Yep, I'm still in Australia!  Back in Sydney, too.  But in between Dispatches, I made a big humungous loop down the coast to Melbourne, through Adelaide, and up to the dead, red center of Alice Springs and Ayers Rock.

Who had the clap?
Who is that German guy?
Why climb Ayers Rock?
Why are Australians so American?

Read on!
++++++++

I was walking down Oxford Street in Sydney.  You've of course seen "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert."  Well, Oxford Street is kind of the main drag drag.  Lots of shops selling sequined gowns in plus sizes.  You catch my drift.  It's a very hip part of town.

Well, I needed a disposable camera.  I've taken to carrying two at once--one is my glammy nice one, and one APS disposable that I can tote all the time without worrying. After trying a supermarket and the 7-11, I walked into a pharmacy (Ottoway's Chemist--Since 1881) and asked the counter girl what she had.  She was small, blonde, and wore braces.  Very plain and average.  And as she was selling me the camera I wanted, an attractive auburn-haired woman came flying out of the back room and insinuated herself into the sale.  She had the aura of the owner.  Or at least of a boss; she had that aura of proprietary officiousness.  Except she was squirming and giggling, like a little girl who has to pee.

"You don't want that one," she said. "Get the cheap one."

Of course, how was I to know that her sales pitch was a veiled come-on?

"The cheap one," I said. "But I like the expensive one."

The woman chortled.  (Yes--actually chortled!  Rather unattractive in a petite woman.)  "C'mere," she said, and scurried into the back room.

"What, back there?" I said as she disappeared through the door.

"C'mere!" she called.

So I took my camera and headed into the back room.  It was the dispensary, with shelves and shelves of prescription drugs stacked high on all sides.  And in the middle of the room was the woman and two young men, one who squatted on a tall stool and another standing.  They each held flutes of red wine.  There was a pizza on a stool.

"I'm Christine," said the auburn woman, raising her wine glass.  She gestured in the direction of a carton of pink pill bottles, which I understood to include her companions.  "And this is Monkey and Mattie."  Instantly it was clear that Christine was, in a word, blotto--and the red wine only partially explained it.

Mattie, who by dint of goatee and a soft-focus smile revealed his sexual orientation at a glance, said hello.  Monkey just nodded.

"We want you to sit down!" Christine said grandly.  Shades of Auntie Mame as she swept the pizza off the stool and offered it to me. "Sit and have some wine with us!  What's your name?"

"I think I will," I said. "I'm Jason."

"Jason, darling," Christine began. "I'm quite pissed.  But you can get pissed, too, and it'll be all right.  Have some wine."

Mattie poured.  Monkey sat and grinned at me.

"Sweetie," Christine continued. "I am the owner here, and when I say it's time to get pissed, everyone gets pissed. I bought this place with the intention of getting pissed whenever I damn well felt like it."

"Good policy," I ventured. I couldn't help noticing the towers of prescription medication all around us.  I wondered, inwardly, where her policy found its boundaries.

"Yes, well, we were looking at you out there and decided you were very handsome and thought we'd call you back here to find out a little about you." Christine laughed and threw back another wallop of wine. "Mattie fancies you."

"Be nice!"  Mattie said, blushing.

"Well, so do I!"  she barked at him. She then indicated her own availability by telling me she was a scandalous slut. "Don't get embarrassed.  Jason, do you want some pizza?"

"Um?" I said. "No thanks."

"Monkey doesn't fancy you though," Christine said. "She's a lesbian."

"Hi, Monkey," I said, and began to drink my wine a little faster.

"We don't call many people back here, so feel honored," Christine said.  "Well, there was a beautiful Iraqi guy in here a while ago--"

"Habibe," said Monkey.

"Habibe!" said our blotto Christine. "But he wasn't Mattie's type, if you know what I mean.  And I didn't want him because he was here for the clap."

"You gave him something for the clap?" I said.  "I don't blame you for sending him away."

"Yes, but I told him to come back in a few days."  And they all laughed. "Honey, I'll sleep with anyone!"

They all laughed again, but no one looked at me.  Her smile never went away, but suddenly Blotto seemed very sad. She pulled out a stack of photos she'd just had developed and, for her amusement more than mine, showed them to me as tangible proof of her accommodating nature. They were mostly shots of her passed out in various inappropriate locations.

