Hello from Perth! Our arrival here marks the end of our Australian road tour. It is here that we will unpack and repack our trusty but disabled Land Rover and prepare it for shipment back to South Africa. Nicole will give you all the gory details; I only know that the whachamacallit that controls the Landy's thingamajig finally imploded from one too many dreary 'tracks from hell.' I frankly can't say that I blame it.

So much has happened since my last update that it's hard to know where to begin!

Lizards and Things

First let me tell you about my ill-fated encounter with a Frilled lizard. We had been looking high and low for this lizard in the wild to photograph it but to no avail. These lizards are small, gray and rough-textured like the branches of their favorite gum tree, and when their frill is flattened they are perfectly camouflaged.

Suddenly, though, I spied one on the road as we were winging our way to Windham early one morning. He was just sitting there in the middle of the road enjoying the morning sun. We screeched to a stop and with great excitement I grabbed my D1 and crept as close as I could, hoping not to frighten him off.
He almost immediately puffed out his frill - just as you would open an umbrella. He thought this would frighten me off but it didn't. So he opened his mouth as well in a fearsome leer. My zoom lens allowed me to keep a respectful distance so he just sat there as I moved up and down and then all around him to get the best angle. I couldn't believe my luck! What a photo op! I even had time to run back to the Landy to get my F5 with an 80-200 f/2.8 zoom attached. He was being so cooperative, my little lizard friend!

Suddenly things changed dramatically. He decided he was not happy with me after all. Just I was standing up from a back-breaking deep squat he rushed at me, hissing loudly. It worked, he frightened me! I stepped back quickly still in my ungainly crouch but I tripped and went head-over-heels, cart-wheeling with my F5. We both landed with a sickening thud while the lizard laughed all the way up the tree.

When I picked myself up the lizard had gone and I had one nasty lump on the back of my head. I also had an expensive but totally wrecked, completely dead 80-200 lens on my hands.

On Signing Guest Books

As we travel around Australia I always sign my name along with our web site address, in any and all guest books that I come across. I do this for fun and I usually write in my big, bold scrawl which uses up two or three lines. So I signed the guest book during our visit to the Healesville Sanctuary near Adelaide.

Soon afterwards I received an email from someone who had seen my name and recognized it as a ghost from their past. They checked our 2DocStock web site and, sure enough, there I was, the same little punk kid, only with lots of gray hair on my head.

They wrote me this very cryptic, deliberately mysterious note mentioning my home town and even the name of our 12th grade English teacher! I worried over their identify for days. It turned out it was a childhood friend from northern Minnesota and her cousin, Larke. I had not heard from her since our high school graduation, somewhere back in the dark ages. Janny King now lives in Australia and my signing that guest book got us back in touch again! Larke, too!

Spreading the Word

We also have our web site posted in big, bold letters on the rear window of the Land Rover. An 11X14" plastic map of Australia is taped there as well. The map details the 40,000 or so kilometers that we have driven since our trek began last September.

Needless to say, these two items attract considerable attention. Folks who see the map stop to talk to us about our travels and pretty soon we are all pointing to the map and comparing notes about the different places that we have seen. Inevitably we hear, "Oh, no! You haven't been there??!" We duly cringe and then try to explain why we didn't visit their favorite rock or something. Even though we have seen more of Australia than most Australians you'd think they could cut us a little slack. No way.

We also get email from folks who pass us on the road and write down our bigger than life web site address. They usually are dying to find out what in the world two middle-aged, grey haired women in big Aussie hats are doing, driving this tank-sized 4WD vehicle in the arid, macho Outback. We even got an email one day from one of Australia's Royal Flying Doctors who just wanted to wish us 'happy traveling!'

We have made some great friends this way, believe me.

The Anna Plains Cattle Station

A few weeks ago we visited the Anna Plains Station. This is a working cattle station that is not open to the public but we called and talked to the head stockman asking to take some photographs. In no time we found ourselves in the middle of real, honest to goodness Western Australia cowboy country as the guests of Joe and Roz Grace and the owners of Anna Plains.

We were given our own bunks and, like all good cowboys, Nicole and I chowed down with the guys at the crack of dawn, sipped mid-day tea with them, and ate with them again in the evening as everyone talked and laughed about the day. We had a wonderful time with these folks and we took away from there some fantastic images of life on a cattle station. Anna Plains, by the way, is no small operation. It encompasses nearly a million acres and a scant 26,000 head of cattle. The arid land doesn't support much more cattle than that so a track of that size is needed to compensate. A six million acre station is not unheard of.

With great pride I can report that not only did I get to photograph a real live Road Train as burly cattle were being loaded onto it directly from the pens, but I even got to sit inside its cab and photograph the world as it looks from that amazing perspective. A guy drove that big Road Train into Anna Plains, and then he single-handedly managed the whole cattle loading process. When he drove away with 150 head of grunting and gyrating cattle in the bowels of his rig, well, I had to tip my hat to him. What a life these cowboys have.

We left Anna Plains with another whole bunch of new friends. I left some digital images burned to a cd-rom with Joe and Roz and their kids to remember our brief time with them, with promises to send them some photographs at a later date.

Micko and Gang

After nearly seven months of traveling around Australia we have become quite accustomed to our daily diet of adventures. And there have been lots of them. Fun places, exciting photo ops, beautiful scenery, weird and wonderful marsupials, birds and reptiles, helicopter rides, riverboat rides, crocodile scares, sailing adventures, even diving and snorkeling adventures. Australia has been a warm and wonderful place for us.

Just when I thought it was all about to end along comes Micko and his gang. That's Micko O'Byrne from Perth and his wife, Beth, and his two sons Blaze and Liam. Micko, in what I now know to be characteristic form, sauntered up to our Landy at Cape Leveque and introduced himself. We had just arrived there dead tired from the long day's drive, and we were in the process of settling in for the night.

Micko took a long look at our getup, and at us, and he figured that we would probably be pretty interesting company. He and his family were camping close by so he suggested that we get together later for a drink, which I thought was a fine idea. Micko was sure that Beth would like to have a glass of wine with us after their rather strenuous month of horseback riding through the Kimberley.
Boy, was that an understatement! Beth needed resuscitation. All of them did.

They came and they stayed, Micko and Beth, and we talked and laughed long into the night about the hardships and adventures that they had endured in the name of treating themselves to how life used to be in the Kimberley. With eleven year old Blaze and fourteen year old Liam in tow, these adventuresome folks traveled on horseback in the open plains with two elderly Aboriginal guides, Sam and Fred, and twenty some pack and saddle horses. I will never read another Outback story without thinking of them.

After a few bottles of fine Australian wine we put together a group dinner and by then we were fast friends. You know how it is, you meet up with certain folks where everything just seems to click. We were all adventurers in our own right and it felt good to meet up with mates who were not afraid to test their limits or face the unknowns of life.

Upon leaving Cape Leveque we were confronted with some unanticipated Landy problems, yes, but all this was easier to endure with the invitation to stay with our new-found friends in Perth at the end of our trek. And here we are, the week-long house guests of Micko and family in Perth where we are having a wonderful time. Some of it is work time, as in packing and preparing to leave the country soon, but a lot of it is warm and nurturing interactive time with yet another grand bunch of Australians who have so generously invited us to share their lives.

We will also be meeting up again with the Grays of Sussex Inlet for a farewell dinner in Sydney on the eve of our departure for the States. The Grays befriended us during the first month of our travels in Queensland and we have been in contact with them ever since. They even joined us for a week on Kangaroo Island in May.

These are the just kinds of experiences that have made our visit to Australia so very rich. Are we lucky, or what??!