Tripped

Photos and More Photos

If you look to the right, you can see I've added a bunch of new photo albums in the past week, taking us from New Zealand and Australia right through our safari experiences. Not a lot of captioning to explain what you're looking at; hoping to get to that at some point, but if you have any questions about any of them just fire off an email or comment here.

Aïda in Sydney Thumbnail Review

Very enjoyable, although I was really expecting more in the way of stagecraft for a new production. The set design was particularly weak - lots of cheap-looking cardboard cutouts. Maybe they thought they were going for something stylized, but it ended up as a very high school musical look. The lighting designer bailed out the sets big-time in the third act, however, with some beautiful work, and the costumes were also a highlight. Performances were generally excellent, although the woman in the juicy second female lead part of Amneris was far and away the best. The lead soprano was in wonderful voice but could use some polish on her acting - a telling overheard comment during one of the intervals was "she doesn't know what to do with her arms." I'll be curious to see what the local papers have to say about the production.

As for the opera house itself: surprisingly intimate. I thought the acoustics were good, although the singers were occasionally a bit muted when their blocking took them back to mid-stage. Our seats were excellent, given that we only bought them on Friday - near middle of the stalls in row P, less than 20 rows back from the stage.

Just a few hours of sleep now, and then we're off to Johannesburg!

Opera in the Offing?

We've been staring at this view for the last few days from our 26th floor room at the Shangri-La Hotel, wondering if the tickets to Aïda on Tuesday, which we ordered from a third-party tour agency, were actually going to come through. Because what's the point of being in the city with this opera house if you don't actually see an opera there? First new production of it in Sydney in 25 years.

Today we got the confirmation that we're going to get our incredibly expensive seats in the stalls ... we think.  I'm not sure we'll believe we have the tickets until we show up at the box office and claim them.

Channeling Our Inner Tim Gunn

I hesitate to write this for fear of offending my Australian friends, but after five weeks in this country Eileen and I have decided we can safely conclude that a very large percentage of the female population here doesn't own a mirror.  How else to explain some of the truly bizarre fashion choices we've seen, everywhere from Sydney to Brisbane to Melbourne? Fashion eclecticism has blown straight past the realm of individual expression into flat out bad taste.

We come from the land where babes with belly rolls shamelessly expose their jiggling midriffs along with their piercings, so who am I to cast a stone at another nation's fashion sense? But really, you have to see some of the outfits here to believe them: satin cocktail dresses paired with cowboy boots as office wear. Hot pants, colored tights, and Uggs for a day out shopping. Flip-flops with a miniskirt and a padded wool jacket. Patterned stockings that a Times Square hooker would kill to own.

The shot above is from Sydney, several of the others here are from Brisbane, but trust me, the theme has been consistent everywhere. In Sydney and Melbourne they've also topped it off seasonally with a fetishization of winter wear that appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the actual temperature outside. We've had several days in the 60s F in both cities that feel like normal summer weather in SF, and you do see a fair share of folks in t-shirts and even shorts. But at the same time the other half of the population has decided that because the solstice has passed, forecast be damned it's time to break out the scarves, the wool coats, and even the down jackets. Weird.

Then again, the fashion retail industry here seems to encourage this, judging from many of the display windows we've passed. If the stores do nothing but push bad taste, can you really blame the customers?

A Relaxing Lunch

 

We ate Chinese food at a third floor restaurant on Sunday in the new museum complex near the river in Melbourne, right across from Flinders Station. Eileen's checking out the passersby on the plaza down below us.

Semillon!

It's the signature grape of the Hunter Valley, but not one we've had a lot of experience with prior to our visit here. The big revelation for us as semillon novices was how well it ages over a 20+ year life in the bottle, as we learned thanks to the flight tastings we did at a couple of cellar doors, including Tyrell's Wines and Audrey Wilkinson. Dry and citrusy and with almost no color in its early years, often with some acidity, and yet still not tasting like the similar-in-appearance sauvignon blancs we're more familiar with. Remaining dry as it ages, but much softer and more well-rounded, with a beautiful gold color that looks like a big, bland, buttery chardonnay - but fortunately doesn't taste like it, with much more subtle and complex flavorings.

A 'Roo in the Wild

It took more than four weeks, but we finally got our first wild kangaroo sighting, next to a river on the Great Ocean Road. Actually four of them. Now several others since then. Before this we thought all those road signs were big lies - like the ones for cassowaries in Northern Queensland:

Unexpected Great Ocean Road Excitement

The drive up was beautiful, and as you can see here the Apostles near sunset are an impressive sight, albeit one overwhelmed with daytrippers on this Saturday afternoon at the beginning of a three-week school holiday break. But it was the drive back that provided all the drama for us.

We were coming around a curve on the Great Ocean Road, only a few kilometers south of the site of the Apostles, when on our right across the highway we saw a compact car lying on its side in a patch of grass. I roared to a stop, and we both jumped out and ran across to see if we could help. It was obvious the accident had happened only seconds before, as a young woman was just starting to pull herself up and out of the window in the passenger's door, which was now the top of the vehicle.  I asked her how many of them were inside. "Just two of us," she answered. Fortunately there was no smell of gas or any visible smoke. By now she was out of the window, and the car was teetering as if it might roll over completely into the shallow ditch it was resting alongside. Another passing car had stopped, and the driver and I steadied the wreck so she could jump down. Her friend inside quickly scrambled up after her.

