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Yes! The Dispatches can continue, in their way. Irregular, yes, but would you have my thoughts come any other way?

So here I am in Oz. Again. It's funny -- you learn a great deal by returning to any inaccessible place to which you've already been. The first time I walked around the lush waterholes around Uluru, or Ayers Rock, I felt unfathomably thankful that I was allowed to see it. I'd traveled halfway around the world by hook and crook, you know, and been away from home for about 15 months. The rock held powerful vibrations meant just for me, mostly because of what it took to get there.

If there's anything more lucky than being able to see Uluru, in the arid and remote Dead Red Center of Australia, it's being able to see it twice. The blessing isn't just doubled, but quadrupled, magnified, mushroomed into something so joyful that I'm nearly ashamed of it. Yep, I thought, it's still here. I didn't dream it the first time.

This time, too, I got to see it on my terms. No longer was I beholden to the grimmest hostel in the Southern Hemisphere -- a row of bunks like army barracks. I got to stay in one of the resort's ridiculously expensive hotel rooms. I got to drive my own little toodlin' car instead of waiting for $15 van shuttles. I got to reclaim in, in a sense, and enjoy it without restraint.

What is there to learn in going somewhere twice? When I was a kid, my parents used to fret when I'd go see "The Color Purple" over and over again. But seeing a world landmark is more than simply tagging it, sticking its image into a camera, and moving on. Learning comes in layers, and exposure allows the details to reveal themselves.

The way every color in the outback isn't what it appears to be at a distance. Oranges rock turns out to be mottled red and brown, like scales on a rusty dragon. Lime green spinifex grass is actually pine leaves and wheat-colored shoots, rustling and blending in tandem. Contrary to popular reports, there is no sameness in the outback, but a common alphabet of animals and trees stretching unbroken in innumerable iterations. Although the outback reaches past the mind's borders, for those who look closely, it is no more identical than each wave that hits the seashore. Nature's patterns are relentless, but they're anything but mindless. It's only man's inability to survive in it that allows him to obsess about its enormity. Be it a desert, a city, or a country, the sum is never greater than all of its unexamined parts.

+++++++

I spent a few days in San Francisco before flying over. Our Web site, Frommers.com, was nominated for two Webby Awards. So Pauline and I hung around town to attend both ceremonies. We didn't win the big Webby. Expedia got that one, being the corporate leviathan it is, and a smoke-voiced platinum-haired saleswoman accepted its award most ungraciously, saying that this trophy proved they "were the best travel site there is." We last saw her at the end of the bar.

One fun thing was that Sam Donaldson hosted our ceremony. Everyone in the audience was given envelopes, and some contained winners. If your envelope had another golden envelope inside, you had to go on stage with Sam and announce the winner within. I got the winner for the Games category. I stood next to Sam Donaldson and said "The Webby Award goes to 3DGroove.com," and a 14-year-old (or something) guy in a red iron-on T-shirt (I think it was of the Transfomers), be-bopped up and took his trophy. Acceptance speeches could only be five words long, and he tried to have his friend give theirs on a cell phone into the mic. It didn't work. It was that kind of shindig. We did win the People's Choice Award, though, which was excellent.

The next day was a whopper. I had breakfast on the 33rd floor of the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. Then I drove down to San Jose (rental car count: 1) to do a story on a vacation-selling company, where I had lunch with the gals. (After that, I killed a few hours by visiting the astonishing Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Surely you remember Cathy Lee Crosby, Fran Tarkinton, and John Davidson discussing it on "That's Incredible!" At the turn of the centry, a crazy widow, heir to her dead husband's Winchester Rifle forture, started building a house and just didn't stop. Staircases go nowhere, windows open into brick walls, rooms ramble into rooms, and there are 13 steps on every staircase, 13 holes in every drain, and so on. She was mad as a loon. The house is a jungle without reason, sprawling for hundreds of rooms like a timber fungus. Afterward, I sealed it with a kitsch by pressing one of those souvenir pennies. Don't miss it!) Next, I flew to Los Angeles, where my friends Justin and Mike Ness were there to take me to the illustrious In-N-Out Burger shop by the airport. Then we had a beer in the Encounter bar, which is located in that extremely '60s tarantula of a control tower right in the middle of the terminals. It's now a cheesy restaurant with funky lighting and, of course, valet parking. After a fashion, I boarded by midnight flight to Sydney. So I'd had breakfast in San Francisco, lunch in San Jose, and dinner in Los Angeles.

