Sunday, November 09, 2008

Traveling Australia

Namaste to you all, well as some of you know for the past few months I've been fortunate enough to get a chance to travel around my own country with one of my best friends. At the moment it feels as though it could be the last time I see Australia for quite awhile, so I guess it's important to me now to take a look at my own country before I head back overseas.

Our plan was to travel from the east coast to the west coast. Well for some reason we've been stuck in the middle for a month now. Yep alot of things have happened to keep us around what I call the heart of the nation 'Uluru' or (Ayers Rock as it was once called). It certainly has been interesting living in Alice Springs, which is the closest largest town near the rock. I have never lived in a town where a majority of the population are aboriginal.

I have never understood the plight of the native people of Australia and after spending a month here I'm still no further down the road of understanding how as a nation we can help the aboriginals to help themselves. Now the most obvious thing to alot of people say is education! well what I've seen so far is that, that cant work yet with these people because 90% of the children refuse to go to school and their parents don't make them.

So how can you educate a person if they don't turn up to learn. When I'm talking about education I'm not really just talking about white mans model eg maths, science and english. I mean this certainly helps in this world to have an education, but I think first and foremost these people need to learn about some of the basics of life it self, again. I think through all the pain and abuse as a people they've some how along the road, have forgotten the basic way to live in a semi-harmonious way.

Alice Springs has some of the worst statistics for crime in the world, as well as having been known to have the most alcoholics per-capita in the world. The people I have met in the town talk about how huge the mountain is to climb to help these people, alot of them cant even see the light at the end of the tunnel yet. One friend talks of the only way these people can move forward is, time! Time is needed to heal the pain and suffering these people go through and have been through. I fully agree with this statement, but what can we do to speed up the process of healing? After being around here seeing and hearing from whites and blacks I'm not quite sure.

I used to say about everybody in any situation, if you play victim you will never heal, you will never grow and move on. I still maintain that is the problem with most humans, especially these days. Humans have for some reason taken on the idea that we don't have to be responsible for our own actions, that it is because of other people, other circumstances outside of ourselves that we behave the way we do. Well sorry but I believe that once a person turns around say eighteen to twenty one years old, then it is about this time that we have to understand that we are responsible for everything we do and everything that happens in our lives.

If you want to be happy, successful, miserable, kind, loved, hated, addicted to a substance, rich, poor, etc, etc, then you and only you can have the power to change, to be what you want to be. I know some people will say but that isn't the case with everyone! some peoples circumstances are just to hard to rise above, some people don't have the choice, well that can also be very true and I can understand this. Some peoples tests are huge, but it still doesn't have to be the way they think it has to be, because as a species we all have one thing in common, we all have a thing called CHOICE!!!


Here are some pictures we've taken on our travels.



This pretty well sums up how alot of Aussies try and go about life.

This unusual little creature looks pretty harmless, dont be fooled their called blue bottles.
These little fellas have created many surfers and swimmers plenty of pain.

We stayed at one of my favorite places along the East Coast of Australia, Seals Rocks. It's still pretty untouched, which is very rare for Australia these days.

The surfing at Seals is excellent, as well as the fishing. It's great to see the local fisherman still going out in their little boats, pulling their nets in, as they've done for a hundred years.

We were told this shark was caught a day or so before the picture was taken. The locals were quite upset that the man didn't release it back into the water(and we wonder why so many creatures are becoming extinct).

Some of the locals lazying about, these guys are wild, just very friendly.

This is where I grew up as a kid. I haven't been back to the house where I spent most of my life for about nine years, ah the memories.

This pub is at Windsor, a small river town west of Sydney.

The Three Sisters is one of the most well known tourist attractions in N.S.W. Its situated in the Blue Mountains(one of my favorite places in the world).

We found a fantastic little camp ground in the heart of the Blue Mountains. We met some great people here that have been travelling around OZ for awhile. It was very significant to meet these people, they had a book called 'Camps 4' it's an atlas of Australia, that has every free camp ground in Australia. This book has been our bible, we've saved heaps of money. If you want to drive around Australia, please do yourself a big favour get this book.


posted by ophiah @ 2:58 PM