Gosh, it's The End

Joanna writes:

Another hurried one, as we're almost out the door to catch our plane to America. Fifteen hours. We hope there are movies. Thailand has managed to provide a last week that's making us particularly glad to be going home, but now that the time draws near, it's easy to forget the rain and the mosquitoes, and think fondly of the wonderful food and beautiful places.

From Bangkok, we headed off down the coast to the east, stopping first at the town of Chantaburi, a mecca for gem trading. I think something like 60 percent of the world's gems pass through here, and our guide book told us the gem market would be awesome. We pictured a stereotypical, Disney-esque Arabic market with baskets overflowing with precious stones and people yelling out prices and guarding rubies with swords or something. Of course, that was not the case. It turned out to be just a series of very sterile shops with little white porcelain dishes of gem stones. I could not tell you exactly why they are considered more pretty than colored glass. We had also ended up at a pretty dismal hotel where no one spoke English and the name was only written in Thai, so we didn't exactly know where we were. We had no map of the town, and spent the first morning wandering blindly around until we stumbled on a posted map, and then almost didn't find our hotel again before dark. One of the stupider things we've done on this trip. However, we managed to redeem the whole excursion with a trip to a small national park with a phenomenally beautiful multi-tiered waterfall. We played in the pools and swam amidst swarms of lovely butterflies and dragonflies and fish that nibbled our toes.

We've long been planning to end our trip with a romantic few days on a Paradise Island to celebrate our anniversary (prize to the person who figures out which one-- your prize is to shock everyone who didn't know), so we embarked for the small island of Koh Samet. Koh Samet is technically part of a national park, but the only justification for that inclusion is the huge entrance fee levied on foreigners and the signs, largely disredarded, asking people not to litter. (Luckily, due to either the laws of physics or the diligence of resort staff, most of the washed-up trash is found only on the rocky areas between the sandy beaches.) The beaches are overflowing with resorts and restaurants. We managed to find an even more dismal accommodation than the last, a dilapidated shack that will probably fall over before it sees too many more occupants. It was the only cheap accommodation on the whole island as far as we could tell, though, and we figured, hey, we're not here to sit in a hotel room, we're here to sit on a beach! Unfortunately, we only ever saw the sun for about ten minutes on our last afternoon while we were eating lunch, and it turned out the roof of our shack was well perforated. We ended up pretty wet.

All that said, though, we actually did enjoy a lot of our time there. The ocean was wonderfully warm, and the waves were just big enough to be fun and exciting without inspiring mortal terror. (Ben contends that Hawaii was better, but I am far less happy to get completely destroyed by waves.) The weather cleared for a couple hours each evening, and we got to walk along moonlit beaches while watching distant thunderstorms play on the horizon.

Now we're preparing to leave Bangkok, where we've had a busy couple of days doing lots of shopping. We're staying at my aunt's friend Maren's apartment again, though she and her husband Jerry are gone for the weekend. We cannot begin to thank them for their generosity in letting us stay here--it's beautiful and convenient, and they've given us loads of invaluable advice about the city.

So, I guess that's just about it. We've been meaning to write some entries about all the stuff we've learned through our experiences, but perhaps we should just say that if you'd like to hear more about the importance of local and organic food and why you should be nice to elephants, we'd be happy to talk to you at length when we see you in person. I'll end on a very sappy note, but also the most important one, I think. What we've realized more than anything else, is just how awesome our friends and families and lives at home are. We miss you all, and are really looking forward to seeing you again.

Elephants

Ben writes:
Hi. This is a quick one, as we are running out the door. Don't feel bad, our journals are equally neglected.

We spent a week at the Elephant Nature Park outside of Chiangmai. It's a place for elephants who are abused in the tourism or illegal logging industries. Unfortunately, that is all elephants in those industries. There is a lot to get into, but the short version is that to train elephants, it is believed that they have to be tortured, in a three day ritual called the pujong (phonetic spelling), to break their spirit first. After that, they are continually abused, basically using negative instead of positive reinforcement. A lot of the abuse stems from ignorance rather than deliberate cruelty, but that doesn't make the situation better for the elephants.

