APOKALIPSIS

This is my last night in Australia.
I’ve packed up my bags in almost exactly the same way that I packed them a year ago, and in the morning I’ll hoist them on my back and hit the road again. Almost everything I’ve acquired over the past year, mostly souvenirs, mementos and comic books, fits into a cardboard box I’m having shipped home. I’m not bringing back too many things that I didn’t take with me…
except for thousands of photographs and a year full of unforgettable memories…

Here are some photos from my last few months in Australia:

on the road…

Springbrook lookout

Yay for friends!!

Lizard at King’s Canyon

Champagne at Uluru

Remarkable Rocks at Kangaroo Island

Riding camels near Alice Springs

Sydney at night, from the Harbor Bridge

King’s Canyon

Snake Creek, Kangaroo Island

Croatian wedding!

24 hours on the train to Alice Springs

Sea World on the Gold Coast!

Fruit drink for the road back from Coober Pedy

Massive salt lake, somewhere in South Australia

Camels + Me

Enroute to Uluru

awwww

That’s strawberry sauce, not blood. Thanks for the cake, Kim!

Those pictures don’t even begin to touch on all the adventures I’ve had here. Those of you I’m going to see back in the states should prepare yourselves to be bombarded with stories and photographs. I’ll be in Hawaii tomorrow.
xoxoxo

Until I visited Australia, most of my knowledge of echidnas came from the Sega Genesis, but it turns out that they don’t really look much like Sonic the Hedgehog’s friendly rival Knuckles:

(As a side note, I’ve always wondered how Knuckles’ shoes were supposed to work. Are those metal bolts screwed directly into his feet? Why does he have little Mario sewer pipes for socks?)

Unlike Knuckles, echidnas cannot defeat their enemies by jumping onto of them, but who cares? Have you seen these things? They are ADORABLE. Look at them waddling down the road!

They are fat, cuddly little bundles of spines with big ol’ claws for diggin’ stuff and tearin’ down ant hills. If you don’t understand the appeal, I think it comes down to this: these things possess the best traits of both teddy bears and steamshovels, which appeals immensely to my inner 4-year old. Add to that the fact that they are relatives of the platypus and are named after the mythological Mother of Monsters, and you have THE BEST ANIMAL EVER.

Sadly, when they are kept in captivity the yearn for freedom. It is too bad that unlike Knuckles they cannot actually climb walls. Observe:

Even when futility trying break free from the bonds of the zookeeper man, they are CUTE CUTE CUTE

All pictures taken at Paul’s Place on Kangaroo Island
Aaron + Echidnas = BFF!! <3

Adelaide has a reputation for being Australia’s least exciting city. Sydney is where the action is, Melbourne is where the alternative scene is, but meanwhile Adelaide is “the City of Churches.” Can you get more square than that?
However, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my life in towns that give new dimensions to the word “boring,” I’ve found Adelaide to be quite charming and vivacious. I’m staying in Kim’s apartment in the middle of the city, on the corner of the main thoroughfare and a small alley of boutique clothing shops and pubs. Right across the street is a small empty square of urban landscape that often serves as a blank canvas for local artists.
There’s been graphitti and chalk drawings, pasted up pixel art from Commander Keen, scribbled posters of squid, all sorts of wonderful things done to the square. Eventually it all gets erased or taken down, but something else always crops up in its place. The best of these urban exhibitions happened last Tuesday. We were driving home from playing poker out in the country, just about to pull into the parking garage, and I saw this:

Someone had turned our square into a cardboard menagerie! There was no artist’s signature that we could see, no further information given, just this gift of cardboard animals to the city. The most remarkable thing, to me, was that whoever put this little diorama together must have known that it would be gone in the morning before hardly anyone could see it. Drunken revelers would certainly see to its destruction.
What we were seeing was like the raffelesia flower in Borneo … something that only blooms occasionally and for a short period of time, but is spectacular to those fortunate enough to see it. Thankfully, unlike the raffelesia, the animals did not smell like rotting flesh.

I went down to see what was left in the morning. It had been rainy and windy that night, so if the average citizen didn’t destroy our little patch of jungle, mother nature certainly would have. Sure enough, just about everything was gone. All that was left was this elephant head:

After a brief breakfast, we packed up our jungle camp, hammocks and all, and headed back upstream back to MESCOT.

As we were being loaded into our boat, Margarite slipped and fell in the mud, dragging one of our guides with her. He sank in nearly all the way to his knees! Here he is washing out his boot:

We managed to catch a glimpse of a crocodile on the way back. It was just sunning itself on the riverbank, and we tried to get closer to get a picture … all of a sudden, swish, splash and it was gone, disappeared into the muddy river.