Miraculously, neither of them had a visible injury (thank you seat belts) and the car was surprisingly unmarked, with one exception. From their description and from looking at the skid marks, it appeared as if they had hit a patch of gravel on the road surface, skidded sideways, and bounced off the ditch, with the car spinning 270º before it rolled onto its side. The rear axle was severely bent near the left rear tire, which was flanged in 45º and must have taken the brunt of the impact when they hit the ditch. That was the only obvious damage to the car itself.

One girl managed to get through to 000 (the Aussie version of 911) on her cell phone after she was standing up, and a dispatcher told her the police were on the way. But she couldn't get a signal to make an actual call on her cheap Optus phone, so I loaned her my iPhone which had Telstra access so she could call family. Having been through this experience ourselves a couple years ago when we and our friends Donna and Maia were nailed by a red light runner in SF, we were worried that they might have head trauma and not realize it - they said they had bumped heads, probably when the car hit the ditch and rolled on its side, and they were clearly shaken by the experience. So we waited with them for the police, not wanting to leave them alone. Meanwhile, the woman in the other car that had stopped clearly wanted nothing to do with the situation and had never even left her seat, until she finally got out to convince her boyfriend to leave.

Eileen kept trying to make small talk about other subjects to distract them, while a number of other cars passing by the scene also stopped to make sure no help was needed. We learned that they were both from Melbourne and just taking the weekend to do the Ocean Road, and that one of them had spent a year at Berkeley while she was at university. We told them a bit about our travels, and about seeing the Apostles that day. Eventually a cop showed, called for an ambulance, and told them that they would be brought to the town where they were planning to stay that night. And that was that - we hugged them and wished them luck and we were on our way again.

Thumbs Up for Melbourne

After several days here our verdict is in: it's our favorite Australian city so far. Cosmopolitan and lively and international in a way that feels very familiar, with the some of the best meals we've had anywhere in the country. A lot of that has to do with the large ethnic populations here, including big Greek, Italian, Jewish, and several Eastern European groups. Plus we've lucked out with the weather. The shot above is from the public pier in St. Kilda, the beach neighborhood that's a short tram ride from downtown where we've been staying, taken a couple days ago. It's supposed to be a few days into winter here, and many Melbourners appear to rely on the calendar to dictate that it's time to break out their wool coats and scarves, but the thermometer has made most of those outfits look laughable to us. With temperatures rising into the upper 50s and low 60s it's a nice summer day in San Francisco!

Aborigines Trump Incas

Here's the difference between a dead New World civilization and a live one: we climbed all over the Incas' religious sites; we didn't go near the Anangus'. The latter are the Aboriginal people who live and have lived in the area around Ayer's Rock (Uluru to them) for tens of thousands of years, and for them many parts of the Rock, including the path where it can be climbed, are spiritually sacred. They implore you, in the friendliest but most repetitive way possible, on signs throughout the national park surrounding the Rock, to respect their wishes please stay out of certain caves and please, please, please, do not to climb the Rock itself. The climb is supposed to be reserved only for Anangu men, who do it as a prelude to a spiritual gathering at the site.

But they never actually put up a stop sign and say, "No!" to the climb. Part of that is the completely alien notion of property rights to the Aborigines - they really don't think they "own" Uluru - and part of it is what they think of as good manners. As a park ranger explained to us, when we joined a short tour at the base of the Rock, the Anangu don't want you to get hurt, or worse yet die during the climb (a few dozen unfortunates have done so) because they would feel responsible. Even more so if you expire, because your soul would be troubled from dying in a place away from your own people. And yet they want to leave that decision up to you, as if it would be rude to put up a barrier to an outsider.

Still, we found ourselves adhering to those requests, even though many, many other tourists choose to disregard them (the Japanese appear to be especially fond of the climb, and I overheard a woman on our tour describe a large family of American Hasidic Jews, who we later saw at our hotel, scurrying up the hillside). This despite the fact that it's something that not exploring as much as we could would have been unimaginable to us when we were entering the sacred caves within Machu Picchu and when I was climbing Huayna Picchu to look down on the city. In a different mood, I might have climbed Uluru anyway, dismissing the spiritual concerns as mere superstition and wanting to see the view. But this time it didn't seem ... necessary.

From the pictures you see before you arrive you'd think that the Rock is isolated in a flat, featureless landscape, but that turns out to be not true at all. There's a surprising amount of green, muted as it might be in the landscape, which reminded us a bit of the high desert parts of Nevada you see driving on Route 50. The green stuff helps anchor in place an endless series of ochre red sand dunes, and the undulations of the dunes become small hills as you scan the horizon between the sandstone outcroppings.

I say outcroppings because Ayer's Rock is not the only ancient piece of seabed to be forced up through more recent strata. The nearby hills called Kata Tjuta, which the English-speaking explorers named the Olgas

are just as spectacular as the Rock, made up of the same red sandstone and glowing equally impressively when the sun hits them: