Leeches, Bandicoots, and Flooding

Wednesday started pretty mellow, with a morning walk and workout in Nambucca Heads. This coastal town is nice and even quite scenic during stormy weather. We decided to head inland to the rain forests of Dorrigo, a World Heritage listed National Park since the weather was forecasted to be incredibly stormy for the next 4-5 days. As the day progressed, so did the intensity of the rain. We managed to get a couple of hikes in, and found our first hike to be an amazing display of vines and massive rain forest trees. We also discovered our disdain for leeches. During our second hike, we stopped at our destination (a large waterfall) and noticed the small leeches all over our clothes. I made the mistake of taking my shoes off to get rid of the leeches only to discover more attaching to my clothes, socks, shoes, etc. These leeches are much smaller than the "Stand By Me" ones, so they can burrow through holes in shoes/clothing much easier. The one shoe I took off had at least 10 small leeches inside. I had 2 pairs of socks on so I decided to "let it be" and get the hell back to the van. When we returned to the van, we discovered only one of our headlamps had enough juice. With one small LED headlamp, we de-clothed and de-leeched in a massive wood/stone picnic shelter while the storm raged around us. A small leech had burrowed through 2 pairs of socks and I had a small bleeding wound for hours. As the rain continued to pound, I cooked dinner in the shelter on our stove and Scott built a fire. Since we only had one headlamp, the entire process was a bit belabored and dim. After I chopped into a big butternut squash, I left it on the picnic table as I stepped away from the stove. When I stepped back to the stove, a large marsupial face was there to greet me in the dim light of the headlamp that Scott was wearing. Of course I over-reacted and ran away, while Scott grabbed his weapon -- our dinner plates. After he told me it was a bandicoot, I came back to check it out. We thought he would run away but he grabbed our butternut! I screamed "HEY!" and as he turned his back to us, Scott slapped his bum with our dinner plates and he went soaring off the picnic table.

The heavy rain continued all night. Being in the van was like being in a Jiffy popper. Luckily, we had earplugs. In the morning, we half-joked that we may not make it out of the park since they were predicting major floods. We made it out, but not without a big leech attaching to the top of Scott's foot after he had stepped out of the van for a few moments in the morning. I have to admit, it's kinda fun to put a little salt on the leech and see it detach (as long as it's not attached to me).

Skipping the morning coffee routine, we drove along the 10km dirt road through dense and gorgeous rainforest in the pounding rain. After some rough spots in the road, Scott happened to look out his window enough to see that the roof rack with 2 surfboards and a FULL rocketbox, had come completely off and was just resting on the van roof. OMG, this could have been horrible, but the only casualties were a few dents in the roof and Scott's very wet clothing.

The longer we drove, the more we realized that flooding was a very real possibility and that we needed to get out of the bush and into a town as quick as possible. As we drove down the mountain, two waterfalls that had been small the day before were now raging out of control. Both of them were pouring water onto the roadway but not enough to prevent us from driving past them. After we arrived into the valley, we learned that the waterfall was over the road. We had narrowly escaped being marooned in a small mountain town for days.

We are 2 days into the flooding and it is the worst they've seen in 30 years--over 8 inches of rain in 24 hours with more on the way! We are trying to ride the storm out in Coffs Harbour, a town of around 60,000 (much bigger than anything we've come across in the past month) -- I don't know how long I can do the library-aquatic center-shopping mall-laundromat routine!

The Pub With No Beer

It is very rare that things exceed our expectations -- mostly because we are a pair of cynical and jaded folks. Last night was quite the exception. After an epic, bordering on ridiculous, bike ride up to a 2700 ft peak (that surprisingly included 2 other 2000+ ft peaks), we decided that we should drive the extra 15 km to a pub in the middle of nowhere that seemed to have the potential to be a tourist trap. The "Pub With No Beer" is famous for the Slim Dusty song of the same name (Slim Dusty is like the Elvis of Australia). There was a bit of advertising hype about the pub on the information center map, and our Lonely Planet guide seemed to hint that it was a shameless tourist trap. They were wrong!! Or, maybe it's just different on an off-season Friday night.

