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Sydney, Australia.

The Twelve Appostles, Australia

The most authentic thing in Sydney is how they celebrate Christmas Day. The 25th of December, in the morning, you can see everybody waiting for the bus to go to the beach, wearing a swimsuit and a Santa Claus hat. Although what they really like is to brag about the last night of the year, so much so, that they even created a brand: the NYE (New Year’s Eve). Thousands of people come from all over the world to Australia to be the first ones to celebrate the New Year and see the fireworks from the Harbour Bridge, one of their beaches, or parks. One week before the event, the Tourist Office organizes seminars to explain how to manage all the hustle and bustle that take place those days. The first suggestion was priceless: “if by noon you don’t have a good location to see the fireworks, you can go back to your hotel room and watch them on TV”. With that, as with everything else, they were exaggerating. Following their advice, we found a good location in a little creek and we went there 10 hours before the show, with our cooler and our take-away-sushi. It was not until 5 minutes before midnight that people started to arrive with no rush. As I said before, much ado about nothing.
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Sydney, Australia.

Kata Tjuta (Las Olgas), Australia

Australia is a country on sale but nobody seems to be interested in buying it. On the north and on the south, houses and stores, everything is on sale. And the strange thing is that the ones that have the “For Sale” sign are not the ruinous business or the dilapidated houses, but the most luxurious flats located in the best areas. Apart form the crisis, the reason for so many businesses to be for sale is that here, everybody wants to be successful to leave. Just like everybody wants to leave, nobody wants to come in, not even the Third World country immigrants. Only a few Chinese people in Sydney, and that’s it. That’s why everything is so expensive in Australia. Since they don’t have cheap labour to cover the most basic services or the most simple professions, maids and waiters are people like us, locals who get their hands dirty in exchange for a salary that, without being anything special, it would be a fortune for a Filipino. The exception is a couple of Europeans working in fashionable bars to learn English, but the rest of them are just a bunch of modern Cocrodile-Dundees. Very chic, but also very embittered.

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Uluru, the aborigines sacred mountain

Although in the airport sign says Ayers Rock, we are at Uluru, the red mountain, one of the most sacred location for the aborigines. And no wonder, because it really seems to be alive. If you stare at it you can even see how it breathes, like if, deep inside, there was a creature from another world waiting to come out. For some people it is just a simple rock set in the middle of nowhere, like an iceberg made of red sand. For others it is the evidence that even a rock can have a soul. But it is not all alone. Less than 50 kilometres away, a walking distance when you are in the heart of Australia, you can find its twin soul. If Uluru were a god, Kaja-Tjuta would be its goddess, and it also breathes, but it is more brutal. Uluru is subtle, almost an imperceptible movement, as if it were an abdomen going up and down very slowly. Kata-Tjuta breathes deeply, absorbing the air with her mouth full and blowing hurricanes to fill up their throats with energy. If you climb up to the Valley of the Four Winds, you will be able to feel the strength of its breath, as if it were feeding the life that is inside of it.

Before Uluru and Kaja-Tujta the world was plain. It was the Ancestral Beings who travel through it and created the plants, animals, and other things, leaving a piece of their soul in each of them. Aborigines believe that they are the direct descendants of those beings, the heirs of an oral will that rules their lives. It is a shame that it is secret and that only little parts of that knowledge have been revealed to the white population. We know just enough to know that it is the first ecologist manifesto in the world, nothing weird in a country were its population depends, more that any other else, on Nature to survive.

These sons of gods, authentic prehistoric hippies, woke up one day with these other sons of “their mothers” camping in their Eden Garden. They, who didn’t know the wheel or the writing, had travelled to the future without leaving their island. Twenty thousand years totally isolated without knowing what a war was until they ran into a bunch of prisoners freed by the Queen’s whim. It is not necessary to explain what happened. The Australians have been trying to make everybody believe that the aborigines were a tribe who lived in the dessert. Liar, liar, pants on fire. The few that they didn’t hunt, literally, were thrown from the best lands to keep them themselves. They had only one option: leave and hide where the white people would never dare to look for them.