I slept on board.; who wouldn't after all that? I yanked the blanket over my head, as is my custom, and sawed major logs. The lady next to me, a teacher from Connecticut who was beside herself with excitement, keyed into my idea and did it, too. We looked like a couple of cocoons from the "Alien" movies.

When I woke up, the flight attendants were buzzing over me. How was your sleep, sir, would you like a drink, sir? Turns out Qantas, which gave the magazine the air tickets for free (guaranteeing coverage--it's how it works, folks) had faxed the crew to telll them an Important Writer was aboard. Before dawn, after we passed Fiji, I was brought to the upper deck to sit in the cockpit with the pilots--something forbidden in America. There, as we headed west, I saw the sun rise over the nameless stretches of the South Pacific. The pilots jabbered crap with me (it seems one of them wants to shag Brooke Shields) and ate leftover meals from First Class, one floor beneath us. They showed me all the buttons and knobs. It turns out that many of them repeat themselves all over the dashboard so every crew member can reach them. Somehow that disappointed me because it significantly diminished the complexity of the gadgetry. It made me think what I'd always suspected: that anyone with a few hours' training and a hairnet could operate a transoceanic jet aircraft.

The pilots showed me how the plane works, too. "Watch," one of them said. He nipped a single switch and we banked; the ocean sagged at the left and the clouds curtseyed to us. "Wanna go to Cairns?" he chortled. You have to wonder about Qantas' famous safety record. Then again, it must be Rain Man's favorite airline for a reason.

Landing in Sydney, it was 7 in the morning on Saturday, but five in the afternoon on Friday back home. I'd lost an entire day. I ceased to exist on Friday, July 20. (If it's any consolation, I will have two shots at August 17, and I intend to use the extra time to track down the identity of Deep Throat.

Sydney was marvelous again. It always was, only in my absence, where I couldn't be positive of it. The first of my designated hotels (more press freebies) had a view of the Sydney Opera House, and on weekends, it cost the equivalent of about $110 American dollars for total luxury. I washed the detritus of all those Economy classers off my water-retaining body and set out to walk. I beelined straight for the Opera House and Circular Quay. Upon seeing the Industrial Age strut of the Harbour Bridge, tears once again sprang to my eyes. I'm the luckiest bastard in the world. Here I am again. I laid down on the verandah next to the Opera House, facing it. It made people stare, but I don't care. I've been booked into big fancy hotels by the tourism authorities, and the clerks stare when I enter with my backpack on. But they're nice enough when they see my business card. I keep getting free bottles of red wine. I keep sleeping in big suites. Tonight's is a two-bedroom "apartment." What am I gonna do with three beds?

Anyway, it's ironic. I want to see all this so much, again and again, for the rest of my life. But if I do that, I will start to take it for granted. While I would love the satisfaction of taking it for granted--since it would mean that I belong to the world, and not merely my corner of it--I would hate to be cavalier about it. There's no middle ground. Without the whiff of thankfulness or unworthiness, I am lost.

Onward I walked, down Macquairie Street, to the war memorial (did you know Australians fought and died alongside America in Korea and Vietnam?), down the suddenly down-at-heel gay stretch of Oxford Street, up Pitt Street. I had a sushi snack at my beloved Sushi Train. It was all like a dream--as every city is when you climb off a long flight.

After a day of recuperation, which I wasted in my hotel room and walking around town in intermittent downpours, I headed off Monday morning for Canberra, four hours by train to the southwest. Canberra, if you didn't know (and so few do), is the capital of Australia's 19 million citizens. It's located midway between Sydney and Melbourne, the story goes, because neither city could agree on which should be the capital. If you ask me, it was because neither city wanted anything to do with it.

Canberra is a study in soul death. It's a city that only a car could love, in that in Canberra, the shortest distance between any two points is a gently arcing tree-lined avenue. Walking anywhere is quite out of the question, as the city is planned for effect, not practicality, and distances exist purely to justify the importance of its critical structures. Everyone who has the misfortune to live in this extended bedroom community has the double misfortune of working as a civil servant. It stands to reason that this portentous, isolating steroided suburb was the design of an American, Walter Burley Griffin, for whom the city's central fake lake is named. Ironic too is the fact that the city's most recognizable landmark doesn't really exist, per se, at all: The Captain Cook Memorial Water Jet shoots lake water 150 meters pointlessly skyward every day from 10 to noon and 2 to 4. Needless to say, most of the water falls just as pointlessly back to this earthbound town as soon as it's launched. If there's a breeze, the rest of it douses innocent motorists on Commonwealth Bridge. So all the women look bedragged, like Pauline Collins. Worse, no one looks at you as you pass them. Considering how few pedestrians there are in Canberra, I take this is a great slight.

It's worth noting that the Prime Minister, John Howard, refuses to live in Canberra. It costs the country $150,000 a year in commuting charges. The Governor-General also lives in Sydney. It's the first time since Canberra was named national capital in 1927.

There are some nice things. I was listening to morning radio when the DJ announced there was a lost dog on some street, and could the owner please claim it? But buses only come once an hour, and it seems like every shop belongs to either a lawyer, a financial advisor, or an optician. Oops, I'm back to the negative again.

I was in town to visit the new National Museum of Australia, which was opened in March of this year on Acton Peninsula. On my last trip to Australia (when I came away with more generally positive observations), I kept my Dispatches online as I traveled. After I came home, the makers of the museum located them and decided they should be memorialized in the sanctified halls of the country's first national museum. Remember Burley Griffin, it wasn't the first time an interloping American was commemorate in this city, but I have to admit than when I first heard about the exhibit, I had misgivings. Australia is such a wonderful, intricate place, so why should they need the opinions and rantings of foreigners? Folks Down Under already co-opt much of American culture, so it seems faces are always turned toward North America. Frankly, I would prefer that Australians learn to look within for their national identity. Only then will national pride be as strong as it hopes it can be--instead of a bumper-sticker ideal.

But I accepted the offer, and I was going to see the finished product at the Museum. Appropriate to a museum dedicated to Australia, you really have to work to reach it. It's near nothing. Planners erected it at the end of a forlorn finger of land in Lake Burley Griffin, separated from business district by a prairie of empty government parking lots, acres of sterile lakeside parkland, and a four-laned divided highway. It's a lot of hostile terrain for a tourist to cross on foot (as most tourists must). But they do it, elbowing through Canberra's interminable sprinkle showers and sudden gusts, and probably resentful of the isolationsist symbolism of the Museum's placement.

The Museum is a bold feat of modernist design or one of the ugliest muddles on Earth's fair face, depending on your aesthetics. No right angles, just colors that end in mid-plane, scoops of colored sheet metal, and a towering orange loop swooping from front doors to parking lot like a scorpion's sting. It reminds me of one of those pet roller coasters the Vegas casinos have. The executing architectural firm of Australia's new National Museum is--do I really have to say it?--American. (An American-trained Italian also did the $1 billion Parliament House, which crouches like a flagged arachnid at the focal point of all Canberra's major thoroughfares.)

The content of the Museum, though, is fascinating. My part was really good, and I'm not just saying that. A huge video screen, shaped like Australia, spands two floors of an atrium. From the balcony above, visitors use touch-screen kiosks to request the little video on a variety of topics, including Weather, a sample of nutty roadside attractions ("Big Things"), the prehistoric landmass called Gondwana, and so forth. I'm under "Holiday Explorers," which is one of the more popular displays. I share the segment with three other folks: a girl from the Netherlands, a guy from Austria, and a retired couple from Sydney. "Jason, 27, is a writer from New York City," it begins. And then it traces my path on the map, animated and with cool train sounds and airplane beeps, all the while flashing some of my holiday snapshots like on "Pop-Up Video." Meanwhile, on the kiosks, you can thumb through about 20 pages of my writing --well, snippets, anyway--and more photographs. I thought it was so cool. To be immortalized in such a neat way!

No one recognized me.

