If your dad doesn't have a beard

Video!

Here's a facebook status update that was posted to Eli's profile after his parents flew back home, following two weeks of us all travelling together:

"I can't help but brag - my parents are awesome. Not only did they say they wanted to visit us in Australia, they actually did it! They drove with us from Sydney to Melbourne, took the ferry to Tasmania with us, drove on the left, climbed hills, were excited by koalas and Tasmanian devils, and were generally amazing. So Mom, Dad - thanks for coming. I love you, and I'm really lucky to have you."

They're somewhere in this photo

That's what we had to say about their visit. 

What did *they* have to say about their visit? First of all, they had a great time - they enjoyed the country, us, their friends in Sydney which they haven't seen since 1990. Secondly, they told us they liked what they saw in us - our dynamic, they way we travelled, everything. Besides that, they remembered one of the first trips they made in Israel. They were recent immigrants, and one weekend they packed up two little kids into the tiny Suzuki, took some food and a few friends, and drove all the way to Ovdat, in the south of Israel. They were immensely proud of themselves for going so far and felt really adventurous. They say if anyone told them that less than 20 years later they would be going to Tasmania, on the other side of the world, they wouldn't have believed them. For them, then, it was like going to the moon.

***

After a few fun days in Sydney, we went on the road - there is no other way to experience Australia. We left town two days before New Year's Eve. You know how they always show the fireworks in Sydney on the news, and say it's the first big city to celebrate the new year? Well, if you want to just sit or stand in the park with a view of the city skyline when these fireworks start, you have to line up in the morning. If you want to sit on an island in the harbour and watch the city center from afar, you have to book a few months in advance, and cough up around $1,000.

Sydney - more beautiful than Haifa!

yeah

Sydney photobombs us, like many cities before it

The line for the fireworks, 8:00 am, 16 hours before they start

By the time these people took their seats, we were far from town, somewhere on the way to Melbourne. We stopped for the night in a small town, and asked the motel owner whether there were fireworks at midnight. He said there's nothing in town, but the next town over has a celebration at 21:00. We went. It looked like the entire town, or maybe the whole district, were gathered around a single rugby oval (yeah, Aussie Rules Football, whatever), with hot dogs, beers and glow-in-the-dark bracelets. At nine o'clock sharp, the best fireworks we've ever seen started. Yes, even better that the ones on the night the man burns at Burning Man. The fireworks came out of the middle of the oval, and we were so close they were above us and around us more than in front of us. It wasn't just loud, colorful and full of light, it was also very aesthetically pleasing and surprising - just when you thought you've seen the climax of the show, you're surprised by a new kind of firework you haven't seen before. We tried to capture it with our cameras, but some things just can't be photographed or videotaped. And as much as it's an experience without any plot or substance, it's very communal. When a large group of humans stare upwards and their smiling faces all light up at the same time, it brings them closer. Maybe it has something to do with the fact we're all basically cavemen. We know that fireworks are nothing but chemical reactions with a timer, and we've invented much more advanced and sophisticated forms of entertainment, but deep down that's all we are. Cavemen. Give us colorful explosions, and we can't stop watching. To us, it's utter and complete magic.

We told you it doesn't come through in photos

Happy new year!

***

We've already told you Wally is a wonderful, strong car, but we guess he wasn't in the best condition when we bought him. Who can you trust nowadays, if you can't even trust used-car salesmen?! At some point between Sydney and Melbourne we started hearing strange noises every time we pressed the accelerator. Like with previous car problems, we went through the textbook five stages of grief. First there's denial: "What noises? I don't hear any noises"; then anger: "Stupid car! Can't go 15,000 kilometers without breaking down?!"; then negotiation: "Well, maybe it's just a small issue... please, Wally, if it's a small issue we'll let you drink all the oil you want!"; then another stage we can't quite remember; and in the end, acceptance - it's time to go to a mechanic. You know the "good news, bad news" thing? Well, our mechanic tried it when he told us there was a big hole in the muffler. "Well, it's not doing any further damage, and it can keep running like this. Oh, but there's a small chance the car will catch fire". Burn, M**********r, burn.

