George of the Jungle Needs Universal Health Care

by Scott

I can't really blame a cartoon for my penchant for swinging on vines, though I did watch a lot of George of the Jungle when I was a kid. I also used to swing on a vine over the ravine in the woods behind our house in Indiana. That ended when one of the neighbor kids fell 15 feet and broke his arm. His dad then chopped down the vine. In any case, here I am thinking about turning 40 someday, and I still can't pass by a vine without taking it for a swing.

Lucky for me, the rain forests of Australia are littered with vines. Not so lucky for me, not all of them are swing worthy. In the Eungella rain forest in Queensland, there was a vine hanging directly over the path, just out of my reach. However, if I jumped, I could bat it uphill, run up the hillside, and hold onto a small tree until it swung back. I gave it a good tug to make sure it was stable, and then swung out over the trail. I was cautious on the first attempt, but started pushing it on the next couple swings. Heather captured this picture, but it's hard to tell that I'm a good 12 feet above the rocky ground.

Not wanting to miss out on all the fun, Heather took a couple swings. I tried to take pictures, but they didn't turn out very well. We decided to try video. Bad idea. I decided to go big. As you can see in the video, I went big, but not in the manner I intended. The vine immediately started coming down, but like a good captain, I went down with the ship, never releasing my death grip on the vine. Watch as my head bounces off the edge of the trail.

Don't hold back your laughter. Heather didn't. She did stop the video, but after I recited all known curse words, she started laughing hysterically. I didn't immediately get the joke, but after realizing I wasn't too hurt, I saw the humor...and saw it over and over again in the video. Since the damage to my head was all internal, you can only see the damage to my back.

While this is primarily a comedy, there is a moral to the story. Australia has public health care for all, and private health care for those that want it. Heather worked in both the public and private hospitals. Someday, we will return to the United States, and I really, really need universal health care. I could go the employer provided route, but that means employment, which means work, or pretending to work. Both cut into my vine swinging time. The other route is private insurance, but seriously, what for-profit company is going to sign up to cover me? I need a public option. After all, your own private nurse can only do so much, especially when she's laughing.

Rust, Rain, and Dolphins

I had to take a look at our pictures from the start of June to remind myself of what we were doing 2 months ago. We endured quite a bit of rain during June, which is supposed to be one of the dryer months in NSW. The worst floods in 30 years occurred approximately 2 weeks after the other record breaking storm. This storm was unique from the other because it came out of the east, causing massive waves that tore up the coastline. Shipwrecks that had never been discovered were uncovered. The rain caused a few problems for us, most notably very rusty bike components. We are now equipped with removable chains in an effort to mitigate the rust attack.

Despite the rain and cold, we had one of the most exciting days surfing on our new shortboards. This experience was exceptional mostly because we were completely alone on a gorgeous beach, with a pod of at least 30 dolphins. They seemed to be toying with us as they lifted their dorsal fins above the water only inches away, then quickly disappeared into the murky storm-stained ocean. We had to guess where they might pop up next. Dolphins compete with sharks for food, and are also known to ram into them with their heads to keep them away. This thought is awfully comforting when you are surfing with dolphins. We've also officially graduated to surfing on shortboards. Although we are proud of our progress in surfing, I usually always feel like the biggest goompa on the water. I can't say that I've had any ripping surf days yet on my new board.

We were also treated to our first of many whale sightings along the NSW coast. For about 2 weeks, we could look out into the ocean and always see a Humpback whale breaching (coming completely out of the water and landing on it's back). Even from very far away, it's an awesome sight. We met many Aussies who had never seen a breaching whale. At first, we were appalled that people who live in coastal cities/towns hadn't seen something that we saw many times a day. We realized that it was probably because they're indoors, working during the day when you can actually see the whales (not to mention the daylight hours are quite short during the migration months).

One of the more unique things we saw was a cave full of "glowworms". We visited the cave at night and found it completely filled with bright blue stars. The glowworms are actually larvae of a flying insect that glow to attract prey into their sticky, silk snare lines that hang from the cave ceiling. The glowworms spend most of their lives as larvae. Once they become an adult fly, they don't feed, and only live long enough to reproduce. Cool!

We made it to the northern border of NSW before turning back south for Sydney in order to catch a flight. During one of our nights, we had another mouse episode in the van. It turned out that in fact the mouse was not IN the van and that it probably wasn't even a mouse. We still don't know what it was, but the teeth marks on my flip-flops look a little bigger than the mice we've seen. Your guess is as good as ours as to what chomped the hell out of my flip-flops (I had left them on the ground outside of the van). Check out the remains in the picture to the left.

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.