Back to the Desert!

The future is in our past - Australia is not anything like the picture in my mind before arriving here. For one thing it came a complete shock to me to find myself housed in a heatless room, in Melbourne, in the middle of winter. Yes, that's right! The temperature was freezing and the room had no heat.

The first call to the front desk got a pleasant, perfectly trained young lady who said sweetly, "It takes a while to heat up." The she added, "I will see if there is an electric heater but I think they have all been taken." Warning bells went off in my brain. The heaters have all been taken? So, there is no heat anywhere in this hotel?

The second call, hours later, got a young man who said equally pleasantly, "No heat? I will turn it up from here." It was reassuring to think that something would be done remotely. Well you can guess that there was no heat that night.

With thoughts of being in an unheated room in the swine flu season and the jet lag from a 24 hour journey, sleep did not visit me the first night in this country. After the third call, on the second day, the heater arrived.

Is that enough talk about a swank hotel with no heat? It was colder in the lobby than outside. Maybe this lack of heat came from the fact it is so warm here most of the time that people do not think to install heaters for the colder month. Maybe they are happy to be fresh for a little while.

Another interpretation is that the hotel belongs to an environmentalist who wants to save the planet (or something like that), by reducing the energy consumption. You know, keeping it conveniently fresh and forgetting that the health of people can be adversely affected by living in cold, unheated houses. Or, maybe it is just to save money. The brain always wants to find some explanations, like this year they have an unusual frost.

There are other things to say about Australia. Food is abundant but very expensive. Meals in restaurants are excellent but the price is almost out of reach. Yet, clothing and gas seem cheap. Melbourne is a city that has all the latest fashions, at a fraction of the cost in Canada. It is even cheaper at this time of the year because of the sales.

Melbourne still has many of it's shops housed in buildings from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, complete with crystal chandeliers. One of my favorite shops was a rhinestone and crystal shop. There was every type of hair ornament, jewelry and rhinestone-decorated clothing imaginable. It was dazzling. There was only one problem. Too much from which to choose. The style is strange too, like a good mix between nineteenth century and modernity.

But most of all Australia is a breathtakingly beautiful country. From flat land, reminiscent of scenes from the movie "Out of Africa", to rain forests, to mountains to desert. Australia has it all. It is a virtual feast of eye candy.

It's magical to see the forest of eucalyptus trees surrounded by large greens pastures with grazing sheep, all bathed in a crystal clear sun, hot even in this winter month. The road stretches on and on over large distances with only a few small towns dotting the landscape so that it even reminds me of Newfoundland.

In fact it seems even more spread out than Newfoundland, but their road system is better, much better! Australia has few people relatively speaking so it makes me wonder why we don't have better roads.

This is being written from a motel called The Outback in the Outback. And guess what? It has heat! It has everything else one could want too. So much for the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne. Last night's motel was even more up to date. It had the Internet!

In some respects this country is like Canada. All the usual businesses such as IGA, Foodland, Safeway, McDonald's, crop up, making one feel at home. The dangerous road animal here is the kangaroo. Instead of moose signs there are kangaroo signs. We have already seen several dead kangaroo on the road.

To get to the Outback we had to drive through the flood plains. In the rainy season roads can flood very quickly and strand travelers. Newspaper stories tell of people caught in flash floods. It is news!

Moving north the countryside moves from rich farmland and Vineyards to more and more spread out farms, until finally the trees disappear, to leave only small bushes. Tomorrow the green should disappear even more as we drive into the desert. It is always a strange journey to drive into a desert, from land of plenty to spare space of what looks like nothing but is actually teeming with its own vibrant life.

The adventure is just beginning. It's hoped that I'll be back next week to write another column and take more pictures of this fascinating place for John Melindy. Otherwise, I'll just be one more explorer lost on the tracks.