Australia I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

Posted on October 31, 2012 by lisafindley

(We interrupt your regularly scheduled Where in the World Wednesday for a truly scary Halloween post. Fair warning, this post contains a couple photos you don’t want to see while you’re eating, and some graphic descriptions of my gruesome illness.)

Australia is trying to kill me. Not with the expected methods–shark attacks, spider bites, bloodthirsty dingoes, or calculating crocodiles–but with something far more bizarre and at the same time mundane. I’m stuck in Australia with a bad case of shingles.

SHINGLES. Like you get when you’re 80. I’ve had mysterious ailments all week, and finally on Monday I saw a doctor who said, “Oh yes, that’s a bad case of shingles you have in your eye.” IN MY EYE. And all around it. Y’all, I do not even need to dress up for Halloween this year. I’m going totally natural. Naturally gross, that is.

Scary monster

I hope this photo conveys to you just how nasty the left side of my face is right now. Lesions from my forehead to my eyebrow, in the little crook of the eye where you get eye gunk at night, and all down my nose. A sprinkling on my cheeks. And then a bright red eye peering out between swollen eyelids. The most comfortable position is for me to have the eye closed, but that does not mean I am comfortable. I’m constantly leaking tears, which I have to be careful when dabbing so as not to disturb the lesions on my face. (LESIONS. Like a freakin’ leper over here.) Despite all the leaking, the eye isn’t lubricating much, so it’s dry and sometimes I feel the lower lid sticking to the eyeball. The eyeball itself is alternately itchy and sore, like part of it ripped, so even when my eye is closed I feel that. All this eye leaking means some of the liquid is going down the nasal passage, so I’m blowing my nose all the time too. All the bones in my face ache, and while the lesions aren’t too painful right now, the doctor assures me they will be. Oh, and I have a stabbing pain in a specific spot on my head, like someone sending an electric shock through my brain every 10 minutes or so. Shingles: they are not fun.

Seriously.

What is going on with me? If you had chicken pox when you were a kid, it’s possible you could get shingles later. If your immune system is compromised, the chicken pox virus might come out to play, and it takes the form of shingles. What happens is one nerve branch is affected (maybe more, on me it seems to be just this one), so all along that nerve branch you get lesions and pain, and in bad cases, the nerve damage can be permanent and sometimes you can even get scarring. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, the doctor thinks I got to him in time for the antiviral drugs to be effective, which should keep permanent nerve damage out of the picture, but you don’t know until it’s over. And since it’s a virus, it just hangs out in your body and comes back when conditions are right and it’s feeling malicious. As with other ailments, if you’ve had it once, you’re more susceptible to having it again. GOODY.

Well, how did I get here? By doing too much, too fast on this trip, is how. The last few weeks before I left were highly stressful (leaving a job; discovering bedbugs–yes, that’ll be another post; saying goodbye to everyone I know and love). I did relax in Hawaii, although as you’ve seen from the blog posts, we did pack a lot in as well. When I got to Australia, I thought I was pacing myself okay, but it might’ve been too much for my exhausted body to handle. Illness is rough enough without thinking that you probably brought some of it on yourself, and it’s all compounded by my annoyance that I couldn’t handle it. I thought after 29 years of inhabiting this body, I was a pretty good guess on what it could do. It’s frustrating to be told in gross, lesion-y terms that I was wrong.

Watego’s Beach, Byron Bay

Now, out of the whole country of Australia, this is the place to be stuck. I’m staying with relatives in Byron Bay, and they’ve generously offered me a room for as long as I need to heal. I’m in a home and not a hostel, I have my own room and bathroom, I share meals with the family, and when I’m feeling up to it, I can walk into town for people-watching and cheesecake-eating. I’m hugely grateful to them for putting me up, and for ferrying me to the doctor as well!

Also, there are a couple of these guys keeping me company

I should be clear that although going full throttle probably contributed to getting me in this state, I had a lot of fun doing it. I hope the Where in the World Wednesday posts and occasional Facebook updates convey just how beautiful Australia is, and how much I’ve enjoyed seeing it.

I’d hoped to be in Melbourne by this time, but that’s just not going to happen. It hurts to open my eye for too long, so I’m not sure how much writing I’ll be able to do, but I do plan to catch up somewhat. I’ll take it slow and easy, and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be able to carry on. These aren’t the adventures I was hoping to have on my trip, but such is the nature of travel: you truly never know what’s next.

