I just found this pic on my camera’s memory card. It serves as quite the accurate “before photo,” summing up my mental state as I prepare to assault my hapless birfday cake to relieve the tedium and frustration of being in Mongolian pneumonic quarantine:
Actually, the cake was quite tasty.
(Wow. I just heard my mother’s voice from 10,000 miles away: “Oh, for Pete’s sake. He’s 42. Will he ever take a normal picture?” Don’t hold yer breath, Ma.)
But now I feel 100% again and can unreservedly recommend Australia as an ideal place to convalesce. Just the right combination of tropical climate, neat and tidy prosperity, and robust, cheerful people who all call you “mate,” even when you’re wearing a skirt.
I have to say that, normally, robust, cheerful people make me a little uneasy and suspicious. Not here. It’s so genuine and yesterday I had an insight into part of what might inspire such frames of mind: kangaroos. Guided by one of the KPC Australia sangha members named Deb, who happens possess the immaculate quality of unbridled enthusiasm for seeking out birds, we spent the whole day doing just that. Now, the Australian character manifests in their language. Often birders are an understated lot. When they finally spot a lifer, they’ll play it cool and say, “Nice. Good bird.” Compare that to the phrase I discovered in Australian birder Sean Dooley’s hysterical book The Big Twitch. He declares such sightings to be “absolute stonking cripplers.” How can you not embrace the latter?
Thus, yesterday we toured the coastline, mangrove thickets, and saltwater marshes of the Sunshine Coast (where it was overcast with intermittent showers), which produced one absolute stonking crippler after another until I was nigh delirious: Plumed Whistling-duck; a mated pair of the indigenous Australian crane called a Brolga; Brahminy Kite; White-bellied Sea-eagle; Little Bronze-cuckoo (the one lifer for Deb); Rainbow Bee-eater (yowza); Blue-faced Honeyeater; Red-browed Firetail – 34 lifers altogether for the day. But the highlight was cruising into the sleepy little town of Toorbul, past yellow-diamond signs cautioning us not to clobber the kangaroos. And then, there they were, eastern grays, the males almost as big as me. Not fleeting figures bounding off into eucalypt thickets or creating distant silhouettes on a red dirt horizon. Just there loitering by the curb...
...grazing on citizens’ lawns or just vegging out by the birdbath:
I just couldn’t stop gawking and laughing as they munched and hopped and scratched. “Deb,” I said, “this place is unbelievable. The ‘roos are the town squirrels!” She chuckled at this, but countered that it was just as funny that every time one started to hop, I’d point at it and go, “Boing! Boing! Boing!” and giggle like a mental patient. She had me there. I couldn’t help myself and you wouldn’t be able to, either. My point is, it’s close to impossible to be moody when kangaroos are about (I mean, just look at them) and I propose that their mere presence in the land is a strong environmental factor in Australians’ cheerfulness.
And I met an awfully nice bunch today, at my first presentation of “The Buddha Was Only Sleeping.” The Brisbane group did a fine job of organizing and promotion. I had high-tech slide projection gear in the little theater at Brisbane’s spanking-new main library (my friend Sarah declared this to be “schmick,” not the first time she’s used this descriptor for something fancy and just too-too; swears it’s of Yiddish origin, though I never heard of it), and about 30 people dropped in and at least feigned appreciation and interest. One amazing encounter was with a woman named Alex and her husband. She belongs to a chapter of a long-standing organization called the Country Women’s Association. Each year, the CWA members study a different country and guess what the Queensland CWA is into this year? Yes, of course. Mongolia. So I promised all the help I could, including trying to scare up a secret family recipe for mutton dumplings. Then they asked me to find a Mongolian orphanage to the recipient of a charity event they’ll hold in October. Then I found out they too were serious birders. Then I knew we were fast friends.
I head north on Monday: Maleny and Maroochydore, talks on the 16th and 19th respectively; see the right hand column for details, and watch this space for pix and tales.
No ones tried to pass off Vegemite for chocolate yet have they? lol
Posted by: Loden Jinpa | January 12, 2008 at 04:50 PM
Didn't Charles W. Leadbeater live in Australia?
Posted by: Don | January 12, 2008 at 05:07 PM
LJ: Not yet, and I have to say that the limit of my great respect and affection for the Australian people ends precisely where containers of Vegemite and Marmite begin. There really is no satisfactory explanation for the popularity of these vile substances.
Don: Are you being obscurantist? Again? Who on earth are you referring to?
Posted by: Konchog | January 12, 2008 at 06:17 PM
Konchog, sometimes I think you must have been brought up in a cave by wolves. Leadbeater is of course the author of Australia and New Zealand as the Home of a New Sub-Race .
Posted by: don | January 12, 2008 at 06:48 PM
I can't hear 'smecks' without thinking of these cookbooks. http://www.amazon.com/More-Food-That-Really-Schmecks/dp/0771082584
Got to love it, she followed up this doozy with 'Food with Smecks Appeal"!
I love Canadian publishing.
Posted by: Beaweezil | January 12, 2008 at 11:01 PM
(smacks head) THAT's what I need, kangaroos! Hmm. Wonder if the zoo is open this time of year...
Posted by: dara | January 15, 2008 at 01:02 PM