(Extra credit if you understand the arcane 1958 reference in the headline.)

There’s nothing more beautiful than the long, effortless bounding of a kangaroo. Doesn’t matter where they’re hopping — across the empty outback, through your backyard, down a sandy beach, between two rows of vines or along a country lane — they’re poetry in motion.

Maybe the only thing more beautiful than seeing a kangaroo is seeing a baby kangaroo (a joey in Aussie lingo) hop full speed into mom’s pouch.

It doesn’t matter how many kangaroos we’ve seen, the next one never fails to bring smiles to our faces.

While perusing ListVerse.com, one of my favorite websites, I ran across an article titled “10 People Who Faked Their Race And Ethnicity.”

Much to my surprise number three on the list was a musician named Korla Pandit. And much to your surprise, I must assume, is the fact that there exists a photo of Pandit and me. Together. Shoulder to shoulder.

From a musty, dusty copy of the Colton Union High School 1966 yearbook comes this photo of a bevy of hot high school cheerleaders, a bejeweled and beturbaned Pandit, and two scrawny guys. I’m the scrawny one on Pandit’s photo left. On his photo right stands Pat Wick, a buddy of mine who went on to become a well-known forest ranger, but that’s another story.

Who, you may ask, is Korla Pandit? And what the hell you may further ask are young Jim and Pat doing in this odd and somewhat inexplicable photo? Well, let’s answer the first question first. Here’s how ListVerse.com described Korla Pandit,

Korla Pandit was a musician from the 1950s who had a musical show, Musical Adventures with Korla Pandit, where he would play a Hammond 3B organ and grand piano. On his show, Pandit never said a word. Instead, he just looked into the camera with his mysterious eyes while wearing a bejeweled turban. Altogether, Pandit released 14 albums, recorded over 900 episodes of his show, and is considered the godfather of the exotica musical genre. During the 1950s, he was one of the most famous Indians living in the United States. 

Pandit’s career trajectory had clearly taken a downward turn by the mid-60s because he had been reduced to hauling his Hammond from high school assembly to high school assembly, including his always much-anticipated annual performance at my esteemed alma mater, Colton High School.

ListVerse finally gets to the juicy part of Pandit’s biography:

As for his biography, Pandit claimed that he was born in New Delhi to a French mother and an Indian father who was a personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi. Pandit moved to the United States when he was 12 and later attended the University of Chicago. When Pandit did talk, he spoke with an accent and referenced Indian culture. For example, he compared himself to Gandhi, saying that he wanted his music to touch people from all walks of life.

In 1998, Pandit died of pneumonia. Two years after his death, Los Angeles magazine revealed that Pandit wasn’t Indian at all—his real name was John Roland Redd and he had been born in St. Louis, Missouri. Not even his background was Indian; he was African-American. The revelation didn’t really hurt his reputation; in fact, it revived interest in him after he had passed away.

The story behind the photo of Korla Pandit?

As I recall, I was walking across campus (presumably following a Pandit performance at Colton High) minding my own business when I happened upon Korla, the girls and a year book photographer. “Hey, Jim,” someone said, “Jump into this photo.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity to have my photo taken with a gaggle of attractive girls, I did as was requested. (I do not know how Pat got into the shot, but I suspect that his story is far more sordid than my innocent tale.)

By the way, this might be an opportune time to confess that I am not Indian nor do I own a bejeweled turban. Nevertheless, I think I would look very stylish if I were to begin wearing one and looking “into the camera with mysterious eyes.”

That’s a winner no matter what your race may be.

By the way, let’s give a little credit to the bevy of beauties (from left to right): Chris Ruiz, Susan Nunn, Patty DeArmond, Diane Ryan, Renee Cameron, and Debbie Anderson. There’s another pair of legs and pompons hidden behind Debbie, but I did not know the cheerleaders well enough to recognize any of them by their pompons.)

Photo Credit: Ranger Wick Historical Archives

Angaston is our home away from home. I would opt for it to become our permanent home, but Jamie isn’t quite ready to make that commitment. Give me a couple more years and I think I can win her over.

The grand old Angaston city hall was built in 1911.

Take the main road from Nuriootpa to Angaston, turn right at Sturt Street and go up the hill for two blocks, then take another right at the Angaston Uniting Church. You can find us at the third cottage on the left.

