Last week in Australia.
Back in Devonport, the northern part of the island has lost some of its charm. At the end of summer (yes, March is already autumn here), lack of rain and a relentless exposure to the almost unfiltered UV-light has not only tanned the unexperienced visitors but also the country. The land that was lus...
The Tasmanian Devil.
Finally. It was about time. Alas not a wild one. They are just too rare and shy. That is why the Devils@Cradle sanctuary works together with the government and other similar institutions to create a backup population. In case the wild one doesn’t make it. In case the Devil Facial Tumour Disease find...
Red rocks and presumptuous possums.
Tasmania is so small that it’s so easy to wish to see everything. A mistake. Already working through the ’60 great short walks’-list of the National Parks and Wildlife services will not only require sturdy hiking shoes but also a trustworthy vehicle to access any of the nineteen national parks or in...
Australia’s southernmost beach.
South Cape. How imaginative. But one step further south are only endless miles on the Southern Ocean before reaching the ice-covered plains of Antarctica. No road extends so far south, the windy cape is only reachable by foot, water or air. Australia’s most southern multi-day hike passes through her...
Where the Platypus live.
Apparently in Geeveston in the Huon valley, just an hour southwest of Hobart. Not that this place had anything else to offer though. ‘A hidden gem’, some would call it, ‘still undiscovered’. Two semi-full caravan parks along the Kermandie river without any facilities are the sleepy town’s only appro...
When everyone decides to go to Tasmania in summer and it’s not even warm.
‘We’re already full.’ The standard answer to any kind of request regarding work. Strawberry season is just about to finish. Cherries have run out a week ago and until the apple and grape season starts in a few weeks everyone just has to hang in there idly. ‘Why don’t you come back in April?’ The apo...
Where are all the people?
Devonport is empty. And not that kind of empty as the Northern Territory countryside where the streets were simply wide and the houses sparsely located. No, it is full of homes; one-story English countryside buildings shoulder one on another with only narrow stripes of clean-cut lawns in between. Th...
Sydney to Melbourne.
Time has come to move on. The summer has reached the southern parts of Australia, tempting with a more temperate climate, not so hot as in Sydney, but also not too cold as the winter down there. ‘If there was any time to visit Tasmania, it’s in summer’, is considered common knowledge. So, out of the...
Back to the Blue Mountains.
Sydney in summer is like hanging out with a pubescent teenager on mood swings. There are the weeks of radiant sunshine, full of lively activity from sunrise until deep into the night. Smiles everywhere, bright eyes and invigorating happiness, instantaneously contagious. The never-ending white noise...
Where the hell is Kellyville?
Expectations were low. All the long-term locals in Sydney recommended not to go to Kellyville. They remembered old, poorly maintained buildings, large empty spaces, garbage everywhere, a faint idea of alarming crime statistics. However, as another victim to gentrification, Kellyville has polished it...
Australia is empty.
A quick search shows that this huge island, a continent by itself, is the sixth largest country in the world, but has only about 26 million inhabitants, a sad number fifty-five in the global ranking. Over fifty percent of these souls actually gather in the four largest cities, Sydney, Melbourne, Bri...
Welcome to the Turquoise Coast.
Jurien Bay. That’s where the sea lions are, informs a tiny green flag on the map, a marker set a while ago following the hearsay advice of a random stranger met on the road. Enough to render it the next destination halfway towards Perth. Upon arrival, it crystalizes though that a few more pieces of...
Warroora Coast and Shark Bay.
Just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the first big red jumps in front of the car, scared by the unaccustomed noise, irrationally fleeing into danger’s way. The dirt road away from the North Western Coastal Highway towards the campground has brought along more endless stretches of flat shrubland, d...
Ningaloo Coast and Coral Bay.
On the map Yardie Creek looks like a massive river running into the ocean just in the south of Cape Range National Park, forming a natural boundary to Nyinggulara National Park (ex Ningaloo), both occupying the west coast of the Exmouth peninsula along the Ningaloo Marine Park (remember the one with...
Exmouth and Cape Range National Park.
Just one day earlier and the last whaleshark tour of the season would have been departed with us on board. The summer months, though, drive the biggest fish of the ocean away from the Ningaloo reef, the biggest fringing reef in the world, which watches closely over the coast of Exmouth and the Cape...
Karijini National Park.
Bees. Hundreds of tiny stingless bees swarm around like flies and, though cuter to look at, still settle mercilessly on sweat-covered arms and legs. When the first get attracted by the dampness of an eye or ear, the protection of a head net doesn’t sound so ridiculous anymore. Luckily, similar to al...
Broome to Port Hedland.
Back into the tropical heat. About a thousand kilometres further west and a little further south than Darwin, Broome still has to be patient for a while before the rains will start. Suddenly in Western Australia, time has reset to full hours, the half was rather confusing, and the irritating cane to...
Darwin’s summer rains.
It has begun. The pre-monsoon season in the northern part of the northern territories. When summer approaches in the tropical climate around Darwin, the humidity becomes so high, unbearable almost, that huge amounts of water gathered in gigantic clouds seep in from the Timor-sea, announcing their ar...
Kakadu National Park or Life is funny sometimes.
The white rental with rooftop tent stops decisively a few meters away from me. A middle-aged woman, grey hair shaved short at the sides, jumps out energetically and smiles at me. ‘Virigin’, she points at herself and ‘Stefan’ at the middle-aged man circling the front of the car from the driver’s side...
Nitmiluk National Park or When reality hits
The car passes me twice before stopping at the command of my outstretched arm and raised thumb. A smiling face with dark, long, curly hair looks out the window and inquires where I would like to go. Not that there are many options, the only place this road leads to is Katherine Gorge. ‘Jump in, it’s...
See you in the Northern Territories.
Or short CUintheNT. ‘Do you have that car sticker in your store?’, a customer asks me over the phone. My brain is not making the connection and I’m confused about the apparent banality of the question. ‘I’m not sure, sir.’ I answer honestly. Awkward silence on the other end. ‘Could you maybe check?’...
The Elsey National Park.
Named after the cattle station that spawned the earliest settlement in Mataranka, the Elsey National Park nowadays harbours only ruins of the original homestead, with a more intact second one having been refunctioned into the service point of a modern campground. Conveniently located next to one of...
The Never-Never country.
The tourist season just ended in Mataranka, Northern Territories, and with the departing camper vans a piece of its soul left too. In the beginning of October, during the hottest days of the dry season, outside-life during the day is virtually impossible. The bird voices, still so divers and plentif...
Kangaroos at waterholes.
Inland is different. The backpackers are gone, replaced by Australian tourists in camper cans. Leathery, and surprisingly expensive, cowboy hats protect sun-burned faces and flannel-covered shoulders from the scorching midday heat. Houses have reduced from several-floor apartment buildings to one-st...
The Great Barrier Reef.
Most of the east coast of Queensland prides themselves with their proximity to the Great Barrier Reef. But not everywhere is the same. Further up north, where the reef almost touches the coast, Cape Tribulation, already famous for its Daintree rainforest, also gloats with its closeness to this huge...
The Spanish invasion of Queensland
South of the Daintree River Australia has never stopped existing. Patience-testing traffic lights, wide but widely unused sidewalks and large cleared areas refunctioned into perfect but perfectly unnatural little parks attract a very different type of tourist into the tropical warm vacation hotspots...
Daintree Postscriptum.
As usual, the best comes at last. It arrives slowly, takes a long time to develop but then overwhelms with its perfection. I got lucky. Again. Subjective but indisputable, I had the privilege to discover the Daintree as a tourist after being a quasi-local for so long. My senses had trained for sever...
End of a season.
Everyone is leaving. The flow of tourists has slowed down from the thunderous wave of Australien families to a calming trickle of overseas solo travellers, more interested in the real jungle experience than the kids-friendly tourist traps. Budgetary restrictions force them to bring their own food, a...
Sam.
When Sam was born the sky sent a single glowing sunray through the canopy of the dark green fan palm forest where Sam's dad had built a comfortable soft bed of old, rustling leaves. And although his dad had taught him quickly not to dwell on the past, even five years later, Sam remembered fondly his...
Crocs are real.
I had to. After three months of living in the jungle, of imagining them in all the dark water holes I was crossing maybe a little too recklessly, of praising their beauty and magnificence to whoever might lend me a pitiful ear and of warning each and every tourist of their merciless strength, I just...
Jungle fever.
Not a single ambulance. In my three months here, I haven't seen a single emergency vehicle pass the streets of the jungle. Not a single siren or any kind. It's kind of peaceful that way. But obviously there are still accidents. Just that people are able to take care of themselves. Only in very sever...
Hiking creeks.
The worst thing to do in the jungle is straying from the path. People have gone missing here. You turn around three times and lose all sense of direction. The forest canopy is most of the time simply too thick to make out where the sun is coming from, assuming of course you were lucky in the first p...
Chai means tea.
And Kulfi means ice-cream. So, Chai tea and Kulfi ice-cream are something that in German we would call 'doppelt gemoppelt'. And if you try either, you have to realize immediately how much the standards in Chinese and Indian flavours, respectively, differ from the European. Which in my mind also incl...
Bush Tukka.
It's surprisingly hard to open a coconut without any tools. I mean, we knew that from all kinds of movies, but still there was a small part in me that thought I would be better at it. And it's not even the hard shell that's the problem, because one can always just smash it on a pointy rock, but the...
All but united.
Jungle people. What a curious crowd. One could imagine that their common interest, which drove them as far as packing up all their belongings to move into the rainforest, would make a convenient denominator for establishing a homogenous community. But no. Not even close. The people are divided as in...
Water en masse.
Now that's the one resource nobody in the rainforest really worries about. Not surprising, you think? After all we are surrounded by it. One step to the right and I'm standing in the ocean, one step to the left and I'm swimming in a creek, and looking up it pours down on us constantly. The surprisin...
Barefoot lands.
Stepping off the Daintree-river ferry, crossing from the wilderness back into civilisation, the first thing I noticed was the absence of sounds. So used had I gotten to the shrieking voices of birds, the deafening crashing of the rain and the disturbing rustling of leaves, that suddenly I felt the w...
No crocs in Crocodylus.
As so many other remote areas on this planet, the upper Daintree region thrives on its ambivalent image as inhabited but simultaneously untouched territory. This ambiguity shows up in every soul that crosses the Daintree river northwards with the one and only ferry, whose schedule of operation regul...
Daintree icecream...
-- English -- … has all these exotic-fruit flavours that I never heard of before, like Sapote, Wattleseed and Jackfruit. Wait, no, the last one I know but so far it existed in my mind only as the chunky tasteless meat-substitute that I can find canned in a generic supermarket. Who knew it tasted lik...
Jungle pidgeons are colourful.
They come in all kinds of colours, blue, purple, green and red. After seeing them eating fallen papayas I'm afraid their grey city cousins will forever remain ordinary and dull. What a metaphor. And I remember how surprised I was the first time I spotted them. Because who knew pigeons could be anyth...
Dinosaurs in the Daintree
-- English -- I am having a rather difficult time describing my fascination with the Daintree. Is it the weather? Can't be, because what did I expect when I signed up for several weeks in the rainforest? It is raining here a lot. And not that cosy, warm summer drizzle that you get in some of the nor...
Croc country.
-- English -- Crocodiles everywhere! No, just kidding. Northeastern Queensland has indeed crocodiles living in its creeks, ponds and shallow coastal waters but a week in, and I haven't seen a single one yet. I mean, I did hear about those ancient reptiles before I left Sydney, but I wasn't aware tha...
