I love Australia and have travelled there, for various reasons, on three occasions. I’ve seen just about all of it except the Top End. As we often think of the US by regions—Dixie, Downeast, the PNW—and the perimeters of those regions may enclose parts of several states, so does the land Down Under have its regions. The Top End is Broome east past Darwin to the Gulf of Carpenteria and down a little way. It includes parts of Western Australia, Queensland, and Northern Territory [a side note here: in this country, that would be Tare-a-tory. In Australia, it’s terror-tree. Ofttimes the written language has little in common with the spoken tongue].
When I visited Iceland, the youngest exposed land on earth, I flew over the Canadian shield, the oldest exposed land in North America. The very oldest on earth, however, is the Pilbara of northwest Australia. I will pass through it on the bus.
Every paleontology book in Christendom has a photo of Shark Bay showing stromatolites. Stromatolites are unprepossessing lumps of algae and sand, globs a few feet high at most. Shark Bay is nearly their last bastion, but there was a day three billion years ago when they were hot stuff and widespread, the latest in lifeforms. Shark Bay is on my itinerary as I take buses from Darwin south to Perth along the west coast.
And being a zoo freak, I intend to visit the Taronga Zoo in Sydney and the zoo in Perth.
How do I get to Sydney? Wednesday, 5 October, I board a train to San Diego, lay over a day getting the COVID test that the Noordam requires, and let Holland America take me to Sydney the long way, here and there among the islands of Oceania. Daughter Mary will accompany me on the Sydney-to-Perth leg; she too has never been through the Top End (she did, however, honeymoon on Rarotonga, one of my ports of call). I will miss Thanksgiving and get home around the end of November.
But that will not dampen my profound gratitude.