I don’t know how close you’ve been to a crocodile, but the notion that one might be slithering through the water right underneath your boat is enough to provoke at least a few nervous giggles.

We did, however, make it back to MESCOT safe and sound, and no one got croc-chomped.

We avoided another danger as well: a swelled, hungry leech that Chris found on the boat ramp. We put it on a little piece of paper towel and watched it sway its greedy little head around, looking something like a fat, featureless brontosaurus. I was fascinated and took a lot of pictures, while Elizabeth said “What are you doing?! Get rid of that thing!”

MESCOT is respectful of all life, though, even bloodsucking slug life, and we were encouraged to return it to the wild once we had finished its glamor-shoot, which we did. It wasn’t “goodbye,” though, since we figured it would turn up on someone’s ankle sooner or later, slurping away.

We had a bit of free time to spread out on the veranda to nap, journal or play with the MESCOT kitties. Then it was time for a “cooking lesson!” I think what this actually amounted to was the staff of MESCOT getting us to help make ourselves lunch, but it was still quite fun. We all sat on the floor, surrounding a spread of vegetables, spices, dough and meat, and then were broken up into groups of two or three to each prepare a different dish. I naturally chose to be in the the group making “donut cakes.”


This weren’t cakes though — they were just donuts. The only difference was that we made then sitting on the floor and under the direction of a kid who didn’t speak a lot of English. It was a good time, even though it took ages to kneed the bread and our group was the very last to finish. Everyone else was done in about fifteen minutes. Not much of a lesson, but it resulted in a great meal!

After lunch, it was time for a traditional dance show! The music was almost entirely percussion, lead by an old woman playing an instrument that resembled a xylophone made of pots, which was apparently an instrument the locals had developed long ago as an alternative to more expensive conventional instruments. Each one is handmade and unique, which I thought was quite impressive. The woman wore a bright, traditional-looking outfit, and remained stoic the entire performance, her law set tight, as if she were performing a most serious ritual. The music was complex and repetitive — it seemed to be less of a song and more of a transformative experience, a beat to get lost in.

The first dancer was this dude, who looked like he was about 15. He performed a variation of the traditional warrior dance, which is usually done with a perang, the locals’ formerly-ubiquitous machete/sword that was used for everything from farming to taking heads back in the day. They’re still used plenty of places, and now you can also buy them in gift shops at the mall! Our friend made the dance into more of a martial art demo, which was quite cool.

He was followed be a group of teenagers in bright traditional costumes who did a very swaying welcoming dance, eventually inviting us all to participate and dance with them. I wish I had pictures, but I was having problems with my camera at that point. After the dance, we were each given a plastic blue flower with candies tied to it. I think I still have mine somewhere.
The whole Culture Show made some of us a bit uncomfortable, as the culture we were being shown seemed to sort of clash with how the local people lived. It seemed a little like these charming people were lowering themselves to being a tourist attraction for us. On the other hand, it’s very possible that this type of demonstration helps keep the traditional culture alive, and who am I to say how they felt about performing?

Volleyball and Mohamed are coming next!

The night that we spent in the hammocks was a mostly sleepless one for me. Between wrestling with my mosquito net and listening for elephants or wild boars, there just wasn’t much time to sleep.
Some of the sounds we heard during the night included:
-A cacophony of cicadas
-An orchestra of frogs
-Trumpeting elephants
-Booming cannons used to chase off the elephants
-Some large animal splashing into the river (possibly a boar)
-Deep, mournful moaning sounds … which we determined in the morning were coming from our Australian friend Chris.

Before the sky had started to get light, I felt a hand on my hammock — it was Hahn, our guide, making the rounds for our wake-up call. I untied my boots from where they hung, pulled them onto my feet, and stepped from my hanging cocoon of mesh and canvas into the wet and muddy jungle. This was the beginning of our third day in Borneo.

By the time we had all woken up and strapped into life jackets, the sun already was shining off of the muddy river. This part of the morning would be the best time to see animals, so we piled back into our boat for another jungle cruise.

It was a cool, calm morning as we quietly floated down the river. Every few minutes we would stop so that our guides could point out a proboscis monkey, or a pair of hornbills or an eagle hanging from the branches of one of the trees on the riverbank.

Even though we had heard elephants the night before, they didn’t seen to be out where we were. I still kept my eyes peeled. Meanwhile, Elizabeth desperately hoped to see a crocodile.

