe hundreds of these witchetty grubs, all crawling towards the highway.  Marching toward destruction and havoc on the main highway from Adelaide to Sydney.  Excellent material for a B Grade horror movie.  For my foreign readers checkout:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub.
• The display from our video camera at the back of the van was for most of the day upside down.  Its amazing how quickly the brain can adapt to an inverted image and make sense of it.  The image eventually fixed itself. One of those weird technical situations when you realise the technology is in control.
• The website for closed roads tells me the roads we wanted to drive are closed or only open to heavy Sounds like  a change of plans is required.  Of course our travelling companion who is ahead of us and is now out of mobile phone coverage, so no emails, SMS or phone calls to adjust our plans. Sounds like life in the 1980s!  Not sure how we will cope.
• Today I heard someone refer to us as ‘grey nomads’.  How insulting; I might be greying but nomad suggests a lack of a sense of direction or purpose, just aimless wandering.  I know where I am heading!
• Whilst many think accent, rugby and the haka are the only things that separate Australia and New Zealand.  No, there is one more major difference.  In Australia there are signs telling you about the camp grounds in the town you are approaching well before you get there.  This is something NZ should really consider.  It’s too late when you are already lost in the town looking for accommodation.
• Finally, every major undertaking has a vision and mission statement and we have decided our Vision is ‘High Quality Recycling Across Australia’.  We will achieve this through our Mission  statement  which  is “The distribution of containers that once held high quality wine and beer across the recycling bins of Australia”.  We think this is a socially responsible vision that somehow will save the polar bears.  These mission and vision statements were developed without a workshop or any stakeholder engagement. No consultants were  injured in the development of these statements.

 

That’s it for the moment. More to come.  Not sure where we will be next but we are heading to the town where Barb and I met 41 years ago.