The Doddridge Blacksmith Shop was built all the way back in 1867. (See the next blog item.)

We have American friends who continually ask us why we visit the Barossa Valley so often. We even have Aussie friends who ask the same question.

The first photo below tells you most of what you need to know — the Barossa is a long way from anywhere. If that’s not enough, I think the following photos thoroughly explain why we keep coming back.

350 square miles checkerboarded with fields of wheat and sprawling vineyards. Only 20,000 people live here and half of them live in two neighboring villages. Angaston, the village we call home, has just 1900 people.

It’s not unusual to see a mob of kangaroos hopping down a country road or through a vineyard. We’ve even seen them hopping down the main street of Angaston on a quiet Sunday morning.

The headline on this blog item is a quote from my lovely wife. It’s her sweet way of saying that I screwed up.

The good news is that we got to spend an extra day enjoying Melbourne. The bad news is that we got to spend that extra day because I completely messed up our reservations. I thought our flight back to Adelaide was at 9:30 a.m. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn that until we arrived at the airport at 7:00 a.m. that I had actually made reservations for 9:30 p.m.

We checked out of our hotel at 6:30 in the morning and arrived at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport almost fourteen-and-a-half hours before our flight was actually scheduled to depart.

That left us with two options: (1) Sit at the airport for fourteen hours, or (2) Have a fun day in Melbourne.

We chose door number two, grabbed a cab back to the same hotel from which we had just checked out. The desk clerk gave us a “Didn’t you just check out” double take before asking if he could help me.

I explained our situation and asked if it was possible to check in again and go back to the same room we had just checked out of.

Luckily, the manager was there and he just laughed about the whole thing and said, “Sure. And I can give you a 4:00 check out time.”

Perfect.

We returned to our room, crawled between our already rumpled sheets and slept for a few hours to make up for early hour of our earlier wake-up call. Then we headed out to enjoy a day in Melbourne.

We window shopped, dined at Il Forno on the Degraves street restaurant enclave, and did some major league people watching.

We had the longest, most leisurely lunch of our lives. We noshed slowly. We sipped our coffee and tea as if we had nine hours to kill. Oh, wait. We did have nine hours to kill.

Our waitress tried to talk us into ordering Italian desserts, but we ended up buying gelato a few stores down the alley. It was cold and rainy, and we didn’t want to eat our ice cream out in the elements, so we walked back to Il Forno to ask if we could sit down again and eat our ice creams under their umbrella and heater.

“Not unless you buy two more coffees,” our waitress purred politely.

Ahhhhh, what would be better than chocolate ice cream and steaming hot coffee on a rainy afternoon in Melbourne?

Absolutely nothing. We had so much fun.

The crowds finally began to thin out around five o’clock, making the people watching far less interesting, so we headed back to our hotel, sat down in the empty bar, and ordered hot teas.

Eventually it was time to head back to the airport to catch our original 9:25 p.m. flight. We retreived our bags out of the hotel’s storage area and hailed a cab for our third ride to and from the airport that day.

Soon after we arrived, they announced that boarding would be delayed an additional 45 minutes because of weather. So instead of leaving for Adelaide at 9:30, we would now be leaving at 10:15.

Then, when we finally landed in Adelaide, there was nowhere for our plane to park, so we sat out on the taxiway for an additional fifteen minutes. We finally disembarked at about 11:15.

But by the time we found our car in the long term parking lot and got on the road, it was past midnight. We were exhausted and didn’t feel like driving the dark, dangerous country road between Adelaide and the Barossa Valley.

So we rented a hotel room in Adelaide, caught a few hours sleep for the second night in a row, then got up and drove back to Angaston, arriving about 24 hours later than we were supposed to.

Damn good thing that Dame Edna was funny.

Because they trip wasn’t.

Here’s something interesting I ran across earlier today:

“People who have been deaf from birth but gained their hearing later in life often say that they expected the sun to make a noise.”

Since I’ve never been deaf (a concept that Jamie may well dispute), I’d never given it a thought.