This place is located in a "town" with a population of 50 in the middle of nowhere. It has it's own brewery (Murray Brewery), a beer can museum in a restored church, and the locals on a Friday night are the best entertainment you can find. Besides that, the Murray Cru is the best Australian beer we've had. It's 8.8% ABV, which is quite heavy for an Australian beer. Before offering the beer to us, the bartender asked us if we were staying for the night. We told her we had our van and weren't sure where we were going to park. She told us we could stay "here" (meaning the parking lot, I assume) and told us about the showers attached to the large deck (too bad we already showered in the bush with bottles of water!). After ordering a few of these beers, the next bartender asked us who would be driving. This seems a common concern here in Australia, where the legal driving limit is 0.05 BAC. After I told him we were staying in our van, he gave me another.

The main reason we decided to go the pub in the first place is because we wanted a massive supply of potato wedges after our biking. We ordered the wedges, but had to wait 30 minutes for the kitchen to open. The "cook" came out to tell us that they were out of sour cream. This was a travesty! Quintessentially Australian, sour cream and sweet chili is the only way Scott will eat his wedges now. Lucky for us, we had some just-purchased, late-date sour cream in the cooler. Things got even better when we ordered our 5th beer and found out it was happy hour...$3.50 schooners!!!...unheard of in Australia, so we had a 6th and called it a night in the parking lot of The Pub With No Beer.

Random 1-month van livin' news

It's been about a month since we started our van living. Things started a little rough with a week of rain. I've always said that living in a van is fantastic unless it is raining for an extended period. Nothing dries, you can't hangout outside, and the condensation on the inside of the van in the morning is gross. We've got things pretty dialed now. We absolutely love the public facilities and off-road areas where we can camp. Speaking of those public facilities, we just discovered a massive covered pavillion in Crescent Head, NSW that has power hookups, free electric BBQs, and shelter from the common evening squalls. All of these things are what people pay $40/night for in the campgrounds, but it's free if you look around the corner.

We are doing a lot of surfing and biking and have so far decided that Crescent Head is the best place for us to hone our surfing skills. We've been here over a week and despite leaving yesterday, we found ourselves back here again. We still haven't left our state of NSW. The days are short (sunset around 5 pm) and it's not very warm (70 degrees) so it would behoove us to drive way farther north. New South Wales has some amazing coastline and scenery so we have decided that the short days and cooler weather are worth it.

A couple of weeks ago we learned that the $480 that we spent requesting a 1-year tourist visa, was denied. We were informed that 1-year tourist visas are rare and require "compelling and compassionate" applications. What the hell does that mean? We were given a 6-month visa and have to leave the country before we can get another entry (November). I guess we will have to spend our money elsewhere Australia! New Zealand, Bali, Thailand?

A couple of weeks ago we parked close to a river off a dirt road in the bush. We usually have a window and our sliding door open with mosquito netting during the night. We woke in the middle of the night to rustling of a plastic bag. Scott woke me up and I told him it was "just the wind". Sure enough, it WAS something in the van. For a while I was curled in a ball afraid to look out from under the covers as I was sure it was a goanna (big ass lizard) or a snake. Turns out, it was a mouse who was very interested in our tomatoes. The next day we set an elaborate trap with a cantilever over a big container of water. We headed out on a long bike ride and when we came back to the van we hoped to find a plump mouse floating in the bucket. The trap was never tripped and we never heard the mouse again -- smart little thing escaped.

Including our friendship with the local mice, we have had some great run-ins with lots of kangaroos and large birds of prey. There are some albatross-like birds that feed while we surf and I have managed to hit one of them while surfing. In fact, today, the bird got run over by the wave and as I tried to stand up on the wave, he rolled over my board! I don't imagine I'm the first to hit one of these guys since they seem quite nonchalant about humans, surfboards, and waves.

The latest P-I-the-A is our main computer must have a crack in the keyboard electronics board because we have lost both the "h" and the "g" key. The password to login included a "g" so we had to beg the local cafe to use their USB keyboard in order to login to the computer. I've managed to remap the keys to other rarely used keys but I'm sure we will be losing t, y, b, n soon. Time to shop for a new laptop and backup our pictures.

We have mastered the art of cooking all our yummy meals on a hotplate BBQ -- since these are free and readily available throughout the parks. Thin crust pizza and portobello mushroom sandwiches are our latest craze. Whenever we are near grocery stores we stock up on supplies for these all-time favorite meals.

Karma

I’m sitting watching the sunset on Toowoon Bay and listening to Scott work through a new song he has written. We’ve managed to exit our working life in Sydney and start our trip around OZ. Things started to get really hectic about 2 weeks ago when Scott managed to get all of his instruments (FINALLY) onto eBay. The good thing about this is that we got rid of the major bulk of our belongings but of course, this was quite painful for Scott. Despite being extremely non-materialistic (is that a word?), he is the first to admit that his instruments mean the world to him. The skin on our fingers were raw and peeling from so much packing tape. We are still carrying around a few items in the van waiting for people to pay us so that we can mail the damn things!

The night before we had to exit our apartment, we realized we were scheduled to exit on the Sunday (by 10 am) of a 4-day weekend that included Easter Monday. One thing we’ve learned about Australians is that they take their weekends and holidays very seriously. We couldn’t resist the urge to stay in our apartment one more day as we KNEW no one would be stopping by to make sure we had left. I did try to email the rental guy to ask if we could stay a couple more days but he never got back to me. True to form, no one stopped by and we managed to stay one more night in the apartment. We had everything moved out of the apartment except for our toothbrushes and a few food items. Karma was working hard against us though. Around 8pm on Sunday (the night we were not supposed to be in the apartment), both of us left the apartment together to get something from the van. We came back to the apartment only to realize we had locked ourselves out. This is serious bidness since we couldn’t really call the rental agency to ask them if they had an extra key, without a really good story about why we were still in the apartment. After a few expletives and many natural bursts of adrenaline, I suggested that maybe we ask our neighbors if I could try and climb around the brick wall between our balconies. Scott was very skeptical and our bewildered neighbor (who didn’t speak much English) managed to mutter the word “d a n g e r o u s”. I was determined. It turned out that it was quite easy to scale the wall because my foot had a nice 6-inch ledge. Did I mention the apartment was on the 8th floor?

We were lucky enough to have our building manager (thank you Wayne) hook us up with some free storage in our old apartment building. Unlucky for us, it was in the garbage compactor room and the smell will surely permeate EVERYTHING we store. We tried to put plastic bags over everything we expected to eventually want in our van but I somehow doubt this will keep the smell out.

We’ve been living in the van for a week and we’ve only managed to get about 120 miles north of Sydney. At this rate, we’ll get around the perimeter of OZ sometime in 2012. Although the weather is starting to get a bit chilly (high of 70 degrees), we are still having so much fun exploring the areas close to the place we called home for a year. We have spent lots of time actively adventuring as well as some well-needed time in the basements of our brain (gotta credit that phrase to The National). Bedtime = 9pm and wakeup = 6:30am. Perfect.

Off The Grid

I think I have to thank my friend Dan for suggesting the title of this blog. I've been extremely remiss in writing anything on this blog for the past 3 months and in an effort to be inspired, I asked Dan what the topic of my next blog post should be -- he suggested "Off The Grid". According to wikipedia: "The term off the grid or off-grid refers to living in a self-sufficient manner without reliance on one or more public utilities". So much has happened in the past few months that it has been hard for me to capture anything properly in a succinct blog post.

We were informed sometime in January that the owners of our apartment wanted it back and would like us to vacate by March 15th. Despite our polite request to extend this date, we were given no mercy. Instead of trying to find another place to call home, we decided that maybe we should start our off-the-grid living sooner rather than later. It actually didn't require much debate on our part to decide that we would start our Oz van tour about a month after we would have to leave our original apartment. Since our eviction, we've moved into a furnished apartment until April 12th, afterwhich we will officially be off-the-grid (but still online!). My parents visited for 2 weeks in Feb/March which turned out to be loads of fun. It is so fun to be a tourist in the Sydney area. Scott and I took almost 2 weeks off to spend time touring around the area with Mom and Dad Matthews -- pics are here!

Since we were fortunate enough to move a large part of our "stuff" here on a sea-container, we have had so much "stuff" to get rid of! I have always been very proud of our simple-living until I realized that we actually have sooooo much stuff. For the past month we have been trying to sell, sort, and give away almost everything we own. The pictures to the left are from our 24 hours of packing and moving from our former apartmant to our new 1-month apartment (I think we logged at least 5 FULL elevator rides). If feels so good to literally get down to only a few items of clothing and a few pairs of shoes!

So what is the plan? We plan to apply for a 1-year visitor visa that we can tack onto our current work visa. We will take a year to tour this massive country and visit as many things as we can. Our tentative plan is to go around the perimeter of Oz rather than cutting across it in any form. I've found the 2 most common questions are, "Then what?" or, "For how long?". During these odd economic times, I find it hard to convince anyone that living off-the-grid is our plan foreva. Instead of trying to convince or explain why/how we will travel and semi-retire until we're cripple, my typical response to "then what", is "I don't know" (maybe we'll explain it all in a book someday!). I DO know that we will not return to any life that involves a 9-to-5 job. There's too much to do and see in this world for us to spend our days working. I'm not opposed to working and/or making money but at this stage in our life and financial situation, we really don't plan on doing it very much. Both of us feel it is important to take these days of health and energy to do what we love and to raise our spiritual wellbeing.

I soon hope to have more time and energy to write some blog posts about our adventures. Stay tuned.

Love letter to Australia

Scott and I just got done with a fantastic 2 week van adventure south of Sydney. We had some revelations during our fun times. We realized that for a country the physical size of the United States but the population of Ohio, it has an amazing infrastructure of roads and facilities. By facilities, I mean outdoor showers, picnic tables, and electric grills at almost every beach and park. We traveled only 120 miles south of our home and found amazing scenery and numerous state and national parks. This country does an amazing job of preserving nature and ensuring green space is available everywhere (probably the advantage of such a low population!). I can't say more about the gorgeous and diverse beaches as well (and we've only seen 1/100th of the coast!!!)

On Christmas day, we road biked to the Mxxxxxxxxa Rain Forest in Bxxxxxxo National Park. A few miles from the park, at the turnoff, there was a sign saying the park was closed. We continued on. How do you close a national park, much less, a rain forest? About a mile later, we passed a group of people who had parked their cars along the road, and were having a picnic in the ditch. They called out to us that the park was closed. We continued on. Sure enough, we got to the entrance, and the gate was locked…open every day but Christmas. There was a sign saying the area was under 24-hour surveillance, but we climbed over the gate and passed over the bicycles. We had the whole park to ourselves. Even better, the whole trail system was built on platforms, so we actually got to road bike through the rain forest…probably the only people in the world who've done that. Had we been caught, I'm sure the fine would have been thousands of dollars, but we escaped unscathed…except for a leach that attached himself to the back of Scott's leg. The leach let go after I coated him in the remnants of our mixed salted nuts.

We managed to explore some amazing beaches and find some lovely camping spots to park the van (fo' free!). One of our favorite ones (pictured here) was at the boat ramp in Gerringong where we were able to sleep right next to the breaking surf and wake up to an amazing view from the van. One morning we decided to hike up the ridge above the van. The view was fantastic but in order to get to the view we had to pass under an electric fence that, much to my surprise was ACTIVE! Scott, the Indiana farm boy, didn't seem phased by me getting electrocuted , but I was very freaked. It took my breath away -- I wonder if that's what it's like to get tazered?

Another highlight was snorkeling at Jervis Bay, about 3 hours south of Sydney. We saw all sorts of fish, and swam along side a manta ray with a 5-foot wing span. That was the coolest. You think of rays as being flat, but it was thick. It's head was easily the size of a human's. I had a close encounter with a big lung fish—sort of a hybrid between a catfish and an eel.

We were excited to finally see some wild wombats while we were driving at night. These things are MASSIVE guinea pigs. They remind me of the black guinea pig I had growing up that I named Remus. During our biking adventures during the day we saw lots of wombat burrows (pictured on the left).

I can't write a love letter to Australia without mentioning the fantastic (albeit expensive and polluting) Sydney New Year's Eve fireworks display that we enjoyed from our balcony. It was extremely novel to see such an amazing display, that growing up we always saw on TV (since Australia celebrates NYE waaaay before the United States).

This trip got us very excited and optimistic for the adventures we will be having in the very near future around Australia.

Who inspires you?

I've recently been touched and inspired by two people who I don't know. One of them is a friend of a friend who has a blog titled "inspired adventurer". She used to live in Portland, but now has been traveling the South Pacific for almost a year. I don't know her exact story, but it appears she caught the same bug that we did, and decided something needed to change. She travels like we hope to do someday very soon. My favorite quote on her blog: "It's never too late to become the person you might have been." -George Elliot

The next woman who has touched and inspired me and Scott is Christina Bockius. She is a kiteboarder from Hood River who recently died a few days after breaking her neck while kiteboarding in La Ventana, Baja. This is where Scott and I spent a month kiteboarding during our travels in 2003. Her obituary brought tears to both of our eyes. She was noted to have sayings like: “We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time,” and “Life’s too short to be in a bad mood.” She was a mother, wife, and amazing athlete. She spoke 4 languages. She was happy.

What I've gleaned from both of these amazing women is that life really is too short to do things that don't make you happy. I've always felt that if I could ever find a bit of inner peace and daily joy, it would also find it's way into the hearts of other people. These women have done that for me. Thanks Sara and Christina.