Further downstream we found a couple of trees that were loaded with proboscis monkeys. It seemed that every time we thought we had spotted them all, another one would appear, crashing through the foliage.

Proboscis monkeys have big ol’ snouts which take up most of their faces, and make them look something like a fairy tale goblin. They are very cool to watch, and there’s nothing like them anywhere else in the world — they only live in Borneo.

When this monkey was above us, our guides in the front of the boat started giggling, and told me to take a picture. “Did you see his … ‘red rocket’?” they chortled. Sure enough, as if those noses were phallic enough, proboscis monkeys also have bright red penises, which are permanently erect. Ah, the mysteries of nature. I hope that typing that particular detail of biology out won’t significantly increase my website hits.

A bit further down the river, Elizabeth saw something slithering on the riverbank. “Look!” she cried, “I think it’s a crocodile!”

It was actually a monitor lizard, I think, but we all had to applaud her for her good eye. Nice work, gumshoe!

Here we are, headed back to camp. In the front are Ed and Margarite, farmers from Saskatchewan who were pushing 70, but could more than keep up with the rest of us. And they always looked so cheerful! We really had a terrific group to travel with.

Next time: Crocodiles, dancing, volleyball and Muhammad.

Still clad in orange lifejackets, we ventured into the great, green jungle.

The first thing to do was make camp. We each carried in a hammock, which had to be strung up between a few trees, and then covered by a tarp. Our guides showed us how to do this — Elizabeth was lucky because they used her hammock for the demo, so she just got to watch! It had just rained, and the ground was muddy enough that my boots were sunk halfway into the mud as I made up my bed.

That’s the river shining in the background.

Jungle camping is intense! Or in this case, in hammocks.

No sooner had we all gotten our bed arranged than the rain really started coming down hard. We had planned a jungle cruise to try and see the elephants in the area, but the weather meant we had to take a “rain check” (sorry!) on that. All there really was to do was take off our muddy boots and sit together under the big canopy our guides had set up.

It was a good time for our group to get to know each other — we’d been so busy since we started traveling that we had barely had any time to chat or learn about where everyone was from! We also had a nice dinner of spicy ramen-style noodles, crackers and tiny bananas.

As it began to get dark, the wildlife started to come out, followed quickly by our cameras …

Armored millipede!

Frog in the spotlight!

Big ‘ol moth on our canopy!

Hahn vs. the moth.

We played Uno, that old international camping stand-by (everyone seemed to know how to play!), in between meeting the denizens of the rainforest.

Eventually the rain let up a bit and we decided to go for a nature walk before bed. Everyone strapped on their headtorches and we followed our guides through the forest, which by now was alive with sound. (yes, that means more blurry animal pictures!)

I was mystified as to how this snake managed to get up onto this tiny branch.

A chameleon! Yes! (He changed colors, too!)

Tiny walking-stick-thing. Amazing!

After we made it back to camp and we preparing to hit our hammocks, we had our first encounter with another form of wildlife: leeches. Elizabeth turned to be, wide-eyed and a bit panicked, and said, “Aaron-I-think-there’s-a-leech-on-me-YOU-NEED-TO-GET-IT-OFF.” Sure enough, there was a fat ol’ sluggy thing attached to her collarbone. It glimmered slick and smooth in my torchlight. I tried briefly to slide it off with my fingernail, as I had heard was the easiest way, but the leech was sucking and stuck fast. Fortunately our guide Hahn was nearby and had some insect repellent to detach the critter. You can read Elizabeth’s account of the encounter here.

The aftermath of the leech bite! Delicious?

To get to sleep we had to sit down in our hammocks, suspended a bit over the ground, take off our boots and tie them to one of the hammock lines, and then lay down in the hammock, pulling the attached mosquito net over us and tucking it underneath ourselves. It was surprisingly comfy, if quite different from sleeping in a bed.

Then there were the sounds. The jungle, for the uninitiated, is full of sounds. Frogs, cicadas, various birds, beetles and who-knows-what-else kept calling and chirping and twittering throughout the night. On top of this was the occasionally elephant call, rustle of wild boar or nightmare moans of a fellow traveler. Once or twice I was sure something small and alive brushed up against my hammock.

(this is a candle melted into a tree branch. it lit the way to our hole-in-the-ground jungle toilet. eww!)