Well, maybe don't burn just yet

***

One of the things Eli's parents were most excited about seeing in Australia is all the unique animals that inhabit it, and with good reason - it's one of the coolest, most extraordinary things it has to offer. So one  day we went to see koalas. They are definitely very cute, although also quite dumb and lazy. Koalas are the only animal known to science whose brain has actually decreased in size during its evolution, and is now significantly smaller than its skull. Once they came up with the brilliant idea of living in trees, no one could eat them anymore. So who needs a big, developed brain? Most of their energy just goes toward dissolving the poisons in the eucalyptus leaves they eat, and that's why they need to sleep 20 hours a day. Let's put it this way - have you ever seen a stuffed doll of a koala? Well, if you want to know what a real koala looks like, imagine something like that, furry and cute, only it sits on a tree and doesn't move for hours on end*.

One pretty, one dumb

- "What'cha thinking?"
- "Mmmmfffff. Ffffrrrrr"

The lights are on, but nobody's home!

How did I get here?

Pictured: Tom Shadmi

Get down from there! All you do is sleep 20 hours a day, eat for another 4, and sometimes mate! Actually, that sounds like a pretty sweet gig

No shooting koalas from giant slingshots

***

Our next stop after Melbourne was Tasmania, a pretty big Island off the shore of Australia that was connected to it once, but it was so long ago there's a completely separate ecological (and anthropological) system. Speaking of separate human systems, you should read a little about the Aborigines. They came to Australia at least 40,000 years ago (and maybe 60,000), and their ancestors' remains are the oldest ever found outside of Africa. Theirs is the oldest continuous surviving culture on the planet. They had to come over land to Asia and then cross the ocean, but that requires advanced nautical know-how that no one probably had until tens of thousands of years later. And if the Aborigines ever had such knowledge, they seem to have lost or abandoned it altogether. In short, they achieved something singular and amazing, and to this day no one really knows how the hell they did it. 

Anyway, our oversea journey was much easier. When we were walking around in Sydney's harbour a week before going to Tasmania, Eli's dad got pumped up about the huge cruise ship moored there and said it's a type of trip he's never had the opportunity to have, and that it might be fun. And what turned out? That the "ferry" over to Tasmania was actually a huge cruise ship! Check.

Check.

Hobart, Tassie's capital, is the second city founded in Australia, some time before Melbourne, while the whole place was a penal colony for convicts. The island is named after the dutch explorer Abel Tasman who "discovered" it (i.e. was the first European to go there). In a surprising twist of fate, he tried to name it after a navy superior or lord or something, but history chose to remember him. Sucks to be Columbus.

Alex discovers Tasmania

One of the most special things about Tasmania are its unofficial mascots - the famous Tasmania devils. Apparently, most of the time they're really calm, lazy and friendly, but everything flips when there's food around (hey, just like [insert friend's name here]!). They're carrion eaters, and in captivity they're given huge chunks of wallaby (fur, bones and all) and they just go crazy. They live separately from one another, but eat together. What does "together" mean? Do they sit down around a table, fold a napkin around their collars and dine with a glass of nice wine? Do they share the hunk of meat, each taking bites in its turn? No, no. Their "together" is much more interesting. They aren't happy and don't start eating until they've completed a whole ceremony. This ceremony entails one of them taking the meat in its teeth and starting to run madly with it. The other then chases him, squealing and shrieking, rips the food from his mouth, and starts running the other way. They run in circles in complete frenzy, growling at each other, scratching and biting and bloodying one another, and generally behaving like devils. And then, at some point, they decide "OK, that's enough", and just sit down and eat together like two puppies.

We're sure there's a good metaphor here for something, but we're not sure for what.

Ha!

LOL!

OK, enough.

