Travel and culture
Australia’s Northern Territory is shaped like a tombstone, its base lodged deep in the red central deserts and jutting up to touch exotically-named bodies of water like the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The state’s human population mostly congregates along the Stuart Highway, a north-south spine of bitumen that links Darwin in the… Continue reading The Top End
I really, really wanted to like Esperance. This was our first proper town in Western Australia, a lonely outlier on the state’s southern coast. The name had a nice ring to it, a hissing rhythm when pronounced in Australian English. Esperance – it’s French for “hope,” named after a ship in the same expedition that… Continue reading Little Gnomes and Big Trees in the South West
So for the last six or seven months people have been asking Hailee and I, “what’s your plan?” To this we would rattle off a laundry list of people to visit and places to see along the east coast. We wanted to check out Tasmania. We had people to visit in Brisbane. We had to… Continue reading South Australia: We Finally Go West
In the years that I’ve kept this blog, I would say a majority of the posts start the same. This one is no different: I’m sorry I haven’t been posting. This time I think my excuses are reasonably good. In the past month or more I have been working on other projects (and even getting… Continue reading Western Tasmania and Escaping the Apple Isle
Frenchman’s Cap is a white mountain, made mostly of quartzite, in Tasmania’s southwestern wilderness. It doesn’t look like a Frenchman, or a cap, but apparently some convicts thought it did so that was that. On a clear day you can get a glimpse of it from the Lyell Highway as you cross the island from… Continue reading Hiking Frenchman’s Cap
Well, we’ve had almost six weeks in Tasmania now and have only just made it to the west coast, known as the wilder part of this strange little island. We seemed to get stuck in the south east for quite a while there, because every dirt road seems to conceal some little version of paradise.… Continue reading Still in Tasmania: The South East
Our guts celebrated their return to Australia with a final, furious salvo of the Delhi Belly that had been plaguing us since, well, Delhi. Call it a kneeling ovation for the India trip. Luckily, we had Dad’s spacious place to recover in, and after almost turning ourselves nocturnal with some poor responses to jetlag, we… Continue reading Down Under Down Under
This is Part Two of a two-part post about our trip to India. Click here for Part One. Ramthanbore From Pushkar we headed east once more to Ramthanbore, outside the bustling city of Sawaii Madhopour. We came for one reason: tigers. There is almost nothing for a tourist to do in Ramthanbore except taking bumpy,… Continue reading In India! (Part Two)
Delhi When it came to driving, Deep had a bit of an ego on him. Our hotel in the central area known as “Old Delhi” had sent him to pick us up from Indira Gandhi International late on a Wednesday night, and he obviously relished his role as the very first of the 1,326,801,576 (as… Continue reading In India! (Part One)
I know I said the posts were going to be shorter. And I was going to post this in smaller chunks, but bugger it. It’s going up in one big load. I’m sorry. When I last left off, Hailee and I had quit our jobs and were getting ready to fly down to Australia. However,… Continue reading One Last American Road Trip