Nowadays, the blacks, as they describe themselves, walk barefoot in the streets, with their sight lost, and dirty clothes. Many of them are alcoholics, and all of them are fattened up by the Western diet. They still wonder how their ancestors, who knew everything, never taught them how to face the so called modern world that they feel so odd. Although the other ones don’t seem to be doing much better. Many Australians, as much as the deny it, live embittered, surrounded by natural traps, with the westerner wannabe wish, to end up rotting in the end of the world.

If they could choose, whites and blacks would prefer to travel to their past. Or to their future.  Anywhere as long as they could get out of here. But neither a travel machine nor the Australians themselves can fix that. They tried it 50 years ago officially stealing hundreds of aborigine’s babies to grow up among westerners and they are still trying to get forgiveness for such atrocity. Twenty years ago they came back again making people think that they would return the land to their “original owners” but, of course, they were not going to return the whole country and much less the best areas, where the big cities are. Thus, the issue was limited to desert fields and swampy forests where you can only find flies and mosquitoes, but one thing is for sure, they have the National Park title. There is only one honourable exception, the only land affected by the law and pending to be returned is the one where they found all kinds of mines. What a coincidence, isn’t it?

Three hundred years later they don’t know what to do with them and that is why they stuff them with welfare, without realizing how dangerous it is to take them out of their world and leaving them at ours’ gates. First they stole their land and their lives, then their future and their children’s, and now they are doing the same thing with their hopes. Of course, as soon as there’s none left, I am sure that they will expand the Ayers Rock airport, and even change its name to the real one, Uluru.

Cape Tribulations, Northwest of Australia

When you buy your tickets to go to Australia, you think that it is going to be like a Disneyland adventure but bigger. Rides here and aborigines there, a bunch of kangaroos jumping around and some freak dressed like Indiana Jones. If, on top of that he puts his head in a crocodile mouth, even better. But mostly beer, a lot of beer, the lager one and the good one.

But be very careful, it is the typical movie bait. More a terror movie than anything else. If Disneyland is the amusement park for the good kids, Australia must be the amusement park for the bad ones. I am not exaggerating. It’s no wonder that most of Australian natives are descendants of British prisoners whose sentence was commuted in exchange for dressing up as colonists. Some thought that it was a bargain, but at the end, it was not a good deal for many of them. Here, as soon as you are not watching out, a shark rips your arm off or a crocodile will leave you looking like hell. There are so many danger signs, that you don’t even dare to leave your car. And I am not talking about signs such as “mind your step” or “beware of the dog”. If you don’t believe it, ask the guy who is on the front page of the local newspaper, although I don’t think he is going to answer. If he did, it would be the first talking head in history, because that was the only part of his body that the crocodile that ate him yesterday left.

Perhaps you think that anybody can have an accident. Ok, like the surf champion whose arm was ripped off by a white shark. The coincidence is that two years later, another white shark took the other one. You can see that here, the signs are not like in California or Brazil, where you can see a “beware of sharks” signs and everybody swimming. Here, when they warn you, it’s because the animal is around. Yesterday we went to the Great Barrier Reef, more that 1000 km long and one of the most famous diving sites in the world. Before diving in, they warned us with a laconic “there are some sharks, but don’t worry, they don’t attack humans”. So “very calmed” we dove in, thinking about taking Pictures of Nemo and all his mates. Not longer than two minutes after, a meter and a half shark faced us, staring at us with his cold, impersonal eyes, like if he was bored of seeing so much human bait. That was probably what he thought because immediately after, he turned around and disappeared.

This morning we decided to rest from all these adventures and we went to the beach. Something that seems simple and easy for two Mediterranean sardines like us, but it’s very complicated when you are in the Coral Sea, especially in the summer when the water temperature attracts all kinds of jellyfish, some small, some gigantic, but most of them poisonous. They are so poisonous that they can cause respiratory failure or a heart attack. Here, the beaches are really virgin because nobody dares to go there.

Nevertheless, we cannot complain. We have been told that at this time of the year the most dangerous animals are not there because it is cyclone and hurricane season. How lucky we are!

No doubt then: if you are looking for strong sensations, Australia is your destination! Joking aside, don’t worry about Australia and its wild animals. If you follow the basic, logical rules and keep always an eye on their warning signs, nothing has to happen. Australia is such an amazing country that we don’t have words to describe. We prefer to share with you some self-explaining pictures…