Animals, animals, everywhere! – December 2006

Animal, animals, everywhere!
After leaving the snowy peaks of Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa, we headed home for a three-month break. Our reason: two weddings! We celebrated Jen and Seth’s wedding in September and Ellen and Dan’s wedding in October in great style. We celebrated mom and dad’s 40th anniversary, and even made an unexpected side-trip to France to visit family and friends (I hadn’t been there in 3 years!). We met our adorable niece, Mathilde, and dozens of other babies, because everyone we know now has babies!

We flew back to Thailand in November to gather up our bikes and our saddlebags, where we had left them at our guesthouse in Bangkok. After some fried rice and mangoes and a good helping of humidity and mosquitoes, we left Asia for the southern coast of Australia, where we will spend the first half of the summer.

And so we find ourselves in the Land Down Under! We’re super excited because we’ve seen kangaroos (petted them, even, at a conservation park!), koalas, Little Penguins (the world’s smallest), emus, wombats, pelicans, black swans, echidnas, wallabies, possums, seals (by the coastline), and not too many spiders or snakes yet (or sharks, either, although there was a shark attack today off the Victoria Coast). This place has some awesome animals! We camped in a family’s backyard the other night, and they told us that a baby koala fell from their roof (crawling from a tree) the previous night and they were able to pet it!

We flew into Adelaide, the laidback capital of the state of South Australia, and from there biked through the Adelaide Hills, a dry country featuring wineries, outback stores, brown wheat fields, horse farms, wildly colorful birds, and animal farms selling “sheep poo,” “chicken poo,” and “cow poo.” The towns are small and the people super friendly.

The Australians love to talk and are definitely not shy. They are easily approachable and infinitely friendly. Their expressions are sometimes hard to figure out, but it is their propensity to abbreviate words and add a “y” to the end of words that I find especially funny. My favorite examples are “brekky” (for breakfast), “pushy” (for pushbike, or bike), “Chrissy” (for Christmas), and “pokie.” (for poker, or slot, machines).

It’s the summertime here, and the sun is scorching (with the hole in the ozone layer concentrated right over Australia), but it still feels cool with the strong winds. We’re in the middle of the worst drought South Australia has ever seen. It’s high alert during the fire season.

It’s a bit funny to see everyone preparing for Christmas in the middle of the summertime – Christmas trees, Santa hats, Christmas caroling on the beach, “Merry Christmas!” greetings everywhere….

We’re currently following the coastline and the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne, where we hope to be by mid-January. Catch ya later, mateys!