Elad’s blog

Just a few pics from past events in Australia, that my friends took on their cameras and now sent me.

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Despite the intuition many of my readers have, Polar Bears and Penguins never meet in nature.
The reason for this is obvious: polar bears are confined to the arctic circle, in the northern hemisphere, while penguins thrive at the southern hemisphere, and are never found north of the equator.

They are found, however, throughout the southern hemisphere - not only in cold regions, like many people imagine, but also in subarctric and moderate zones - they can reach as north as Galapagos, which is near the equator. Thus, it shouldn’t have surprised me (but it did) that a nice colony of Little Penguins (this is the scientific name; there are 17 species of penguins, and these are the smallest - only 30 c”m in height, they look just like furry puppets) lives happily on Kangaroo Island; and as we came here on the right season, we got a good look at the jeuvenille penguins, which was even more fun.

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There are table wines and fortified wines and sparkled wines. There are red and white and rose varieties. There are sweet and dry. They come in every colour, from crimson to amber to white. In every flavour and in plenty of smells. One of the 60 winneries of Barossa valley must have what you want, and it sure is lots of fun searching (especially when, like me, you don’t know what you want).

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The vicinity of Adelaide, as I mentioned previousely, is pretty similar to an english countryside; what I didn’t know previously, is that Adelaide looks like a typical english city, from the colonial area.

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According to my Lonely Planet Guide to Australia, Australia is home to 20 milion people and 106 milion sheep. Thus, it is very surprising that only yesterday I saw for the first time a sheep in Australia.

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The first sign that the desert is giving way was the insects. In the evening, when we drove from Coober Pedy to the closest free resting area to set our tent, I noticed much more mothes and flies than usual. The second sign was the clouds. The shiny sky of the last two weeks gave way this morning to partly cloudy sky. Than came the vegetation, small pine-like trees that fill the semi-desert (oddly enough, the savannah in south australia does not include neither eucaliptuses nor termite mounds, so typical of the northern territory); and finally the desert broke, in a series of semi-dry salt lakes, and turned into an almost mediterrenean scenery as we approached Port Augusta, on the shore of the southern ocean.

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A rock traveled silently in space. Suddenly it got caught in Earth’s gravitation, and started to accelerate. Upon entering the atmosphere it broke into at least 12 parts, which fell in the middle of the Australian desert many years ago, creating the Henbury Meteorite Craters.

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Yehuda Amichai, who is one of my favorite poets, wrote in one of his least-known poems: “Observe the beauty of a sunset / even a physicists, who knows and understands / can just look at the sunset / and say how beautiful it is. ” (I hope his widow will forgive me for the poor translation).

Looking at Ayers-Rock, these words just floated into my mind.

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Australians are really keen about their centre. The Alice and its surrounds are constantly referred to as the “red centre” in all the touristic publications. Today, on my daily hike of the West Macdonnell Ranges, I understood why.

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