DISQUS

I remember you went to Uluru right in the middle of the coldest period we had in Brisbane all winter. There was a massive cold front that came up from the bight, and it got cold enough to snow just inland from us here. I've got to say that your timing seems to be excellent.

They were probably burning off because it was a low danger time. Either that or some idiot translated "low fire danger" to mean "light a fire anywhere and ignore it".

Still a great picture. :)

Pidgin is part English, part German, part local languages (balu is bird in one local language, pidgin for plane)

The sign roughly says "no kids on the bridge/wharf without an adult"

TOK SAVE - Information/Warning
I TAMBU [Its forbidden(taboo)] TRU [I mean it] LONG OL PIKININI {for children) NA MAN [with no man] NA MERI [(or) no woman] LONG GO LONG BRIS [to go on the bridge/wharf]

There's quite a lot of other crops, but mostly not by the highway. If you'd gone off the main road near Bundaberg, there is a lot of vegetable farms - backpackers often stop there for a while and do seasonal work to get some quick cash. Just north of Brisbane you would have driven through plantation timber.

But mostly we use the coastal strip for sugar cane and bananas because they both like it wet - and the coastal strip gets a lot of rain showers even in drought years. Go over the great divide, were the coastal showers don't reach, and it becomes more like you were expecting.

Just south of Innisfail, at Tully, we got hit by a Cat 5 hurricane a few months after Katrina. It took out more than half of Australia's banana crop for a few years.

Holidays Are just about over in Qld, (started a week earlier than NSW) so it should get better here.

I read your earlier comments about the Opera house and fully agree - it's designed to be seen from afar, not looked at up close.

The best thing about Sydney is the water - the harbour, the beaches, the Hawkesbury river just to the north, etc. If you haven't done so, I suggest you try and find some time to get out on the harbour for a bit. Even the ferry to Manly or similar lets you get out and look at the harbour a bit, just avoid the rush hour.

People have been climbing the bridge for years. It just wasn't legal before. It was a little more difficult though - you had to have an in with one of the maintenance men with a key, or climb around the lower blocking fence.

Not all right hand drive cars have the turn signal on the right. Fords are mostly (all?) on the left, even on a right hand drive car. My fiancée and I have cars which are different, which means we have to keep changing if we drive the other car.

Enjoy Canberra sightseeing - they designed the whole centre of the city with sight lines in mind, so it's different to a city that 'just grew'.

If you're going from Sydney to the Blue Mountains, you may want to stop in at Jenolan caves on the way. Even if you don't take one of the tours, it's still worth a quick look at the area, and it's an interesting drive. Just be aware that the road between Jenolan and the Blue Mountains is closed for part of the day so they can get coaches in and out without pushing cars off the road, which gives you an idea of how narrow the road is.

Even if that were true, that doesn't change the fact that moonrocks are worth what somebody will pay for them, which is considerably more than zip.

Oh, and I hope at some point you're going to try and get to Cooper Pedy or Lightning Ridge. Some of those outback mining towns are pretty fascinating.

I blame atlases. You generally get a double page spread of the entire Pacific, with Australia down in one corner. Even when you later see it on it's own page, there's that image in back of your mind making you think "small".

While you're wandering around Australia, try and drop into most town/city halls or any CWA (Country Woman's Assoc.) You'll get to see the Queen looking at you.

If you are going to try and see a lot of Australia in one car, then the basic question is do you want to cross the Nullabor? If not, your basic pattern is an arc up north. If so, it can be a circle.

If you are searching the net for help on this, as well as the normal tourist and backpacker sites, search for "grey nomads". That's the slang for retirees who pack up and spend months travelling around Australia. There are websites with recommended routes, stopping sites, travel times. You may not want to take as long as they do, but some of the info should still be useful.

The cricket season is starting to wrap up, but there are still some games around. The Aussie Rules season is just starting. The big league doesn't start for another month or so, but they start playing pre-season games now, so hunt around and you should find something. Victoria is the centre of Aussie rules, so there's a lot more games around there than anywhere else.

http://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/ is more than you'll ever want to know about cricket. However, the link "Is Cricket like Baseball?" on that page starts with baseball and explains cricket from there.

Aussie rules summary: - get the ball between the centre two posts - 6 points and a centre restart. Between the outside posts - 1 point and restart from the goal. You can't tackle someone without the ball, you can kick it, punch it, but not throw it, you can carry it if you bounce it every ten yards. If some-one kicks it and you catch it, you get to kick it yourself and they can't tackle or block you. Everything else is details.

Both the Bali bombing and the tsunami gave Indonesia a bad name for tourism. Which is a bit odd, because the tourist area that got badly hit in the tsunami was in Thailand, but Indonesia was badly hit as well, so it sort of got mixed together.

Australia is one of the main sources of tourists for that region, so the continuing saga of the Bali nine being brought up in the news all the time doesn't help either.

Many years ago I used to have a specialised compass that came with a list of world cities and bearing - set the dial according to the number of beside the city you were in, make the needle line up with the markings and you were facing Mecca. Nowadays there are devices that do much the same thing, but use a GPS to figure out where they are.

I once sat down and used a globe and atlas to figure out how it worked, and it used great circle.

The highly decorated vehicles are all through Asia, though the extent varies. In some places, the cargo trucks are actually the most decorated vehicles, in others it's the Jeepneys, some places its the rickshaws (or whatever the local variations of these are called.)

Some of the work is really spectacular.

Oops - I missed the US mainland leg. That make a big difference.

It'd be interesting to compare the percentage of the globe you've covered (about 1/8 - 1/6th?) to the percentage of the landmass those countries are (maybe 2%?) - and almost all of that would be the Phillipines.

I knew we must be talking about different things. I've never heard of anything called a cream pie. Here we'd call those either a meringue or custard pie, if we had them at all. I've never lived anywhere that has the fascination with pies that the US seems to have.

Coconut milk is the liquid in the centre of a coconut - tastes a bit fizzy in green coconuts, sour and bitter in mature ones. Coconut cream is pressed out of the flesh of the coconut, looks like cream and is sweet. It's often used to cook greens and fish in PNG & the Solomons(nice but fattening), and is sometimes used in vegetarian cooking to replace cream as long as it doesn't need whipping.

If you want a different take on Gilligan's Island (which I've seen maybe twice - it's never been on where I lived) try Gilligan's Island Conspiracy sometime.

There are a number of foods that I think of as Pacific (not just Polynesian). But they are not things that people tend to sell to visitors (or even to other locals, most of the time). It's stuff you'd pick in your own garden and eat. Most of my experience is with Melanesia, really.

The Hangi, Mumu, underground oven - whatever you call it - is a Pacific staple. But it's not often done for retail food - takes to long to cook. There also a number of greens (Ibeka, shoots from a lot of plants, palm hearts), sago, and sweet potato is (was) a major staple in places with enough land.

I've passed this on to somebody who is trying to get something done about it - carefully. The main problem is tell the wrong person and it will just vanish.

Umm - your definition of a coconut cream pie must be different from mine. Here, we would assume that meant it was made with 'coconut cream', which comes from coconuts, not cows.

Ah - the wonders of co-badged flights. Some of flights have been shared amongst airlines. They get two flight numbers, eg. an Solomon airlines one and a Qantas one. If you look in the airport, you sometimes see both displayed on the schedule boards. Often they just split the seats between the two and sell them separately, so one flight can be full but you can book on the other (sometimes at a different price) but still fly the same plane.