Aussiefornia

We agreed when we began the journey on our October road trip across America that there were two types of trip: travel and vacation. Coming to Australia was a welcome vacation from three months of backpacking travel in Asia.

Aside from potable tap water and an only minimal language barrier (what is a rippa? or an arvo? or bloody oath?), the thing that struck us most about Australia was how much the east coast resembled California. You can think of eastern Australia as an inverted west coast, with Melbourne as a stand-in for San Francisco and Sydney playing the role of Los Angeles.

It's easy to see how so many of our friends end up working in Australia for a few years. The houses, the cities, the size and type of cars, the coffee shops, the restaurants, the attitude - so much of it mirrors the California vibe, or even takes it further. Many Silicon Valley startups pick Australia as their next market for these very similarities. The Aussie attitude, even if at times be a bit contrived, is always laid back and amused.

Our trip also helped us overcome some of the harmful, negative stereotypes that Australians are forced to endure on a regular basis. For starters, nobody there drinks Fosters. Aussies don't say "shrimps on the barbie," but do love "prawns on the bar." From what I could tell, nobody I met had a dingo eat their baby. But, "Aussie Aussie Aussie, oy oy oy" is a real thing that does happen.

Melbourne's corner cafe's - they're just like ours!

We started our vacation in Melbourne, where we were hosted by Sarah's parents and our friend Mike Guertin, who took us into the city and down the Great Ocean Road. The area Mike lives in, Fitzroy, could easily be mistaken for The Mission in San Francisco. Hipsters, tattoo parlors, themed pubs, artisinal food, and coffee shops stretch as far as the eye can see. A free trolley shuttles you to any part of the city you need to visit. And, like SF, Melbourne (pronounced Melbin) goes through four seasons in a day. Anyone working in the city needs an umbrella, jacket, and lightweight summer shirt on them any day of the year.

In characteristic Mike fashion of always giving it 110%, we were presented with a comprehensive Great Ocean Road itinerary (below.) Feel free to copy from him if you choose to check it out. He also showed us how valuable it is to have a friend with a camera (who can actually take good photos...)

The Anglesea Golf Club is infested with kangaroos.

It's all cool until you hit one with a ball.

Teddy's Lookout.

There is just no limit to how many awkward bro photos one can take.

Note that Mike scored center spot for 3 / 4 bro hug photos.

(p/c for most of these to Mike Guertin)

• 1. Anglesea Golf Club
  • Pay $10 per person to go on a Kangaroo tour on a golf cart
    • **probably about a 30-minute stop (20-minute tour)
  • About 10 minutes inland from the Great Ocean Road
• 2. Great Ocean Road Memorial Arch
  • Pull over and take a picture of the iconic highway sign
    • **a 5-minute stop
• 3. City of Lorne
  • Stop in the city of Lorne, a really cute town
  • Park your car and walk through the town
  • Bottle of Milk---- good burger place; they also have 'breakfast burgers' (called the Cold Shower) in case you're in the mood for something more breakfasty
    • **could be a 40-minute stop on the short end and a 2-hour stop on the long end
• 4. Erskine Falls
  • Nice 100-foot waterfall
  • Park your car and hike down (200+ steps) to the lower falls lookout
  • You can hike down further to where the other people probably will be, so that you end up being closer to the waterfall
    • **probably about a 35-minute stop

Erskine Falls, along the Great Ocean Road.

Koalas are actually fairly uninteresting and lazy animals.

We abandoned these koalas to watch the Super Bowl on Mike's laptop.

• 5. Teddy's Lookout
  • A nice lookout point with a good view
    • **probably about a 10-minute stop
• 6. Kennett River
  • Park your car near the Koala Kafe
  • Walk down the gravel, tree-lined road to look up in the trees for koalas
    • **probably about a 15-minute stop
• 7. Twelve Apostles
  • Park in the main car park area (you can't miss it)
  • Walk out as far as you can so that you can have more lookout points for the Twelve Apostles
    • **Probably a 1-hour stop

Mike's photos somehow made this view look much sunnier than mine.

London Bridge (collapsed a few years ago, leaving some tourists stranded.)

Probably deep in thought, ruminating on life's great questions.

• 8. Loch Ard Gorge
  • Hop back in your car and it's about a 3-minute drive from the Twelve Apostles
  • Park your car; walk down onto the beach
    • **a 20-minute stop
• 9. London Bridge
  • Hop back in your car and it's about a 15-minute drive from Loch Ard Gorge
    • **a 10-minute stop
• Head home
  • If you need to fill up with petrol / gas, the city of Colac is a somewhat big town that will have a few stations

The Mike Guertin Tour of Sydney's Botanic Gardens.

