Post 6:

A mild-mannered priest named Rodrigo,
had a church by the bay of Montego.
But when he said mass,
he was an arrogant ass,
the reason? 'Twas his Altar Ego.

As serial readers of this blog may have noticed (at this point, a hello to those of you new to it), each post begins with a one-line joke. I would like to clear up any misconceptions some of you may have had and stress that I made these jokes up myself. Perhaps they are not quite the sharp, pithy quips that I have aspired to start my blogs with, but I feel I have a little license to use them given they are the fruits of my own endeavour. However, it struck me recently that much of a joke is in its delivery. Thus (as can be seen from the above) I have decided to try an alternative approach and begin this post on a more poetic note. Let me emphasize that this is a trial period and that feedback from you lot is required in order to determine whether this new format is adhered to or dispensed with in favour of its predecessor. Either way, the point is I know they're cheesy, but both jokes and limericks are the product of my own twisted mind, and as such, it's ok to use them.

Yet again this post is well overdue. Sorry that I haven't replied to emails, but I'll be clearing a backlog once I get this post finished. I had intended to write it immediately before leaving Melbourne, but I let things run on and am writing this having already been on the road again for some time. As a result, this post has to cover the end of our time in Melbourne as well as the beginnings of our adventures across Australia. It may go on for some length, so I'd reccomend reading it in bitesize chunks or going to get a cup of tea before continuing (if, indeed you choose to continue). To cater for the true modern-day men and women reading this, I've tried to include as many pretty pictures as possible; hopefully this will in some way compensate for their inordinately short attention spans.

Being in Melbourne for some of the 6 nations rugby games was a mix of the tragic and the sublime (if you're Irish). Obviously you need to be some sort of deperate character to stay up till 5am on a working Monday morning to watch your team snatch defeat from the jaws of glorious victory (thanks France), but I had plenty of other desperadoes to keep me company (and we were there 2 weeks later for emotions at the other end of the scale courtesy of England).

The end of February saw us wrapping up our stay in Melbourne and preparing for a month on the road in Oz. The box of surplus stuff that we sent home was ridiculously heavy and was chock full of all the stupid things naive travellers initially pack but don't need, along with the odd politically sensitive t-shirt that would be unwise to wear in South America at the best of times let alone in the current Chavez-led socialist climate.

As Australia is a fairly big country, we're actually only touring half of it, going up through the middle and then across and down the east coast. The more sparsely-populated west has to be ignored due to the limited time we have here. The plan - such as there is one - has been to fly to Alice Springs from Melbourne, exploring Ayer's Rock (Uluru to the informed) and then to ride north with a bunch of other paupers up the tropical town of Darwin, taking in Kakadu national park - home of Mick Dundee and 5-metre crocs with a taste for German tourists. From there, we're to fly to the north-eastern coastal town of Cairns - a major jumping-off point for the Great Barrier Reef and then to party and surf our way down the east coast to Sydney. Here's a nice little map of the planned trip that they won't let me copy into this blog.

The Outback

Alice Springs is pretty much in the centre of Australia. "The furthest from any beach but the closest to every beach", the locals are fond of saying. It has a population of ~30,000, making it the second largest town in Australia's Northern Territory (a province that would fit Ireland and the UK into it with plenty of room to spare). It is rather hot. Usually >40°C hot. And it's a little weird. Living in such a hot, bright, desolate place clearly has an effect; the locals all have a certain wild-eyed glint and a particular manner that is best described as "feral". In-keeping with much of the Outback's most successful and populous species such as dingoes, cats, horses and camels (a recent camel census puts the local population at ~300,000), the humans who moved into this area once were domesticated. No longer it seems. The things that go on in Alice can be as strange as the people. There is a hush-hush US military installation known as "Pine Gap" within 10km of the town. Little is known about what goes on there other than it must be a very clean place. As Uncle Sam's boys aren't robots they have need for beer and company. Thus it is inevitable that they have ended up mixing with the good denizens of Alice. The two groups seem to get on rather well, but the locals are left puzzled by the fact that every advocate of mom, baseball and apple pie that they meet from Pine Gap claims to work there as a janitor. A very clean place indeed. As with most things, wikipedia will explode the mystery and nascent conspiracy theories forming around such a place. It reports that Pine Gap is a NSA listening post, eavesdropping on all forms of communication emanating from this corner of the world in an attempt to find bad guys. It was more fun when I thought the yanks were there working on a genetically engineered race of hybrid mole-men which they would use to infiltrate every country in the world...

Anyway, Alice is used as the staging post for visiting what is arguably the most recognizable natural or manmade feature in Australia - Ayer's Rock (or Uluru). A massive piece of rock protruding from the desolate desert. People had told us "nothing anyone can say will prepare you for its sheer enormousness, and its complete isolation". Unfortunately, in saying this those people proved themselves wrong. Having listened to such people perhaps a little too much, we were amply prepared for Uluru's size and were a little surprised to find out that it wasn't all that isolated; there were a number of other huge rock formations sticking out of the desert within a radius of a couple of hundred km. Nevertheless, the range of colours it goes through at sunrise and sunset is quite beautiful and the contrast those colours form with the clear blue sky is very striking.

Leaving Uluru behind, we went on a 3 day backpacker bus north to the coastal capital of the northern territory, Darwin (this involved travelling through 1,500km of progressively greener outback). I had hoped that this would be my chance to taste some "bush tucker". Bush tucker is the traditional food of the aborigines, who came up with all sorts of ingenious ways of finding nourishment in such desolate terrain. I was particularly interested in sampling the legendary witchetty grub and although they don't look too appealing, they're supposed to taste of peanuts. Unfortunately I never got the chance to try this most appealing of delicacies, but I instead tried to stomach some even more daunting native cuisine. Waking up on the second day of our road trip, I found most of the breakfast eaten, and I had to make do with Vegemite on toast. There is little to be said for this stuff other than the Aussies identify with it the way the Irish do with Guinness, and that it does a good job of looking and tasting like thick, salty mud. But then the Aussies (like the Irish) are not known for their culinary prowess. Their contribution to international cuisine is chicken cordon bleu in a tomato sauce and on a bed of chips - a dish that goes by the name of "Chicken Parma". For breakfast, many of them eat a rectangular version of Weetabix produced by a company called "Sanitarium". If I'm not mistaken, a sanitarium is a convalescent home for the chronically ill; the thought of a bunch of plague-ridden walking corpses making one's breakfast cereal does not fill one full of confidence. The Aussie penchant for giving things entertaining names a la "wombat", "billabong" and "kangaroo" can also be seen in the food industry. Readers of some cultural awareness will no doubt cry out in objection to this observation. "Most of the so-called 'entertaining' names you're talking about are derived from aboriginal languages", they will say. "The only reason you think these words are funny is because you are ignorant of the Aboriginal culture and languages", they will claim. There may be a modicum of truth to this observation, but it cannot explain why Nestle Australia has chosen to call one of its most popular chocolate bars a "polywaffle". I can picture it now - the Nestle marketing gurus working on the name for their new blockbuster product. They've been working night and day for months on the problem and have narrowed it down to three final candidates. Ultimately - and after much wringing of hands - "polywaffle" wins out over the other two hopefuls; "chuzzwuzzler" and "wallangadoo".

At this point, I take my tounge firmly out of my cheek, make conciliatory gestures to the few Australian readers of this blog, and wish you all the best of health and promise a final post from this fine island/continent before we depart for New Zealand on the 10th of April.