Greetings Family and Friends,
It has been a while since I last posted. I enjoyed three days doing some rendering to a straw bale house in isolated Mongarlowe, NSW for a lovely woman named Alice. She has 100 acres of beautiful bush land and is intending to develop two or three more straw bale houses on her property for her and her friends. Her rambunctious German Shepard Toby provided the entertainment. (Watch out for junk, see pic below.) Two days of applying a lime-sand based render on three sides of the interior of the house and we ran into a moisture problem and spent day three putting up a rather ad-hoc temporary tarp roof. Moody Mongarlowe tends to experience 4 seasons in one day.
(PICS: The Huff and Puff Crew, Quinn by the water barrel in morning, playing with Toby, Alice exposing moisture, Quinn constructing temporary roof, rendered wall - a days works, the roof going up)
After Mongarlowe I spent a lovely three nights back in Sydney staying with a builder friend on Manly Beach. Manly is a 1km crescent shaped beach. It is twenty minutes outside of the CBD and if your’re working in the city your commute either a 45 min drive in typcial city traffic or an amazing 30 min ferry ride across the harbor. There was a definite beach vibe in Manly but it seemed to be more a more humble one. I imagine the typical Manly resident saying; “I love to work out every morning on the beach and get ripped. But I’ll put my shirt back on before I go to by my milk and bread.”
What do I do for the month of April? I have the entire month to bide my time before the next building job starts. What about Bali? Too expensive. What about a scuba diving trip to the G.B. Reef? Too expensive. Sailing? Too expensive. Eating, traveling, walking, breathing in Australia is too expensive. Come on Zack be creative what’s your next move going to be? Three options came to mind. 1.) More farm stay work (ideally on a horse farm)- I want to learn to ride and I like the cowboy image (yes I am vain), 2.) More building work, 3.) Go out to Uluru (the red centre ofAustralia) no plan see what happens, high financial risk. Yep. Took option three. I flew out of Sydney to hot and humid Darwin. A bit of a wild west town. Full of well paid tradies, out door enthusiasts and loads of backpacker. I met a lovely and amazing woman who bought me dinner. She was on her way to be a field nurse for the Australian military base in very violent East Timor. Machete attacks, shootings, kidnappings, and rape are all very serious realities for this young rock star. I admired her. She aspires to be a medical chief (like her father) a position I don’t doubt she will achieve in her lifetime. She had her head on straight with the confident flare of what I would label as the educated red neck. Strong willed, sure of herself, likes beer and sport, can ride a dirt bike. Despite being partially in love I was not surprised when she told me she grew up on a farm. My travels and life experiences have shown me many people. Some of the strongest and best in character that I have come across were raised in rural or agricultural settings. Perhaps it’s living closer to our mother earth or being forced to account for the weather, the price of fuel and other economic factors that makes country living “more real” The people that can do this in good humor and with some success are usually first class humanoids. Any-who, after a beefy dinner and a few drinks we parted ways and like many brief encounters of the traveler our relationship will probably go no further than facebook. Ce la vie.
A slow but romantic two day train ride on “The Ghan” took me to Alice Springs, Australia’s most land locked city. Alice Springs is a small-isolated, ruff and ready place almost directly next to Australia’s geographic and magnetic center. The purpose of my three day adventure here was to experience Uluru (Ayers Rock)- the heart of Australia, the Red Center, a place of significant and almost unexplainable Aboriginal spirituality. One of the easiest ways to get there is to book a three day adventure tour – a completely unspiritual and unsustainable way to experience the rock – but I accepted the cheesiness of the experience and actually had a good time, me and 23 other people. In three sunny days and two full moon cloudless nights in the desert we saw Kings Canyon, Ayers Rock, and the Olga’s. The pictures explain the experience best. And now back at the youth hostel in Alice Springs I still have three weeks to kill before the next build. I may stay in Alice and find a bit of work or I may move on if something better turns up. I’ll keep you blogged.
Uluru (expected to run 2-6km below the earth)
Uluru at Sunset
(The Olga's at sunset)
Currently struggling through “The Human Condition” by Hannah Arendt and in a bit of sappy juxtaposition with my most recent trip “The Hara – The Vital Centre of Man” by Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim.
Just do it.
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