It’s a good thing I practiced my nomadic lifestyle in LA a couple weeks ago, because Australia so far has really put me to the test. Since arriving on Tuesday, I haven’t spent more than one night in one place and it’s looking like that pattern will continue until Sunday, when I move into my permanent housing at La Trobe.
The flight was long of course, but not unbearable. After passing a seven hour layover in LAX (Thank you, Father, for taking any opportunity to save a buck or two), I finally boarded the most enormous plane I have ever seen for the nearly 14 hour flight to Melbourne. Fortunately, the plane had individual tv’s for all the seats, even those of us banished to Row 83, and I watched “Million Dollar Baby” (excellent), “The September Issue” (entertaining), the first five minutes of “No Country for Old Men” (a compressed-air killing machine? No thank you), and two episodes of the British “The Office” which was, as always, excruciatingly, uncomfortably hilarious. Despite two Tylenol PM’s and a lot of fervent hoping, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, and so I arrived in Melbourne with the slightly cracked out feeling one achieves whilst running on very little sleep and a lot of anxiety.
After waiting at the baggage carousel and passing through customs dragging two large suitcases, a guitar, and a tote bag, I finally managed to find the group that I was supposed to meet up with to take us to the hotel we’d be staying in until our dorms were ready. “Hotel,” however, is a bit of a misleading term. It implies that one has taken a vacation and hopes to pass some time in relative comfort before heading back to the daily grind. “Hostel” seems more appropriate to me, the kind of place where you can imagine someone snatching you in the hallway and taking you to a basement somewhere where rich businessmen pay for the privilege of gouging out your eyeballs. The Miami has no elevators, meaning we dragged all of our luggage up two flights of stairs before arriving in our tiny rooms, bathrooms not included because they are located down the hall, along with showers that will either chill you to the bone or potentially scald off an upper layer of flesh, depending on your preference. After passing a surprisingly restful night in my closet-sized room, I dragged all my bags down the two flights of stairs and out to the bus where we would be heading for an orientation trip down the Great Ocean Road.
The Great Ocean Road is a bit of a deceptive name, because at least the stretch that we drove was located about a mile off the coast. Nevertheless, it features some pretty spectacular landscapes, and definitely helped impress upon me the vast beauty of Australia. In some ways the landscape reminds me of California in the summer; large flat golden fields dotted with deep green trees, but Australia is much more variable; equally prone to large flat expanses as to dense, tangled forests of gnarled trees. I spent most of the hour long drive with my nose firmly pressed to the window glass, trying vainly to spot a kangaroo, saltwater crocodile, platypus, or some other hallmark of Australia, only to be presented with sheep, sheep, and still more sheep. We arrived at our camp pretty early in the day and ate a quick lunch before heading out for our first activity, a surf lesson.
Despite the occasional lie I tell to impressionable non-Californians, I have never surfed before, and I was definitely psyched to give it a try, if a bit apprehensive about my lack of upper body strength and general coordination. After struggling into wetsuits, we headed down to the beach where a grizzled old Aussie drew complex diagrams in the sand with his toes and we stared blankly at him. About five minutes into that, he instructed us to lay on our boards in the sand and put us through a dizzyingly fast sequence of commands that left the majority of us thrashing around on our surfboards like a conference of epileptics, after which he looked at us approvingly and told us to get into the water.
Surfing is incredibly difficult and tiring, but it was a completely amazing experience. Despite spending the majority of the time flipping off my board into the surf and coming up with saltwater pouring out of every orifice in my face, the .4 seconds I managed to stand up on my board gave me such a rush that I gladly allowed myself to be continuously piledrived into the ocean floor so hard I suspect I will be finding sand in the various nooks and crannies of my body for days to come.
Salty and bedraggled, we headed back to our camp, ordinarily used as a Scout Camp, who, judging by the paraphenalia littered about the grounds, are fond of kilts and woodworking arts and crafts projects. We slept in tiny cabins that slept 12 people piled into tiny bunk beds presumably meant for boys of a scouting age. It was in this cabin that I first encountered what I suspect will be my nemesis for my time in Australia.
Despite hearing tales that a “huge” spider had been found in one of the other cabins, we all went to bed with relative ease, being completely exhausted from our surfing adventure. I was awoken in the morning by a slight scuffle that turned out to be one of my fellow campers vaulting from her top bunk onto the floor. We all sat up, startled, as she mutely pointed to the window right above her bed, where, perched daintily atop the lace curtain, sat a brown spider approximately the size of the palm of my hand. As a group, we all silently packed our belongings, keeping one eye on the beast, and vacated the cabin, never to return again. I hope our spider friend is content with his new lodgings.
After breakfast we proceeded to a low ropes course facilitated by a trio of Aussies who seemed perfectly content to allow us to come dangerously close to death with only a quick “Better look out there,” as we dangled precariously over whatever new torturous exercise they devised. It was a lot of fun to be out in “the bush” and staying active, and after lunch, we hiked down the hill and got as close to the beach as we could, before being stopped by the cliffs. Everything is completely gorgeous and I’ve been really excited by how eager everyone is to get outside and go exploring just to see what we can see. On one such exploration, we stumbled upon two kangaroos just chilling in the bush, grazing. We snapped a bunch of pictures before our squeals of excitement got to be too much for them, and they hopped away.
All in all, Australia has been great so far. Tomorrow morning I head off on another orientation trip, this time for my specific University, not just IES students, and I will get to try my hand at surfing again…despite the fact that my muscles still haven’t healed from my last adventures. Wish me luck!
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