I had heard that elephants had invaded the camp of another group the previous week, so I slept with my camera nestled on my stomach in the hope that history would repeat itself. My mosquito net also had a few prominent holes, which I tried to cover up various ways before finally relenting and venturing back to the big canopy to get my sewing kit and patch it up. Somehow, my needle managed to break off in the net after I had finished, but I didn’t get any bites. That didn’t stop me from twitching in paranoia every few minutes.

It wasn’t one of the most restful nights I’ve had, but it was probably one of the best.

We had arranged for a cab to pick us up from the Sabah Museum when it closed around 4 p.m., and headed back to the hotel. We still had a couple of hours before we were meeting the rest of our tour group, so we decided to do some last minute shopping. We had forgotten which room we were staying in, though, and while trying to unlock the wrong room, we discovered another member of our group: a 22-year old UK girl named Nat who had hadn’t been able to find anyone else to talk to since she arrived two days prior. She was quite glad to meet us, and accompanied us to the mall.
I had lost very few things since leaving Oregon back in January, but one of those things was a pair of lightweight hiking pants. Elizabeth needed a pair for herself as well. Fortunately, Nat had previously found a store in the mall which sold such things, so she lead us up escalators and around corners until we finally found the place. They had one kind of pants, but fortunately, it was just the kind that we needed. And that is how my sister, a girl from the UK and I all ended up with matching pants.
Back at the hotel, we met the rest of our group in our guide’s hotel room. Besides Elizabeth, Nat and I, there was the trio of nineteen-year-old Danish girls, two Finnish girls working on medical Ph.D.s, an Australian electrician in his mid ’30s, a Japanese woman who was about to return to her native country after nine years in Australia, and an elderly farming couple from Manitoba, Canada. Our guide, Hahn, was native of Borneo. Quite the group!
Together, we trekked a couple of blocks for dinner at an Indian restaurant where our meals were served on big banana leaves and we were supposed to eat with our hands — a technique we would quickly have to get used to in Borneo!

The next morning we reunited for breakfast near the bus station. Breakfast was noodles with a fried egg on top — something else we would quickly get used to.

Our group at the bus station: Hahn, Nat, Ann-Sophie, Anamari, Kay, Saari and Elizabeth!

The bus was one of those high, large tour buses that seem to be common in Asia. We were a bit cramped in the seats, but there was a television (showing Rush Hour 3 of all things), and nice curtains on the windows. Observe:

Out the window you can see the palm oil plantations that have replaced so much of Borneo’s jungles.

Here’s a nicer view from out the window:

It was a long trip, so we stopped for lunch along the way at the Malaysian equivalent of a roadside diner: an ourdoor restaurant serving rice, noodles and assorted meat and vegetable dishes, usually combined with a store selling sodas and packaged snacks (think 7-11) and perhaps some local vendors with fresh fruit or other goods. Over the course of the trip we visited a lot of places like this, but thankfully none were as terrible as this one. They had some sort of travel package worked out with the bus company, so that we got vouchers that we could present at the restaurant to receive a bit of rice and a few portions of fried yellow anchovies, chicken anuses (!!!) or mushy vegetables. The place was kind of dirty and grimy as well, but we took it in stride. There weren’t a lot of other options! Half an hour later we were back on the bus.

A few hours after that, we had arrived at our destination:

We were being hosted by an organization called MESCOT in Miso Walai, a small village on the Kinabatangan River.

It was raining as we walked there. Check out my awesome backpack!

Mescot is a ecological conservation and economic development program, which uses eco-tourism to increase awareness of the forest and the issues that threaten it, and also provides an alternative income for the families who live in Miso Walai and other parts of Sabah. They’re good people. They would be taking us upriver to spend the night in the jungle. But first, they fed us!

We had a delicious snack of tea and fried bananas. Yum. Meanwhile, right behind us, the Mescot crew were getting our boats ready:

(There were kids of all ages, as well as plenty of cats, hanging out around the Mescot center all the time. It was one of the things I really enjoyed about being there — you felt like you were just part of the day-to-day life, almost like part of a family.)

Saari from Finland and Ed from Canada looking out at the river.

Soon we were strapping into life jackets and preparing for our Borneo first boat trip!

Kay from Japan and Chris from Australia — we all got our cameras out to photograph any wildlife we might see on the journey.

Elizabeth and I continued to struggle to be in a decent picture together. That thing I’m holding aloft is the hammock I would sleep in that night.

And we’re off!

Adventure travel is serious business.

The Kinabatangan River is also serious business.

Small riverside longhouse.

Hornbills!!