At the park, every elephant has a personal handler, a mahout. This is true of all elephants, but the ones at the park don't use sharp sticks and hitting, just tugs on the ear and yelling, when needed, which is often, as elephants are large and somewhat willful. One of the goals here is to show that elephants can be trained with positive reinforcement: three of the baby elephants who have not been through the pujong are on a positive reinforcement regime, with good but gradual results.

The park does not aim to have people boycott elephant tourism entirely, but to educate people, and change the industry. If you should go on an elephant trek, please ask to walk with the elephant, rather than ride it, as those baskets basically break their backs. One mahout on the neck or head suits their anatomy just fine, though. Go to www.elephantnaturefoundation.org for more information.

Our role in all of this was to be helpers and vacationers. There were about 15 other volunteers that week, some for the week, some having been there for a month already. Every day when the food truck came, we unloaded huge amounts of corn, pumpkins, watermelon, pineapples, cucumbers and such, cleaned it, chopped it, and put it in baskets for the elephants. Then we, and the day visitors, would feed the elephants a few bits at a time. You can see Jo feeding a baby above. The elephants are perfectly capable of feeding themselves, but they let us do it for fun, which it is. We also go in the river with them, and scrub them off every day, under the careful guidance of the mahouts. And twice a week, we removed the gooky layer of mud from their new mud pit, and then refill it with water, so it's only a little muddy -- elephants are apparently picky creatures. We get very muddy doing it, and then hop in the river, where we dodge floatin elephant poo.

Spending so much time up close with elephants was amazing -- they look much weirder than you think, and they definitely have personalities. On the last day, we saw two young boy elephants play with a soccer ball, and then stomp it, kick it once, and walk away. The young ones also sometimes like to charge at inexperienced volunteers for a laugh, though not while we were there. Oh, I also fed the really old elephant with no teeth, which involved putting the food right into her gummy mouth. Please take a minute to really imagine that.

We were also lucky in that we had a great group of co-volunteers. Canadians, Americans and Brits, as it happened. And there are about 35 dogs at the park, always ready to be patted and played with, or follow you if you go somewhere, or come back, or do anything. The dogs really made every minute even better than it should have been.

Since then, we took a long train ride down to Ayutthaya, where we saw some ruins, and then to Khao Yai National Park, where we hiked in the rain forest, got attacked by tiny leeches, and saw gibbons, hornbills, and porcupines in the wild. Now we are in the wonderful Bangkok apartment of Joanna's aunt's friend. We're taking a week for more national parks and island beaching, and then back here, and then... home. Well, California. And then home.

Wow, We Were in Laos! And Thailand Now.

Ben writes:

OK, dudes, we have been in an entire other country since we lasted posted an interweb weblog update post. We have actually three countries to mention here. So.

CHINA
Well, we did fly down to Xishuangbanna (enjoy pronouncing that), and spent a few days in the region. We went from being incredibly cold in Zhongdian to incredibly hot and humid in the city of Jinghong. Also, we thought we had seen polluted air in the bigger cities up north, but this was incredible. You could see it in the air around you. And it was the dry season, so there was a layer of dust on everything -- all the plants were coated in brown and grey. We don't know if it's always that way, or just in March. We may never know.

The city was nice enough, though, and we managed to get out and see a Chinese action film called Twins Mission, probably a sequel, in which the twin sister spies / circus acrobats are joined by like 3 sets of good twins to fight 3 sets of bad twins over some stolen artifact while the evil capitalist somehow blackmails the mother of a cancer kid named Happy (no translation, they call her "Happy") into giving up the artifact, which she apparently owns. The girls fight FIVE fake-looking CG snakes, the cancer child is dropped from a crane, there is a weird racist interlude (this kind of humor persists because there are very few black people around in China, which results in pretty basic ignorance -- for instance, there is a toothpaste called Darlie that used to be Darkie. Its logo is a black man in a top hat with shiny white teeth ), and it ends on a cliff-hanger. Awesome.

