editor’s note: this blog post, our last from australia, is being published after our departure from down under. we sincerely apologize for the delay, which was due to unavoidable schedule conflicts and miscommunication between me and my long suffering and patient editor, kevin lynch. and thank you, kind readers, for enduring all the technical hassles that are endemic to luddite blogposting.
we’ll soon be off to our next post, belgrade, where pernille will pursue her diplomatic career and i will tag along for the ride. with a bit of luck, we’ll be in touch again once we get settled in serbia.
meanwhile, please indulge us and pretend this is june, 2024 and we’re still in oz as you read this.
and now, on to the post.
it’s sunset for us in oz. july 18th is “wheels up”, back to the unfamiliar shores of europe, the end of a fabulous four year tour. so for a grand finale, we hopped a plane to one of our fave spots, wa. wa, as in western australia, known by aussies simply as w-a. knowing aussies, i’m sure they’ve thought of ways of shortening the “w”, and maybe just call it “dub”; or for purists, maybe “dub-a”. they’ve already got a town called dubb-o. one can only imagine what dubbo must have been before the abbreviators got hold of it.
in strine, (aussie-speak), mates grab an eskie of coldies and hijack the telly for the footy match in tassie. hang with the tradies (working class) and you’ll meet chippies (carpenters) and sparkies (electricians) and firies (firefighters) and humpies (not sure what they are) and on and on in unintelligible gibberish. usually, someone mercifully breaks and does a translate for visitors. we have a friend, mark binskin by name, a retired royal air force general and former chief of the ausie defence forces, (i.e. a very distinguished fellow) who is known simply as “binnie”. call him binskin and you draw blank stares from aussies. say binnie and their faces light up. he’s a myte (mate for your non-aussies).
so with 30-odd days and counting, we’re off to w-a for an encore. it’s mid-winter (june) so there are only a few dozen surfers (what???) at the mouth of the margaret river heading down toward antarctica, a favorite of the surfing class. but no worries, as aussies say, there’s a warm current that heats the water up to a comfortable 70 degrees fahrenheit (21 celsius). heck, these old bones need 90 fahrenheit (32 celsius) before they uncreak. even my relatively youthful scandinavian spouse doesn’t appreciate 21 celsius. but this is w-a. w-a w-a w-a. the sound of a shivering me crying my eyes out at the mere suggestion of surfing (or even toe-dipping) in 20 degree celsius waves.
the vino along the w-a coast has a warming effect, however. maybe that’s what keeps those surfers afloat. or maybe it’s the price of the wine, which never goes down, no matter the weather. imbibe the juice of those grapes for long and you’ll have trouble keeping your head above water, both literally and figuratively. sometimes that’s blamed on the sharks.
to keep well above water level, we opted for whale watching. about 80-thousand of these 30-ton sea mammals migrate north from antarctica to the milder waters of the north australian tropics for the winter in may-june, so we just had to go half a mile off shore, drop anchor, and wait for these playful fellows to perform their morning whale-o-batics. our guide said these humpback whales are like little kids; they can’t wait for an audience to show up so they can do their tricks, and they did. not as cute as jumping dolphins, but a LOT more intense. you wouldn’t want these monster acrobats flapping their whale-tales too close to your boat. but they understand that, and keep a respectful distance.
the vineyards are still booming in margaret river, oz’s finest wine region. regular readers will know we’re not winos, but we’ve found a cabernet sauvignon from the stormflower winery that knocked our socks off. looks as if socks are being knocked off all over the place . best not to wear socks in margaret river, it seems, lest they be knocked off. i could imagine heaps of socks littering the lanes around the caves road vineyard region
no socks!
.
speaking of caves, we’ve seen a few, but none more spectacular than the margaret river cape caves. i’ve been to carlsbad caverns in new mexico, which are massive (though it’s been many decades since the last time), but i don’t recall them being any more spectacular than the ones just off the side of caves road. our verdict: awesome. especially after a wine-tasting tour. (but don’t overdo it.)
we’ve been waiting three years to visit one of w-a’s most talked-about attractions, the horizontal falls off australia’s tropical northern coast. (they do). it’s winter, so high season for “horizontal falling””. but how does one photograph water falling sideways? truth is, it only falls a couple meters, at least while we were there. so it’s hard to photograph. but the force of the water gushing through a narrow passage from one pool of water to another has to be experience to believe. david attenborough visited the falls at one time, and through a mathematical calculation determined that a million liters of water passes through the falls every second. we defer to david’s superior knowledge.
our previous attempts to visit the falls were stymied, first by covid, then by the weather, but third time’s the charm, and we’ve booked an overnight stay on a deluxe houseboat just outside the falls. so we jump on a seaplane, yup, the kind that lands on skis, and ferry out to the houseboat, which is parked in a little inlet away from the falls (to avoid accidental slips and falls, we assume).
the houseboat can be a bit disconcerting to first-timers. we got to our room and looked out the window to a big mountain facing us on the nearby shore. a little while later we looked out again and…no mountain. in its place was an inlet that looked as if it was the passage through which we had come on the ferry. the secret we learned is that the boat is anchored on an axis in relatively shallow water, so it’s constantly rotating, like the revolving restaurant atop the space needle. what you see at one point is gone next time you look. if you keep looking long enough, it will come back, but only after doing a full 360. don’t hold your breath.
so it’s “au revoir” from oz for us. it’s been an eventful four years. but as they say, all things must pass (like last night’s tacos). australia, in all seriousness, has been the experience of a lifetime, as close to heaven on earth as we ever could have imagined. thanks to the aussie people, whose warm hospitality has shone through in every moment of our stay, never wavering. as we head back north of the equator after four years here, we feel as if we’re leaving home.
australia, we’ll miss you. cheers, mates.
-30-
not that heinlein 