Do Giant Pineapples Count As Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Just a few more pictures:

Beer seems to play a vital role in this region ;) (road sign near Brisbane)

A man and his message

"Uh, Sir, your fuel station was just crushed by a giant pineapple, good thing it didnt hit the fuel-tanks on the left hand side, though" ;)

Dont say nobody warned you

It's still not dead, Jim!

I know, I know - in contrast to my "It's not dead, Jim"-post, this blog may seem pretty dead to some of you. During the last few weeks most image-links were broken as well, leading to a somewhat devastating complete picture of my once promising blog, I guess. Well folks, I have news for you: prepare for

>|>|> PHASE II <|<|<

- or to put it more dramatical, prepare for the mighty:

>->->-> Ralf's OzBlog Reloaded <-<-<-<

I finally turned into the good and faithful webmaster I used to be and moved the images to another server, fixing the broken links in the whole blog as well. On the new server we now have enough space for many more images from our travels, which I will upload soon.

In the meantime I will stand relaxed at this remarkable rock and greet you with a happy smile. Oh yes I will.

Happy New Year Everyone !!

yeah, I know, I'm late - awfully late, that is... though still early from a chinese point of view, as the chinese will celebrate New Year not before 2/9/2005. For the chinese, 2005 will be the year of the rooster, in honor of a certain australian fast-food chain. ..

Still there..? .. ok, I promise I will stop making fun of ancient asian cultures (and modern australian cuisine)! If you encounter a rooster live and up in person here are a few tips for getting along with him/her. Well known roosters include not only Katherine Hepburn and Eric Clapton but also Richard Wagner, Verdi and Britney Spears (well, thats quite a mixture :).

If you are an ox or a snake and feel attracted to a rooster you should either consult a psychiatrist or you found your perfect partner, as roosters get along very well with these two zodiacs. As the rabbit that I am, I should concentrate on pigs and goats but leave the roosters to themselves. Well, at least I share this fate with most of the 1975ish-people ;) Ugh, I just realized that I am going to be 30 this year....

Let me finish with a chinese proverb: "The man who waits for a roasted duck to fly into his mouth must wait a very, very long time." (I still believe there is *some* connection to them... ;)

Happy new year everyone!!


PS: Here are a few pictures from our new years eve 2002/2003 in Sydney:

Here comes the sun

These pictures are dedicated to the mighty duality of the sun and Uluru. I know, theres not much else on it to dedicate it to, but anyway ;)

It's not dead, Jim.

Hey all, sorry for being so lazy with the updates during the last days of our trip through Australia! Apart from having few time in Sydney, I must admit that I was simply not "in the mood" - so I spared you a few probably boring lines of text (not that there wouldn't have been anything to write about, but my writing tends to get weary, when I'm not "in the mood", I guess :).

This blog is anything but dead and I will keep posting short stories and pictures of our tour during the next weeks and months.

We are now back in Germany for almost two weeks and we are currently in the process of copying the images from our digital camera back to the PC - which is a bit tricky as the file-system of the portable harddisk we took with us had decided to go completely nuts at some point of our tour (this also led to the situation, that all of the hundreds of MP3's we had prepared for our trip to Australia simply vanished, leaving us alone with three cheap Frank Sinatra CD´s for most of the Outback ...oh boy... but that is another story).

All in all, we have roughly 2000 images from the digital camera and about 1000 images from the normal camera. Digital cameras are somewhat evil, as they allow you to make heaps of the most senseless pictures, making you develop a mentality of "look there [click] - and there that mountain [click] and that cloud over there looks funny [click]". Usually it was me, making the most senseless pictures of all. I remember spotting a cloud that looked perfectly like a platypus, a crocodile and a turtle dancing together in a circle (HA, when did you ever see a cloud like THAT? ;) But I must admit that I had problems identifying that impressive sight later on the photo again (one of the clouds might be a part of the shell of a turtle... ).
One might call it "fast-food-photography", but thats why we had two cameras - one for the "quick&dirty" images and one for the superb ones (I hope). Well, the term "quick&dirty" is a bit misleading, as we made lots of fabulous pictures with the digital camera as well. Here are a few for the start (descriptions will follow):

Remember my comment on the Ghan being a "long train"? See for yourself:

The following pictures are all from Kakadu National Park which is located next to Darwin. Kakadu (or "Gagadju" as the Aborigines spell it) is one of the most famous australian national parks and I will soon dedicate a whole article to it. What you (luckily) don't see on the pictures is, that it is relatively crowded with tourists, which is a bit nasty sometimes, especially when you experienced the emptiness of the Outback during the days before. The pictures were all made at dawn in the huge floodplains that Kakadu is famous for - mostly from a boat that floated around with hundreds of tourists for the "morning tour". These boats are - apart from a few walking tracks - the best way to experience the floodplains of Kakadu. Especially for the zillions of animals, that is - as it would be much more disturbing for the wildlife to have thousands of tourists shuffling around on their own, than watching a few boats scurry by each day. Wildlifewise there are heaps of wild animals, especially millions and millions of birds, but also wild horses, buffaloes, crocodiles, wallabies and many more. More about Kakadu during one of my next posts.

Wild horses in the mist at Kakadu

Reflections Part 1

Reflections Part 2

These rocks belong to the "Devils Marbles" - a very weird looking rock formation near Tennant Creek in the Outback. Most of the "Devils Marbles" rocks are absolutely round and I will post more pictures during the next days. This picture is not really typical for the Devils Marbles, but I liked the colors and shapes:

This is me before a billabong in Karumba, up at the Gulf of Carpentaria. I might add, that this was Ulrikes "dead animal day" (see my "Barramundi bite" post) so its good to see that a few animals were actually alive up there ;) In fact, there are about 10 kangaroos and lots of ducks with me on this picture.

Reflections Part 3 (Is that Australia in our rearviewmirror? You bet it is!)

Hmm, looks like nature decided to place the perfect waterfall right before our camera.

We were certainly not. The creature on the right hand side of the sign is a "cassowary" (see my "Cassowary encounter" post), though it looks a bit like the roadrunner, don't you think? Meep meep!

This is one of the last 1500 remaining cassowaries that you can see wild and free in this world. I hope the Australians are able to keep their numbers steady, but I am a bit in doubt.

This is an "Australian Magpie" - a very common bird at the eastcoast. We also called them "freeloaders", as they tend to be very interested in free food of all kinds. Check out their weird call here (*.au file).

This is the "Singing Ship" in the town of Emu Park at the eastcoast - a memorial to Cpt. James Cook who sailed past the area between 25 May and 27 May 1770. I wonder what they would have erected if he had actually set foot on the beach ;) I made the picture from an unusual angle to hide the sun behind the peak of the memorial. Seen from the side, the memorial has several pipes that make whistling sounds when the wind from the sea blows through them (which is almost constantly the case). It sounds a bit like an Australian Magpie (see the link above).

Rain and Showers in Sydney

We took the plane from Alice Springs to Sydney today, which brought us from one world into a completely different one - weatherwise, that is. We had the bluest sky in Alice Springs when we took off and landed in the rain and shower hell of winterly (as a matter of fact it IS winter over here) Sydney. Though temperatures did not differ too much, as both cities are at around 20 degrees celsius (and it was damn cold in Alice in the evenings..down to 1 or 2 degrees celsius).

The flight was surprisingly rough and a bit strange, by the way. We flew with Qantas for the first time, which means that we even got lunch onboard (yuck!, you call THAT lunch, Qantas?) and generally had a better service in contrast to Virgin-Blue flights. (Virgin-Blue is the australian counterpart to RyanAir) There even were neat LCD Displays, that miraculously descended from the ceiling shortly after take-off, allowing us to watch a harmless but nice Hollywood movie called "Connie & Carla" about two women pretending to be men that pretend to be women (got that, everyone? :). After that, I curiously switched through the audio-channels and stayed with one for a short while. After some minutes I listened more closely to the text of the song that had just begun and was a bit astonished to hear the singer sing these words: (imagine yourself looking out of a plane window at the rain, cloud and storm that covered Sydney almost totally at that time)

Sky pilot, sky pilot, how high can you fly
you'll never never never reach the sky.
[...]
soon there'll be blood and many will die
mother and fathers back home they will cry.
[...]

I thought to myself "wow , splendid choice for an onboard radio programme on a domestic flight" :) (I just learned that it is an anti-war song by "The Animals" from the late 60s)

Well, back to the interesting things: we spent the last seven days in the centre of Australia, after we reached Alice Springs with the Ghan (have a look at my last post for more info on that). We stayed in a fantastic backpacker hotel in Alice Springs for one night, picked up our campervan and started off to Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock). Surprisingly, our campervan was upgraded to the next bigger version free of charge, as the rental company was obviously short on the smaller models. It was also a very new model and looked like the deluxe version, so it was a very comfortable way of travelling for us.

Most people tend to think, that the town of Alice Springs is almost next to Uluru. This is almost true, if you consider 450km a "short distance". Its a pleasant drive however and the Outback around Alice was much different from the picture I had built up in my imagination. My imagination said, it should be red and flat. In fact, it was covered with absolutely green grass (spinifex, mostly) with yellow and blue-ish flowers in between. It was also much more rugged with lots of mountains, rocky ranges and several (also plant-covered) dunes. Maybe its just like this in winter, but it was a great sight, to say the least.

Our first sight of Uluru turned in fact out not to be Uluru, but Mount Conner, a strange looking mountain that rises abruptly into the sky before a huge plain. It is absolutely flat on top and I believe thousands of travellers have shouted "There, Uluru!!!" (pointing at Mt. Conner), while being on their way to Uluru.

[Intermission: its late in the evening and I will continue this post tomorrow!]

Have an awesome day!

Back in Katherine

We are currently on our way to Alice Springs with the Ghan - one of the great old railways in Australia - and we have a three hour stop-over in Katherine. As we already saw the town of Katherine before and there was not much to do except for browsing the windows of shops, we decided to spent some time in an internet cafe again.
The Ghan, by the way, has not always been such a glorious railway. In fact, the final connection from Alice Springs to Darwin was just recently finished, about 100 years behind schedule (for one century it was only possible to travel from Adelaide to Alice Springs - half way of the total planned route). Additionally, the original Ghan was built partly onto a floodplain, so that the tracks were frequently washed away by the floods. Apparently this was not a good base for a regular train service, so the tracks had to be built elsewhere in the seventies again. In the years before, it was not uncommon that train passengers had to be supplied with food and water by parachute drops, as the train was often stranded virtually nowhere in the vast plains of the outback. And even if the tracks remained in place, the service was not too fast, as the Ghan once arrived ,10 days late in Alice Springs. The last of the old Ghan locomotives was finally put out of order in the late seventies, after it collided with a cow. ;)
Well, as far as Katherine, the tracks were in place and we did not hit any cows or other animals, but the pace of the train is a bit slow, as it travels at an average speed of 80km/h. On the other hand it is LONG. It consists of 42 wagons, each about 30m long, which brings the total length to way over 1km. The first sight of it is really impressive.

Here is a picture of the Ghan from some internet source: