rtw with lucy

How to do the Aussie salute: take you hand and wave it around your face as if to shoo a fly off your nose. This in fact is what you are doing since the flies take many liberties with your face, such as divebombing your eyes, using your nose as a landing pad, and trying desperately to crawl into your mouth.

While they have some of the most venomous snakes and spiders and jelly fish and sharks and many other critters we don’t even know about, and we must respect them for that, the fact is that they think we must be pretty tough to put up with grizzly bears and tornadoes. Little do they know that Erin got chased down by an emu on our own little country road one day!

The crime rate here is very low, with almost no violent crime. We have not heard about one murder in the news since we got here. Most Aussies feel that they can go anywhere in their own country without worrying about it too much.

They have fewer weight problems than we do in the states, though they are catching up. I’d say they are about 20 years behind us in this. They see us as a country of many fast food restaurants and have the impression that this is mainly what we eat. The interesting thing though–when Europeans come here, they gain weight, depite the exercise, and when we came here, we lost weight. Hmm.

Australia is in the midst of a nationwide drought. The only area unaffected just happens to be the dryest place here anyway. This drought has been going on for over five years and they are beginning to think that they will have to take some extreme measures soon to ensure that they will continue to have drinking water. Right now a fight is on about whether to start building seawater desalination plants. In many places they can’t wash their cars or fill their pools, and we even heard a rumor about a place restricting people to a shower every other day. Also, one day we drove to a national park, only to find that it was completely closed to the public due to a fire ban.

Most of us know that Oz is a dry country in the middle, with most of the population concentrated on the coast line, and this is true. In some places, you only need to drive about 30 miles or less to get into the outback, like Queensland, and in SE Australia, you would need to go in much further. There are some places around the coast where you won’t see a house for miles, though it is forested. That’s because much of the coastal land is in national parks.

An interesting thing about the topography is that within a square mile you can have pockets of rainforest. Many times we have taken a walk that started out in a dry eucalypt forest, then descended into rainforest, then back into dry forest and then into grassland. We have all these changes too–they just don’t happen so quickly. In some of the rainforests there is a tree called a “lilly pilly tree”. Even the rainforests have eucalypt trees though.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.