Well, it’s tomorrow here to my American friends. The U.S. is so yesterday on this side of the International Date Line. We had a fabulous day in Sydney yesterday, largely courtesy of Kevin ‘s college chum Dana
and her husband Keith.
We saw the Sydney Opera House
Saw our first koala
and took a ferry to the seaside destination of Manly.
Tomorrow, we head to Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock).
I have a feeling it has to be seen in person to be experienced. Every picture of it online looks like . . . well, a big rock in the middle of a desert. Which it is. But I imagine it is a BIG rock in the middle of the desert, to the point that no photo can get the proper perspective to indicate what it is like to be there. I look forward to being able to experience it for ourselves.
As you can guess from the renaming, Uluru, it is a sacred place to the local native people. Mary and I have always been interested in Australian Aboriginal cultures. Many artworks that made an impression on us before we met were related to that culture, such as Walkabout, in which an Aboriginal boy on his ritual walkabout helps two stranded white children survive in the Outback.
But most of all, one of our favorite books is Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. In it, he outlines how natives sang as they walked through the Australian outback. The song helped them know which route to take, but it was also as if the landscape was being sung into existence on each trip. If you look for themes in these blog posts, you will notice how many come together in this idea of Songlines.
I love walking (did 6 miles again today around Sydney), and each trip seems to be a new experience even if I have walked the route before. And travel to me is related to art, storytelling, and religion. In more modern religious literature, it is called pilgrimage. Traveling to certain sites brings you a divine insight, but it is the journey, not the arrival, that is the revelation. The traveler transcends time and loses connection to concepts such as yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
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