My Ozverbations

Size

Australia. It's big. Really, really big. Coming from NZ, our concept of big is Mount Aoraki, Lake Taupo, Steven Adams, or maybe a Double Whopper with cheese and large fries. Having only previously flown in and out of Australian cities, you get little perspective of what a giant land mass Australia is.

After completing a road trip from Adelaide to Canberra, I still feel that I have only a small sense of the size of this country. If Australia was a person, New Zealand would fit into the money pocket of their jeans. With room for change.

On our road trip we stayed with some farming friends in a seaside town called Robe.  One of them mentioned that they had just popped down from Adelaide the day before. Just like I would say that I just popped down to the dairy. The only difference was my pop is about 4 minutes, vs their pop which was over 3.5 hours! Owning a gas station would probably not be too bad a thing over there. And it would be an ideal place to market your podcasts.

Drink

Robe reminded us of Kuratau on the western shores of Lake Taupo. As there was there was a high percentage of farmers, they knew each other well, had been holidaying here for years, were reasonably well-to-do, and liked a drink! It was here we learnt a new term; mothing. This is where you have been out drinking and are not quite ready to go home yet, but your current venue is closing. So you wander around town with your bottle of grog looking for lights on at your friends’ places. If the light is on, in you go!

But if you are looking for a good craft beer, go to New Zealand. Aussie beer is expensive and homogenous.  If they have a vibrant craft beer scene it has yet to make it out of the main centres (I am not including Adelaide as a main centre). Wet, yellow, and cold seemed to be the main criteria of the people I saw drinking beer. And I saw a few of them because….

Heat

Australia can be hot. Sweat running down your butt crack hot. We managed to time our visit with a heatwave where it got to 42 degrees in Adelaide. I had entered a cycling event and the organisers had to cancel it – abiding by their hot weather policy. I have never heard of anyone having a hot weather policy before, but then I don’t live in a country which regularly transforms into a giant oven.

In NZ everyone would have been up in arms shouting H&S gone mad, pussy organisers and what ever happened to personal responsibility? But over there it was “Bugger. But mate, I reckon they made the right call”. Quite a number still did the ride and there were some cases of dehydration, but I’m sure it would’ve been absolute carnage had they let the ride go ahead.

I went for a long ride on race day and I have never sweated so much in one day in my life. I had ridden the previous day and not managed to keep properly hydrated, so on this ride I thought I was being quite diligent with drinking. Nope, not even close. With the heat and low humidity, at speed even your eyeballs would dry out, so the faster you went the more you had to blink. Quite a strange sensation.

The pros

I now have new respect for professional cyclists. The speeds they can maintain riding up big hills at temperatures that had my ice cream running down my wrist within about 10 strides out of the shop were unbelievable.

I got up close to them while they were preparing for the start of one of the stages. Curious specimens, they had the body fat percentage of a baseball, strapping thighs, and the upper bodies of gangly teenager. I presume that helps their aerodynamics and gives them a low centre of gravity for better cornering.

Flies

I have new respect for Australians’ tolerance of their flies. They are really fucking annoying. And they are fast little suckers, so are hard to kill. Which would be rather pointless anyway as there are so many of them. Then we came across the ones that bite you. Bastards. Not a fan of flies.

They are more prevalent in the country than in the cities. We watched a guy operating a stop - go sign at some roadworks. Swat. Swat. All day. If you were in any way averse to flies walking all over your face, then this job could be a great alternative to a prison sentence “You are hereby sentenced to 40 days on a stop-go sign in summer.” “AAhhhgggg, nooooo! Can I have solitary confinement, or 100 lashes, or some waterboarding? Please?”

Camping

The Australians are king campers. They put kiwis to shame here. With what they pack in and on top of their 4WDs and trailers, they could comfortably set up a new residence anywhere and not have to go home for a year or two. These campers have a national love affair with Toyota 4WDs. Crumpy would be proud! And I’d never seen an off-road caravan before, but I guess it makes sense when you see their roading network.

One thing the Aussies excel at is building bull bars – which they call roo bars for obvious reasons. No self-respecting 4WD is without one. Many of which look like they could do duty on one of their road trains without any modification. Crumple zone only applies to the other guy on these vehicles!

Cops

The traffic police must be a scary because no one speeds. Orderly lines of cars doing the posted speed limit. I’ve heard stories about Australian cops and the little crap they take, but also it is very expensive to speed. You don’t have to do much over the limit to be shelling out large wads of moolah to the local government with their fines being up to double of ours.

Wildlife

Those early settlers managed to find a country full of creatures that can kill you. I bet they didn’t say that in the brochures at the time; “Come and settle in Australia and experience the thrill of avoiding becoming crocodile food, bitten by poisonous snakes and spiders, or being gently nibbled by great white sharks. And once we invent cars, your descendants can add to that list; kangaroos removing your windscreens and all the front seat passengers while you travel enormous distances to get anywhere.”

But I guess there is a possibility that those cunning Englishmen already knew this, and thought sending their convicts to Australia for a new start was actually a very clever form of genocide.

Road tripping

This is something we do less of in our haste to get to a destination. But this trip reminded us of the simple pleasures that the journey can bring. When we were younger, road tripping was a frequent activity (but that probably had something to do with having little idea of what the actual destination was when we set off!).

Nowadays we tend to plan our holidays with military precision. We like to think that is because we have limited time so we need to ensure we use it as best we can. But I think the actual reason is as we get older, uncertainty becomes less attractive, and is no longer the comfortable bedfellow it used to be.

But uncertainty hasn’t changed, we have.

So I would look uncertainty up and take them out again. You will find they are just as much fun as they used to be. And they love road trips.