The Depths of Difference

A parent of one of my students travels frequently for business. When taking about Australia he said, "The one thing I didn't like was after traveling for a day I wanted to feel like I had entered someplace utterly foreign on arrival." I got a sense of what he meant during my run out of the Sydney airport. The surroundings felt a lot like home. I ran passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Office Maxx, a Ford Dealership and the great American icon, McDonald's. I could have been in Dallas or Portland. Okay, so like the British, drivers in Australia use the opposite lane from folks in the U.S. In this way I could easily picture myself in London (where I also left the airport to run). 

Here's the thing, Australia is not like any other place, and even though I had some very familiar experiences at first, it soon changed. One fun thing to mention would be visiting Daintree, which some scholars and scientists believe is the world's oldest rainforest. Sure, you can't find that in Atlanta. Perhaps more interesting are the birds I mentioned I heard when running in Cairns. I was overwhelmed by their number and the very odd sound they made early in the morning. I elected not to run under the set of trees that housed them for fear of droppings.  Good choice as it turns out, the birds are not birds at all. They are very large bats.

Then there is this silly little incident. When running early in the morning I turned off a city street in Cairns for the more appealing grassy banks of a canal. Shortly after leaving the street I found the canal much darker and somewhat unsettling, especially as I moved away from physical structures. Behind me I heard a splash in the water, larger than seemed normal (for a city dweller). Even though turning around meant going back toward the splash, I ran away from the bank and back to the street (considerably faster).

Later that afternoon at Hartley's Crocodile Farm I learned one of the many silly things people do that gets them harmed by crocs is to be out on the edge of water in the dark. Yikes! So, yes looks can be deceiving. Let me be the first to say, Australia is really nothing like Dallas or Portland.

Avoid wild animals. Run.

Tom