Monday, November 13, 2006

Over the red center

Yay, the Activities Center of the Academia Sinica has wifi! I'll tell you more about Taipei tomorrow when I know more, and when today's oneiric dusk taxi ride from the airport and the charming walk through night markets and temples have sunk in a bit.

What I need to share with you is a priceless but unexpected perk of flying to Taipei from Melbourne. It's not just that I've learned that long-haul south-north flights aren't nearly as exhausing as east-west ones (can you believe this is my first such flight, after scores of flights east and west?). It's that I got to spend four and a half hours mesmerized as we flew over the "red center" of Australia: up over Broken Hill, east of Alice Spring, then over Katherine, past Kakadu and Darwin, over Melville Island and out into open waters. (It didn't hurt that I'm finally reading Patrick White's Voss, the classic novel of the white man's doomed struggle to conquer the land!) As discussed way back when, Australia's cities hug the coastlines, unsettled by their wild heartland. Facing the seas and distant continents, they have their back to their own. Much of the land we flew over is desert with scarcely any rivers and narry a bush or tree, and patterned in ways new to me -- long streaks, broad ripples, and occasional epidemics of dried up waterholes. It all looked a lot like colors and patterns I've seen in Aboriginal painting. For most of the stretch there were no clouds (although it was raining in Melbourne as we left!). As we got near the north coast, though, clouds gathered and ... am I imagining things or did they make the shape of a giant crocodile over Kakadu National Park? When I get back to Australia, I've got to turn inward. Maybe I'll take the train across the country! In fact I've got my eye on a rail pass which will let me do Melbourne- Perth (on the Indian Ocean) in early December, before the summer holidays begin, and Melbourne- Alice Springs- Darwin in May, when the weather's more manageable, and I can face Uluru. And at some point, since it's a railpass, Adelaide- Sydney, over Broken Hill (Ned Kelly territory). Of course what one really should do, I suppose, is bushwalk, indeed go bush walkabout! (By the way, in case you didn't know, you can click on any of these pictures to see a larger, clearer image.)