Also, we rented bikes for two days and took a 27k trip on the road along the Mekong River down to Ganlanba, a "village" that was actaully just a town. We kind of wandered around the night market as it concluded and then watched Chinese TV. The next day, we went back to the market, where there were baby chicks and puppies for sale!

Then we took our bikes on the very short ferry ride to an "actual" village across the river. It became quickly apparent, however, that we were basically treating a town as a tourist attraction. There was really nothing to see there but people with less money than us. In fact, Ganlanba has a "minority village" where you can pay to do exactly that. Speaking of racism again, China is generally not very respectful of its ethnic minorities.
So, that was really awkward and unpleasant, but a learning experience I guess. We got down to the river and swam in its freezing cold waters for a minute on the way back to Jinghong.
And then we spent two very long days riding buses to

LAOS
After crossing the border, which was easy enough, we just barely made all the necessary buses to get to the city of Luang Prabang on time for our 5-day hiking / kayaking excursion. This is where we finally met up with Ian again. In addition to Ian, our little group included Melzie and V, sisters and British, and Simon, the crazy Swedish guy whom we like a lot. Our two Laotian guides were Wontong and La (phonetic spellings there), who proved to be very fun guys.
Basically, each day we would eat breakfast, hike (or later, kayak) for a while, stop for lunch in a village in the woods or near the road, hike / kayak more, then have dinner and fun at the village where we'd sleep.

It is burning season in Laos, which we had no idea about. This meant that though much of the jungle was lush, green and beautiful, a lot of it was on fire or burned to make room for agriculture. Also, the air was filled with smoke, so we could not see too far. Nonetheless, it was great to be in the outdoors. Our first day the guides were guided by a young woman and a fleet-footed little boy from the village to a nearby cave, which we all explored together. Which is to say, they'd never seen it either, but helped us through by holding our hands and saying "be careful" a lot. This is why Laos is more fun than America. Similarly, on the third day, we got to climb in a waterfall, made possible by some rough plant life growing in it.

Staying at the villages was less awkward than our experience in China, as we were paying guests, but still strange. Walking around taking pictures the first day did not necessarily feel like the best choice. Kicking around an awesome woven wooden ball with some kids/young people did, though. It makes the hackey sack look very dumb in comparison. Yeah, I said it.

In the evenings, after we ate, the correct thing to do was to buy the local beer (Beerlao), and/or lao-lao, the local moonshine, or lao whiskey, which you drink out of long bamboo straws from a ceramic container, and is much sweeter than whiskey. This felt too indulgent at first, but there was not much else to do at night, and it generated income for the village. In some villages, no one was impressed about us, but in the ones farther from the roads, we would get an audience of people just kind of looking at us talking and drinking.

After the trek, we spent a few days in Luang Prabang, a relatively sleepy but pleasant town. We did less than we might have, as I spent one day basically vomiting the entire time. What got in there, we'll never know, but I got it out. I feel pretty recovered by now.
From LP, we took a speedboat for about 7 hours on the river, and then a bus, and then another bus, to get to

THAILAND
We are in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand's second biggest, but only a little more metropolitan feeling than Luang Prabang. The old city/downtown is contained within a square moat (now easily crossed), and marked by some remaining/restored sections of wall. We are in the midst of Songkran, the Buddhist New Year, celebrated here, in Laos, and elsewhere. A once very benign custom of sprinkling water on others to wash away the last year's sins has escalated into a daytime hours full-on street party of people riding in pick-up trucks throwing buckets of water out of a giants barrel onto the people on the sidewalk, who are doing basically the same thing. Some people are drunk. Around the moat, it is especially crazy.
Finding fun things to do at night has been frustrating/depressing (lame backpackers' bars, lascivious white men playing pool with Thai women, etc), but daytime is great. Yesterday we biked to the zoo, shooting our feeble water guns at everyone who watered the heck out of us. If you plan to go anywhere or do anything during Songkran, you plan to do it wet.













