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From RuralNorthwest.com Wandering with Sam
Australia is about the same size as the United States, but with a population smaller than Canada, so there are vast areas that are virtually unpopulated. Most Australians live in the more populated areas in the vicinity of the largest cities like Sydney and Melbourne.
When I first arrived in Australia, I decided to spend the day in Sydney despite being exhausted from a sixteen hour overnight flight from Los Angeles. Sydney’s commuter train system has a stop right in the airport, so it was only a fifteen or twenty minute trip from the terminal to the city center. The city itself is similar to other large cities, with a dense cluster of skyscrapers and people in suits scurrying about on the sidewalks while buses and taxis roar by on the narrow streets. Sydney reminded me more of New York than Seattle or Portland, because of the overwhelming crowds of pedestrians that crowded Pitt Street during the daytime. Sydney’s main attraction is its harbor, an inland bay surrounded by leafy suburbs to the north and the glass and steel skyscrapers of Sydney to the south, and flanked by the Harbour Bridge on the left and the famous Opera House on the right. The Circular Quay in the center of the harbor is a major ferry terminal with vessels leaving at all hours of the day. Adjacent to the Circular Quay are The Rocks, one of Sydney’s oldest neighborhoods dating back to the eighteenth century when Australia was largely a penal colony for Britain. In fact, to this day, Australians refer to British people in general as “poms,” unofficially a loose acronym for “prisoner of mother England,” since many new arrivals from Britain to Australia were in fact convicts. Today, The Rocks is an area of restored sailing ships, gift shops, a large number of pubs, including a few ancient ones, and even a Shakespeare playhouse. Sydney’s main shopping area is along Pitt Street in the center of the cluster of towers, including the Space Needle like Centrepoint Tower. The malls at the Queen Victoria Building and the Strand preserve an element of Victorian elegance to the otherwise quite modern city center. Such a quick day in Sydney after an exhausting flight is quite inadequate, considering Chinatown, the museums, the aquarium, and the various neighborhoods and beaches, but I was on a limited schedule on this work related trip. After spending much of the day in Sydney, I returned to the airport to catch a commuter flight to Newcastle.
The tourist attractions in Newcastle are the wineries throughout the Hunter Valley to the north and the abundant beaches. Beach activity seemed a bit slow in June (winter in the southern hemisphere), but there were quite a few surfers in wetsuits riding the waves during all hours of the day. Winter in Newcastle is quite mild compared to the northern tier of the United States, since the typical daytime high was about sixty five to seventy degrees. The city center was built on a peninsula between the mouth of the Hunter River on the north and the Pacific beaches on the south. Much of the center consists of early twentieth century stone and brick buildings with neoclassical facades, evidence of abundant wealth during this period.
The University of Newcastle (known as the Uni) gives this fading industrial town a youthful feel, especially in the various pubs. The pubs in Newcastle were open late and seemed to be hubs of activity just about every night. Wednesdays (Uni Night) and the weekends are the typical nightclub scene with dancing, while other nights tend to feature more laid back activities, like pool tables and pub trivia. Most of the pubs were actually hotels, offering fairly cheap backpacker style accommodations upstairs, and most had “hotel” in their name; i.e. Hotel Delaney, Hotel Great Northern, etc. Australian beer was for the most part quite good. Mostly I drank Tooeys, Carleton, or Victoria Bitter, my favorite being the Tooeys Old Dark Ale, sort of like a porter. The tap itself at most pubs was usually encased with a thick layer of ice to indicate that the beer was quite cold. Since I spent most of my time working a rigorous shift for the Navy, I did not get to spend much time sightseeing in Newcastle beyond the area immediately around my hotel, so I did not see much of the city’s suburbs to the west, which is where most of the population lives. After my two week training in Newcastle ended, I rented a Hyundai Elantra from the airport to drive north. Driving in Australia is a bit different than in the United States, mainly because they drive on the other side of the road, but also because they utilize photo cameras and traffic circles. I was a bit apprehensive about driving on the left side of the road since the consequences of a moment of absent mindedness could be instant death. Driving on the left side of the road meant sitting on the right side of the car and shifting with my left hand. Thankfully, I had an automatic, so shifting wasn’t that big of a deal. The other catch was the reversal of the turn signal and the windshield wipers. Even on my fourth day of driving, I would still turn on my wipers when I wanted to signal a lane change or a turn. Since much of Australia’s road system was rural two lane roads, I didn’t think I’d have too many problems, so long as I remembered which lane to pull into when entering the highway. Another irritating aspect of driving in the state of New South Wales was the frequent speeding cameras. A sign would announce the presence of a traffic camera in advance, but I think I passed several of these before I realized this, so perhaps I will be getting speeding tickets in the mail in the upcoming weeks! The final potential driving hazard in Australia was the frequent traffic circles, which seem quite simple, except I was never quite sure who had the right of way, so I would slowly follow the circle around with my foot on the brake all the while hoping that I was going the right way! After leaving the airport, I carefully drove straight for the Pacific Highway, and then followed this highway north out of Newcastle. Initially, the highway was a busy four lane dual carriageway, then a two lane road with extensive construction to upgrade it to a dual carriageway as well. The first few miles wasn’t all that scenic; I just cruised along behind trucks and campers at 110 kilometers per hour (about 67 miles an hour), while trying to ignore the churned up earth along the highway. After about 30 minutes of monotonous driving on this busy highway, I escaped onto a local road leading towards the ocean near the Myall Lakes National Park. After driving into a progressively more remote coastal area, I found a trail that led to the beach itself. I was expecting a quick hike through coastal scrub before hitting a beach filled with children running between the surf and their annoyed parents hiding in the shade. Instead, I hiked through about a kilometer of eucalyptus forests before arriving at the edge of a vast expanse of sand dunes very similar to the ones along the Oregon Coast near Florence. I was pretty much by myself as I trudged across the dunes, save for the crows flying over head while calling out “Waaahh! Waaaahh! Waaahhh!” with quite human sounding voices. Eventually, I arrived at the beach, which was also devoid of life, other than occasional tracks from four wheel drive vehicles. In the midst of the roar of the surf, the steady wind, and the cries of aquatic birds, I scanned the water for a glimpse of a humpback whale, but I had no luck. Later, I hiked back to my car and continued heading north. This bypass road was so lightly traveled that a ferry was used in place of a bridge at a 50 foot wide water crossing. The ferry itself, a small barge designed to haul only about six cars, was moored across the waterway. The setting was very tranquil and slow paced, with a couple of canoes and pelicans gliding across the water while the wind blew against tall grass along the swampy shore. Finally, the barge’s engine coughed into life, and I made my crossing with one other vehicle. After my brief excursion to the Nyall Lakes National Park area, I was back on the Pacific Highway again among the large trucks and the NSW speeding cameras. After another hour or so of driving along the Pacific Highway, I stopped in Tyree for lunch. Most small towns in Australia like Tyree had main streets that resembled American small towns of the 1950’s. The city hall or shire buildings would usually be marked by an ornate neoclassical building with columns and pointed arches and these would be next to shops that seem to be disappearing from the main streets of American small towns. For example, the butcher would be next to a bakery, a small grocery store, or a fruit market, and these would be across the street from a hobby shop or clothing store. However, Australian towns closed up shop early, promptly at five o’clock during the week, sometimes as early as one o’clock on Saturdays, without even opening on Sundays. Even though it was late afternoon on a Saturday, I did find an open takeaway (a local fast food outlet), and ordered a burger with chips, Aussie style (which means that the burger will include Canadian bacon, a fried egg, shredded carrots, and beets along with the usual stuff). I had originally planned on spending the night in Port Macquarie, a small city an hour or two after Tyree with a koala reservation, a small rain forest park, and miles of spectacular beaches. However, when I arrived there at five o’clock in the evening, I had just enough time for a spectacular sunset before it was dark. After my hike along a beach, I found the town center closed up and totally deserted except for a handful of skateboarders and juvenile cyclists in oversized pants and backwards ball caps. So I just stopped at a café, ordered a flat white, (an Australian name for a latte), and kept heading north on the Pacific Highway towards Coffs Harbour.
The next morning I didn’t get all that far from Coffs Harbour until well into the afternoon because I spent a good part of the morning exploring a fishing boat marina and a massive offshore sea rock. I met a woman with a little black Australian Cattle puppy, with the similar bluish grey coloring that I recall from an Australian Sheep Dog that my family owned years ago. I bypassed Coffs Harbour’s main tourist attraction, a large banana plantation marked by a giant banana shaped building, but I could not pass up the local zoo with its collection of Australian animals.
The zoo housed a small group of koalas that hid in their eucalyptus trees, several large bands of various kangaroos, a feisty little wombat, a ten foot long carpet python, ostriches, peacocks, a camel, and even a dingo. This critter looked just like a reddish German Shepard, or maybe a coyote, except that he would periodically leap about ten feet into the air when he got excited (at feeding times or when his handler showed up with a leash and collar). I noticed that the fences around his pen were over ten feet high! After the zoo, I stopped in a community called Red Rocks to hike through a wildlife refuge where a slow moving river entered the Pacific Ocean. I longingly watched a couple of people paddle their canoe up this river through the eucalyptus trees while trolling for fish. The beach itself featured the namesake clumps of red rocks that resembled a Martian landscape.
