After the race Alex and I went on a road trip! We drove north from Melbourne to the Oodnadatta Track and Lake Eyre, then west to Coober Pedy, south to Port Augusta, then east back to Sydney. The trip was about nine days and we covered over 2000 miles.
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| Starting in Melbourne and ending back in Sydney via Lake Eyre |
During my bicycle trip across the US I covered just over 4000 miles. I took the long way across by covering three sides of the country instead of straight across. A road trip like this brings the size of Australia into perspective. The map looks like a little trip around the corner, but there were several days of driving through desert with just a few wild animals and no standing water anywhere. The landscape varied and changed quickly. Fruit fields turned into low desert shrubs as soon as we left the Murray river irrigation area. Two days later we were on a washboard dirt road passing between big orange sand dunes.
We traveled for several days on dirt roads and camped with the flies at night. Australia is famous for their flies and we found them en masse on the banks of Lake Eyre.
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| Alex and his fly friends |
Lake Eyre rarely has water. When it does fill animals from all around arrive, breed, and leave. Then the lake dries back into a salt bed and awaits the next rain. It is usually three or four years between rainfalls significant enough to fill the lake and call in the critters. It was dry at the time Alex and I visited. We walked out on the salt bed and explored the crystallized rocks and bugs.
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| Alex on Lake Eyre |
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| Beetle on the lake |
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| The Alaskan avoiding sunburn |
The drive back to Sydney was uneventful. We crossed back through the low desert shrubs, fruit fields, over the Blue Mountains, then into the suburbs of the big city.
Over the past few weeks I have been exploring Sydney all over again. I have also been doing boat work with with Alex and since I'm on a work visa I have been job searching. That is a blog in its own. It's a whole new experience being on the other side of the statement, "...foreigners taking away our jobs..." The "backpackers," as we are known are young, highly educated, and an entirely exploitable foreign workforce. For example: fruit-picking. Minimum wage is around $17/hour. That wouldn't be so bad except most farms offer mandatory room and board, which they deduct from wages, plus a required deposit for said room and board before work even begins. So in the end, a fruit-picker working a 40-hour week, with the (pending parliament approval) 32% backpackers income tax, ~$200 for room and board leaves us workers with about $260/week. That's about $6.50/hour and it's perfectly legal. This is in Australian dollars, so it comes to just under $4.90 in US dollars. Sadly, the United States is guilty of very much the same.
Alex sold his sailboat Berrimilla II a while back and last week we helped the new owner move her onto a new mooring up the Paramatta river. A friend of Alex's in the Ukraine was following the trip up river on one of the Sydney web cams and sent us pictures of BII and Alex's new/old sailboat BIII as we convoyed up river.
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| Berrimilla2 and Berrimilla3 heading up river |
The weather is beautiful and Alex's cat is still cranky.