Even just watching them chew is quite a spectacle. They have the jaws of a 50-kilo pitbull even though they only weigh 8, and you can hear bones crunching when they take a bite. They're carrion eaters in the wild (too lazy to hunt) and the animal that used to provide them with most of their carcasses - the Tasmanian tiger - went extinct last century. This is an interesting story in itself. But now the devils themselves face quite a challenge, not due to humans but because of a terminal and highly infectious disease that has ravaged their numbers**. The surprising method for saving this unique creature - they're keeping a healthy population isolated on a separate peninsula in south Tasmania, and just waiting until the rest die off. When there aren't any more sick ones, they'll loose the healthy population to refill the land.

The devils are the most famous and publicized animals in Tassie, but there are many other interesting creatures there. From little 4-gram marsupials (the smallest mammals alive) that catch and eat scorpions twice their size, through the two only mammals that lay eggs (platypuses and echidnas) and to a weird frog-faced bird that sits around motionless and catches insects when they tickle her mustache. It's as if there's an experimental division of evolution here. Like someone said, "OK, screw it, just go crazy".

Wait, am I a platypus or an echidna?

Hmpff.

?

Hi. Hi. Hi hi hi.

***

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart is the best museum we've ever been in. It's based on the private collection of an eccentric billionaire, and it's a museum kind of like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in a movie - it's technically true, but if you walk in expecting anything like a standard experience, you're going to walk out very confused. The place is contained within a huge underground space, and it combines archeological exhibits ("old art") with drawings, statues, video-art and lots of freaky things. Like an exhibit molded from dead insects. Or a machine that eats food and produces poop a few hours later. Or flies that make jewellery. Some examples, starting off with the magical exhibit "Fans singing Madonna":

Yes, these are real insects

a roomful of life stories

These little flies build themselves cocoons out of mud, wood chips and small rocks. This is what happens when they are given gold flakes and precious stones instead.

Ta-da!

Exhibit: "Fat car".

***

After Eli's parents left we spent a few more days in Tasmania, most of them at a folk festival. Just like the American midwest of the 1950s is alive and kicking in the outback, the folk, blues and blue-grass scene of the 1950s is alive in Tassie. It's a remote and disconnected corner of a remote and disconnected country, and it contains special people and a village-like sense of community. When someone tells you they're from the east coast here, you can be sure they mean the east coast of Tasmania, and not Australia. Because for many of them, the rest of the world is a distant and vague entity that doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. Which didn't keep them from making great friends with musicians from all around the world, and hosting them like family. No, seriously, the musicians who came to town were hosted by local families. So cute!

At the entrance to the festival, we had our first age-30 crisis. We were asked whether we preferred to pitch a tent in the quiet or the loud zone. we looked each other square in the eye. We knew we were young, cool party people looking for action. What, do we want to go to bed early? Do we want to wake up in the morning and sit on the beach like old people? Don't we want drinking games with drunk teenagers?!

We lowered our gazes and asked for the quiet zone.

Yeaaaaaah!!!

Wooohooo!!1

In a surprising twist, we were apparently completely right. The loud area wasn't so due to teenage troublemakers, but a much louder nuisance - hordes of little kids.

Here are a few recommendations for good folk music from Tasmania (OK, not all of it is really from Tasmania. And come to think of it, it's not all folk either): There's Irish Joe, a poet who read aloud, among others, a moving piece about a judge who sentenced people to Tasmania, but if he only knew about the gold - under the ground, in the fields of wheat and in the sunlight - he would have gone himself; there are the Vegetable Sound System, a funky group with a lead singer/banjo player who looks a bit like Justin Timberlake all of whose songs are about permaculture (growing one's own veggies); there are the Stray Hens, who have a certain magic that doesn't really come through in a recording - the song from the previous clip is by one of them; and then there's Angus Webb, whose music accompanies the clip at the top of this post, who wasn't at the festival but absolutely hypnotized us playing on the street at the Sunday market in Hobart.

We also saw a few groups who don't even have albums, like a local women's choir who sing like angels, a bearded guy who came on the buskers' stage because he saw a guitar and couldn't resist (he sang "the lion sleeps tonight" with a bunch of kids from the audience), and a dude who nailed a death metal solo and continued to sing his original "If your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two mums". But the highlight, which told us everything we needed to know about the spirit of folk, was Two old guys with white beards (and one old lady without one) who performed songs with no names that they've heard from someone who's heard them from someone else, accompanied by a guitar and an accordion. They still sing with great fury about the great mining disaster of 1912. They're happy you liked their show, but no, they don't have an album. They're playing in Scottsdale next weekend, if you want to call by.