"Here I am passed out drunk again," she said.  "In my underwear, of course."

Oh, lovely.  "Where are you?"

"I don't know.  Little Pussy took this one." (I didn't ask.) "So, Jason do you want my phone number?" she teased.

"No, thanks," I said. "I can find it in any toilet stall in town."

My repartee seemed to please everyone, so Mattie showed me the plastic deck chair they kept in the dispensary for when Blotto passed out on her shift.  Blotto also proudly related the previous weekend's most notable incident, in which she got so pissed she forgot where she had parked her car.  She had to take taxis for three days until Monday, when she saw it out the cab window as they passed it.

"Stop the taxi!" she had yelled.  "That's my car!"

Scary people--these drunks in the dispensary--but fun!  It's good for the ego to be called in off the street for your vague sexual aroma, even if it's by a drunken trollop and her band of merry misfits. (What does that say for my ego, though?) I was feeling pretty solid in my charms, fairly well in control of these tentative predators, and happy for the serendipity of being summoned from the street by strangers for a few glasses of wine on a Tuesday night.  Bee-Bee, the girl with braces, came with more wine (white this time) fetched for my amusement.  I wondered aloud if Blotto ever dipped into the pharmacy stock and there was general titillation at this notion. But no confessions.  Mattie reached for a cabinet to show me something but Blotto said, "Don't you dare!", and the sharing ended with that. There were mutterings about licenses.

When Blotto realized that I wasn't likely to touch her--not even with Mattie's (or, for that matter, Monkey's)--she announced they were bored of me now.  Monkey and Mattie didn't agree; they thought I was sparring rather well with their fall-down boss.  Monkey snickered in the corner and observed wryly while Mattie was as polite as a choirboy (I think Blotto actually had embarrassed him).  So we all chatted on while Blotto slowly ran out of ways to try to shock me.  If only she's known I was a New York City boy.  Nothing can shock me.

Ten minutes after that, the clerk in a nearby bookshop started eyeing me.  What is up with my bad self?

Only in Sydney, though!  Fun instances like that are the reason I love it here. People are indeed playful and very nice--if a bit off the rails.  And where else can you find such a party-prone chemist?  I mean, think of it!  A woman who's both the disease and the cure!

++++++++++++

The next day I took a train to Melbourne.  Twelve miserable hours to go a distance similar to Manhattan to Chicago.  I really hate traveling like that.  In a country this big, you should fly, and as a backpacker you can get amazingly cheap rates.  But when I was in the Perhentians in Malaysia, a German girl named Kristine Rathje gave me her unused Australian Rail pass, so I'm traveling for nothing.  It's highly immoral, of course, but so are the prices. Every time I go on a train journey, I put on my Armani specs, which make me look cool in Manhattan but oafishly German everywhere else, and speak in a strange accent. I become Mr. Kristian Rathje of Frankfurt (raised in America), Pioneer of the Rails.

Melbourne used to be Australia's biggest city.  In the last century, a major gold rush poured immigrants and convict-settlers alike into the city, which became the focus of intense development and speculation.  Ever since then, Sydney and Melbourne have had a bitter rivalry; the choice of an Australian capital skipped over both cities to avoid a political fracas and settled in Canberra, about mid-way between the rivals. Both cities duked it out for the 2000 Summer Games--guess who didn't win? Sydney is like the Australian L.A.: beautiful people, beautiful bodies, suburban sprawl, consumerism and lots of shoreline.  Melbourne, to Australians, is their New York: arts, theatre, commerce, skyscrapers, and some cool bohemian districts. And whereas the people of Sydney are sociable, fun-loving, easy-going, and blotto, those who live in Melbourne are a lot more, well, British.  There are also many immigrants in Melbourne, especially Greek.

The city itself reminded me in a way of Edinburgh--mostly because of the ornate stone buildings everywhere and the phenomenon of Scottish Sun--that wintertime daylight where the sun is out but you can never locate it, basking everything in a silvery-grey semi-gloom.  But mostly, I thought of Chicago.  The tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere, the Rialto Towers, is here.  It was going to be the site of the tallest building in the world, too, but the plan disintegrated while I was in Malaysia (which actually holds the record).  As it stands, the skyline is gleaming and impressive, but the hubbub on the streets in minimal at best and everyone wears suits.  Like Chicago, there's also a muddy brown river meandering through town, yielding some pretty pictures but little other purpose.  You never think of Melbourne when you think of the world's cities, and boy, do they resent it!  Yet it's a pretty nice place to be.