The glamorous approach to protecting my hideous eye

Somber and Conflicted at Pearl Harbor

Posted on October 29, 2012 by lisafindley

Pearl Harbor is the most popular tourist attraction on Oahu, but I felt uneasy the whole time I was there. It’s a massive monument to a successful military strike, as told from the losing side in that strike. It’s a memorial for over 1,100 people who didn’t even have time to register that they were dying before they were gone. It’s a collection of solemn displays and audio clips that plot out exactly what happened on December 7, 1941. It’s a narrative of how the tide turned and the USS Missouri, one of the attacked ships, became the site of the official surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945.

The USS Missouri and USS Arizona Memorial

There’s a strange mix of lax security and overblown alert levels at the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. We had to check our bags and only carry in cameras and wallets, but then we breezed through the gates with hardly a glance from the security officer on duty. Tickets to see the USS Arizona Memorial are free, but you have to pick one up so that you can start the tour in a specific time block.

The political and military significance of Hawaii’s location was stressed again and again

First, you watch a video that attempts some historical context for the attack on Pearl Harbor, although it’s comically simplified and contradictory. For example, it mentioned the commercial interests the United States wanted to protect in various parts of Asia, and then condemned Japan for having similar interests. I mean, I know this isn’t an unbiased museum display or anything, but that did seem a bit odd. The website actually does a better job at telling the story, I think.

Half mast

The rest of the video drives home just how thorough the Japanese were in preparing and executing the strike, and how a bad bit of luck resulted in the Navy getting no warning. (The guy on radar was literally on his second day on the job, with minimal training, and they were expecting a block of B-17s that day anyway, so a large group of planes flying in didn’t alarm them as it should have.) The video then does a good job of emphasizing that the Arizona is now a graveyard and should be treated with respect and solemnity. It seems an odd thing to have to point out to people, but then once we got to the memorial, I saw a couple posing for smiling photographs in front of the wall inscribed with the names of the dead, so I guess it’s necessary.

We took a short boat ride over to the memorial, which was built on top of the sunken wreckage of the ship. It’s a white building that sinks in the middle, which the architect said was to show how well the US was doing before the war, how low it felt after the attack, and how it emerged victorious at the end. The bridge-shaped building has been placed at a 90 degree angle to the ship, so that when you look out one window you can see a gun turret on one of the decks, and the “tears of the Arizona” leaking from beneath it. The National Park Service has decided it would disturb the dead too much to clean up the oil, so the remaining 500,000 gallons will continue to leak into the ocean for the foreseeable future.

USS Arizona gun turret

The tears of the Arizona

I liked the monument for its simplicity and focus. You can gaze at the Missouri across the harbor. You can look into a small hole in the floor of the memorial that shows flower petals floating in the water above the wreck. You can meditate on the flag flying at half mast. You can read the names of the dead on the wall of the shrine at the far end of the memorial. You can read the few plaques dotted about and listen to the audio tour, which features first-person accounts of being on the ship that day. That’s it. There is nothing else to do here, no gift shop to visit, no adjoining display to wander off to, not even any bathrooms to go to. When you are at the Arizona memorial, you are there to reflect on the lives lost on the day of infamy and in the war that followed.

Back at the museum, we listened to an audio tour narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis (her father was a WWII vet before he was a Hollywood star) and walked through an exhibit that got very detailed about battleships and 1940s military technology. Outside the building, there’s a path along the shoreline with quotes from people who survived the attack, and from people commending the valor of those who died.

The most heartbreaking plaque on the Walk of Remembrance

I do not mean to diminish the importance of the deaths of those who lost their lives in the attack, but I do not understand how it was a matter of valor for those who died almost instantaneously. Surely we should be commending the brave men who survived the initial bombing and fought back, and the civilians who rushed to the hospital to help the wounded? It seems to cheapen the whole idea of valor to apply it to people who were unfortunate enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if that place was a military ship.

I also wondered what it was like for the Japanese tourists who were there, quietly walking along the same path as me and hearing the same audio about the vicious Japanese attack and seeing the same signs about defeating the Japanese. War tourism is a strange thing.

I feel strange in places that walk a fine line between memorializing the dead and celebrating the war that killed them, but overall, I’m glad I went to a site that looms so large in American history.

Where in the World Wednesday

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On the ferry to Magnetic Island, Australia, October 8, 2012

Big Times on the Big Island, Part 3

Posted on October 22, 2012 by lisafindley

I might eventually write a piece on the many terrifying obstacles to smooth driving the Big Island presents, but I’m still too traumatized to attempt it. Suffice it to say I was relieved every time we passed something we wanted to photograph, because it was a chance to pull over and release my death grip on the steering wheel. Of course, there were a million such photo opportunities, because the Big Island is 4,028 square miles of visual perfection.