Today we emphatically joined the insanity, standing on the road across from the moat, drinking beer and dancing to (for example) Madonna remixes with all the friendly Thai people. Tomorrow we're off to a week of volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park, which is what is sounds like.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Joanna writes:

Well, we've temporarily lost our friend and guide Ian to the lack of reliable anti-malarial drugs in this part of China (he's currently in Thailand sorting that out), but we did get to spend a few days together in and around Kunming. We stayed with his friend Lexi in her Kunming apartment while we explored the city and discovered the wonder of Y20 (about $2.50) hour-long massages, and haircuts where they spend almost half an hour massaging and shampooing your scalp before they even reach for the scissors. (I just got the shampoo, but Ben and Ian came out looking quite sharp.) We also took an overnight trip down to the Stone Forest, a geological anomaly two hours south of the city that's been encompassed in a lovely park.

Though sad to lose Ian, it did give us the chance to travel up to the northern part of the Yunnan Province and hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, a stretch of the Yangzi River that's one of the deepest gorges in the world. It was one of the most wonderful things we've ever done. The gorge is just indescribably beautiful, and we got to spend three whole days hiking the high trail along one side of the mountains, stopping to sleep and eat at the lovely guest houses along the way. We also descended the steep path down to the river, where a spry little old lady led us out over a rickety bridge to the rock where a mythical tiger supposedly leapt the gorge.

Not only is the natural scenery of the gorge spectacular, but the human endeavors there are also quite amazing. Tiny farming villages dot the steep hillsides, and the terraces of crops are both impressive and beautiful. Even the infrastructural elements like telephone wires and water pipes that would normally seem to be a blight are such feats of engineering that they're more of a sight than an eyesore. Though the camera is a vastly inadequate tool for capturing the grandeur of the scenery, we did take a bazillion pictures and, sadly, unless you plan to visit China in the next couple years, that may be the most you'll ever see of the gorge. Despite international protest, China seems to be moving ahead with plans to dam the Yangzi, and that may spell the doom of this place. However, there's a flurry of new construction going on in the gorge, and tourism is booming, so we'll see if perhaps it will be saved in the end.

Right now we're in Zhongdian, a city very close to the Tibetan border. It's really cold, and really beautiful. Today we will visit a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and tomorrow we fly south to the lowland tropical city of Jinghong in the region of Xishuangbanna to reacquaint ourselves with heat and humidity. Then the current plan is to cross the border into Laos to meet up with Ian again before we scoot over to Thailand to chatch their new year's festival. Not sure when we'll next be able to update, so be well, everyone!

Beijing is the size of Belgium

Really, no kidding. We're pretty sure that this gigantic figure includes a lot of surrounding countryside, but the point is, it's a huge city.

Joanna writes:

March is not Beijing's most becoming month, but we had relatively good luck with the weather, and managed to enjoy ourselves despite the chill. Our first three days there were sunny, or as sunny as it gets when the wind isn't blowing in the right direction. The pollution there is really quite extreme, and makes the sky seem permanently grey and heavy. It also makes for some neat sunsets.

Our hostel was in one of Beijing's old neighborhoods, called hutongs. They have narrow streets and old, often rundown buildings, and are becoming more rare as they are demolished to make way for modern apartment buildings. It was a cool area to be in, and we spent a lot of time just wandering around. It was also pretty convenient to the central sights, like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where we visted our first day. Unfortunately, Mao's mausoleum is closed for some time (a lot of things are being renovated for the 2008 Olympics), so we didn't get to gawk at the waxy remains of the Chairman. We did get to see the huge portrait of him that hangs on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a pretty cool place to visit, with lots of beautiful architecture and a huge lovely garden, though it probably would've been cooler when it was still forbidden.

