Photographic Memory

I think it's tomorrow. Still. At least, that's how my body feels. I pop awake at 5 a.m., hungry. Breakfast comes and I do not want to eat. I couldn't have dinner until 9 p.m. tonight. The jetlag is slowly ebbing away, but damn if I only remember slivers of Friday night after I got home--except that Lesley, Ryan, and I downed my souvenir bottle of sparkling Shiraz/Pinot in no time flat and then yelled things at the TV as I caught up on the last three episodes of "America's Next Top Model"--who is a Latina drag queen! God bless this country.

Thankfully, instead of coming home feeling like I'd been beat up, I thought back on this trip and realized it was actually incredibly enjoyable. It was not too much time in a car; we were near Adelaide most of the time, and we had tours from people who were so good natured. I really do love Australians--even when they can be as trashy as Americans.

The trip began in Adelaide, with tours of the city and the Central Market, another of my new favorite places. It's where you can by frog cakes (I can't even get into it), tacky souvenirs, and the best produce around, which is saying something in a state of Australia renowned for its food.



Of course, you can also buy lots of GAME MEAT. Yum. 'Roo!

I could go on and on about a Saturday night spent out with some lovely gay guys who organize Feast, the local LGBT festival, but the other side of that story concerns drunken behavior by a few others along for the ride that sent two of the writers I was with into a bit of a panic (and rightfully so). Let's just say that we nicknamed certain offenders Creepy and Grotesque and leave it at that. Still, getting drunk and enjoying the local color is always fun--esp. when you are walking back to your hotel at 2 am and getting text messages from writers that are cracking you up and making the few homeless people on the street look at you funny.

We took off the next day for the Barossa Valley, where some of the world's best wines are made. We stopped off at Penfolds to mix our own blend of wine. Mine was 60% Grenache, 20% Mourvedre, and 20% Shiraz, and I was awfully proud of my tasty libation.



Of course, we all felt like we were in some kind of night school adult education chemistry class (or maybe it was just me)...



But at the end of the day, we got to walk out with cute little bottles of wine. They were supposed to keep 5 days. When we opened mine 2 days later, it was utterly nasty and had the taste of a tire about it--nothing like those other romantic tasting notes like "cut grass" and "cherry."



Still, staying in the Barossa Valley when it's actually rained is gorgeous. It helped that we were lucky enough to score rooms at a 16-room luxury resort with outdoor showers and views of some of the most amazing expanse of sky. I'd not seen the Milky Way in so long. It almost makes me cry when I see it. But then I woke up at 7 am with the sunrise and saw the vineyards:



So of course I sat outside and took photos of myself reflected in the window on my terrace. Because you can't spoil a good sunrise with self-portraits:



Luckily the weather held, and the next day we headed up into the Adelaide Hills and visited more wineries. It rained as we gorged at lunch on local cheese and coffee and watched the leaves on the maple trees in the town of Hahndorf turn yellow (it's fall there, don't ya know). But then the rain cleared and at the last winery of the day, this was the view from where we did our tastings:



More wine tasting the next day in the McClaren Vale, another renowned wine region, where I even got to see where some of my fave sparkling Shiraz is produced (Vixen), and laughed as Larry screamed at a Huntsman spider--a hulking, jumping thing that is totally harmless...which he kept running toward to snap a picture and then, every time it moved, he screamed and ran away. All for the good of the story of course.

By the time we may it to the beach to eat at a Greek cafe I was partially drunk, my stomach unhappy, and I could only stare at the ocean. Of course, that's when Larry got this shot:



We combed the beach after lunch, looking for cool rocks and cuttlefish skeletons. I could have easily just slept on the beach for a few days.



But there was no sleeping. It was off to the city to catch a 30-seat plane to Kangaroo Island, a 25-minute flight from Adelaide and easily one of my favorite places on earth. Granted, I have not been THAT many places, but it's a pastoral country with rolling beaches and rocky inlets where you can see so much wildlife it's kind of ridiculous. We saw tiger snakes, an echidna (egg-laying mammal that kind of looks like a porcupine), not to mention kangaroos, and, at Seal Bay, a baby seal that came within about four feet of me when he wandered down from the sand dunes on his way to the ocean, barking like a dog:





The southwestern corner of KI is a desolate wild place that's pretty stunning, and as we walked around Remarkable Rocks and Admiral's Arch trying to contemplate how the ocean stretched forever until it finally hit Antarctica, I of course found time to be totally geeky and take pictures of lichen--as well as some more self-portraits halfway inside the rocks:









The last full day on the island was at my new favorite place, Lifetime Private Retreats, where I swear I will spend a month at some point just learning to garden and doing yoga overlooking the ocean. The "resort" is simply three houses near a small beach on the north shore of the island, where you can eat dinner under a fig tree or in an old shearing shed. Trust me, the 22 hours of travel to get there is worth it. And of course, I for some reason have no pics from this trip when the hills were so brilliantly green and lush. But I was a lucky enough son of a bitch to be there last December too:



I made it back at 6:40 am Friday May 18 after leaving Adelaide at 6:40 am on Friday May 18. Wrap yer head around that one.

To tell you the whole story would take me years and you would be bored, no doubt. But I was more than happy to be back. I needed to find the perfect place to put my new small boomerang carved from a tree in the Simpson Desert, give Ryan his Barossa Valley beer cozy (why on earth do they have beer cozies in the most famous wine region of Australia?), and Lesley her chocolate-dipped honeycomb with honey from the last pure strain of Ligurian bees on earth.

Because what good is going to Australia if you don't come back with the weirdest shit you can find... I mean, short of trapping an echidna?