Officialness!

"In the jungle, the might jungle..."

Amazing.

The promise....

kept.

*** After two days on the Great Ocean Road (it was pretty great), we went to see an exhibit of music videos in Melbourne. It was amazing how much you can enjoy them when see them in the context of a museum, with frames of various shapes and good earphones. Here are some especially good ones, mostly of the non-famous type: best use of censorship, which is the most original video we've ever seen (slightly NSFW); best use of a karaoke dot, which is the funniest video we've seen on display; best short video; best story; best use of the internet.   

Get a prize if you can recognize all five videos!

*** When we got back to Melbourne the city was half-paralyzed by the Australian Open tennis tournament. Here are the ten things*** we learned from watching it live at the court: (1) You see less than at home, but the image is sharper. (2) Azarenka's grunts are ridiculous in real life too. (3) It's really fun to root for the underdog, especially if he's a local 17-year old and there's a crazy crowd that won't stop screaming. Especially if he gets injured and heroically returns. Even if he ends up losing in five sets. (4) Only in Melbourne can a tennis match be cancelled due to a heat wave, and two hours later another one cancelled due to rain. (5) On the other hand, only in Melbourne can you expect a neverending line of taxing waiting outside the arena complex at 2:00 am, with an orderly system of workers pointing you to the next one. (6) The whole rating system isn't very nice. How is the 86th-rated player in the world supposed to feel when she's up against Azarenka, or the 267th when he's up against Andy Murray? No one told Hapoel Tel Aviv *exactly* how much they sucked when they took to the pitch against Chelsea. What is it good for? And by the way, what is Murray supposed to do in this situation? Humiliate the guy? Only practice difficult shots? (7) What Andy Murray actually did was no less than astounding, and a real treat to see in person. He won the first two sets 6-1, then went down 1-5 in the third. And from that moment he hasn't lost a single ball. He took 23 rallies to win the match. That's almost an entire set! At some point there was a kind of murmur in the crowd, when everyone realized that that's it, he's not going to miss a single shot from now on. Magical. (8) The court is really small and quiet. If someone from the last row yells something to the players - they can hear him! It makes for a really personal connection with the athletes, and it's pretty cool. (9) There are six(!) boys/girls that fetch balls and towels, and lots of line refs. How many? Freaking nine. Three sitting and the rest squatting. What act of refereeing heroism must you commit in order to be promoted to a seating position? We'll never know.

Just an entrance to a shopping center and a hotel in Melbourne

Watching "the tennis" on lawn chairs in Federation Square. May locals were against building such a huge and extravagant place in the middle of the city, but it's been a huge success - every time there's a sporting event, even in the middle of the night, it's full of people.

Centre Court!

Aussie Aussie Aussie!

*** We couldn't ask for a better end to the Aussie leg of our journey that the amazing hosting we recieved at Josh and the gang's, and then at Pierre's. We had it all - an on-point recommendation to get in the ocean even if we have five minutes; a late-night argument about Judaism and politics; a fun night out at a bar with a rooftop view of the whole neighborhood; a traditional Reunion Island dinner; a local indoor football match; a kangaroo barbecue; even chess! Anyway, thanks for everything, you lot are awesome. 

This is apparently the only photo we have from this period. We were too busy having a good time.

That's the end of our Australian journey. On to New Zealand!

Bye, Australia

------- * Of course, this is a slight exaggeration, for dramatic purposes. When you see them up close, especially if you can catch them eating or moving, they're really cute. But still quite dumb. ** Well, maybe humans aren't to blame for the disease itself, but it definitely is our fault that their population was too thin to deal with it in the first place. There used to be devils all over Australia, but we hunted the tigers who provided most of the carcasses for them to extinction, and today the devils are left only in Tassie. *** Yeah, there are only nine. What are you gonna do about it?