Other exhibits were very interesting indeed: Phar Lap's horsey heart in a jar, an original yellow-and-black convict jacket from Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), rows of Hills (backyard laundry carousels the Ozzies cherish for some reason), a dress once worn by dingo-eaten baby Azaria Chamberlain, and so on. Plus cool multimedia shows that are viewed from a rotating turntable -- gliding video screens timed to each other, colored lights, music. "Isn't it like Disneyland!" exclaimed one senior citizen, quite overcome.

Having secured a car by the next morning (rental car count: 2), I found Canberra much more manageable and actually sort of pleasant to zoom around. Even though the city was laid out at the turn of the century, it's ideal for having wheels---how did they predict that? So I took another pass through that famous Parliament House, too. They've got one of the four known copies of the Magna Carta in there, preserved in a case of argon gas. You can walk wherever you want in the House with a minimum of fuss. It seems that Australian leaders don't think they're very important, either.

I drove back to Sydney along the Hume Highway. On the left. By American standards, it's an out-and-out hinterland, but it's one of the oldest tracts of homestead in Australia. Cute little towns like Bowral, Moss Vale (very attractive), and Golbourn. I enjoyed it, and arrived back in Sydney at rush hour, when I had to slolam through buses and pedestrians all the way to the hubbub of Circular Quay, which has been Ground Zero of Sydney since Day One. The anchor from the flagship of the First Fleet of 1788 is in situ at a nearby park. Kids skateboard off its pedestal.

Next morning, too early, it was off to Darwin. Qantas' solicitiousness had vanished. I was given a window seat with no window--just a wall--and when I asked to be moved, they told me quite plainly that it was impossible. So I flew something like five hours to the Top End, just where Australia stops and Indonesia begins, without a window. The old woman next to me said she'd be writing a letter.

In Darwin, things are more tropical. The weather is in the 80s all winter (meaning now) and dry. In summer, which they call the Wet, the weather is, well, wet. Torrential. And hot. And humid. It's so different that most of the outback up there, being floodplain, is inaccessible for over half the year. And in July, when it can be as cold as 74 degrees and sunny, locals huddle with chills.

As the capital of the desolate Northern Territory, Darwin gets a lot of flack from the rest of Australia for being remote, and for having a citizenry as ostensible as its location. They're not wrong. I found Darwinians to be dull-witted to the extreme, and you know that I don't often say things like that. The famous Australian dry wit is not much in evidence in Darwin. Bill Bryson described the typical vacant Darwinian countenance as "the Darwin stare," and I have to admit I saw me a little of that. Any sarcasm misses its mark, and is greeted instead with earnestness, so wherever I went, I left a trail of sour-faced Territorians.

Part of the riddle is understanding Darwin's place in Ozzie culture. It's the outpost. Of all the country's major cities, its warm weather and wild nature, which girdles the city on all sides, attract the dropouts, testosterone-heads, and idle minds of the country. Since I know Key West well, I could easily compare it to Darwin. It's where artists and tinkerers and Sydneysiders at the end of their ropes can bow out and take it easy. Time and again, you'll hear tales of people who Had It All, only to realize they hated it all and wanted to chuck it all. One of my tour guides was a bruiser from Melbourne, another escaped Sydney after a car wreck and a bust-up with a girl. The imperious tall poppy who runs the Mississippi Queen guest house came to Darwin 30 years ago and just never left. He bought a few buildings, some old camper vans, an abandoned rail car, and collected them together under the palm trees. Young people move in and, just like him, never leave. He's the Anna Madrigal of Darwin, and the reigning guru of a coterie of misfits. I didn't think there were any places left like that in the world. I thought the Big Money had driven them all away, but the Big Money has not been interested in Darwin.

Well, until recently. These days, they're finally building the rail link between Darwin and Alice Springs, which will link it for the first time with the rest of the country. For years, the main method of freight transport to Darwin has been the famous "road train"--tractor trailers three, four, even five cars long that thunder up the Stuart Highway from Adelaide, no mercy in their paths. With a rail line installed, shipping will be much snappier, and the city will lose its outpost atmosphere. The owner of the Mississippi Queen says he plans to sell out when the rail line is done, in another three years.

Darwin has a more interesting history than you'd think. It was a hub during World War II, when the Japanese bombed the crickey out of it. It rebuilt, but on Christmas Dar 1974, Cyclone Tracy came along and leveled pretty much everything. There's a museum devoted to the Northern Territory that shows video and pictures to the devastation, which was absolute, and there's a little pitch-black booth where you can listen to a recording made of the storm by a local priest. It starts with the distant, disintegrating sound of a choir singing. It must have been on the same tape he was using. Suddenly, in mid-note, like the sudden attack of a nightmare, the sounds of chaos begin. Remembering Hurricane Andrew, I hustled out of that scary little booth in a hurry.

Past Darwin, nature takes over and it doesn't relent for 2000 miles south. Half the year, it barely rains at all. That's now, and they call it The Dry. During the Wet, the rain comes heavy and often, and much of the area floods. Consequently, the land has never been settled, and it's some of the wildest land left on Earth. I visited two major national parks, Kakadu and Litchfield, to have a look. A few cruises up some waterways took us past croc after croc after snaggledtoothed croc--some as much as 15 feet long. We'd cut the engines and literally float right to them as they dozed on the bank. I could have reached out and petted them, if I only wanted to be able to do it once, twice at the most, and never pick my nose again. Birds of every size and stripe, from little blue-feathered finches to magnificent kites with six-foot wingspans. I spent two nights camping under the million Southern Hemisphere stars, as the wallabies (small kangaroos) nibbled around my camp. Meanwhile, out in the sea, you have some of the most colorful and diverse life in all the marine arenas. And the most deadly--on Darwin's beaches from October to May lurks the box jellyfish, sometimes called the "sea wasp," which carries the most toxic venom known to man. It eats single-cell goop from the sea, but for some reason, harbors enough poison to kill a man with excruciating lashes. There are also plenty of sharks, and of course, the saltwater crocodile, which snacks on Americans dumb enough to swim in estuaries.

We had to swim about a kilometer through waters where fresh water crocs live. They're the ones that leave people alone, but that didn't mean that every splotchy underwater rock didn't petrify me. The reward was great: A huge wall trickling with a freshwater waterfall, and a sandy beach to lie on.

(This always happens when I write a dispatch. I run out of time and have to hurry the rest.)

One of the highlights of Darwin was the Beer Can Regatta. It happens once a year. All of town turns up at the beach, when teams compete with boats made out of empty beer cans. There are no rules; it's a free-for-all. Very trashy. Guys coming back bloody.

Here on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," they don't have a "final answer." They "lock in" their answers. Just so you know. They fail out early, too. The guy on tonight burned all three lifelines to decide gazpacho was made of tomatoes and not corn. (They also have "The Weakest Link." Not Anne Robinson, but a similarly sapphic sour-lipped coppertop.)

Another side note about Australian culture. Pick up a magazine, any magazine, and you'll find at least one story about a young talented Aussie who's living in New York. Young-Aussie-Makes-Good-Abroad stories are part of the legend here. It's too bad. Once, again, it reinforces the false idea that anything worth doing is going on outside of Australia. Pick up any newspaper, and the same applies to products or ideas. One story told about how kangaroos are almost as widely recognized as the Statue of Liberty.

Turn on any TV, and you'll find sport. One or two channels (out of four or five) will be showing Australian Rules Football or rugby. This morning at 7:30, track and field was on.

After my time and research in Darwin, at the top of the continent, I hopped a car (rental car count: 3) and undertook the legendary 1500-kilometer trip to Alice Springs, in the middle of the continent. We're talking one town every 150 miles or so, and you'd better make a plan if you don't want to run out of gas. I was really looking forward to the Zen of it. Australians, though, asked me if I was really sure I wanted to do it. You see, on the day I arrived, the big news here was the abduction of a young British couple driving on the same lonely stretch of highway. An unknown assailant pulled them over, telling them he saw sparks coming out of their van, then when the boy went round back to investigate, the stranger apparently shot the guy and tied up the girl. Somehow, she escaped, and the man ran away with the boyfriend's body. Authorities are still looking for both. Good luck finding either. (And just today, I heard a bulletin that another body was found at a rest stop near Alice Springs. I remember one rest stop around there, the site of an old outback well from the 1880s, that smelled like dead meat... I thought it was just my sandals!)