Eventually we made it to our destination…

No sooner had we gotten into the jungle than we saw elephant tracks (which Anamari was photographing in this picture I believe). We had heard that they were roaming around this area, and there was a chance we might see them later in the afternoon. Were we excited? Are you kidding??

Stay tuned for the next installment when we head INTO THE RAINFOREST…

I may have mentioned that I take a lot of photos. I have taken thousands of photos since beginning my travels in January, and it has proven difficult to get them all online, but a lot of people have been asking for them. There’s no way I can post them all at once, but I thought I’d at least put some up on this blog and say a little bit about them. It’ll be like I’m sharing my vacation slides with you! Except hopefully not that dreadful.
So come in, and grab a seat on the couch. Can I get you a soda or something? There’s a bowl of corn chips on the table if you’d like. Now let me see if I can get this darn projector working …
There we go …

I’m starting with the beginning of our trip across Malaysian Borneo.

This was more or less my first view of the island. That’s Mount Kinabalu rising out of the clouds in the background. It looked so huge that I could not wrap my mind around the fact that we were going to climb it.

This is Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, as seen from the air. I don’t have any pictures, but as seen from the ground, it is vibrant and humid, full of colors, cars and smells. There are no crosswalks!

After my airplane touched down, I exchanged my currency and arranged for a cab to the hotel. My cabbie was a cheerful old man, who greeted me with a twinkling eyes, and a bright “Howdydo!” He was possibly the funniest person I have ever met, and although his English was quite spotty, he just kept cracking jokes, babbling on and laughing hysterically. The conversation turned, as such conversations do, to American politics. “Do you know Kalimptong?” he asked. I had to admit that I didn’t. We went round and round until I realized he was trying to say “Clinton.” My mistake!
Later I told him I was going to Australia and I would try to bring him back a koala. “Or a … a… kangaloo!” he suggested. “Very fast! Jumping-jumping!” I laughed, “Yes, you can use a kangaroo instead of a taxi!”
“Ho ho ho!” he laughed, “Very fast! Jumping-jumping!”
I could not think of a better welcome to Malaysia.

This was about the extent of the lobby of the small hotel we checked into. The decorations were for the Chinese New Year. (“Gong Xi Fa Cai” means Happy New Year for those of you who don’t speak Cantonese), and since it is the Year of the Rat, there were cardboard cutouts of cartoon mice (Disneyfied or otherwise) on the doors of many businesses.
Elizabeth had checked in some time before me, so I went out to the plaza area to search for her. I came back to the hotel to hear “Your sister was just here looking for you, but she left!” It took a couple of tries, but we finally found each other!

Elizabeth was very excited to see me.

We had a late lunch of rice, shrimp and vegetables from one of the many outdoor restaurants in the plaza (seen above!). My favorite thing about eating out in Sabah was that you could get a big glass of any kind of fresh-squeezed fruit juice for about $1 US. Watermelon was my favorite.

After lunch, we connected with three young Danish girls who were on our tour and caught a cab to the Sabah Museum, which on the outside looked like something out of science fiction, and on the inside looked like a boring museum. There were lots of traditional native costumes on mannequins, long inscriptions about history next to black and white photographs, sickly looking taxidermied animals, and a staggering amount of pottery.
After about an hour there, we were seriously MUSEUMED-OUT. But outside was something awesome: a “cultural village,” the first really jungle-y place we got to visit, which had examples of native houses from all across Sabah.

At the trail down to the cultural village. This is not a good picture, but it is included here for the sake of our parents.

The cultural village included giant tropical trees and wooden huts suspended above water. For a couple of kids who grew up spending hours playing with a Playmobile pirate island, this was a dream come true. It was like the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse at Disneyland (RIP), but cooler, better and REAL.

Our Dannish traveling companions, as seen through a long house window!

This is another terrible picture of me and Elizabeth, but it does capture how ridiculously ecstatic we were about the cultural village. We felt like we were about 10 and 12 or something, on THE ULTIMATE ADVENTURE! It made me wish that we were ten years older and both had kids so that we could bring them here.

Check out the roots on that tree!!

The fact was, this was the safe, museum-version of the jungle, a mere preview of coming attractions. The next day we were headed out into the real thing, and I don’t think either of could have anticipated the adventures we would have there…

To be continued!