Something else Americans don't know about Australia is that many people hew closely to interstate rivalries as well.  Just as New Jersey and New York bicker, so do Victoria (where Melbourne is) and New South Wales (where Sydney is).  Northern Territory, which has Darwin, is adamant that it's not like any other state, but so does Western Australia, where Perth is. Queensland has Brisbane, South Australia has Adelaide.  There are two more, but you can look them up yourself because this paragraph has become tiresome.

Melbourne city is crisscrossed by an extensive tram system.  They're very cool, these trams, even if the rails and traffic make being a pedestrian tricky business.  The city rumbles with them, like Amsterdam or Prague does.  And they go just about everywhere.  I hopped one to St. Kilda, which is their Victorian beach district, complete with an old-time seaside amusement park, Luna Park.  Luna is said to contain the world's oldest wooden coaster, but I'll have to check into that.  (Australians are famous for fudging the truth in the hopes of pumping up their self-image, and Melbourne, that City of Sour Grapes, holds the worst offenders.)

Truth is, there's not a lot to do in Australia.  The Lonely Planet is fat with places to go, but it was written by people who live in Melbourne, so there you have that.  The Book will have you sheep-shearing, forest-walking, and touring museums on "interesting" forgotten explorers every day for eternity if you go by its pages.  Besides, most of the good stuff to do is located a long way from anything else, like Kakadu National Park way up north.  On the map, it seems near Darwin.  But in truth, Oz is huge and nothing is near Darwin except beaches swarming with killer jellyfish, hungry saltwater crocs, and angry riptides.

So while my current tour of Oz must be largely restricted to the cities, I do a lot of cafe-hopping.  My tan is not due to the ozone hole above Australia (which makes it one of the worst places in the world to go outside), but due to the shocking amounts of caffeine I am imbibing in my search for the real Australia.  During my comprehensive tour of bohemian Melbourne, I got a flat white on Chapel Street and a cappuccino on Brunswick Street. (Speaking of which, everyone is getting into the cafe act here.  McDonalds has "McCafe," ladling  McCappuccinos by the industrial drumful, and even KFC offers cappuccino and a muffin for $2.50.  Eeeee-yuck!)

I also saw "The Phantom Menace," which was one crap film.  It was basically a movie about meetings.  The Senate meets, the Jedi council meets, the Emperor meets with his flunkies, the Queen's cabinet meets.  They all sit around spewing bad lines about international trade (a movie about TARIFFS?) and every now and then George Lucas tosses in some cursory mythology. If Vader created C-3PO, why doesn't the droid know him later on?  And why is there a prologue crawl at the beginning?  It's the first damn episode and we're STILL not at the start of the story.  Meanwhile, none of the human characters had personalities (the better to sell plastic toys by), and all the aliens were based on tired old racial stereotypes: the Emperor's flunkies were Chinese (shifty), the merchants were Arabic (greedy), and Jar-Jar Binks, who may die please, was '70s Pimp (jive).  Hated it!

Thanks to the miracle of mobile technology (the new wave of the backpacker), I was able to field a last-minute call from Chris Boyce, whom I met in Italy during a European trip (my first backpacking trip!) in 1995.  We traveled together a while back then--we were booted off a train at the Czech-Austria border, made our way to Berlin together...all this stuff that sounds so cool today.  Now, he's married and a barrister in town.  We met for coffee (but of course) in the ironically named Cafe Milano. After almost four years, we stared at each other from across a cafe table.  It felt so melodramatic.  Here he was--a new person.  Married, with a career, settling down.  And here I was...doing the same damn thing.  (I'm simplifying, of course.  He's five years older than me and I did work in magazines in between.)  He said he, too, felt weird seeing me.  We mused about the promises we'd made back then to each other about how we were going to live our lives.

"I said I was going to quit law," said Chris. "I said I was going to move to Sydney."

"You never said that," I said. "You just said you wanted to."

"I didn't?" he said, and seemed bemused for a while. "Oh, I thought I promised."

We both realized that we'd been feeling guilty about not keeping promises we'd never made.