I mean, really

We were reluctant to leave Puna; the house was so lovely, and we hadn’t been to the hippie spa yet, or gone to one of the Wednesday night beach parties, or ventured onto the nude beach nearby. But we packed up on Sunday and drove through the drizzle to the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Factory. The factory is set three miles off the main road, and you drive through groves of nut trees dotted with Burma Shave-style signs to get there. After careful deliberation, we each chose a can of nuts to buy, and while the white chocolate covered nuts were good, the butter candy ones were deemed best after an extensive taste test later that evening. The factory building has a wall of windows on one side of it, so you can walk along and look inside as the nuts get sorted by machine and by hand, and then salted, and then packed up. We saw Mauna Loa nuts sold everywhere we went in Hawaii, so it was neat to see where they all start out.

On the factory floor

We drove through Hilo and up the coast, and this part of the drive was tough not so much for the road conditions as for the stunning valley views we passed every few minutes. I had to will myself to look at the road and not the deep crevasses of green spilling into the blue sea below. I put Heather on photo duty, and she made a valiant effort to get in-focus pictures while going 50 miles per hour.

Driving to Waimea

After a while, we passed into another ecosystem, a grassy area called Hamakua that’s been used for farming for centuries. We were passing into the region of the kings of Hawaii. Somehow, the hills got even bigger, and we passed fields of cows and horses as we climbed them. We eventually reached the Waipio lookout. I’d thought about hiking down into the valley, but it was even steeper than I’d expected, and there were several signs asking visitors to consider not descending, as this was a sacred area. So instead I stared out into the sliver of valley visible from the lookout, and saw why you’d establish this as the seat of your kingdom.

Waipio

We made a stop at a local souvenir shop, where Heather attempted to buy one of everything (lucky for her friends back home!), and then we drove on into yet another ecosystem. It didn’t take very long for us to pass out of lush farmland and waterfall central into a desert. I actually shook my head in amazement when I realized we were looking at something very similar to the American Southwest, mere minutes after seeing the Heartland.

I was driving across a burning desert…

Kona coffee comes from this side of the island, although I’m not sure where in this dry place they grow it. We didn’t see evidence of coffee plantations, but we saw many signs of other people who’d driven through here before us. The ground was all a dark gray, and there were lots of little white rocks scattered around. People gathered them up and spelled out their names, big hearts, little messages to photograph and send back home. We’re so fond of leaving our mark.

Kailua Kona is a fun little beach town, and as we went down the main drag, we checked out the shops and restaurants to see where we might want to visit the next day. Monday morning, we went snorkeling, which you can read about here. It was so fun, and mesmerizing; it’s easy to spend hours at it without realizing how much time has passed.

That evening we strolled across the street to Huggo’s on the Rocks, a beachfront bar, and had cocktails and dinner. A couple guys played classic rock covers on acoustic guitars as the sun set, and Heather and I toasted each other with our pina coladas and mai tais. Later on, some girls from a nearby dance school did a little hula show, much to our delight.

Big night out on the Big Island

On Tuesday, we took it easy after snorkeling, so that we’d be all ready for our big night out. We’d ponied up the money for a luau, and at 4:30pm we lined up on the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel lawn with about a hundred other smiling tourists. We bought leis—a flower one for me and a kona nut for Heather—and then wandered to the pre-dinner area. Heather got some tough tattoos, and I took a hula lesson. Everyone was laughing and scooping up more mai tais from the punch bowl, so it was a relaxed and happy group that sat down to dinner. Heather immediately made friends with the whole table, of course, so that was fun. We chatted with our neighbors as we ate poi, ono (which was ‘ono!), Hawaiian sweet potatoes, pork from the imu, and fruit.

The royal court arrives

The entertainment featured the same 10 or so dancers going through various Polynesian styles of dance, while a live band played to the side. We had good seats right in the center, so we could fully appreciate the athletic jumping, shaking, stomping, and twirling of dances from Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand. Apparently it’s normal to end with a fire dance. Since I’ve never been to a luau before, I don’t know what’s normal, but the fire dance was pretty great, and what a way to finish. Heather and I went back to the condo fully satisfied with our immersion in tourist country.

The next morning we drove back across the island to Hilo and caught a plane to Honolulu, for the last part of our vacation together. Tune in soon to read about Pearl Harbor and island living!