I have a kind of neurotic impulse to capture everything that happens to me. Part of the reason I am a writer is that I’m always composing sentences in my head to best remember and describe what I’m experiencing. A lot of those sentences get lost because I don’t carry a notebook to jot them down in, but I don’t carry a notebook around because it’s a bit like staring down a bottomless void — if I were to try and document every moment and every thought (which I would feel responsible to do if I carried around a notebook for that purpose), the sheer weight of it would be overwhelming. There’s no way I could write fast enough to keep up with the constant stream of time. I would end up doomed to despair!
Plus, I would probably end up losing the notebook before I had written anything worthwhile.
A digital camera does wonders for this kind of impulse, however. It is quick and easy to capture any moment in time with six, seven or even EIGHT mega-pixel clarity … provided you have adequate light, proper focus settings and don’t wash anything out with the flash, of course! As anyone who has been with me when I am in possession of a working camera will tell you, I take LOTS of pictures. I feel that it is something of a moral obligation — to try to testify to the uniqueness of each moment in spite of the swift, eroding tyranny of time! Unfortunately, I am very much an amateur photographer, and I usually end up with a lot of crap photos, which typically do not testify well to anything. Oh well.
Perhaps because of my obsessive-compulsive need to document my life with high-quality JPGs, I seem to wear down my cameras rather quickly. In the middle of trying to photograph a gutter in the shade of some trees (I am not kidding) at the beginning of the second part of our Borneo adventure, my little Canon PowerShot told me it had a lens error. I knew from experience what this meant — my camera was toast. I would have to send it back to the manufacturer to have any hope of getting it repaired, which was not possible.
And so I found myself unable to document the second part of my journey. Fortunately for me, my sister still had her camera. Unfortunately for her, she had to endure me shouting “oh! get a picture!” for the rest of the trip.
… and that was an unnecessarily long way of explaining that the following pictures, which illustrate the story I posted yesterday, are borrowed gratefully from my sister. I hope that you like them!

A bit of the trail up.
Notice the ladder in the distance!

View from the top! This is the Pinnacles.
Notice Frodo, Gandalf and the gang wandering betwixt them!

The “boxed lunch” we ate at the top.
Notice the wild boar and fried rice apparently mixed with Pre-Packaged Vegetable Medley!

Me on the way down.
Notice the extreme intensity in my eyes!

Elizabeth on the way down.
Notice her unparalleled sense of adventure!

More of her photos can be found here. I’ll have my photos online soon, but I’m still in the process of culling the crap photos from the decent ones!
Also, while I’m stealing SHARING Elizabeth’s stuff, you should check out her blog, where she has posted a couple of tales of our adventures in the jungle:

Part One details our early morning seance to appease the longhouse spirits with ricewine!

Part Two recounts a harrowing encounter with a bloodsucking jungle leech!
And since she provided pictures to go with my story, I’ll provide photographic evidence of her leech encounter:

Delicious!

“Hey! What are you — why are you taking a picture of that?!” She asked me.
“Trust me,” I said, “you might not be happy now, but you’ll want this picture in the morning.”

So I am in Australia! It is great, although people do not say “mate” or “g’day” nearly as much as I thought they would, which I have to admit is a bit disappointing. There is also a severe lack of fedoras. When I was about 16 my mom got me an Australian fedora for my birthday from some Aussie specialty store in the mall. It was this huge, wide-brimmed hat, which was probably too big for my head, but I was so excited that I wore it constantly for the next couple of days. If you do not think that makes me awesome, well … you are not alone.
One day when I was walking to school, I passed an older kid who looked considerably more like a redneck than myself. He looked at my hat from beneath shaggy eyebrows and sneered, “howdy,” through his teeth without a trace of respect. Shaken, but still determined that I was awesome, I tipped my brim down slightly to him and meekly said, “g’day mate.”
If only I had known! No one in Australia wears fedoras, and no one says “g’day mate.” So that unruly teenager I passed on the street was not mocking me, he simply did not recognize my culturally ignorant effort to appear that I had walked straight from the outback. Woe to sixteen year-old Aaron!
Fortunately, there are some stereotypes which Australia does not defy. Namely, there are tons of awesome animals here!
Last week I visited Cleland Wildlife Park, where animals such as kangaroos, emus and other strange Aussie birds and mammals are allowed to roam free. Some of the animals are in pens, and you have to line up to pet the koalas, but we got to see a remarkable amount of marsupials up close, which was pretty amazing, and also a good excuse for me to put on my Wildlife Photographer hat. Observe!

A Koala!

A Tasmanian Devil! Cute, no?

Albino Kangaroo with Joey

Baby Kangroo at the watering hole!

Some odd-looking owlthing

This is an Australian goose (???)

I made a friend! <3