Tiffany and Greg Around the World
OK so you finally figure out where the heck Uluru/Ayers rock is and you at long last secure some decent wheels to get you there…
…Then you dive for 6 HOURS until you see this
And you’re all –
But you’d be wrong
because once again Australia lied to us
Like we said, Uluru (AKA – Ayer’s Rock) is not IN Alice Springs.
It’s 287 miles away.
Then there’s the whole bit of us then needing to immediately backtrack that whole route in order to make the 1786 mile drive from Uluru to Cairns.
Through, might we remind you, that whole “barren wasteland where nobody lives except freaking feral camels” part of the country.
(gonna say that twice – FERAL. CAMELS.)
And us with a car that went and got itself all kablooied up all the way back in Adelaide.
So there we were, middle of the desert, no car, no transit system that links to Alice to Uluru to Cairns and on a short time table.
It’s moments like these that Greg loves being married to Tiffany.
Alice Springs is an odd place
So we set out to explore the many different facets of this little big town in the dead center of nowhere.
Well we were gonna lead into this entry with some intro along the lines of “we have changed appearances several times over the years, and so has our blog.”
Then Greg put together a collage of pictures of us and he realized something…
When you wear the same 3 blue t-shirts for 3 years straight, well, it makes your “appearance” about as consistent as humanly possible.
Stuff the witty intro then!
Hey everyone, we’re changing up the blog!
There was one thing the camels, or the train that replaced the camels, couldn’t help us with.
Something that was a serious point of consideration for us when we decided to come out into the pretty much completely uninhabited ‘Red Centre’ of a country that takes a sense of personal pride from the fact that a swift and painful demise is never more than a few feet away even in the most urbanized of areas…
…oh lets not forget the ever present and very real threat of detesticulation…
And that thought was “Ok, so what happens if we’re a few thousand miles from the nearest hospital…
…and we end up getting detesticulated? What do we do!?!
One of our favorite stops in Alice Springs was the Kangaroo rescue center
kinda obvious why…
Where we learned more about the complicated relationship the people of Australia have with their semi-official national ambassador…
They have trains that traverse Australia. One of them, called “The Ghan” bisects the country running from Adelaide to Alice Springs to Darwin and when we bought the tickets online they charged us half of what the website said they would…
…kinda wish we knew that BEFORE our car broke down in the middle of the outback but hey, it’s a better story this way…
So after having our car break down in the middle of an Australian zombie outbreak and narrowly escaping with our lives it was time to seek alternate transport.
But at least now we understood why the koalas hang out it the trees. Apparently zombies can’t climb eucalyptus. Come on, have you ever seen a zombie Koala?
[fgallery id=18 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”zombie koalas”]
Well, after spending a week with them in the wild as they laughed at our misguided attempt to repair our car we can confidently say that neither have we.
Continue reading “Zombie Koalas”
The Beast in sleep mode
We were asked if we thought we got ripped off and lost money on our Aussie car when it broke down and we were forced to scrap it. Some of you may recall that in New Zealand we managed to sell our car for the same price we paid for it (oh, and NOT spend a few hundred on maintenance in the process…) so at first the comparison burned us a little bit. Then we did the math:
New Years is the closest thing we have to a completely worldwide recognized holiday.
Though some Asian cultures don’t celebrate the changing of the Gregorian calendar (no relation to Greg, but don’t tell him that ;-), the tradition of a time set aside for the passing of the year still exists…even if that year happens to be lunar…and that time happens somewhere in the spring. As humans, we all seem to agree that it’s important we take the time to look back on our past and forward to our future at least once each 12 months or so.
Our Australian New Year found us (probably unsurprisingly) a few hundred miles from, well, basically anywhere.
