Down Under

An American guy in his late 50s sets foot in Australia for the first time in his life. What does he spent most of the afternoon doing? Taking a public bus to a costume shop on the other end of town, to purchase a wig and beard for Halloween.

First there was a brief trip to the Post Office. The lady behind the counter assured me that Aussies have dress-up Halloween parties, in fact she would be going to such a party as the Statue of Liberty. This tempted me to respond in kind by being Crocodile Dundee or an aboriginal Australian forest guy. Being too heavy for either of those, I briefly considered being an overweight BeeGee.

All this pondering was done on a pretty bus on the way to a costume shop in this western Australian city of Perth. By the time I reached my destination, I‘d returned to Plan A -- utilizing my Viking horny helmet in some way. With the purchase of the tiger-stripe cloth in Singapore the previous week, I’d already lost the accurate Viking look. I compounded this by purchasing an evil-looking Genghis Khan FuManchu beard, and a wig of long black hair a la Cher. A Mongolian Viking with feminine leanings.

So nice to be in a foreign country where everybody speaks ENGLISH. The Crocodile Dundee style, mite. Mate becomes mite and ninety-nine becomes noinnty-noin. There was an Asian lady on the bus talking like this, so weird to see Aussie talk coming out of her.

When you were a kid you might have heard that you could (theoretically) dig a hole straight down into the ground, and reach China on the other side. Quite untrue, unless you dug a very crooked path. China and USA are both in the Northern Hemisphere, so the “antipodes” (to use a fancy geographer’s word) for both countries will be somewhere “down under”.

Anywhere in the USA, if you dug through the center of the earth, on the other side you’d wind up in the Indian Ocean. In fact the entire North American continent has the Indian Ocean as its antipode. The east USA coast antipodes would be the closest to land, with the New York City about 500 miles from Perth.

So being in Perth, I was about as close to being on the opposite side of the globe from NYC as I’ll ever get. This information plus about two dollars will get me a ride on any bus in Perth.

A few days prior to Perth, the ship crossed the equator and stopped at Bali, an Indonesian tropic isle a few degrees south of the equator, and it was the last stop of the Asian part of this voyage. Also the ONLY Indonesian stop, thank God. It was a beautiful place, but the natives saw the cruise ship as a money machine. Guests arriving at the dock were besieged by a swarm of native peddlers, from age 5 to age 85, with the most aggressive and annoying sales tactics I’ve ever seen.

After a little dickering, I hopped into a “cab” with a few crew people, and took a “guided tour”. To the driver’s credit, he did take us to a few Hindu temples that were high on the official list of Places To See in Bali.

To his discredit, he deliberately drove us to places where he knew there would be yet more peddlers, after we thought we’d escaped these leechy grabby people at the dock. One peddler sold me a shirt 5 miles inland, and then she somehow materialized back at the dock two hours later when we returned.

At one point we were taken to the Hindu “Mother Temple” of the Island. The cabdriver hung out in the parking lot after handing us off to his friends at the gate. We were required to wear a sari in order to enter the grounds, so we rented out the damn things for $3 apiece. We specifically said we did not need a tour guide, yet some annoying jerk with a turban and a big stupid mustache followed us the whole way, yakking out information. We acquiesced, allowed him to tag along, even asked him a few questions, including How Does It feel To Be Such an Annoying Jerk.

Bali is home to quite a few ship employees, the room attendants and dining room helpers who go out on 10-month contracts with Holland America. For the ship to actually stop in Indonesia was a rare thing, giving these employees an unusual opportunity to see their families while in the middle of a contract.

The ship graciously made provisions for Bali family members to get on the ship, as visitors, for a few hours. A large feast and party was held in the crew mess for a few hours. Lotsa smiles in the crew area later on.

So bring on the swagmen, kangaroos and boomerangs. Australia is not as far Down Under as I thought, dipping down no further than 40-45 degrees south, whereas NYC and Seattle are 40-45 degrees north. The day after Halloween -- which to me has a forboding “Here comes the Winter” feeling in New York, is instead down here a sort of gateway to the southern summer months. Christmas is warm and weird.

This is day 42, the 2/3 mark, time going fast, as always, as always, as always.

Shooting the sheet with the Sheet family

Leo and Henry, Filipino bar staff colleagues in the Rembrandt Lounge

My new promo photo