WOW! AMAZING! FANTASTIC!

Wednesday, October 29

After lunch our little band of 15 passengers plus ship’s escort Judy met our tour guide Sandy and boarded the bus for our afternoon tour of Perth and Freemantle. Perth is a lovely city on the Swan River, and one of its famous features is the black swans that live there. Our bus driver/local guide located a family of these birds for us to admire.

We had some free time in downtown Perth during which we were urged to purchase an item called a “fly net.” I thought, “Yeah, sure,” but bought one anyway. Little did I know then that this would be the most useful item I’ve ever purchased on any trip I’ve ever taken anywhere! Next we visited the Kings Park and Botanical Garden with great views of the city.

Back to Freemantle for a tour of this very Victorian harbor town where the America’s Cup was held a few years ago. While touring the marina area, we saw just about the biggest and most gorgeous yacht any of us had ever seen. She was called “La Masquerade” out of London. One of our band, Alan, walked down there later and chatted with a couple of the crew, but didn’t find out who the owner is.

We spent the night in an historic hotel called The Esplanade and after a nice buffet dinner I turned in early as we had an early gathering time in the morning for our flight to Ayers Rock.

Thursday, October 30

Our Quantas flight went smoothly, and we were picked up at the airport by Mick and his huge orange bus complete with kangaroo screen. Off to our hotel, Sails in the Desert, which was very very nice. After checking in, we rejoined Mick for a tour of Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas).

This red sandstone formation is located in the same national park as Uluru (aka Ayers Rock). It is made of larger pieces of sand and rock than the very fine-grained sand that composes Uluru, but is essentially the same stuff. However, it’s different composition has caused it to erode into about 36 separate domes. Most everybody went off for a walk into one of the crevices or small canyons, while I pretty much hung around near the trail head.

This is where I and the rest of the tour group learned the high value of our fly nets! You wouldn’t think that there would be so many flies out in the dry desert, but oh boy, there are! And the little buggers sense that humans are walking water supplies and come straight at your mouth, nose, eyes, ears and any exposed part that is sweating (which is just about all of you). If you are mostly covered up, you sweat more, but you don’t feel as many of them walking around on your skin. At least they were flies and not mosquitoes, so you don’t get bitten...just walked on.

After a pit (literally) stop at what Mick described as “long drop toilets,” we went to see the sunset at Uluru. As huge as Uluru is, it is very like an iceberg since it extends six kilometers underground. It was formed in a shallow depression in an ancient sea bed and has since been tipped up at a steep angle as can be seen in the fine sediment layers.

We were served champagne and hors d’oeuvres while we waited. It was somewhat uncertain whether there would be a decent sunset because the sky had been mostly cloudy all afternoon, and there had been rain showers in the area along with beautiful sunbeams through the clouds off and on. However, Mother Nature and Uluru did provide an absolutely spectacular show, with the rock standing out against the clouds probably even better than if the sky were clear. Just toward the end of sunset, a faint rainbow appeared on top of Uluru which doesn’t happen often! It was totally awesome!

Sunbeam through the clouds
Red sand, gold spinifex,
Uluru gleaming.

Rain in the desert.
Wispy droplets are falling,
Not all reach the ground.

Stark and grayish red,
an ominous Uluru
broods beneath the clouds.

Uluru sunset –
Monolithic, crowned by clouds
with a rainbow jewel.

Friday, October 31

Up and out and on the bus by 5:00 a.m. to go see sunrise on the other side of Uluru. No champagne this time, and the viewing area is closer, so you can’t really get the whole thing into one photo, but spectacular nonetheless. This photo shows part of Uluru with Kata Tjuta in the distance. Onward to the Aboriginal Cultural Center for a presentation on the various kinds of tools they have used for thousands and thousands of years to survive in this difficult land.

Back to the hotel for breakfast. Then off again in the big orange bus headed for Alice Spring. Our first brief stop was at a cattle station where one family runs about 5,000 head of cattle on about 850,000 acres of land. They would probably have more, but Australia is in about the eighth year of drought.

For lunch we stopped at Mt. Ebenezer Roadhouse. It was near the junction of the road to the Kata Tjuta and Uluru National Park and the main (only) road from Adelaide to Darwin. Part restaurant, part tourist stop, part aboriginal art gallery, part local convenience store, and all Aussie. You’d almost expect Crocodile Dundee to come strolling around the corner of the building!

