Melbourne & environs: funky city, lovely country...

Melbourne is far more eclectic than Sydney, mixing Romanesque and Victorian architecture with the most playful swooping steel and glass, goths and Japanese hipsters mixing with Australian rednecks ("bougans" in local parlance), yuppies, and rockers. Maria & Adrian's house is a sweet refuge. They are so generous as to lend us their truck, a massive Landcruiser with a chunky transmission and bellowing, shuddering motor; maneuvering this beast through the left-hand city traffic is quite entertaining on an action-comedy tip.

Riding Melb's excellent train and bus system - it seems like every other industrialized nation in the world has generally better public transport than the U.S., even ostensibly "liberal" San Francisco - a wide mix of Indian, Oceania (i.e. Samoans, etc.), Asians, africans, and various of the original penal colony descendant and ex-pat Brits and Irish, with scattered suburbs of small houses and colorfully painted businesses (running to yellow and other sunny shades), generously festooned with graffiti, all under the over-powering sun careening unfiltered through the ozone hole. All the older white folks have extraordinarily wrinkled skin courtesy of all the world's aerosol cans.

This brilliance, and the weathered faces of the rural folk, seem appropriate in the exotic wilds of the countryside, but set against scenes of Aussie urbanity, the hoodie-wearing, acne-befuddled teenagers spitting on the station floor, the dissonance seems strong, unmooring the subterranean at least in my mind, while the fundamental facts of the capitalist system that generate squalor as an inevitable byproduct churn forward inexorably, regardless of human or climactic context, what might have been cheerful brightness mercilessly exposing every flaw in crisp relief. Here we are in the twenty-first century, the density of contradiction growing like the components on cell phone silicon, unimpressed by mere sunshine.

Outside the city. Of all the places I've been - and I've been to a few - Australia is the most like the U.S., barring Canada. The main differences, other than generally predictable (and media-depicted) cultural wrinkles, are the population density and the flora and fauna. The size of the continental U.S., but with fifteen times fewer people, there's a lot of bush out there, space devoid of humans, to be explored and appreciated. Add in a plethora of unique critters and plants (considered to generally resemble the greenery of the primal Gondwanaland supercontinent), and a great park system, and you have a recipe for some incredible camping and hiking -- love!

Above, one of the beach altars Amanda made... A wombat, possibly the one that ripped a hole in our tent... Our wonderful Melbournian friends....