Still Alive

Yes, I'm still alive, and I even drew an exciting travel map of where I've been. Internet access is few and far between out here, but at long last we've found a town with moderate levels of civilization in it.


To go back a few weeks.. we spent a few days in Perth, which is the largest city on the west coast of Australia, aka the outback. Here is girlfriend beside an octopus-looking tree. Perth was kind of cold, but every day of the glorious road trip north, things get slowly hotter (and eventually, hot enough to swim, yay.)

I think I forgot to mention that we now have a third traveling companion, aliased Faizah. She joined us in Adelaide, which is at the bottom center of Australia, and is someone I know from "The Internet." She is like our personal tour guide and has helped explain a lot of Aussie culture we wouldn't have picked up on otherwise. She is traveling with us, sleeping in the backseat of our rental car, up to the north center of Australia, where her crazy karaoke-ing uncle and grandma lives, and will let us camp in their yard for a while.

In a book store in Perth, Faizah found a baby book that had the words "I'm leaving you" written in it. At one point during the road trip she was musing over the possibile situations that would lead someone to write something like that, such as someone finding out they were pregnant and their partner leaving them via a message in a baby book. Quite cruel if that was the case.

Anyway... before heading north we drove south to a forest area with half a dozen public caves. Each cave we saw (four of them) were better than the last, until finally, we visited the greatest cave ever: Jewel Cave. One of the previous caves, Lake Cave, had a large (tarantula-sized) spider dangling from a web, which had died and while still in its web, was being crystallized by the above dripping stalactites. The cave pictures didn't turn out so well, lack of proper light and all, so you'll have to use your imagination :(

After that little detour we headed north north north, past Perth, and dropped by a Spanish monastery in the middle of nowhere. It still had black robed monks living in it, but much of it no was longer in use and what remained were ancient Spanish-style buildings. Very out of place in the middle of the Aussie outback.


One of the deserted buildings.


The cemetery of the monastery was my favorite part. Very gothic.

One tomb in particular struck me as uniquely Aussie:


Well, that puts me at about here on the map, driving north:


The internet is kind of expensive so I will update more when I can. Or I might die out here in the outback, my corpse being picked apart by the various lizards and death snakes I keep running over as I drive. Cheers, mates!