Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 12:34:24 -0700 (PDT) 
Subject: Adventures in Oz, Report 5: post-trip catch-up, part 1


Hi,

I've been back in the States for 5 days and I'm finally
getting around to writing this wrap-up catch-up of my
last few days in Australia. Here we go:

Sunday, September 23:

In the morning I took the train to downtown Sydney again.
My last day in Sydney.  I originally had planned to take
a train out to Katoomba, which is a little town in the
Blue Mountains with lots of hiking trails. oops, they
call them bushwalking trails.  But somehow the thought of
4 hours round trip on a train, the day before the 3-hour
train to Newcastle, didn't sound that great.

So, instead I guess the idea for the day was shopping,
which is weird considering my aversion to shopping but
that's really what happened, basically.  I had a great
breakfast downtown near town hall, at this place called
the "Jet Cafe" and then I strolled through the Queen
Victoria Building, which is like a huge 4-story mall, but
all ornate like it used to be a fancy old train station
or something.  The most amazing thing about this place is
a huge clock hanging from the top of the central atrium,
which is a big globe.  When the hour strikes, a ship
sails around the globe and arrives in australia, while a
little aboriginal figurine marches around the globe in
the opposite direction.  Very strange.

I didn't buy anything there but then I went to Red Eye
Records, which I had been told was the best record store
in Sydney.  It was pretty cool, though they had a lot of
suprisingly mainstream stuff there too like Tori Amos.
Anyway, I ended up spending almost 100 bucks australian.
They had lots of the kind of stuff similar to what I see
in San Francisco but specifically different discs.  In
other words, many artists I'm familiar with but not the
exact albums I usually see. And lots more Japanese stuff
than you see in the States.  I also bought a great zine
devoted to east coast of australia punk music, which came
with a compilation CD.  It was sort of a usual punk zine,
but cooler, to me, because it was all from an australia
perspective.  One highlight is a story by the editor,
Bianca, about her trip to California last year.

I ended up spending too much time in that record store. 
I had wanted to get to this bookstore I had heard was
really cool, Glebe Books, but as I started in that
direction I realized that I was just not going to get
there in the time I had.  I was supposed to meet Isabel
at Central station so we could meet Shannon and go to a
flea market sort of place in the Merrickville
neighborhood.  So, instead of trying to get all the way
to Glebe and back I wandered south through Chinatown and
into this huge market, which was a great source of field
recording material.  Very concentrated commerce going
on.  And it was everything from produce to cellphone
faceplates.

Walking through that experience and a few blocks more, I
found Isabel at central and we took the train to... i
forget the station, but it was near Shannon's house.  He
met us there and we drove to the Merrickville market,
which only happens on sundays.  The market was a big open
grassy space with lots of tables where people were
selling stuff. Next to this open space is a building
called The Bowery, which is basically a big junk shop
that recycles lots of used materials and sells antiques
and books and stuff. It was cool because they had a very
pointed position about recycling/reusing stuff, printed
on signs and brochures and stuff.

Outside, one of the spots in the market was occupied by
Mike and Louise, who are friends of Isabel's.  Louise
draws a cool goth comic about this supernatural rock
band, and she also makes these really great and cute
little voodoo dolls. Mike is a professor at University of
Sydney and he's writing a paper on comics.  They were
both really nice and gave me some free comics, as well as
a "flannie". A flannie is a flannel shirt, which they
explained is a very Australian thing (predating U.S.
grunge fashion).  Mike showed me how to wear it - around
your waist.

Next Shannon, Isabel and I went to dinner at a
vietnamese place nearby.  I had an extremely delicious
prawn salad, if i remember correctly. Then we went to
Frigid.  Which is a weekly electronic music night at a
pub whose name I forget, and whose location I never
understood, but it's somewhere in Sydney and it's run by
one of the guys who organizes Sound Summit, which is one
of the other 3 festivals (besides Electrofringe) that
makes up the This is Not Art festival in Newcastle. 
Anyway, there were a bunch of cool folks from Adelaide
there that night doing pretty nice intelligent dance
music.  Though no one was dancing.  It seems IDM means
dance music that you don't dance to.

Monday: This is the day when I started getting a cold. 
The lack of sleep from jetlag made me catch it, I guess.
In my journal I wrote "If I can just get to Port
Macquarie I promise I'll do nothing but lie on the beach,
and maybe look at koalas."  I broke that promise, and I
still have a cough a week later.

Mostly travelling today.  Train to Newcastle.  Then
rental car, drive up to Port Macquarie.  A list of
observations:

1. Once you get outside Sydney there's not a lot out
there. Remoteness happens pretty soon.

2.  That remoteness is beautiful and the landscape is
strange and tropical looking.  Though I kept thinking
about how the large number of eucalyptus trees kept
reminding me of California.  If I wasn't used to
California I probably would think Australian countryside
was even more exotic.

3. Some thoughts on driving in Australia:  It doesn't
take too long to adjust to the basics of driving on the
the wrong side of the street;  but there are various
consequences of it that you it takes a little while to
notice.  For instance, on the highway you pass on the
right, not the left.  And, more profoundly, the
difference extends beyond driving - when people walk they
walk on the left side of sidewalks, stairways, etc.  I
figured this out after wondering why I kept bumping into
people more often than I do in North America.

4. Traffic circles:  This isn't neccesarily a consequence
of which side is driven on, but in Australia they have
these traffic circles. These aren't the huge circles in
the UK or Europe, they're just little circles the size of
a regular intersection, with just 4 exits.  You always go
left at them, and then you drive around them clockwise
till you get to the street you want to be on, and you go
left onto it. At first I thought these were completely
ridiculous and unneccesary.  But then I figured out why
they have them: to avoid right turns (which are the
dangerous difficult turns, crossing oncoming traffic and
2 perpendicular lanes, like our left turns).  This is a
good thing, especially for the foreign driver.  I think
we should have them in the States. The only thing I don't
like about them still is that the crosswalks are set back
a ways from the actual intersection, so as a pedestrian
you always have to jog over a little bit to cross the
street.  Uh, I'll draw you a diagram later...

I arrived in "Port" (short for Port Macquarie) at about
6:30 that evening. My hotel turned out to be wonderful -
clean, spacious, and with a 3rd-floor balcony looking out
toward the beach.  It appeared that almost all the hotels
there were specifically oriented to look toward the
beach, which is not suprising because the view was
incredible. The shoreline was similiar to California's,
with rocky outcroppings sheltering little coves with
sandy beaches. Better, finer, sand than in California
though, and the water was a lighter, more tropical shade
of blue-green.

I strolled around the town, which was cute and quaint,
though a bit tourist-oriented, but not too much so.  Port
was the 3rd prison town after Sydney and Newcastle and is
also at the mouth of the Hastings River, which flows out
from the interior area called "New England".  (For you
country music fans, Australia's version of country is
centered in a town in New England called Tamworth.) I
eventually found a great fish-and-chips place in the
center of town which was still open and seemed to be a
popular late-evening snack nexus.  I was happy.

Tuesday Got up early so I could see the Koala Rescue
Hospital at 7:30 feeding time.  On the map it looked
fairly close to the hotel so I walked, for part of the
way taking the walking path above the beach, which was
beautiful.  It turned out to be a further hike than I
thought, but it was pleasant enough, and when I got to
the hospital feeding time was late anyway.

The koala hospital was basically everything I had hoped
for and more.  The Koala Preservation Society runs it,
taking in koalas that have been injured, usually on
roads, and releasing them back to the wild after they
have healed, if they think they can survive back in the
wild. There are 6 or so outdoor enclosures of various
sizes. The larger ones had trees growing in them, the
smaller ones had tree-like wooden constructions for the
koalas to climb on.  At first it was hard to see them and
I thought they were all inside eating or something, but a
young german couple that was there too pointed one out to
me, and then once I knew what to look for i started
seeing them more easily.  They were pretty stationary,
usually looking like big grey lumps in the crooks of tree
branches.  They have really strong paws that are built
like clamps, with 2 thumbs and 3 fingers, so they can
hold onto trees even while they're sleeping.  In total I
think there were about 15 koalas.

