The Milky Way and Kangaroooos! Part Deuce

I feel like I keep getting picked out of a crowd to watch something for somebody.

It's like that infamous night of Chris $'s wedding when Paul hands me his apartment keys and says "Think you can get these guys back to my place" and I said "Probably" and proceeded to get the fellas into an already occupied cab, convince the driver that I did not just scare of his fare, that he is not already done for the night, and then give him directions to Paul's old apartment before short changing him by $2. We wandered a couple of miles but found the current apartment which is only 1 block away from the old place if you know which way to turn first. The point is somehow Paul picked me out of a crowd of idiots and knew he picked the right idiot to lead the expedition.

Here it's "Hey, can you watch my guitar for a minute" from a street performer we watched for a good 30 minutes. How does he know I'll stop somebody taking his gear or the 15kg of Australian coins in his case? (I swear if they weren't in the metric system they'd have adopted the British Pound as their currency - this stuff is heavy). This guy is really good, sets a great atmosphere on Freo's version of Club Sidewalk.

Or a "Hey, can you watch my 2 year old for a sec" from some guy at the beautiful Cottesloe Beach who didn't want to bring his daughter into the men's loo with him. (Cottesloe is just north of Freo, 5 minutes by car if you know how to get there - else about 40 minutes. Strange thing about Australia: they have a slogan "Australia - Fitness First!" It works - every girl at the beach in supermodel thin, every guy has at least a six pack. But everybody smokes. Yeah, strange.)

"Hey mate, could you watch the, um, like shop for me mate? Just for a minute mate - good on ya mate" from a glow stick toting hippie entrepreneur at a Bush Doof.

No, bush doof has nothing to do with the President. Good guess though - I see what you were thinking.

A bush doof is a techno rave in the middle of the bush. They hire a DJ (well, I guess not hire, they are all sort of a doof team., set up club lights, scenery, and a geodesic dome tent on somebodies farm land 100km East of Perth right next to a hamlet called "The Middle of Bloody (metric) Nowheres". I spoke to the guy who owned the sound system - they make pretty good money. $20 a person, must have been 300 people there. I guess the farmer gets a few trees planted on his land in return.

The directions to the doof read "drive until you see something and then drive another 40km. When you see something else turn right." I thought we were crazy for trusting those directions but I figured man would have never landed on the Moon with that mentality. Turns out they were incredibly accurate. It's nothing for a looong time, and then there is something and you turn.



We did see at least 100 kangaroos on the way! They were gathered in these huge fields on the side of the Great Eastern Highway. The road is traced by a thin wire fence to keep them out of the street I suppose.

The kangaroos were all pretty far away and they all seemed to be looking at me which was a little eerie. With so many kangaroos who needs to take a picture? I'll just see some later right? NOPE. The morning after the doof I walked several km to find some kangaroos but it turns out they are nocturnal. If I had an iPhone I'd have Googled that and known to take a picture then.

I also blew 2 opportunities to take pictures of "Kangaroo Crossing" signs. I have been collecting sign pictures though, they crack me up. First thing I noticed was that all the pedestrians have huge feet. Looks like that YouTube of Sebastian the Ibis cranking that Soldja Boy, huge feet.

Here's a couple good ones:

Notice the shoes. These seemed so funny to me, I'm not sure I'd seen a shod foot on a sign before I came here. Dunno, maybe I'm seeing something else funny and projecting it to the shoes.

This one looks like it might mean "Moonwalk this way, must have white socks"

This one is in King's Park. Criminals do not have shoes:

One thing I find funny in Australia is everybody has the same lingo. Nobody ever says Hello, EVERYBODY says "G'Day". A friend is not a friend, it is a "mate". Even girls don't go out with their girlfriends they go to "meet me mates". And a man is not a man, a man is a bloke. "How many roads must a bloke walk down, before you can call him a bloke?". Well, this bloke was walking down the road and found this direct marketing on a billboard by the Fremantle Train Station:

The best part about being in the middle of nowhere is seeing the Milky Way galaxy. I started to think that this was the same sky that Magellan saw (right before he died in the Philippines but his ship still made it around the world!) and I realized sadly that I don't know anything about astronomy and thus have no vocabulary to help me describe and retain my amazement (except "Orion is in the middle of a somersault"). Luckily, on the 9th day, Google Earth gave birth, in seafoam, to Google Sky (and I and the shareholders rejoiced). Turns out they call Orion "The Saucepan" in Australia (which confused me - I thought my friend was misguided and looking for the Big Dipper which you can't see in the Southern Hemisphere because Polaris, the North Star, is part of it.) In Africa they call his belt "The Three Kings". Orion is so distinct that every society that ever thought to look up at night has given the constellation a name. The Southern Cross, which seems awfully dim for something so well known, is about 165 degrees clockwise from Orion.

Bill Bryson talked about the sky in Sunburned Country although I remember his stories about the pubs a lot more. I was a little disappointed with the ending of that book – he FINALLY gets to Perth. I’m thinking “cool, I’ll get to hit some of these spots”. Well, he goes on what turns in to a 20km walk to find the most expensive house ever built in Australia built with iron ore money (they were searching for gold and found several billion (metric) tons of iron ore which is the major money employment here, one can make $70k driving a truck from the mines). He gets incredibly scorched in the hot WA sun.

There's a great moment when he is looking at a stromatolite, which is quite unremarkable unless you understand the biology. It looks like a rock, it lives in a sort of coral type structure. But a stomatolite, he tells us, is quite possibly the organism that made life on Earth possible. The Precambrian Earth had an atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2. The stromatolite's entire purpose in it's single-cell organism life is to create oxygen. Bryson sits there pondering this amazing idea, that this rock made his journey (it's the end of the book) possible when a woman and her kids pull up in a car. She gets out and looks at the rocks. "WE DROVE ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE BLOODY COUNTRY TO LOOK AT THIS??" Bryson looks at her and shares all the knowledge he has gained from his extensive research, all his appreciation that he has for the creature. She grabs him by the arm, looks into his eyes and says

"Did you know that you have a terrible sunburn?"

Great stuff.

How did this all start?

Oh yeah, so, there I am watching bocce, at Little Creatures my first weekend here. At the pub alone, I had simply asked Ted and Julie, whom I did not know until I posed the question, what the score was. They told me it was Ted 6, Jules 5, and me nothing! So now I'm playing bocce. Jules is completely hammered and Ted is a blast. We start making up rules every roll: under the leg, off a wall, cricket throw (now chucking!), and next thing the whole bar is watching us. It was handy because we’d forget the score and there was always someone to tell us.

So afterwards we were chatting over a few more beers. They call it a night, it's been a long Sunday Session for them which was evident, and their designated driver was getting bored. So on their way out I hear a strange accent. This German accent speaking Australian English. “You have a terrible sunburn, mate!” Bryson! I turn and see Kati with a concerned look on her face, Tina next to her.

I tell her “yeah, I just got to town, I’ve been on the beach for like 3 days”.

“Did you leave your hands at home?”

My hands are as white as Mickey Mouse’s, my arms firetruck red. My shirt is white. I like a snowman, red broomstick for arms with white gloves on the ends for hands. I realize I've been reading for three days on the beach - my hands hadn't seen the sun for a minute!

The two German girls have been showing me Australia since. Too funny how you make friends 12,000 miles from home. Picked out of a crowd.