Goodnight Adelaide, Hello Sydney!

30 May 2013


We had the most gorgeous sunset on our last night in Adelaide - absolutely stunning!  The entire western sky was on fire, and lasted forever, it seemed.  I watched a bit of it on the bus, travelling home from town - then ran out onto our balcony and clicked photo after photo after photo.  The color was incredible.  It really felt like a special treat arranged just for the last time we'll be leaving Adelaide.


Our train left at 10 AM on 28 May, so we arrived at the train station bright and early (just after 8) so we could check in the luggage and relax over a bite of brekkie.  

Eventually 
we were allowed onto the train, and off we went into the bright and sunny autumn day. 

It's so difficult for someone from the Northern Hemisphere to really internalize that the end of May is autumn.  That it is the end of summer, people settle in for the winter, things get cold, trees lose leaves.  Somehow it just doesn't quite compute.  We're so used to the seasons up north, and having the opposite seasons here is just confusing. 

So even though temperatures have dipped into the 50s and 60s, it was a surprise to see harvested crops and empty farm fields.  My brain just hasn't accepted that this is autumn.  Or, as someone told us, the beginning of winter - the accepted date for winter is 1 June.

It was a lovely train ride through farm country outside Adelaide, farms preparing for the short cold winter (and usually no snow).  Crops are harvested, hay is mown and stored, and fields lie bare and fallow for the winter.

But there's so much green!  I think that may be part of why my brain doesn't quite understand that this is really winter.  The winter certainly isn't severe nor harsh.  In fact, the winter is still very green, amazingly so.  There is so much grass still seen, so many green bushes, and very few trees seem to turn colors.  

And the sky, the endless Australian sky, the sky that goes on forever that you only see in flat wide-open spaces like Australia - the sky is much too blue and clear to say "autumn" and "winter."  The endless blue sky says summer to me.

But autumn it is, and winter is nearly here.  People wear sweaters and jackets and scarves, and we blend in well.  Our Caribbean thin blood seems to fit in with Australian temperatures, when hot is steamy and mild winters require bundling up in heavy clothing.  This is not the winter of frozen anything.  But the cold seems bitter after the heat of summer or the Northern Territory, and when we reached Alice Springs coming down from Darwin and heard that the temperature is in the teens (Celsius), we knew that winter is here.

One of the funniest differences I noticed is that the sheep in this part of Australia are almost golden rust colored!  They aren't the fuzzy white fluffy sheep of New Zealand, they're colored to match the soil surrounding them!  I finally figured out that this is a dry country, the soil becomes dust which blows across the fields, the sheep's wool gets covered in the dust, there isn't much rain so the wool stays dusty, and now the sheep are wearing soil-covered winter coats!  


And then the farms and trees give way to the desert, the endless and relentless desert that fills central Australia wherever there isn't a town or city or hill.  Well, more like the desert fills in when people aren't vigilant about keeping the desert out of their farms and towns or cities.  As soon as the people leave the town, the desert takes over again.

George Goyder was an Australian who  mapped a line demarcating rainfall amounts across Australia, almost from coast to coast.  He created a line indicating that south of this line there was adequate rainfall for farming - north of the line, there was not enough rainfall to sustain farming.  And, in fact, for each kilometer north of Goyder's line, there is one inch less of rainfall per year.  For some reason, people still tried to farm north of Goyder's line, but their farms uniformly failed.   

The flat scrubby desert is, however, home to wonderful animals, and totally worth travelling through.  We saw emus!  EMUS!  

I know, as kids we thought ostriches were in Australia.  Sorry, ostriches are in the southern part of Africa.  Australia has emus.  They look like just slightly smaller ostriches to those of us who don't know any better, so they are totally exciting to see running toward the train, suddenly realizing that uh oh I'd better not get close, this thing is scary - then turning suddenly and racing off in the other direction!  They were so funny, with a panicky look on their emu faces, running away on those long legs with the fuzzy tail feathers gracefully wafting in the breeze behind their somewhat ungainly bodies.