I got a little mileage out of that, though. Typical exchange: Them: "I couldn't live in New York. It's so dangerous." Me: "Not half as dangerous as driving down the Stuart Highway!" That shuts 'em up.

The Stuart Highway wasn't as dread as that. Hours of skeletal white-barked trees, hours of red dirt, countless dead wallabies and kangas by the side of the road. And road trains, which are those tractor trailers bearing numerous carriages. Way far in the distance, through the mirage, you'll see the raven flutter of black wings on the road, and when you get close, huge wedge-tailed eagles fly up from their feast of kangaroo carnage. It's the sort of road where strangers driving in the other direction wave at you, just for something to do. And the sort that's full of interesting sidelights. Well, maybe the sidelights aren't interesting at all, but when you've been driving all day between trackless deserts, a rock shaped like Winston Churchill's head is a revelation. (Yes, I really drove 20 minutes off road to see that. I even took a picture.)

There are also scattered outback pubs, usually one of the few remaining structures from gold rush towns, run by colorful bush folk. You know: money from the world's nations stapled all over the wall. The roads raise orange dust, the buildings are made of hot tin, and the hamburgers contain gristle--and ya love it. I stopped at a few, including Daly Waters, where Qantas once conducted its London runs back in the wee days of the centure, and Barrow Creek, where that beset British tourist appeared to report the attack. Most of the towns, though, haven't been worthy of the name for a century. The woman who runs the pub there is something of a national celebrity; she has a big spread in Who Magazine, which is the People Magazine (page for page) of Australia. Towns like Newcastle Waters are mostly collections of rotting buildings, and the only people who pull off the loop roads to see them are tourists who are secretly thankful they don't have to live there. In all, I stopped once every hour or two (oo! look! the ruins of the old telelgraph station!) and stayed in two outback towns, Katherine and Tennant Creek.

Actually, I really liked the old Telegraph Stations. There are only four of the original dozen buildings left. They used to link Australia, which back then only went as far northwest as Adelaide, to Singapore and the rest of the world. Now they're abandoned. At Tennant Creek and especially Barrow Creek, you can still kick around and find bits of old thick telegraph wire -- pure metal, like a nail -- and shards of time-smoothed bottles. After the outback lost its uses (telegraph, gold, etc.) time simply shattered out there, and no one has ever gone back to pick up the wreckage. It was a privilege to tour it while it's still there: 1,000 miles of ghost cities.

Unfortunately, I killed a lot of little animals. It was by accident, believe me. I usually scorn those tourists who take more than photographs, leave more than footprints. But I took lots of birdie life, and left meat in my path. Thing is, since there's no speed limit, and also not much vegetation to give context to your speed, you tend to go very fast indeed. So fast that I probably brushed against the heiney of death more than a few times without even knowing it. I drove so fast that I was essentially a shiny smear on the horizon, which would explain the birds' inadvisable attraction to my bumper. About four creatures met their maker on the bumper of my Holden. They didn't know what hit them---goodness knows I sure didn't.

Then to Alice Springs, where I did a few silly things, such as ask an Irishman to go and have a beer. The silliest was to get up in the pre-dawn darkness to go hot-air ballooning in a vehicle carring 300,000 cubic feet of hot air. From that uneasy moment when the basket first lifted from the spinfex, to the time we reached an incomprehsible 6,000 feet to catch some westerly, I had a blast. Not as quiet as you'd think, though--those gas jets are loud!

When I inspected my rental car before returning it, I found a leglike "twig" curled around the engine grille. There was a small grey blob of meat on the end of it. That poor, beautiful bird. Whichever one it was. I do feel awful.

I do.

On that same hairy day, I flew to Ayers Rock. Yes, I'd been there before, but trust me, there's something about it that bears repeating. I walked around it (nearly 10 km) as a sort of victory lap. I mean, seeing it once is good forture, but seeing it again is profoundly lucky. I spent that night watching sunset on the rock from afar, having dinner (camel meat, croc, barramundi) under the stars and the full moon, with telescopes. Mars is as its brightest in 15 years, they say. And the Southern Cross is lovely, too, but that's all the time.

I did have to put up with the evil Voyages, which runs the hotels at the Rock. Since it has an exclusive contract, it can do whatever it wants, and it does--low prices for a hotel room are around $340 in Ozzie dollars, or $170 in American. It's an appalling stewardship of an exclusive contract. All the tourists at the Rock are European; no Australians can afford to come unless they want to camp overnight in freezing desert temperatures. It's wrong.

Anyway, I got up before dawn, in those freezing temperatures, to drive to the Rock (rental car count: 4, sunrise count: at least 6) and watch the sunrise upon it. Once again, I was moved by its impossible beauty. It glows; it's alive. There have been more than 800 sunrises there since I saw it last; I can't imagine it ever gets old.

Now, I am pleased to announce that I am in Perth, in Western Australia. Well, around it anyway. I'm actually in a perfect little seaside town called Yallingup, which perches on the cliffs over the Indian Ocean on that little nostule of land that sticks into the ocean southwest of Perth. Perth, you should know, is the most isolated big city in the world. Nothing is near Perth, excepting, at the moment, me. It's also the city most distant from New York City, being 12 hours ahead and the nearest city to the polar opposite of Manhattan, which lies somewhere in the sea outside of my hotel window. The distance between Sydney and Perth is about what it is between New York and San Francisco, only here, there's mostly desert and bush in between.

Western Australia, it must be said, is one of the most sensational places I've ever seen. It's beautiful. Perth's harbor is never counted among the world's prettiest, but I'd wager that's because so few people have actually seen it. It might also be because it's not actually a harbor; it's the Swan River. And it's not actually a river, it's an estuary. (Croc free.) But its meandering shores, its massive millionaire manions, and the way the flat water frames the business district's proud towers---it's so very photogenic. As well as patently American. This city may be the most distant from home, but ironically, it's the most like home of any international city I've ever seen. The suburb is king. The strip mall is queen. The car dealership is prince. No, Perth is more Yank than royal.

It's also clean and safe. On the train between Fremantle and Perth, I saw a man sharing a laugh with two policemen as one wrote in a citation book. The three of them were really cutting up. Then, the cop tore out the citation and handed it to the civilian who, still laughing, said "Thanks!" One story in yesterday's paper talked about how motorists were complaining that newly installed roundabouts and other "road calming" tools were causing more accidents than they were averting. You have to love it: A city that's TOO safe!

Today, I pulled into the Karri forest region (rental car count: 5), about five hours south of Perth. We're talking 150-foot fall trees, big around as a fold-out couch, and lucsiously green rolling hills dotted with content cows. Everything is coated with a luxuriant Kiwi green fur: embankments, fallen logs, rocks. And the roads! Winding and lumped with smooth hills and lined with those patchy-barked tree giants, which gleamed orange and tan as if they were bathed in sunset light. This was driving--no one around, roads recently rain-washed, rise and fall, shadows between huge towering trees. Forget about what they say about the Stuart Highway; the real abandoned roads are in WA. In the NT, I'd pass someone every 5 minutes. Here, I'd be lucky to see someone every 20. Now and then, startlingly bright lime-colored birds would spring into the trees at my approach. It was paradise. It was car-commercial good.

No one lives out here! Western Australia is about the size of ten Great Britains, but only 1.9 million live in it. And 1.4 million of them live in the Perth area. We're talking serious space here. You could drop Germany into the middle of it and not kill a soul. (You might kill a few Germans, though.)

I realize now: This isn't just any vacation. This is a driving vacation. I'm taking some of the world's best road trips. Next up is the chief Australian road trip, the Great Ocean Road, which I'll take this weekend on the coast west of Melbourne.

I met a friend of a friend two weeks ago in Sydney. He was an enterainment journalist like I used to be. I told him about how I quit my job and went traveling and it changed my life. Two days ago I got a message from him. Inspired by my story, he quit his job and he's going traveling in two weeks.

The Johnny Appleseed of travel strikes again!

All right, out of time. Too bad, because I have some choice words about the Aboriginal issue.

On to Melbourne, for that Great Ocean Road drive (rental car count: 6), and Sydney, to climb the Harbour Bridge at sunset. Sorry this Dispatch was so long! I got caught up and then I forgot to send it, so I added a little more and a little more....

An apt metaphor for life.