The blue mountains.
-- English -- "... are neither blue nor really mountains", my friend tells me while we're sitting in his truck about to leave the crowded streets of Sydney behind us to explore the countryside west of it. I can't really comment or judge, having never set foot into the national park. And, anyway, our...
Just a train ride away
-- English -- According to the uncomfortable awkwardness in the faces of my friends when I told them I would be staying in Homebush for the next week, I halfway expected to find this neighbourhood in shambles, filled with drunkards and drug addicts asking for money on every corner. But, luckily, the...
Salt water is sticky.
-- English -- It was bound to happen. Exploring beaches all over the area, walking barefoot across rivers and bays and constantly underestimating the unpredictability of the waves, it was only a matter of time until my phone got wet. Luckily, I had recently updated to a newer, but still second-hand,...
Lazy talkers.
This is a young country. On the global age scale of modern civilisations, Australians are just teenagers. Even though the ancestors of the Aboriginal people arrived in this part of the world already more than 50000 years ago, the first Europeans didn't arrive until about 300 years ago (*thanks Wikip...
Possums walking power lines.
Yes indeed. With white glowing eyes when illuminated by the curious traveller's phone flash. I first thought I was looking at gigantic rats, but these actually rather cute marsupials, carrying their young offspring in large vertical pouches on their chests, have a much better reputation than their r...
Sydney's outdoors.
In accordance with its reputation as the surfer's world capital, Sydney's residents make sure to pass on their love for water sports to their children as early on as possible. Tiny kids on tiny surfboards can be found on nearly every beach, mingling happily in a crowd of tiny snorkels and tiny oxyge...
Suburbian Sydney.
Glebe (pronounced Gleeb) is one of the many suburbs of Sydney. Actually, people here seem to classify almost every part of this vast city as a suburb, raising the question where the 'urb' is, because the city center or CBD (central business district) is not that large and really just a 40min walk aw...
Not the capital of Australia.
So, apparently, when Australians had to choose which city was to become the capital of their unified territory, they couldn't decide between Sydney and Melbourne, and thus, as a compromise they built a new city, Canberra, right in the middle between the two combatants. How curious, isn't it? I think...
The imperial city.
When people recommended me to visit Kyoto, I used to nod enthusiastically and I smile a lot and try to tap into their excitement, but really it was all fake. Because how am I supposed to understand their love for a city I had never seen before? But, trusting that the surprising frequency of this inc...
Japans tropical rainforest.
At an average latitude of 24.4°N this is the farthest I've ever been south, and I can now proudly proclaim that I have experienced a tropical rainforest first hand. Admittedly, it wasn't very large, the whole island is rather small and can be surrounded in a matter of hours, but it's the real thing....
Tokyo's plum blossoms.
Yes, you heard right, again I got the season wrong by about a month and instead of the famous cherry (sakura) blossoms I had to content myself with the earlier blooming plum (ume) trees. And, similarly to so many other things I found in this vast city, they were stunningly beautiful but maybe just a...
Israel's desert
It's always impressive how many different landscapes one can find in this small country. There is the Mediterranean, and while not one of the large oceans, still a very impressive sea. Then the mountains in the north, and most different from anything that Europe can offer, the Negev desert, which du...
The Abraham experience
After I discovered the Tel Aviv library as a warm and comfortable place to ride out the stormy days and my friend told me that I sound like a homeless person, it was time to leave the freezing community centre behind and find somewhere else to crash. It was only logical to check in at Abraham hostel...
Winter in Tel Aviv.
I don't know why I always visit Israel in the beginning of the year, it's clearly the worst time, with heavy rains flooding the streets every two or three days. But it was on the way, and I wanted to see my friends. So, I decided to at least make it an experience that I didn't have before, meaning I...