"And yet here we are," I said. "That's life.  We're both okay."

It was extremely gratifying to see a friend I'd met on a trip.  My Australian friend Chris.

I also went to the top of the Rialto Towers.  If there's one common link between tourism authorities worldwide, it's that they want you to go to the top of things.  Just about every city has a lookout.  In Melbourne, as part of your ticket you gain admission to a much-touted 20-minute widescreen annoyance that takes you on a tour of Victoria's myriad tourist attractions. Don't know why--I was already there!  The production, full of people waving at the camera from bridges and trains, was framed with a tepid soft-rock number written expressly for such tourism propaganda.  I already forgot the words, but I remember it was sung by a dude with a gravelly, Boltonish voice.  I think it went a little like this:

"Really Melbourne"

It's a city of dreams
A city of smiles
Though everyone has forgotten us
We've been here all the while
We're so Melbourne!
Really, really, really so Melbourne.

We're not bitter
No, not a bit
That Sydney got the Olympics
And we've a river brown as shit
Not in Melbourne
Really, really, really not Melbourne.

We exist!  Yeah, we do!
And so will you
In Melbourne
It'll be really, really really so Melbourne.
Yeah!

+++++++++++

Adelaide wins the prize for the scariest city I've ever been to.  It's like the Stepford City, engineered from scraps and created by adding a drop of water to the center of a public park.  I've seen a lot of cities, but none as proto-suburban and none with its eyes rolled so far back in its head as Adelaide.

There are lots of austere stone buildings built with taste and style but appearing completely empty.  The streets are wide and handsome and barely scattered with living souls.  It's like someone built a whole city with the best planning available but is still waiting for someone to move in.  The downtown (CBD) area itself is surrounded by public greens, so its tall buildings pop unexpectedly and unnervingly from nowhere.  Beyond the city are endless suburbs and hills planted with what my friend Peter calls "hobby farms."

I met Peter a year ago, in Florence.  We really clicked.  He's easygoing, whip-smart, and a brilliant conversationalist.  Hungarian by birth (with no accent), he looks like David Boreanaz with perennial bedhead.  Only his rakish good looks allow him to pull off such an unruly hairstyle.  Peter picked me up after another bruising (but free) train ride and whisked me to his family's own hobby farm.  His mom and dad moved here from Hungary 14 years ago, when Peter was about 8.  Once again, I was a little nervous to hook up with an old travel buddy, but I needn't have worried.  The same things I liked about him then, I liked now.  He loaded me into his high-powered chickmobile and whisked me around Adelaide, and we had coffee (of course), and he took me up to a German-settled town called Hahndorf, where we bought some kangaroo sausage and porked out.  Then his mom made an extravagant meal, the first of many, full of Hungarian dishes and so perfect and spontaneous it seemed created from smitten earth.

That night Peter rolled me into his duds (which I couldn't pull off nearly as well as he can), and perched me into his platform boots, and we crashed the Law Ball.  It was the function of Flinders Law School here.  Everyone was a future lawyer or a friend of a future lawyer.  That may sound depressing, but there were some real characters.  My favorite was Leo, an accountant, who told a story about trying to bed a Jewish girl by telling her he himself was Jewish.  He's not, but he got her as far as the bedroom; sadly, when his plan was fully extended, she was quick to notice the single errant detail that skinned his plan.

Peter's lothario brother also came, and I met some other friends, including hipster Karen Brothers--one of those girls who gets along with just about everybody (but you rarely see talking to other women).  It was an open bar, with its usual attendant havoc, but I remained observational as always, despite typically Australian entreaties to drink more and get out on the dance floor, mate. As is typical with anonymous but populous cities like Adelaide, its youth tends toward decadence, with cocaine and e making rounds in the bathroom, blokes lighting a pipe in the back alley, and couples locking themselves in toilet stalls to reload.  Young lawyers in fancy dress, and me in platform boots.  Young and horny in Adelaide.  Where do you go from there?  It was fun to see the future of Australia hit the high points of their lives. Well, funny and sad.  After all, it was the Law Ball.  I raised a glass to the most remote city I'll see on this tour.

