Crossing the equator

It took us a while to realize we don't like Nepal. There, we said it. Yes, you meet fun travelers, the mountains are amazing, the locals dance very cute during the festival and it's fun to eat decent (never great) food for pennies. But that's pretty much it. We don't know why, but something just didn't click for us. Maybe in "our age" it's harder to ignore the disabled people lying in the street, the filth everywhere, the dirty water. The hate and frustration in the locals' eyes after and argument with a fat cop, the mud-covered babies. The toothless men our parents' age or the 13-year old kids carrying 30- and 40-kilo loads on their backs (and necks, and heads, in flip-flops) to get a few dollars to feed their families. Anyway, let's just say that contrary to other countries we've visited, including some very poor ones, this time it wasn't too hard to leave.

Festival! Everything is closed, but pretty

One local told us, in a moment of honesty, that we shouldn't believe anything good anyone tells us about Nepal. "The people here are always smiling, but everything is shit". It was a real downer hearing it from him - he's educated, talented, charismatic, has great English, he knows things could be different, but his future is uncertain.

Some people come back from Nepal filled with appreciation of the calm, communal and spiritual way of life of the often-smiling people that live here. We left in awe of the natural wonders here and of the amazing experience of being inside the mountains and at the foot of Everest, but we really wouldn't want to live in a place like this. Yes, we have trouble too, and there's something really fucked up about the capitalist way of life and the exhausting rat-race, but there's trouble and there's trouble. As a smart man (Avishay) one said (a month ago), "The third world is fucked up. Badly".

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After coming back from the trek we had a few days to relax in Pokhara, the local resort town and extreme sports center. It was rainy and foggy, so we mostly rested, ate, answered emails and went over our photos. One of the things we were looking forward to there was meeting up with Itamar and Shira*, who were also there. We arrived in town and tried to set up a meeting while sitting at a restaurant (we were hungry) and they came in all of a sudden! It was really fun. This meeting with them, along with roaming facebook, really made us miss home. Israel, Jerusalem, our families, our friends.

Anyway, in our last night in Nepal, we met Itamar and Shira again and they took us to "cookie walla" - a hole-in-the-wall serving fantastic desserts for $1.50 and shakshuka with salad and tea for $1.70, with a huge menu scribbled on the wall in Hebrew. It's a place so hidden that you can pass by it every day and not notice it's there, but it turns out it's a famous establishment among the Israelis in Kathmandu (that's how Shira and Itamar heard about it, through an Israeli who they went rafting with). We suddenly thought that maybe we should have been less snobbish and not shouldn't have tried to avoid the masses of Israelis in town. After all, there's no doubt the Israelis always find the best, cheapest and friendliest places, and it's not even close. Who knows how many places like "cookie walla" are hidden around? On the other hand, it's not that fun to hear the same conversations over and over, like "what's with all the power outages? They use the festival as an excuse for everything!" or "he tried to sell me the ___ for four dollars, but I got him down to one and a half. I'm no sucker".

Festival! Everything is colorful

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Two more little things from Nepal:

1) Linguistic tips - in the locals' English, "why not" is a suitable replacement for "yes", and "it's ok" can mean either "no, thank you" or "yes, please"; and if you know how to say "thanks" in the Sherpa language, don't go around saying it to people who aren't from the Sherpa tribe. They'll take offense.

2) A little word of warning to those of you considering what they want to do when they grow up - we met all sorts of people n Nepal, traveling for all sorts of reasons. Out of the people who just said "#*%$ it, I just can't take it anymore, I just have to quit and go away somewhere", a significant percentage (around 100%) worked in finance. It's not a very large

sample, but it's still something to think about. Just sayin'.

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On the way to Australia we stopped in Singapore. Only on the second time around did we notice how amazing the airport there really is. Forget that it's nice-looking and all - there's armchairs that give you foot massages! For free! And a cinema! For free! and a four-story slide! And a tower of Pisa made of plants!! And a butterfly garden!!!

We were considering staying to live at the airport indefinitely, but the signs warning it is healthy to use the massage machines for over 15 minutes straight broke the sense of utopia

A random, spontaneous moment or the result of a dramatic 20-minute pursuit? You'll never know

We landed right in Melbourne. Melbourne is a really cool city. There's not much we have to said beyond that, because we were very busy buying a car (our first car!), buying camping gear (more expensive than we thought!) and getting ready for our road trip (it's not fun going to beaches when it's raining!). We did get some good tips, like going to the pier at sunset because little penguins come there. We went, and there were penguins! And they were little! That *is* their scientific name, by the way, in case you were wondering.