Once the feeding started some of the koalas got more
active. One of them, named Pebbles, actually bounded
across the enclosure and over to the gate where it new
the staff would come from with food. She scraped her big
sharp claws against the gate, obviously hungry.  Finally
they came in to feed her. Most of the koalas were just
fed by placing big piles of eucalyptus leaves in their
pens, but Pebbles was special. She had broken her jaw
long ago, and it had never healed properly, so she
couldn't chew very well.  Hence they had to feed her a
mashed-up concoction of eucalyptus, wheatabix cracker,
and apple, which they spooned or droppered into her
mouth. It was really cute watching her slurp up the green
goo from the big eyedropper. She slobbered some of it
back on the staff member's face and hair when she was
picked up. I have great pictures of this which I'll put
on line soon.

After getting my fill of the cute cuddly injured
marsupials (koalas are not bears, as they were first
called, but are more closely related to wombats), I
walked back into the center of town and had breakfast. It
was still early. I decided after that to check out the
beach.  The estuary and ocean shore at Port Macquarie is
beautiful, and you can walk along it on a path that leads
to several consecutive beaches sheltered by rocky coves. 
Despite this shelter all the beaches I saw featured quite
treacherous looking waves, and they were unpatrolled, at
least at the moment. So I didn't go in the water past my
knees.  Even then the riptide was amazingly strong on my
legs.  I laid out in the sun for a while and tried to
relax. I was still stuffed up and a bit tired, but also
excited about what else there was to do in the area... I
decided that after lunch I would drive out to Werrikimbe
National Park, which is a rainforest area, about a 2 hour
drive inland from Port Macquarie.  On the map it looks
much closer, but as the lady at the town's vistor
information center told me, much of the road is unpaved.
She assured me that I didn't need a 4-wheel drive, though
I probably didn't want to take a brand new car there. I
said it was a rental and she said, "oh yeah, go ahead,"
with a smile.

The drive was quite an adventure. At first after I got
off the main road, Oxley Highway, it was a pleasant trip
through rolling farmland on paved roads.  There were cows
and some horses and bucolic, quaint, little farms
scattered about the green hills.  30 miles out the road
turned to gravel and entered a more forested landscape. 
It was logging country now.  The road got steadily more
and more rough, and narrower.  Hardly any cars (maybe 4
total the whole time) came by from the other direction
but when they did it was rather terrifying.  The forest
got thicker and I could hear the cries of strange
tropical birds whenever I stopped.  The car kicked up an
immense cloud of dust behind me. This was probably one of
the roughest roads I'd ever driven on.

It was slow going, but eventually I made it to the first
point of interest, an amazing lookout point on top of a
hill.  I stared out across the amazing low mountains and
hills, covered with trees and a sort of blue haze.  The
haze, I have read, comes from the oil released by
eucalyptus trees.  I ate a snack there I had brought with
me and then continued on. The drive was excruciating and
I soon decided that it was too much to try to make it all
the way to Werrikimbe, but there was another national
park area on the way that I was almost at, called Willi
Willi National Park. I decided that would be as far as
I'd go, because if I went much further I wouldn't make it
back to paved road before sunset.

I drove on into Willi Willi and finally made it to a
place there called Wilson River Reserve.  The forest was
really dense, moist, and green, with huge towering
trees.  I parked and walked some trails that followed a
creek.  It was a true subtropical rainforest, lush and
full of life - plants of course, birds, and bugs.  It was
great. I wish that I had been drive less and bushwalked
more, but there didn't really seem to be any trailheads
earlier on the way.  Anyway, after only a half hour or so
of walking the light was already getting dim in the
forest, so I turned back, got back to the car, and
started the bumpy drive back to civilization.  On the
way, back in more pasture-like land, I thought I glimpsed
the heads of some red kangaroos out in a field. But they
disappeared before I could stop the car and look again.

That night after I returned to Port and had dinner was
when I sent out my 3rd report, from the video store
internet place.


This is quite long.  And there are still 3 more days to
recount! I'm going to break here, and send out yet one
more, soon.

(to cut to the present: I'm in Minneapolis now, for the
Sound Unseen festival.  My performance went pretty well
last night, despite a few technical problems. The final
event I'm participating in is a panel discussion tonight
at the Walker Art Center, with the Tape-beatles, Wet
Gate, and moderated by Kembrew McCleod.)


best wishes,

steev