The same endless flat scrubby desert is home to kangaroos and wallabies - but they sleep in the little shade they find, and don't come out until late afternoon.  Then they go bouncing and springing and bounding away from the train - or they stop suddenly and just look at the train going by, as if they're trying to determine if this strange silver speeding animal is a danger, or if they can ignore it and continue eating. 

Kangaroos and wallabies really are pretty interesting animals - they seem shy, but they get used to other animals fairly easily.  So roos will hang out in public parks, and occasionally steal food from people.  And the big news this week was that one politico was jogging through a park in the capital, Canberra, but not really watching where he was going - and he collided with a large wallaby, who gave him (the politician) 
a couple of good punches or kicks, flattening him onto the ground.  I think there were a couple of long deep scratches from the claws, too.

  

So it seems very appropriate that groups of kangaroos and wallabies are called mobs.  Because while they're willing to watch humans, and share space with us, well, they don't take being pushed around any better than any kid from the 'hood would, either.  They're kind of the juvenile delinquents of the animal world.

We stopped in the town of Broken Hill for an hour - it's a silver and lead mining town, and closes early in the middle of the week.  Nothing exciting to report from Broken Hill.

Next morning we went through the Blue Mountains - this is the highest elevation on the Indian-Pacific train route, and some of the highest terrain in the country.  But actually, they aren't mountains in the usual sense - most mountains have been created by various geologic events that lift up the rocks, usually due to plate tectonics.  Or there are volcanic mountains formed by (obviously) volcanoes building up pressure, magma, lava, ash, whatever.  But Australia's Blue Mountains are really a giant plateau or tableland that has been eroded down into individual and connected hills and mountains, some 3,000 feet (1000 meters) high.  And due to the elevation and climatic differences, the valleys are often full of fog or mist, giving the hills their signature blue-ish color.

The railroad connected this remote area of Australia with the rest of the continent in the late 1800s, and towns began to form along the route.  The railroad still travels through the tunnels cut through granite, something like 13 tunnels, to traverse the Blue Mountains.  

And it definitely looked like autumn up there, with the fog and trees changing colors. 

We didn't have the opportunity to get outside, since the train didn't stop anywhere along this part of the route.  But there are tours available, and we might be able to do something from Sydney.

A few hours later, after a 24-hour trip of 1,693 kilometers, we finally pulled into the big city, and said good-bye to our friendly train crew (some of whom recognized us, or we recognized them from all our criss-crossing the continent by train).  We found our way to our artist studio, with the help of John the Romanian taxi driver, who was one of the most delightful taxi drivers either of us had ever met.  He was funny, jolly, chatty without being overbearing, laughed at himself as well as our jokes, and was just wonderful.  (And I had written down the address wrong, so we got a bit lost, then I looked things up on the computer and got the right address, and he turned off the meter because he promised to get us to our destination and he didn't want us to pay for his getting lost - even though it was my fault.  That's the kind of wonderful taxi driver he was!)

We're staying in the town/neighborhood of Alexandria, which is near the Redfern train station, just one train stop south of the Central Train Station in Sydney.  It's a residential neighborhood with some restaurants, bars, shops, etc. on the ends of the streets, houses in the middle.  The art studio is a converted mechanic's shop and warehouse, and now houses two studios (a painter and a sculptor) as well as providing living space for them.  The painter is currently travelling, so we're staying in his room - for a very reasonable price.  It's very comfortable, with easy access to the city and all the neighboring towns, and it's a whole lot more interesting than the usual somewhat sterile hotel.  We're very happy with this place.

And there's a very cute and friendly cat who lives down the road.  Plus a very shy and slow-to-warm up but beautiful cat who lives in the studio, and he's becoming a little friendlier with us.

So - Sydney lies ahead, ready to be explored.