We tried to place a normal penguin next to it for scale, but we couldn't find one

We tried to take a picture with the sea, but Melbourne photobombed us

Oh, and by the way, we might have stayed with the most amazing apartment in Melbourne. Located in one of the coolest neighborhoods in the city, a whole top floor of an (ex)warehouse, five bedroom, three living rooms, a bar, an indoor garden, two dining rooms, a cinema, and above all - awesome people. So thanks Noam for the connection, and thanks to Josh, Chev and the gang for being awesome hosts and for letting us borrow all that camping gear. We promise only some of it broke on the way.

Will any picture of Eli playing a game signify an embarrassing loss? So far we're at 2 of 2

A house on wheels - no need to pay rent!

And then we were on our way. We thought the first day of the roadtrip would be boring and mundane, because we decided to go to Adelaide through the highway and not the great ocean road, but within 30 minutes we felt we were in a different world. A world of small towns with one main street and a few hundred people, that are spread in all directions like they have all the space in the world (which they do). The towns, the gas stations (petrol stations in Australian), the tractors, the McDonaldses and even the roads themselves - straight and narrow, stretching to the horizon - look like they came straight from the midwest of the US. The only signs that we're on a completely different continent are the awareness that everyone drives on the left, the neverending eucalyptus trees, the sureallistically low-hanging clouds and the fact that the roadside is settled not only by sheep, but by a few kangaroos as well. Oh, and there are no rednecks here.

Speaking of kangaroos, they are ridiculous animals, in the best sense of the word. Forget the fact that they jump from place to place instead of walking or running like decent creatures. Have you ever seen how they move when they're bent over? They place their tiny paws on the ground and pull their overgrown feet forward, like monkeys. Fantastic stuff.

Hop away, strange creature

One of the most enjoyable things on a roadtrip is driving along and stopping or turning when an interesting-looking sign appears. The first time we tried this it didn't really work - we went to a museum that was closed and to a reconstructed gold-rush-ear town that was also closed - but on the way to Adelaide we followed a sign saying "historic train station" and we weren't disappointed.

There indeed was a historic train station there.

Can you spot the part of this that wouldn't pass these days, kids?

But more importantly, one of the locals saw our car coming and came out to show us around. The station opened in 1887 and stayed active for nearly 100 years, and now contains a collection of posters, kitchenware, toilets and other cool things from the 19th century. Apparently the station is on the border between the states of Victoria and Southern Australia, but there is still debate over which side of it is the border itself. The man taught us some Australian slang, even though we haven't heard any of his expressions since so he might have been messing with us. He also recommended we visit the next settlement, the border town Bordertown** and go see the white kangaroo enclosure there.

We weren't disappointed.

There indeed were white kangaroos there.

They are kangaroos that are white

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He had too many beers the night before so we didn't let him drive

When you head to the huge desert in the center of Australia ("the outback") you drive to different towns and tourist attractions, but like in any good road trip the real star is the highway itself. It's pretty fun for whoever's in the passenger's seat, but the one driving feels something much stronger - the magical connection between driver, car and road. And this is one special road. 3,020 kilometers of asphalt, much of it straight as a ruler, passing through the driest area of the driest continent on Earth***. When you drive time moves faster - you get addicted to looking at the horizon, following the striped white line visible for miles ahead, to the the infinite plain stretching in all directions, to the asphalt changing its color from black to grey to faded red, mirroring the desert all around it. And suddenly you see a huge eagle with a two-meter wingspan soar by. Or crows pecking a kangaroo carcass. Or a rusted and burnt upside-down car by the side of the road. Or a 54-meter truck ("road train") pulling three trailers. Or a regular train hauling more and more cars, taking up a kilometer or two. You get used to signs like "emergency phone - 107 km" or "service station - 253 km" or "Darwin - 1170 km".

Or you just open the windows and turn up the volume, and keep going straight, straight, straight.

The tip about these in Lonely Planet: give them a wide berth, they're much bigger than you

Don't ask us if we found four elephants standing on a turtle, we swore not to tell

A traffic jam in the outback

No words

That's it so far. You'll hear more about our Australian adventures in the next post. In the meantime, here's a video.

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* Shira and Itamar are good friends of ours from back home who just happenned to get married a week before us and just happenned to also go on a one-year, round-the-world honeymoon, incidentally to almost the same countries.

** Yes, a border town called "Bordertown". We've also been to places called "Eden", "Paradise", "World's End", "Bon Bon", "Doughboy Creek", "Townsville" and "Humpty Doo". The most amazing bit is the names the Aussies give to their mountains, though. Especially Mt. Surprise, Mt. Horrible, Mt. Direction, and our personal favourite - Mt. Unapproachable.

*** Yes, excluding Antarctica. Nitpickers.