We also took a trip to the Great Wall. It was Great! No, seriously, that thing is amazing, and we also learned some important lessons about tours in China in a relatively painless way. We were initially surprised and delighted by how cheap the tour was, as it included transportation to a faraway part of the wall, a guide for the four-hour hike along the wall to another access point, and lunch. What they didn't tell us was that there were three additional charges for entrance to different parts of the wall. The whole thing was still inexpensive, but it seemed pretty sketchy when they pulled over at a gas station a couple hours out of town and demanded 40Y from each of us for our entrance tickets. So, we now know to always ask if there are additional fees! Our other lesson was that we need to tell people that we're not going to buy anything from them before they waste their time being nice to us. At the beginning of the hike, our little group was joined by about as many Chinese "guides" (we naively thought) as there were of us. Soon a tiny old woman was holding my hand and keeping me from slipping as we climbed up the steep and still icy slope to the wall. I thought, "oh, how nice.“ Well, kind of. Then she got really mad an hour later when I didn't want to buy a book. Anyway,the hike was wonderful, and so was the lunch, so it was a lovely day all told.

Another good experience we had in Beijing was renting bikes for a day. The traffic in Beijing (and Shanghai and Kunming) is pretty crazy and the rules are loose; it's pretty much a might-makes-right situation, with a general hierarchy of buses, then cars, then bikes, then pedestrians, though a sufficiently large herd of the latter two can sometimes overwhelm even the buses. Tons of people still bike in China, and we've seen people carrying all manner of ridiculously huge loads. Most of the bikes are really old, too--it's strange to see immaculately dressed women with high-heeled boots pedalling along on bikes that look like they were built for a nine-year-old boy twenty years ago. There are usually large bike lanes on the main streets, but they're often full of pedestrians, carts, scooters, and sometimes even cars, so you need to keep your wits about you all the time. Luckily everyone goes pretty slowly. So, off we went on our rented bikes into the fray. About five minutes after we set off, my back tire exploded. Ben says it looked pretty cool. Luckily my replacement bike survived the journey, and we had a fun ride.

I think one more sight that deserves note is the Taoist Temple we visited. I think the general impression Americans have of Taoism is that it's basically about chilling out and finding the Way. We do not understand exactly how this idea relates to what we saw, but there is definitely a lot more to Taoism. The temple courtyard was lined with about 50 small rooms, sort of like stalls, that were all labelled as different "departments." Each contained about ten nearly life-sized painted figures illustrating the purpose of the particular department and a judge figure at the back. Some notable deparments were "The Department for Implementing 15 kinds of Violent Death," "The Deparment for Mammal Births," "The Department for River Gods," "The Deparment of Jaundice," "The Department of Petty Officials," and "The Department for the Accumulation of Justifiable Wealth." We don't really get it, but it was a rather surreal experience.

On Saturday night we decided to try to find the local rock scene, and set off for the What? Bar, a destination gleaned from a google search. It was awesome. A tiny little hole in the wall (quite literally, as its door opened into the wall surrounding the Forbidden City）where we saw two Beijing bands rock the house and ran into an acquaintance of Ben's from school (Azalea, for those of you who might know her). We inhaled a lifetime's worth of smoke and partook of the birthday cake served to one of the band members, and had a generally fun time seeing that rock and roll is alive and well here.

So now, after our brief flirtation with our native climate, we've flown down south to Kunming in the Yunnan Province, where it is sunny and 70 degrees and the trees are covered with leaves and flowers are blooming everywhere. It's wonderful！ Tomorrow we meet up with Ben's friend Ian, who speaks Mandarin and is awesome. Hooray!

PS After days of intensive study, we have determined, without a doubt, that the babies here are So F-ing Cute. Especially up north, where they are bundled into 15 layers of adorable clothes and go tottering around with only their faces and bums sticking out (Chinese baby clothes have open bums so they don't have to remove all those layers when the kid needs to wee.) Here in Kunming they have sun hats instead, so the cuteness factor (CF) remains almost as high.