+++++++++++++++++

After the miserable trip on The Ghan train to Alice Springs, I vowed never again.  No more trains.  I'd skinned Australia's rail system out enough dough--after this 20-hour journey in a torture capsule, I vowed to fly the rest of the time.  Not only were we forced to stay in our seats at all times, not only were there no tables or trays for me to write on (the indignity!), but the movies were "In Love and War" and "Jingle All the Way."  (The conductor tried to entice us: "Starring Arnold SCHWARTZ-enegger!" he sang. A few people oohed excitedly.)  So I bought air tickets at a cut backpacker rate. The time I'll save means I can return to Sydney and enjoy it some more.

Alice Springs is in the middle of nowhere.  A massive desert larger than Texas.  It's so massive there are no schools for the cattle ranchers' kids.  Instead, there's the School of the Air, where classes convene daily by short-wave radio.  Students see their teacher and fellow students once a year; for most, it's the first time they've ever played with other kids.  Pupils can be as far as 2000 km away from each other.  Every family has an airstrip, and books and homework are flown in and out every other week.  The broadcasting studio is in Alice Springs, known locally as The Alice, which with a population under 50,000 is the largest town in an area comparable to the entire midwest of America.  You can tour the school, and of course I did.  It was cool.

The first thing I noticed, upon stepping off the train, was that the air smelled of stone.  That slightly moldy, clean smell of old mine shafts and settling rainstorms.  Makes sense--all around the little town, for as far as the mind could reach, is nothing but rocks and sand and desert.  The earth is as red as blood but drier than bone. Not much more than that in The Alice.  An old telegraph office, the town's initial raison d'etre, is now a tourist village where they sell hooks and things made from the old telegraph wire.  Stringing a wire from Adelaide to Darwin was a tough job back in the 1870s, and it killed many men who tried.  But it hooked Australia up to Europe by way of Singapore, and signaled the nation's real initiation into the world scene.

In this part of Australia you also have a lot more Aboriginals, who are the native Australians.  Black of skin and like Native Americans in custom and earth-savvy traditions, they were shunted aside and killed in large numbers when the Europeans settled here.  Today, there is an alarming incidence of alcoholism, drug abuse, and crime among the poor Aboriginals.  Sound familiar?  In Alice Springs, they loiter barefoot in the dry riverbed, drink, and shout obscenities at each other.   It's really very sad, and modern Australians are all too aware of what caused it.  There's even an annual "Sorry Day" laid out by the government.

The real reason people go to Alice, other than to feel like they're nowhere, is to get to Ayers Rock, about six hours' drive to the southwest.  It's also called by its Aboriginal name, Uluru.  It's a bright red rock, almost 10 km around and 400 meters tall (conversion table, please!) that sticks out of a desert as flat as you care to imagine.  A freaky thing, to be sure, and of course the natives worship it.  Every nook and cranny has an associated myth.  This boulder is a piece of stolen emu meat, that crag is a spear wound, that cave is a wallaby pouch.  Apparently, it's the largest single rock in the world, being that it continues underground for as much as six kilometers.  But an Australian told me that, so I'd look it up.

And, yes, it's also where the Dingo Ate My Baby.  You've seen "A Cry in the Dark," the movie with Meryl Streep doing a horrible Australian accent.  She played Lindy Chambers, based on an actual incident in the early '80s where a baby went missing from the campground and a dingo was blamed, but the parents were put on trial.  The site of the dingo dinner is now a Cultural Center, where Aboriginals make high-priced arts 'n' crafts.

Truly, the Rock has a spiritual power I've rarely felt.  Some places are as beautiful as others, but the land just hums with a frequency you can't explain.  There are lodestones on this earth.  Table Mountain is one.  Uluru is certainly another.  You feel something when you're there, and no amount of photography or description can explain it. It's a Soul Thing.  If there's any reason for a life filled with travel, that's it.

At sunset and sunrise, the colors of the sun seem to electrify the Rock.  It seems lit from within, like a pumpkin.  I fully expected to see an extention cord running from the base of it into an outlet at the campsite.  You can't stop watching it, yet you can't believe it's actually before your eyes.  Awesome.  Why describe it?

The Aboriginals would prefer if people didn't climb it, and there's considerable pressure not to do it from guide books and guides alike.  There's even some "I didn't climb Uluru" souvenirs to make it seem cool.  Most people climb it anyway.  It's permitted, after all, and there's a chain and a path to the highest point of it.  Did I climb?  You bet!  I even called my mom from the top with my mobile phone.  Imperialist American pig! (Well, it was her 50th birthday!)

