Sounds of Starlight

25 May
Potts Point, Sydney
Cloudy am, Sunny pm
4530 steps today
(4420 steps on 18 May)
(5250 steps on 19 May)
(5690 steps on 20 May)

We began today out at MacQuarie Point in Sydney Harbor, where the owner of the hotel we stay at here in Sydney arranged for a group photo that will hang on the wall in his lobby. My senior colleague purchased a few copies of the photo for the college. The owner, a native of Egypt but an Australian citizen for over 50 years, then took my two colleagues and I on a tour of his Sydney. We saw many of the bays and side streets of the east side: Rose Bay, Edgecliff, Watson's Bay, the Gap, Bondi Beach, and others. We had midmorning coffee and tea at the Bogey Hole cafe nearby one of the southernmost beaches before Botany Bay. He then took us thorugh the city to the southern part, where he treated us to lunch in an Italian neighborhood. Very picturesque, and a reminder that Australia is a nation of immigrants, much as we are.

On 19 May, we changed locations from Cairns to Alice Springs, for the outback portion of our course. I look forward to this; our trek through Watarrka (whitefellas call it "Kings Canyon") is one of my favorite times on the tour. But that's a few days away. Our flight from Cairns to the Alice was uneventful -- if you read the journal last year, you know that we were about ten hour late on this flight, owing to mechanical problems -- but nothing like that this year.

We checked in to Toddy's, a somewhat older hostel that continues to deliver good service. Much to my delight, our man Steve still works there. Steve is a big burly fellow with a long red beard and a ponytail -- you'd call him an old hippie if you saw him in the States, but no one falls into that category in the Alice. They're all characters, as near as I can tell. I like Steve. He's smart and will engage you in a conversation on almost any topic. We're both fans of the writer Jeffrey Deaver, so I brought him the latest paperback, The Garden of Beasts -- I think I talked about this book already.

We spent the evening of the 19th at a didgeridoo concert by Andrew Langford, called Sounds of Starlight. You can visit his website at http://www.soundsofstarlight.com.au. He plays with a percussionist and a keyboardist, and the trio make evocative and fun music. They also get the audience involved, playing didgeridoos and keeping time with Aboriginal instruments. I had been a little nervous about this, as it had been my idea to include it and I was concerned that the students would be bored by it. But they were enthused, and I think many bought their didgeridoos later from Mr. Langford.

You perhaps do not know what a didgeridoo is. It's a long wooden tube, hollowed out by termites, that produces the classic droning sound that evokes a vision of Australia whenever you hear it. You play it by making a Bronx cheer ("razzberries") into one end of it, though there are many additional things you can do to produce a sound from it. Andrew Langford is one master of the didgeridoo, David Hudson is another, but there are many more.

We spent the next day, the 20th, on a tour of Alice Springs and some of its important historical spots. We bagan the day at Alice Springs Desert Park. It's a good way to get an introduction to the types of land we would be visiting over the next few days on our camping trip. We only had two hours there, so most of the students went to the desert bird show. It's quite an event, involving wedgetail eagles, kites and desert kestrals and barn owls, displaying their natural behavior on free flight. They're very well-trained. I had seen it last year, so I spent my time visting the kangaroos and emus, the nocturnal house, and attending a show on bush tucker: specifically, witchety grubs (eaten live), honey ants (you eat their hind parts while they're alive) and desert 'coconuts' (a moth larva trapped inside a tree gall). Great gross-out food for teh tourists; sometimes I think the Aborigines just make all this up to see if they can get some tourist to eat something gross -- I'm just kidding of course. In fact, as you will see later on, I have actually learned a thing or two worth knowing about our blackfella brother down here. but more on that later.

After the Desert Park, we went to the Royal Flying Doctors Service. This was started early in the 20th century by one John Flynn, a circuit rider minister who saw the heartbreak of floks when they could not get good medical care in the remote regions of the Outback, and put together teams of aviators and electrical engineers to develop a flying medical service and a wireless system to get emergency messages out as needed. They are real heroes; it chokes me up a little even now to think of this wonderful and dedicated group of doctors, nurses, and pilots who serve the citizens of Australia who live far away from the rest of us. There's a tv series down here about them called Flying Doctors; I'll see if I can find a link to somne info about it.

After the Flying Doctors, we went to the School of the Air, a similar service that serves the educational needs of children who live on remote cattle and sheep stations and Aboriginal villages. Our students once again put the Australian tourists to shame by making significant book donations to the School after the tour of their operations.

We ended our day by visiting the original telegraph station that gave Alice Springs it name. The man who founded the station was one Charles Todd -- many things here are named after him -- he neede a location for a telegraph station that was near a gap in the McDonnell range, that was within 200 kilometres of the nearest station to the north, and was near a source of water. He called the water he found Alice Springs, believing it was a spring -- it was a low spot in a nearby riverbed, which doon dried up. But the name stuck; the dry river eventually was called the Todd River, and Alice Springs was born.

I should explain two things about Outback rivers. You can think of them as 'upside down', in that the water is underneath the sand and rock, not on top. The Todd River is usually dry, though my senior colleague and I are among the few tourists who can say that we have seen water flowing in the Todd River -- you can read more about it in last year's journal. Of course, this year, there was none, our weather was beautiful throughout our stay in the Outback.

Tomorrow will be my last full day in Australia, and I plan on doing little more than some last-minute shopping and journal reading -- and of course telling you about our camping trip to the Outback.