With the Hoffmans at the Botanic Gardens.

Somehow this seemed like a good idea at the time.

Catching Rüfüs du Sol in their motherland.

From Melbourne we flew to Sydney, where Sarah's parents generously hosted us for a week in an unbelievable beachfront house, followed by a weekend with our friends Calvin Johnson, Jared Levitt, and Wayne Curry, who cooked a four-course meal for us at their home in Manly Beach (and let us polish off 16 bottles of wine over a 5-hour dinner.) Calvin also let Dan and I join his crossfit gym for the week, an experience made all the more painful by activities such as finishing 16 bottles of wine.

While in Sydney, we got to experience the city break its own heat record for February - the height of summer - at 43°C, or for Americans, 109°F. Even the beaches were empty. It was hot.

As comfortable as it is, Australia does not fit well within the backpacker budget, which is why we were so grateful to be hosted at most of our stops along the way. Whereas hostels would run on average $5 to $10 a night in Asia, in Australia we'd find ourselves paying $30 a night for a dorm room (it doesn't help that they make drinks prohibitively expensive either.)

Hiking the Spit to Calvin's house at Manly Beach.

The deck view from our house in Manly, courtesy of the Hoffmans.

Views back onto Sydney from the Manly Beach hike.

Following Manly, we hit our last stop in Sydney, the famous Bondi Beach. The two beach towns share a lot, but the people make them easy to tell apart. The people in Manly tended to be more interesting and multi-dimensional; the people in Bondi were essentially tall, tan Greek statues - a little more challenging to hold a conversation with. The surfing was better in Bondi. Maybe these things are related.

Our last big flight took us up to Gold Coast, in Queensland, and Byron Bay. When we let the Bondi hostel staff know we were headed for Surfer's Paradise, in Gold Coast, they laughed and told us to get ready to party with young people. I asked how young. They laughed again. If ever God decided he (she?) needed a city to be entirely staffed by club promoters (and, in all likelihood, coke dealers), it would probably look like Gold Coast. If you are not an 18-year old recent high-school grad reveling in your newly legal drinking, don't visit. In fact, even if you are an 18-year old recent high-school grad, it's still probably worth skipping. Maybe the biggest irony was that Surfer's Paradise had no waves. The one benefit for us was finding a summer-camp type hostel, which had bodyboards, volleyball, basketball, and tennis every day.

Byron Bay, conversely, is paradise found. This small hippy town on the coast is an actual surfer's paradise. Pristine beaches run up to a lighthouse on a big cliff - Australia's easternmost point - overlooking the expanse of the Pacific. It was only the blue bottle jellyfish, which we somehow managed to run into every single day we were there, that somehow kept us grounded in reality. The town seems to be exclusively staffed by tanned Scandinavians, eager for jobs to the extent that, when we checked out of our apartment for the weekend, the cleaning ladies were Swedish.

Our intrepid heroes continue their search for the perfect wave.

Note Jared's perfectly coiffed hair on the left.

A well-deserved beach grill session with Chef Niko. (p/c Hetta Carthew)

Yet Australia is not all perfect. Under its chilled-out, beachy veneer, we would occasionally catch glimpses of a different narrative. Drew, a friend of Cambodian descent we met in Siem Reap, grew up in Gold Coast and is studying to be a doctor, yet would prefer to work anywhere outside of Australia so that he can avoid the endemic racism he finds in the Aussie medical profession. Mika, a west-coast Aussie of half aboriginal descent, recalled her awkwardness at finding herself in dinner conversations that would turn unabashedly racist towards "abo's" (akin to the n word in America), the speaker obviously not aware of her parentage. We made friends from a suburb of Sydney called Blacktown, so-named for its original occupants, which tried to change its name a few years ago but had the proposition voted down by locals who wanted the town to remember its legacy.

Some of our American friends, who had been working in Oz for a few years, were quietly distraught that under the good-natured vibes, they couldn't find much academic or global passions in their peers. Maybe being born in a far-removed postcard-perfect beach city tends to diminish the kind of intellectual curiosity you'd find in cities with a legacy like New York or Hong Kong or DC or London.

Still, we loved our three weeks making our way up the coast. When we flew from Brisbane up to to Darwin, our stopover on the way to Indonesia, we were already feeling nostalgic. If Australia was the easiest chapter in our trip (no hospital visits, no food poisoning, no theft, and only moderate hangovers), it was good preparation for one of the most fun and maybe second-easiest: Bali.

Nik / 3.10.17