For the record, Why I climbed: 1) No one owns the earth. 2) Climbing makes me feel closer to my own God's earth; apart from liberal guilt, why is their worship more important than mine? 3) I don't make offerings to Buddhist or Hindu temples when other tourists do; why honor my own religion in those cases and not in this one? 4) It is permitted; they just prefer if you don't climb. There are more reasons, but four is enough.

Typical Australian remark, atop the Rock. Some bloke: "You don't get climbs like this anywhere else in the world!"  Yeah, right.  Just anywhere there's a mountain.

Australians are so American!  They hate hearing that, but it's true.  For one, they're always saying stupid, baseless, nationalistic things like that, with no facts to bear it out.  That's American.  They also live like Americans in a suburban/urban lifestyle.  Yet Ozzies like to think of themselves as British.  Bullcrap!  Want more reasons?  We both have pioneer spirits, we're both young countries, we're both increasingly made of immigrants and immigration is shaping national identity.  We're both big meat-eaters, big drinkers, big about shoving our opinions in other people's faces.  We're both ignorant about the rest of the world.  We both value machismo, lack general sophistication, treasure baseless nationalism.  The main reason Australians hate being likened to Americans is they resent having to import so much American culture.

I spent three days at the Rock, walking around it, sitting by its magical water holes, touring the nearby mountainous rock formations of the Olgas (for my money, more scenic than Uluru by a kilometer... er, mile). The first days, I was with a group led by a cool guy named Andy.  We slept out under the stars, drank wine by a campfire, and tolerated German tourists.  Later, Andy and his girlfriend Trudy and me drank beers and I asked them all about what it was like living in Yulara (the resort's town), in the middle of nowhere and working for the tourist industry.  Fascinating!  I admit I'm always just as interested in the guide as I am the tour.  I'm a writer!  I always talk to the bartender.

We also went to see the Great Australian Circus, an outback-touring circus and one of the saddest excuses for entertainment I've seen.  I loved it!  The lady who sold me my fairy floss (cotton candy) appeared 10 minutes later hanging by her ankles from a rope.  The  llamas wouldn't behave.  The clowns appeared stoned.  The trained pony could only eat grass.  Fabulous!!!

My last day there, it rained more than it has in ages.  Andy said in his tour they only get "about 200 mils" a year of rain.  I have no idea what that means.  I think it's about two-thirds of a Coke can.  But anyway, he's Australian so he could be lying. (He also let me eat a bush plum from a tree; he said one teeny peanut-size fruit has the most Vitamin C of any other fruit.  "There's more C in this bush plum than a bag full of oranges," he said to the Germans.  The bush flora is good for all kinds of stuff, but it'll just as quickly kill you. Everything in the desert is either protein-rich, full of poison, or covered in quills.  The spinifex grass alone will pierce your rubber soles if you step on it just right.)

One guy said he hasn't seen the rock so black with wet in all his six years working there.  It's actually a good thing--to see the water cascading off of Uluru, even from a distance, is wonderous.

Now it's back to Sydney.  A full store of daytrips await me--more journeys to Manly Beach, Bondi beach, diners in Newtown and Surry Hills, a trip up the AMP Tower, perhaps. Already hit the Katoomba, one of the tourist centers in the Blue Mountains, about 2 hours by train west of Sydney.  The Blue Mountains are so named because the oil from all the eycalyptus trees turns the air a moody, smoky color.  Cool rainforest, waterfalls, steep hikes.  I rode an old mine cart for the stupendously steep trip down and hiked the 1000 steps back up.  Back in Sydney, I'm popping wasabi peas and having daily sushi at Sushi Train on Oxford.

Already been to Homebush, where the Olympics are being prepared.  Comparisons to Atlanta's underpreparation won't be fair; Sydney has had twice as long as the Peach State to get ready.  Olympic tickets went on sale two Mondays ago; it's gonna be one mad party.  I wish I could be here for it.

And that's it.  What I did.  I did the Rock, I did the Law Ball.  I did everything but the Wonder Slut.

But there's always time for a second chance.  Look at that--I'm out of aspirin.  Anyone know a pharmacy round here?

The party continues,
Jason

Right now I'm in: Sydney, Australia
Countries: 35  Days: 385