Shanghai: City of Contrasts

Ben writes:
Though today we sit in the Red Lantern House Hostel in Beijing, we are here to tell you about our 72 hours in Shanghai. Seriously, city of contrasts. There is less to do there in the Great Wall / Mao's Tomb kind of way, but instead you get to witness an incredibly burgeoning city. Being in Shanghai lends great credence to the notion that China will, at least economically, be the next world superpower. There is neither time nor space for every astounding detail, but here are some telling moments, at least.
Getting from the airport to the shuttle bus to the subway to our hostel told us less about China than about the fact that we don't speak Chinese. Fortunately, there is a good amount of English on all the important signs in town. But despite this, we spent a lot of time gesturing and repeating simple English phrases while generous kind people did their best to point us on the way. If you stand still and look lost, someone will either say "taxi, hotel, taxi" at you, or actually come over and help. We've gotten a lot of both.
If you do not look lost, you still often get "watch, shoes, ladybag," but we also had the pleasant experience of getting into conversations with Chinese students, one group of whom brought us to a traditional tea ceremony. We barely got to ask them anything, as they were so full of questions about the US, and about us. The tea was great, and we learned a little about tea traditions, too. Good one.
Ok, some burgeoning city stuff. As we rode the shuttle bus in from the sticks, we first went though what one guy we met describes as "rural industrial" Shanghai, which is what it sounds like, and occupies a fair amount of the land outside the urban center. Next came the very tall apartment buildings, in clusters of 3-8 identical buildings. These continue all the way in, but other city things fill in around them.
If you walk on the Bund, the touristy waterfront on the river, you will see on the west coast colonial era office buildings, all stone columns and such. On the east coast are incredible huge postmodern office buildings, bizarrely shaped and lit with neon and gigantic tv screens. None of that was there 15 years ago, we are told.
The urban planning museum has a very impressive scale model of the city, probably 20 meters across. It also has extensive displays on all the development the city is planning. There are many claims of being eco-friendly, and designed with human needs in mind, a contrast to the concrete towers of the Communist era (how Communist is China now? I really don't know. Maybe we'll figure it out). I have never seen a city with such vast ambitions for itself.
We spent one day walking from the French Concession, a pleasant neighborhood with nice trees on the streets and a lot of music stores, to Old Town. Old Town is a decaying mess of streets and alleys packed with fruit vendors, food sellers, restaurants, some book stores, clothes, I don't know what else. There is a lot of demolition, some construction, meat cooling in water buckets on the sidewalk, motorcycles and bikes zipping between people, cars honking through tight passages. It is a lot dirtier than most of Shanghai. It is apparently disappearing to new development, and while part of me wants to say no! it is so special and unique, one should also recognize that it is kind of squalid, and most of it would not be up to code in the US. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
Minutes away from Old Town are vast wide streets with huge pedestrian overpasses, and trendy expensive designers stores around. We got free Bailey's and cheese served by Chinese women at an Ireland tourism promotion thing.
That same day, we passed though several fantastic parks. Shanghai has the best quality+quantity of parks of probably any city I've seen, as evidenced by the fact that people use them! There are brightly colored public exercise machines that everyone is on, people playing cards and what appears to be backgammon, doing movement exercises, sitting and talking. Really good public space.
The public transport is really good, too. In conclusion, Shanghai is a city of contrasts.

Today in Beijing, we split the day between the Forbidden City, and the twisting alley-streets, called hutongs. Tomorrow we're going to the Great Wall!

Australia, Mates

Ben writes:
We got to Australia two weeks ago, and tomorrow we're going to China. How about that.

Our adventures began in the city of Melbourne, a sprawling town of some 4 million (approximately the whole of NZ) in the middle of the southern coast. Our friend Petra's uncle John met us at the airport, holding tiny liscense plates with our names on them. John is a great guy, and a generous host. We spent four days touring around Melbourne and environs with him and his partner Sue.

Inside the city we saw a variety of new and old neighborhoods, ranging from the young and upscale but not too upscale St. Kilda beach, to the terrifying Docklands, where they paved the old wharf and put up gigantic apartment towers. Melbourne is developing at an insane pace, due largely to a boom in the resources economy, as Australia digs up everything that China will buy to fuel its own insane growth. How about that. (Speaking of China, read the weblog of our friend Ian, whom we'll be seeing soon: www.ian-in-shanghai.com).

Outside of town, we took a trip to Montsalvat, an artists' colony established around the turn of the last century by a Swiss architect. The materials were salvaged from various constructions and demolitions in and around Oz (yes, short for Australia) at the time, and the feel of it is right between a medieval village and a medieval castle. My personal favorite was the make-your-own guitar workshop, where classes were in progress. Seeing the room full of raw timber that would become acoustic guitars was pretty amazing.

We also got a driving tour of the bay, including a ferry ride across the channel, and a view of the water from Arthur's Seat, a large hill/small mountain on the east side of the bay. We can not thank John and Sue enough for their wonderful hospitality!

Then Jo and I took off for even more driving, renting a car and checking out the Great Ocean Road, which stretches a few hundred kilometers west of the city. Great, Ocean, and Road pretty well describe it. We stopped at the 12 Apostles, the main tourist attraction on the Road: they are large pieces of rocky land that erosion has separated from the nearby land, standing by the shore. There are only 8 left, as erosion has overdone things a little. However, the really nice stops were the unexpected and less common ones, including a beach with beautiful rock formations that looked like sand drip castles, or petrified roots; clay cliffs with a rainbow of earthtones just below us, and a view of the sea; canoeing in the first Aborignal-owned nature preserve in Victoria, where we saw pelicans, ibises (ibes?), egrets, herons, shags, and more.

Back in Melbourne, we stayed with a guy named Steve, who we found through Hospitality Club (dot org). Our respective schedules meant that we barely got to see Steve, but he lived on a tram line convenient to the Chinese embassy, where we blew a fair amount of time getting our visas, and to the East Brunswick Club, where we got to take in a concert by Love Is All, one of our favorite Swedish bands (definitely see them if you haven't -- so rad!), and Cut Off Your Hands, a pretty solid group from Auckland, NZ (the live show is better than the cd, should you get to hear it). That was a long sentence. Sorry. From what little we did see of Steve, we can confidently report that he is a really nice, cool guy, and we wish we'd seen more of him. Thanks, Steve.

While staying at Steve's, we did some basic city wandering, museums, the botanic garden, the war shrine. It went by pretty quickly, and we got up wicked early (again) for a flight to Alice Springs, a town of 27,000 located right in the middle of the desert. Here we are staying with Ian and Trish, the couple who hosted Joanna in Atherton (in northeastern AU) while she was studying abroad here in college. They moved to Alice a year ago, and so here we are, where it is always over 90 deg F, and often over 100. But it's a dry heat.

We spent the first few days driving over unsealed roads through the desert in their 4x4, stopping at beautiful gorges and waterholes, as well as the former Lutheran Mission of Hermannsburg, now home to an excellent Aboriginal art collection. The proprietor gave us a great talk on what it all meant. You should really look into this stuff.
Then, as in Melbourne, we rented a car for a long trip. This time the destintations were Uluru (Ayer's Rock), Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and Watarrka (King's Canyon), three of the best things the desert has to offer. Uluru is an astoungingly huge red rock sitting all by itself in the middle of nowhere. It has a lot of significance in Aborignal culture -- disrespectful tourists climb it; respectful tourists walk around it, which we did as the sun was setting. We also got up quite early to come see the sun rise, which was a lovely event, though saturated with other tourists.

Kata Tjuta is a series of smaller rocks domes that we hiked in between (also no climbing!), and Watarrka is a great (smallish) canyon where we did the rim hike. The great surprise there, besides the gorgeousness of it, was the side hike to the Garden of Eden, a swimming hole where we hopped in, and then dried on a sunny rock. The whole area is like but unlike the US South-West.

One noteworthy stop on the way was Stuart's Well, a "town" consisting just of camping and tourism stuff, where we caught a free performance of Dinky the Dingo. Dinky is a wonderful dog that, when someone plays the piano, hops up on the keyboard and "sings" and "plays". Though not exactly "musical" the performance, with Jo on the piano, was "awesome" and "hilarious". Dinky has raised over $11,000 for the Royal Flying Doctors. We took a video.

Now back in Alice, we are relaxing, organizing, and packing for the trip to China. We can not thank Ian and Trish enough for their wonderful hospitality, too! Tonight we're going to see some Aussie rules football in town, and that will be that.