But I married a midwife, and she attends international conferences. This year, the international midwifery conference was in Brisbane, Australia, and Kate was going. With one plane ticket already paid for, it seemed foolish not to buy a second and join Kate in Brisbane when the conference ended.
So I did.
It's a fairly brutal flight from the Bay Area to Brisbane, even if you plan carefully. You have to fly through Los Angeles, and the direct flight from LA to Brisbane is 13 hours. In cattle class, shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip, with the seat in front of you leaning deep into your personal space, it's exhausting. If you plan poorly, with a long layover in LA and a change of aircraft in Sydney or Melbourne, it's more like 27 hours.
Of course, if you're rich, you can fly business or even first class, and the whole thing is a somewhat tedious picnic. For the rest of us, it's important to plan carefully, carry water, and pack some extra stoicism.
Australia is a strange place, yet a familiar one in many ways. People look and dress much like they do in California, but there are subtle differences: very few logos or graphic images; a few broad horizontal stripes are the norm, or solid colors. Fewer baseball-caps (fewer hats). Everyone looks just a little... preppy, somehow.
The cities look like American cities, only cleaner. The parking lots and shrubbery are ordinary, the eucalyptus groves familiar to any Californian, except for the Ibis in the parking lots, the wild turkeys in the shrubs, and the rainbow-colored parrots in the eucalyptus.
The surfers look like the ones I see every day—okay, maybe a little more clean cut—and they move their hands the same way when they talk about waves, but the words are different: "wettie" and "go-out" for wetsuit and surf session.
And of course, everyone speaks english, sort of. I mean, it's probably as close to english as what we speak here. Maybe closer.
At night the moon looks the same, and the planets are in the sky, more or less where they belong. But the stars are all wonky. Orion is upside down, and that's the least of it.
Then you leave the coast, and the cities. And things get very different indeed, dizzyingly unfamiliar. Nothing walks or runs, because everything hops. Instead of deer there are kangaroos. Instead of pines, the hills are covered with rainforests. A walk in the desert is punctuated by flights of bright green parrots. The rock art is, not 5,000 years old, or even 9,000, but 50,000 years old. Fifty thousand years. Five hundred centuries.
Not the same at all.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Brisbane is smack in the middle of Australia's east coast, and that's where we started. So, where should we go from there? Kate and I discovered some time ago, we see more when we travel slower; if we rush around to see everything, we get a blurry look at lots of surfaces, seeing nothing in depth. We planned to limit ourselves to the northeast quadrant of Australia, mainly along the coast, detouring inland as time and chance allowed.
We traveled in August, midwinter in Australia. The climate in Brisbane is mild, though: lows in the 50s, highs in the 70s, all year round. North of Brisbane, it gets steamy and tropical. To the south it gets cold in July and August; there was fresh snow and skiing on the southern mountains. So the plan was to go north to the tropics, for some serious snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.
I'm enough of an old surfer that I just had to go a little way south, though, to catch some of that big New Zealand swell coming up from the antarctic, and to add a few famous breaks to my lifetime collection of watery memories. Kate was indulgent, as she often is.
Of course, that meant I was shouldering a large, ungainly boogie board bag, overstuffed with wetsuits, fins, masks, snorkels, my trusty body board, and a ziplock baggie of surf wax, dragging a roll-on duffel stuffed with clothing, medicine for a month, and a daypack full of high tech clutter (digital camera, charger, USB cable, adapter, laptop, AC adapter, iPod, FireWire cable, noise-cancelling headphones for the airplane, earbuds). Oh, well. If you want to be a fun hog, sometimes you have to bear the burden of carrying your gear.
Note: Wetsuits, fins, masks, and snorkels were available (or included) everywhere we snorkeled. Had I known, I wouldn't have bothered to pack ours. I should have packed a small tripod, though... Alas. Live and learn.
Next: The Gold Coast