Yes, we did stop at the camel farm. No, I did not ride a camel, although some of the group did. There were somewhat fewer flies here bothering humans, but only because they had the camels to bother instead!

Finally we got to Alice Spring. This town (current population around 27,000) was originally situated as a telegraph repeater station between Adelaide and Darwin because there is water here. It seems a thriving place, at least from the brief driving tour we had of it before getting to our hotel (an International Crowne Plaza Hotel which was very nice). The Todd River runs through town...once a year it even has water in it! That doesn’t stop the inhabitants from holding an annual regatta. The boats just don’t have any bottoms and the crews standing inside the boats just pick them up and run like hell through the sand!

We were treated to drinks before dinner, then another buffet, after which most of us collapsed quietly from such a long day. Thankfully, we didn’t have to be ready to load the bus until 9:30 the next morning.

Saturday, November 1

Off on another Quantas flight to Melbourne. With an hour and a half time change (from Freemantle to Ayers Rock there was only a 30 minute time change), we arrived in mid-afternoon. We checked into another International Crowne Plaza Hotel that turned out to be one of the most frustrating places I’ve stayed in a long, long while. The rooms were about the size of my cabin on the ship, with less closet space and cheap veneered furniture, and the layout of the hotel was the most inconvenient thing any architect could possibly dream up. In fact, I was quite literally trapped in the hotel building until we left the next morning. The only way down to street level was a long, very steep ramp that I knew I wouldn’t be able to negotiate with my walker at my current level of tiredness. Supposedly there was an elevator and an escalator from the 2nd floor reception lobby down to the street, but neither was operational. The way up to the guest rooms was via an escalator up to another lobby where one took another elevator to one’s floor, or, for me, via a tiny elevator located down a blind hallway half-way around the building from the upper elevator lobby. There were other seriously irksome things about that hotel and its staff, but I will save them for my letter to the CEO of International Crowne Plaza Hotels. Needless to say, I was in a totally rotten mood all evening.

Sunday, November 2

Things perked up as soon as I got out of that stupid hotel, and this last day of the tour was an excellent one! Our first activity was a lovely, leisurely, scenic boat ride up and down the Yarra River through Melbourne. Although rain had been forecast, we had nary a drop. (I attribute this to the fact that I have carried my new rain poncho with me on every tour on this whole trip and it has never rained more than six drops on us anywhere.)

Next we headed up to Yarra Valley toward wine country and the Blue Dandenong Mountains. For a while I was busy checking my eyelids for leaks, and when I opened them again, I thought I was back in Albemarle County! As you can see, the Yarra Valley is a very close match to our little section of the world! We stopped at a local winery for a tasting and a delicious lunch. I had a lamb stew because one just cannot travel in Australia without eating lamb at some point! Several of our band purchased wines there, but several others made a beeline for another counter where they had just about every variety of fudge imaginable. Guess which group I was in!

Our last stop was the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary which combines the aspects of a zoo for indigenous species along with research and breeding programs and the veterinary, rescue and rehab aspects of our own Virginia Wildlife Center over near Waynesboro. Sandy had laid on a special tour for me with my own guide and “people mover” (i.e. golf cart). In addition to a tour of the Health Center (wonderfully set up for educational programs), I got to see kangaroos (this male red kangaroo was definitely king of his own hill!), koalas, dingos, an echidna, several platypuses, and a river rat (usually in hiding...none of the rest of our group had seen it) plus a bunch of birds including several handsome ibises.

We finished up with a driving tour of some lovely areas of Melbourne en route back to the ship. All in all, with the one exception of that stupid hotel, it was a fantastic trip! Sandy and Judy went out of their way to make sure that I was able to do as much of everything as I could and that I would be comfortable waiting for the others when I couldn’t.

Monday, November 3

I actually made it to dinner on the ship last night...had even unpacked, sorted and bagged the laundry, and gotten the dusty remains of the red center of Australia out of my hair before the dinner chimes rang. Afterward I spent a few minutes out in the fresh air up on Lido aft with Jill before coming back and crashing until about noon today! They had relatively good weather and calm seas on board crossing the Australia Bight, but of course a lot cooler than we had been having through the tropics and a lot ooler than we had on our tour through thr desert. Today is still cool, but the Tasman Sea is quite calm. Tomorrow will be the first of our two days in Sydney.