But it makes sense. The sun is a thermonuclear reaction a gazillion times larger than the largest nuclear weapon, so I’d guess that it makes an incredible din but we’re just too far away to hear it. Or maybe it makes a deafening noise that we can’t hear because empty space lacks an atmosphere through which that noise can be transmitted.

Maybe a reader with a more scientific background can chime in? (I’m talking to you, Dr Parkinson.)

But I guarantee that if the sun did make a sound, nowhere would it be louder than here in Australia.

I read a lot while we travel and recently ran across this quote from German poet, writer and literary critic Heinrich Heine. It made me consider the consequences of the way I’ve lead my life:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble dwelling with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, milk and butter of the freshest, flowers at my window, and a few fine tall trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did to me in their lifetimes. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”
                                                             – Heinrich Heine

The only problem with Heine’s concept is that I have plenty of trees with large, sturdy limbs, but no real enemies.

Oh, sure, I may have an ex-business associate or two who has allowed the years to distort imagined slights into festering wounds, perhaps a couple ex-employees who believe difficult business decisions were made at their expense, and a maybe even a few acquaintances who just don’t care for the cut of my jib. 

That being said, I certainly wouldn’t want to see any of them hanging from trees in my front yard. 

The gardeners would probably charge me a small fortune to remove their stinking carcasses.

In 2009 Tourism Australia created an ad campaign that offended a lot of people. It asked potential visitors why they hadn’t yet come to Australia by saying, “Where the bloody hell are you?”

I thought it was very cheeky and very Australian and couldn’t understand what all the hubbub was about. Here’s what it looked like:

In hindsight, that campaign now looks like a sweet, innocent relic of a time gone by. Nothing controversial about it.

Australia is about the size of the United States, but instead of fifty states it has only six. Plus one huge, wild, nearly empty area called the Northern Territory. And the NT now has an unofficial ad campaign that has horrified some and amused others.

I say it’s an unofficial campaign because the actual NT tourism organization has absolutely nothing to do with the campaign. Although its creators are still shrouded in mystery, their guerrilla ad campaign has spiraled into a marketing phenomenon. They have a big, beautiful website and they’re selling T-shirts and other logo items by the gazillion.

WARNING: IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED, STOP READING RIGHT NOW AND SKIP TO THE NEXT BLOG ITEM.

OK, I’ve stalled long enough. You’ve had plenty of time to move to the next item if you’re easily offended. Here’s the Northern Territory’s guerrilla ad campaign I’ve been talking about.

On one hand, I want to buy a T-shirt because I think it’s so funny. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d have the nerve to walk down the street clad in that shirt.

But I do admire the creative team’s creativity and ability to get people talking.

The Saturday morning market is a tradition in the Barossa Valley. It’s also the place to go for people watching.

You see restauranteurs loading up their baskets with fresh, locally-grown produce.

You see moms stocking up for next week’s healthy school lunches.

You see square, bearded, burly German farmers whose families have been tilling the local soil for generations.

You see hip newcomers who will never be mistaken for those square, burly German farmers (and would probably be horrified if they were).

You see friends getting together weekly over steaming hot mugs of coffee.

The doors open at 7:30 Saturday morning and we usually give the vendors about 30 minutes to get set up before we arrive. Jamie heads off in one direction to buy the fresh fruits and vegetables that make up the bulk of her diet. I head off in the other direction to buy Elani’s cinnamon buns and chicken and leek pies.

To each his own.

I love talking to cab drivers. It’s rare to find one who’s not an immigrant and they can all tell such an incredible tales of triumph — fleeing wretched home countries without a cent in their pockets, coming to a strange, foreign land where they spoke not a word of the language, and hard work. Lots of hard work just to survive.

Today we had cab drivers from India, Ethiopia, and Turkey.

This is Ishmael, the Turkish driver. He told us he came alone to Australia “in 1976 when Jimmy Carter was President.” He spoke no English and knew no one when he arrived.

When he left Turkey there were 120 people in his village. When he last went home, its population had dwindled to just thirty and he knew not one of them. “My family left for Italy, London, Ankara, Australia, everywhere. But no one stayed in our village.”

As you might imagine, he loves Australia because of the opportunities it provided him.

“I’m a rich man when I go back to Turkey,” he laughed.

So where do the immigrant cab drivers come from in India, Ethiopia, and Turkey?