Australian vignettes 3- road tripping

1.

Heading south from Stanthorpe, still feeling shaky. We stop at Guyra, in the throes of the lamb and potato festival, and are buying some sausages when a deluge begins. It rains so hard that the air becomes a wall of water. We decide there and then that camping is not a wise idea, and drive through more storms down to Ebor on the waterfall way and get a room in the motel. We compensate by going up to the national park to cook our dinner instead.

The waterfalls are racing, great volumes of water sliding off old lava. Everything is saturated, literally and figuratively; the grass is a poisonous green, tree trunks shine lurid orange, and the water disappears into a bright, impenetrable wall of vegetation. A magpie comes begging for food and the kids give it their leftover spaghetti. I have the best sleep of the trip so far.

2.

The rain clears, finally, in the afternoon. In the evening we turn onto the Lakes WAy and start heading down to Booti-Booti, planning to camp. We drive through the blocky, estuarine sprawl of Tuncurry and Forster, which appear to be inhabited solely by bronzed schoolies and condo-owning pensioners. When we get to the campground at Booti-Booti, it turns out to be hosting a convention of teenage bogans, and we keep going.

3.

After a night in the tent, we pull off the highway for breakfast in Buladelah. We cook in a rest area right on the river, noting the flood debris in the the trees at a level far above our heads. The sun glints off the water, and a flock of geese arrives. They clamber up the bank and start grazing as if they own the place.

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Australian vignettes 2-Stanthorpe

1.

We drive up to Queen Mary Falls for a walk. I feel unwell and have to stop and rest every five minutes on the way down, stop and vomit on the way up. Marcin has already taken a course of antibiotics after coughing up unspeakable things on arrival. By evening I am in the hospital in Stanthorpe with a chest infection. They call me sweetie and poke a great big stick up my nose to get a swab and ask me if I’ve been hanging around with any Ebola victims. I spend the night there, and they send me home the next day, still shaky but no longer delirious.

2.

The kids are on farm time. They wake up at 5:30, Janek demanding a vegemite sandwich. They feed the old peckers (alpacas), collect the eggs, eat perfect corn from the garden. Why there’s not much peoples in Australia? asks Janek. Why the toilets are outside? In the evenings they fall asleep watching Bambi, dogs at their feet.

3.

We go down to the Giraween National Park for a swim and a walk, stopping at the Ballandean Shop for a (now traditional) meat pie and a ginger beer. We have walked about 500 metres when Franki falls into a crevice in the rock, tears the skin off her big toe and bangs up her leg. She almost faints onto the granite but refuses to go to the hospital, having only just extracted me. We spend the afternoon sitting in a sandy wallow while the kids play in the water and the snapping turtles cruise the tannin-brown depths of the waterhole.

 

Australian vignettes: First Days

1.

We arrive in  Brisbane in the evening. It’s hot and humid. When we finally get through customs, Franki is waiting and when she offers to carry someone Janek jumps onto her back without hesitation.

She takes us to a hotel near the port. It is already dark, and after we have eaten  we go to the playground, where there are woodchips on the ground instead of sand, and a shadecloth instead of trees.

On the way home we see a huge possum swaggering through the enveloping branches of a fig tree.

2.

Marcin takes Janek out early one morning for a meat pie and chocolate milk. On the way they encounter an ibis. Look!  calls Janek, delighted. It’s a funny stork!

3.

We drive a winding road to Binna Burra, and mountain resort where we have booked a night. From the picture window we can see all the way down to the Gold Coast, jumbled on the horizon. We eat lambchops for dinner and the kids sleep from 2 in the afternoon until 7 the next morning (with a brief wakeup to eat at 11). In the morning we go into the rainforest, where my nascent twitcher’s eye is befuddled by all the greenery, and my nascent twitcher’s ear is distracted by chants of Carry me, carry me, carry me. We do see a bush turkey and a potaroo, and 2 hikers who have been so mauled by leeches that they look like they have escaped from Wolf Creek.

 

 

 

 

Coming home

We are back in Poland after a month in Australia. There is something soothing about the rain and the grey air, and the spareness of wintertime. I will post a bit about Australia over the next few weeks.