Roadtrip in a Sunburned Country

We’re now on an extended roadtrip, all the way from Sydney to Cairns.

Pretty much anyone in the world who’s ever visited Australia gasped out loud when we announced our intentions to do this.  Do you have any idea how far that is?

But every Australian we’ve encountered has reacted with palpable delight.  Brilliant, mate!  You stopping off in Byron Bay, then? Eh, you’ll have a right good holiday, won’t you? Mind the jellies!

Our first night in Sydney, Tom’s friend and former colleague David took us out on his boat for a barbecue in the harbor.  David was particularly smitten with our roadtrip idea, and after the sun had set and he’d had a few, he took a paper towel and scrawled out a map and highlighted all the coastal destinations we just couldn’t miss.  This towel has subsequently formed the baseline for our itinerary.

Way back before we left the States, I loaded up my Kindle with various books set in the places we were planning to visit, and naturally I got Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.

Now.  It probably comes as no great surprise that I love travel memoir, as a genre.  I do.  And there are a number of travel memoir authors whose work, on any place whatsoever that they choose to visit, I love to read. But the affinity I have for Bill Bryson goes far beyond that.  Bryson is not simply intrepid and insightful and informative.  The man is a comic genius, able to pull off a rambling, self effacing interior dialogue that consistently has me laughing out loud and occasionally — more often than many more sober writers — tips my worldview ever so slightly.  (Henry Mitchell holds the same place of honor among garden books, another genre I enjoy; for much the same reasons.  Mystifyingly, Mitchell never got the audience that Bryson has deservedly achieved… go figure.)

So there have been several times along this global journey, when my reading material has gotten thin, and I’ve stared forlornly at the offerings on the “take one, leave one” shelves of various guesthouses, that I’ve been sorely tempted to dip into my Bryson.

But I held off from temptation.  And now I am reaping my reward.

Bill has become a seventh passenger in the minivan.  I read passages aloud as we hurtle northward, to my mother’s absolute delight — somehow, she’s managed to achieve her, um, level of maturity without ever having read anything by him — and appreciative chuckles from my father and Tom.  Even the kids in the back row periodically lift their gazes from their electronic gizmos and tune in. His narration has become our soundtrack.

Bill just adores Australia.  And really, who can argue with him.

One of the more cherishable peculiarities of Australians is that they like to build big things in the shape of other things. Give them a bale of chicken wire, some fiberglass, and a couple of pots of paint and they will make you, say, an enormous pineapple or strawberry or… lobster.  Then they put a cafe and a gift shop inside, erect a big sign beside the highway (for the benefit of people whose acuity does not evidently extend to spotting a fifty-foot-high piece of fruit standing beside an otherwise empty highway), then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

Some sixty of these objects are scattered across the Australian landscape, like leftover props from a 1950s horror movie… The process, I am patriotically proud to tell you, was started by an American named Landy who built a Big Banana at Coffs Harbour… which proved so magically attractive to passing vehicles that it made Mr. Landy, as it were, the big banana of the business.

Coffs Harbour was the very first dot on the map on David’s paper towel — with “Big Banana” scrawled beside it, so imagine my delight at coming to this our very first afternoon on the road:

David detoured us for this??

Put it all into its proper context.