Where in the World Wednesday

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It’s the triumphant return of Where in the World Wednesday! Since blogging in real time isn’t going as I expected (as in, I haven’t even finished the first week of Hawaii and here I am six weeks into the trip), I thought it’d be good to set up some weekly photos to keep you interested.

Langford Sand Bar sunset, Whitsunday Islands, Australia, October 12, 2012

Fun in New Cultures: Australia

Posted on October 15, 2012 by lisafindley

One of the benefits of travel is, of course, encountering new people and learning about their cultures. This can be a profound experience, but just as often it’s funny, as different ideas of ‘normal’ meet. Here are a few funny/just different things I’ve seen in Australia:

The Freshmaker of Australia

Orange air spray in the toilet: Almost every toilet I’ve been to in Australia has a little spray can of orange-scented air freshener. Several of the toilets I’ve been to haven’t been ventilated at all, so it makes sense that you’d want to put something other than poop fumes in the air in that enclosed space. But several toilets have open windows and seem to be ventilated fine, so why the can? Does poop have to have an orange flair to it here? Whatever the reason, there’s a can in every can.

Breakfast in aisle 1

Eggs in the aisles: I haven’t seen this in every grocery store I’ve been to here, but in several, the eggs aren’t refrigerated at all. This just about blew my mind, y’all. Eggs in the regular aisles?! You might as well leave meat out of a cooler! I’m pretty sure eggs left out of a fridge hatch overnight and next thing you know, you’ll have baby chicks chirping around the cookies.

He needs a little laser gun in his hand.

Lasers in the streetlights: At busy intersections, there are crosswalk “walk/don’t walk” lights, just like in the States. They have a similar red man standing and green man walking. But Australian crosswalk lights are better fitted out for people with visual impairments. When the crosswalk is red, there’s a steady “blip blip blip” sound, and then, wonderfully, when it changes to green, there’s a shooting lasers sound. It’s like, “pew pew pew” and you’re walking across the street like a sci-fi hero. I love it.

Images mine except for the last one.

Big Times on the Big Island, Part 2

Posted on October 10, 2012 by lisafindley

Before arriving at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, I thought the park’s name was misspelled. Surely they meant volcano, singular? But as we learned in Part 1, the island of Hawaii is made up of five volcanoes—one is extinct, one is dormant, and three are active. “Active” apparently means it’s erupted in the last 200 years, which seems like a long time to sit around doing nothing while still getting credit for being active, but who I am I to quibble logic with a force of nature.

There are so many photos like this from our childhood. This one’s for you, Dad!

One of the volcanoes is serious about its active status, though. Kilauea has erupted in the last 20 years (taking out most of the town of Kalapana), and now a part of it is constantly erupting, spewing smoke into the air in the Halemaʻumaʻu crater. You can take a helicopter ride to see lava flowing, or you can do a night walk to try and spot lava as it enters the ocean. These were both expensive options, and heavily dependent on the mood of the weather, so Heather and I skipped them. Instead, we paid our $10 national park entrance fee and got more than our money’s worth with a full day of natural wonders.

Volcano!

We had good luck from the start—a ranger-led tour started just 15 minutes after we arrived at the visitor center. So we joined up and learned about various plants on the walk out to Waldron Ledge. We were struck by the alarming statistic that 90% of the island’s flora and fauna is not indigenous, and we learned about the efforts to contain the spread of some of the more pernicious plants. Our guide pointed out two plants that look very similar; one is an invasive, and one is a rare native. This is why visitors are not encouraged to weed out any invasives on their own time. More likely than not, they’d pick out the wrong plant. The park does sponsor days where volunteers weed out invasives under the watchful eye of a park ranger, though, so you can contribute to the effort. (This is what my friend Matthew does in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula—invasives are found all over the world.)

A koa tree – not an invasive

Lehua blossom on the ohia tree; this has a tragic love story myth behind it

The path out to Waldron Ledge is actually the old road that used to circumnavigate the volcano. The park realized that the road was in a dangerous spot, and they built the current road, which takes a wider path. Sure enough, in 1983, the old road buckled in an eruption and much of it crumbled away into the giant mouth of the volcano. Now it’s overgrown with plants and part of it intersects with the path out to the lookout.