Byron Bay is largely an artist and musician colony that hosted a large number of musical festivals for its size, and this talent seemed to bring a lot of quality acts to its various venues. I attended such concert by chance at the Hotel Great Northern. As I was getting ready to leave the pub for the night, I noticed a couple of young women known as Scarlett Affection setting up the stage for a performance. At first I was tempted to leave anyway because I figured that they would be just as nondescript as the previous act, but as I saw them set up an electric piano and a small collection of other instruments including a flute, I decided to stay to hear the first couple of songs. They were actually quite good and I stayed for their entire show. Their signature was the vocal harmonies between the two women and catchy piano riffs, with an occasional flute solo. I suspect that they were much too good for this venue because at times their harmonies seemed to overwhelm the acoustics of the Great Northern. But apparently places like that weren’t their only venue, since they were excited about their upcoming performance in the Sydney Opera House. After leaving Byron Bay, I continued north towards the state of Queensland and the Gold Coast, a huge sprawling area of several coastal communities that have merged together as a twenty mile long string of hotels and condos along the Pacific Highway. The largest concentrations of high-rise hotels, including one massive tower that dwarfed all the others, were at Surfer’s Paradise, which I could see from the beach at Tweeds Head, about fifteen miles to the south.
About an hour before sunset, I decided that it was time to start heading back towards Sydney again, since I was supposed to return the rental car the next day. Instead of returning on the Pacific Highway, I decided to cut over to the inland New England Highway, an alternate route between Sydney and Queensland. State Highway 95 appeared to be a possible link between the Pacific Highway and the New England Highway, saving me from driving into Brisbane during rush hour. However, I realized early on that it was not a shortcut, as it rounded several sharp corners while climbing into the lush tropical mountains to the east of the Gold Coast. After I climbed past a certain elevation, the landscape was enveloped in a thick fog that transformed the forest into shadowy palm trees. As I ascended a summit, the climb became a steep descent downwards through the moisture saturated tropical setting. Ahead, through the fog I could only see dark palm branches and the red taillights of the car ahead of me. After a few miles, the descent leveled out, the fog disappeared, and the vegetation shifted from a dense tropical forest to open range fields with scattered eucalyptus trees. Long after dark, this road merged with the National Highway 15, also known as the New England Highway. This highway was fairly straight with frequent passing lanes like the Pacific Highway, and it carried a considerable amount of truck traffic. Right before I reentered New South Wales again, the highway climbed over the Great Dividing Range with frequent passing lanes and runway truck ramps. After passing through the mountains, I stopped briefly in Glen Innes to take a break from driving, and realized that the inland part of New South Wales experienced a more dramatic change of seasons still dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, I shivered as I walked around the deserted main street of Glen Innes as a cold wind and a chilling drizzle reminded me that it really was winter in Australia. As I following the New England Highway for another two hours through the northern fringe of New South Wales while crossing two or three mountain summits, I felt guilty that I was blowing past what was likely spectacular scenery. The weather alternated between an occasional downpour and a cold wind that swept the thin layer of clouds across the sky.
I decided it was time to stop for the night in Armidale, which is a small city in Northern New South Wales in the Australian region of what is known as New England. (It was also home to New England University.) After being turned away from a few small motels on the outskirts that were unwilling to sign in guests at this late hour, I arrived in the town center and found a pub hotel. I could immediately tell that Armidale was considerable more rustic than Byron Bay or Newcastle when I saw the regulars sitting at the bar dressed in plaid shirts and work boots. The room was definitely low budget; the twin beds were covered with orange bedspreads and the plastic and particle board furniture had numerous cigarette burns. Down the hall I could hear drunken laughter. And outside, I could see the whitewashed wall of an adjacent building, next to an empty street. I climbed into the bed and stayed up for a while, drinking a beer and reading a Charles Dickens book, feeling like I was the only person on the planet. Outside, rain thundered on the roof and flooded the streets as I lay there waiting to fall asleep. My last day of driving in Australia that took me from Armidale to Sydney was a complete contrast between rural fields of cattle and an urban setting of skyscrapers and beachside condos. The weather was deteriorating now, as the daytime temperature fell into the forties or even high thirties. During a coffee stop in the small town of Uralla, New South Wales, I found out that they were expecting snow in the next couple of days. I shivered while standing next to the wood stove in a quite rustic café while I waited for a hot coffee. The drive south took me through much of the scenery that I had missed the night before, rolling hills and pastureland, but without the tourist trappings of Byron Bay or the Gold Coast. The towns I stopped in seemed to feature freight trains, truck stops, ranches, mines, and agriculture, as opposed to the tourist attractions of Coffs Harbour or the Gold Coast. Even Tamworth with all its big gaudy guitars, Australia’s scaled down version of Nashville, seemed to fit in with this quite agricultural region. Gradually, settlement became more evident as I moved into the Hunter Valley region north of Newcastle, a large wine producing area. And as I got closer to Newcastle, the towns were clustered closer together, with heavier and more aggressive traffic. I had couple close calls near Maitland, as I was getting more tired and impatient with driving, after about 2000 kilometers on the road in just three and a half days. The two lane highway gradually expanded to four and six lanes with traffic circles and intersections clogged with traffic. Finally, the New England Highway ended at the Newcastle-Sydney Motorway, the last phase of my trek through Australia.
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