We didn’t quite get up to 25 MPH on our walking tour

Once we were there, we saw just how vast the volcano is. It goes on for miles, and at the other end is the a vent, huffing and puffing into the air while the crater around it sits silent and nearly barren. I say nearly because plants are unstoppable; they will grow anywhere. There are plants dotting the floor of the crater, pushing their way up through the volcanic rubble and stubbornly holding on in that alien landscape. Those plants impressed me almost as much as the crater they’re growing in, actually.

Vast, I tell you

Stubborn little plants

We drove over to the vent and gazed at it while munching on lunch. The Jaggar Museum there has a few good displays on the volcanoes, and also a seimograph that draws a shaky zig zag if you jump up and down near it. After lunch, we went for facials at the steam vents. These aren’t sulfuric vents, so there was no smell of rotten eggs, just warm water soaking our faces and fogging up our glasses.

Hot ‘n’ steamy

Next we went to the lava tube. It sounds like an amusement park ride, doesn’t it? “Shoot down the lava tube from 50 feet off the ground! You’ll be positively glowing from all the excitement!” It wasn’t quite like that, but it was pretty cool. A lava tube is formed by lava running down a hill, and part of it cooling into rock before the rest of it does, so that lava flows through the hardened lava rock. What’s left behind is a cave made up of lava, tunneling through the tropical plants.

A cave that isn’t a cave

After walking through the lava tube, we got back in the car and went off to see more evidence of what these volcanoes can do. We drove along the Chain of Craters Road, a phrase both literally descriptive and wonderfully poetic. I’m not sure exactly how many craters are found along this road, but we saw many. Most of them look like rock quarries that have been used up and abandoned—uniformly gray rock, a steep wall down to the bottom of a pit, empty of life and machinery. Soon enough, we were in sight of the ocean, and the views got more dramatic from there. We took hairpin turns down the side of the mountain, losing elevation rapidly, and ended up on an eerie plain of misshapen volcanic rock stretching out to sea.

These names!

There were several signs warning to slow down for nene, a rare native bird that inhabits the park.

The road was pretty scary to drive on.

At the end of the road, you hop out and you can walk farther down the road to see what Kalapana might have looked like, or go across the road and scramble down a few rocks to the cliff’s edge. Here, you can see where the rocks cut off abruptly into space, dropping down in a cliff to the ocean. Holei Sea Arch connects a little bridge to nowhere, and the surf crashes underneath it.

Toilet at the end of the world

Holei Sea Arch

After wending our way back up that mountain and through the chain of craters, we went to Volcano Village for a little rest. We treated ourselves to a milkshake and fries at the Lava Rock Café (haha, yes), and Heather caught glimpses of football games on the TV while I retraced our route on the national park map.

It was raining when we arrived back at the Jaggar Museum but we were prepared. I zipped up my raincoat and Heather donned her yellow poncho, and we waited for the sun to set. Lots of other people were there for the same thing, so we chatted with a couple from California and watched the smoke rising from the vent grow brighter as the sky grew darker.

At first, Heather wanted to know how much longer we needed to stay, and to be fair, it was cold and rainy. But after a while, she wasn’t asking that anymore, because she, like the rest of us, was mesmerized by the glow. This was one of my favorite parts of our time in Hawaii, watching the glow of an active volcano as it breathed smoke and fire into the night air.

Life goal!

Finally, we left the park about 10 hours after we’d first arrived, and headed back to our rental house, which was an hour and a half away. It was a scary drive, in the near total dark and at times torrential rain, but we made it back safely, and that night I slept with visions of secret caves and lava glowing in my head.

The East Coast Itinerary

Posted on October 8, 2012 by lisafindley

I haven’t made it too easy for those of you following along at home to know where I am any given week, oops. Here are some plans: For the next three weeks I’ll be traveling down the eastern coast of Australia by bus. It’s pretty tightly packed, and all the activities are outdoors, so cross your fingers I get better weather than the rain that’s been following me around since Alice Springs.

October 8-9: Magnetic Island
October 10-13: Airlie Beach and Whitsundays
October 14-15: Rainbow Beach
October 16-18: Fraser Island
October 19: Noosa
October 20-24: Byron Bay
October 25-31: Melbourne

Plans include sailing, sleeping on a boat, driving a 4WD on a sand dune, snorkeling, sunbathing, swimming, and generally frolicking on the Sunshine Coast. Exciting stuff!

Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world

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First Two Weeks in Australia, in Photos

Posted on October 1, 2012 by lisafindley

It’s been a little trickier than I’d thought it would be to find time to blog, not to mention to find cheap and reliable internet. But I’m working on it, never you fear, dearest fellow travelers. In the meantime, here are some things I’ve done in the past two weeks: