This is a pretty famous and wholly accurate sign in this neck of the outback. I had to take a photo when we stopped for petrol.

We’ve been on the road for just under three months now, which takes care of the “time flies” part of the headline. The “flies time” takes a little more explanation.

If you’ve never heard of a bush fly, if you’ve never had one land on your face, if you’ve never had twenty land on your face and crawl into your nose and your mouth and your ears and your eyes, you can’t believe how absolutely maddening it can be.

C’mon, man, I grew up on a dairy farm with hundreds of cows that generated tons of cow shit that attracted millions of flies. So I know flies and let me assure you that there is no comparison between ordinary American house flies and Australian bush flies.

The former can be annoying, but the latter can drive you right to the brink of complete insanity.

There are billions of them. The moment you step outdoors they swarm onto your face in search of moisture from your eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

The only way to protect yourself, short of wearing a net over your head, is to do what’s called the Australian Salute.

Here’s how to do it: Hold your hand straight up in front of your face, thumb toward your nose. Now flick your wrist back and forth like a windshield wiper during a particularly heavy rain storm. Repeat. Frequently.

It won’t make the flies leave you alone, but it will provide a little temporary relief until the next squadron of flies comes in for a landing.

There’s nothing funnier than sitting inside your nice, air conditioned house and watching Aussie TV newscasters doing field reports while trying not to do the Aussie Salute as flies land on their faces and crawl up their noses. Eventually they can’t stand it anymore and are forced to do the Salute to flick them away.

Yes, we’re easily amused.

Turns out Australia has an illegal alien problem. Just before our last trip down under, a boatload of Afghanis had attempted to come ashore in order to request asylum, but the government wasn’t buying it. Instead of granting them asylum, they decided to discourage similar actions by putting the asylum seekers into a detention facility somewhere in the outback beyond Coober Pedy.

We ended up getting stopped at a traffic checkpoint somewhere south of town. Immigration officers required us to get out of our car, peered into the interior and checked to see what was in our trunk.

I asked one of the officers what they were looking for and he said, “Some illegal aliens broke out of the detention facility in Woomera. We captured most of them, but three are still on the loose.”

“What if you can’t find them?” I asked.

“No problem,” he said. “If they travel during the day we’ll find them or they’ll die of thirst. And if they travel in the dark they’ll eventually fall into one of the opal holes and never be seen again. Problem solved either way.”

If only the United States had opals on its southern border.

Please pardon the near novel length of this blog item. I swear that its disparate elements will eventually come together to make a point:

Many years ago Jamie and I took a trip to New Zealand. We had reservations at a hotel in the small town of Franz Josef on the west coast of the South Island. We drove all day to get there and didn’t arrive until after dark. We followed signage to the hotel which was, I must admit, pretty dark and uninviting.

Jamie didn’t like the looks of the place and said, “I don’t really want to stay here. Let’s see what else is available in town.”

Franz Josef is a very small town that exists only as a base of tourism for the massive Franz Josef Glacier. We drove from one end of the town to the other in about two minutes and didn’t see anything we liked better so she said, “Well, let’s go back and check out the first place. If it’s not good enough we can pick one of the other places.”

We walked into the lobby and got one of the great shocks of our lives. The place was old, it was huge, it was magnificent. It looked like the hotel in The Shining. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was one of the finest hotels I’ve ever seen. And it was virtually empty.

Turns out it was the last week of the season and they had few guests because they were preparing to close it up for the winter in a matter of days. The hotel manager said, “We’re going to give you the Duke of Edinburgh Suite. It’s called that because it’s the suite we gave the Duke when he stayed with us.”

They showed us to our suite. It seemed impressive, but as I said, it had been a very long day on the road so we went right to bed.

I had to get up a few hours later to make a phone call back to the United States. The phone call had to be timed so that it was early evening in the United States, which meant it had to be made early morning in New Zealand. Very early morning, in fact.

I crept quietly out of bed so Jamie could continue sleeping and made the phone call in the suite’s foyer. Then, since I was already up, thought I should look around our suite to see if there was anything interesting we had missed in our rush to get to bed the prior night.

Drapery covered one wall of the suite. I opened the drapes and saw one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen: The immense, stunning Franz Joseph Glacier looming right outside our window.

I quickly pulled the drapes aside, opened the bedroom door and excitedly said, “Jamie, wake up!”

She is, as you know, a sweet, wonderful woman, but the risk you take when you awaken her from a deep sleep is similar to the one you take when poking a grizzly bear with a sharp stick. She merely groaned, so at great personal risk, I repeated it.

“Jamie, wake up!”

One eye flickered opened. She closed it immediately and groaned, “You better have a good reason for waking me up this early.”

“Roll over to my side of the bed,” I said excitedly. “Look out the door.”

She rolled over, complaining as she did it. She opened that one eye again and then both eyes immediately snapped open. She shot up in bed and with all the eloquence she could muster at that early hour said, “Fuck!”

I took it as an affirmation that she thought the view outside our window was just as incredible as I thought it was. In reality, everything was incredible — the view, the suite, the hotel, the town, the glacier, everything.

We have always used that experience in Franz Josef as an object lesson. We try not to pre-judge situations and people and often remind ourselves of the night we were so pleasantly surprised in Franz Josef, New Zealand.

I tell you this long, convoluted story to set up our stay in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia.

Sorry. It does not have a happy ending like the Franz Josef story. In fact, it may be the antithesis of the Franz Josef story.

Tennant Creek is so ugly that we’d prefer being almost anywhere else. Even Port Hedland and you know how much we hated that town. Tennant Creek is a dusty, dirty little outback burg with no redeeming qualities, including our hotel. Especially our hotel.

In my defense our hotel got the top score among Tennant Creek hotels on TripAdvisor. But that’s kind of like saying your sister was the best-looking contestant in an ugly woman pageant.

Jamie is always quick to tell me that I’m unobservant. Somehow I didn’t notice a very important line in our reservation confirmation, a line that should have given me a clue about what we were getting into. It read, “Check in at the Sportsman’s bar which is entered from the main street.”

Much like on our visit to Franz Josef, Jamie looked at the hotel as we drove past and said, “Let’s see what else is in town.” Perhaps it was the fact that we had to register in the pub. Perhaps it was the band of aborigines loitering around the front door of the pub. Perhaps it was the drive-through liquor store attached to the hotel. Who knows?

Again like Franz Joseph, it took us about two minutes to drive from one end of the town to the other and nothing else looked any better, so we returned to the hotel where we had reservations.

As instructed, we walked into the pub which was filled with what appeared to us to be drunks, degenerates and desperados. They may have actually been fine, upstanding citizens, pillars of the community, but we were in no mood to find out.

I walked up to the bartender and said, “Where’s the hotel?”

“Right here,” she replied.

“Where?” I asked, because as far as I could tell I was still standing in the middle of a pub rather than the lobby of a city’s top-rated hotel.

“This is reception. I can give you a key.”

This is odd, I thought, but I am, after all, in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, so nothing should surprise me.

She handed us a key and we walked out to our room. When we opened the door, Jamie immediately wrinkled up her face and said, “Yuck. It smells like your underwear that night in Beijing.” (Note: That is an incident I would still prefer to ignore.)

“C’mon,” I said hopefully, “that’s just a disinfectant smell.”

She seemed to buy that story, but after a short pause I could not resist saying, “The real question is, what are they disinfecting?”

I could go on, but I won’t. We’re here for one night. We’ll be out of here bright and early in the morning, taking with us memories of our night in Tennant Creek and the slight scent of disinfectant. Well, mostly the scent of disinfectant.

UPDATE: Jamie later said, “In all fairness, the room isn’t that bad. It’s been freshly-painted, there’s new bedding, new crown molding, and a new flat-screen television.” Then she paused before saying, “Just don’t go outside.” In other words, the hotel really wasn’t bad, but Tennant Creek sucked.

On one of our earlier trips down under we were driving across the Nullarbor Plains from Adelaide to Perth. It’s a long, boring three-day drive and Jamie had just tilted her seat back to take a little nap when I slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Camel!”

Sure enough, a big honkin’ male camel was grazing along the side of the road. We jumped out of the car to take photos, but he was wary of us and made sure that we never got closer than 50-100 feet.

Most people are surprised to learn that there are camels in Australia. With good reason. They aren’t native to Australia, but thousands of them were imported in the 19th century for transportation and construction in the central and western parts of the country. Trucks and railroads eventually did away with the need for the camels so many of them were simply released into the outback.

That means Australia is now the only country in the world where herds of feral camels roam freely. Of course, the camels did what comes naturally — hump — and now they think there may be more than 1,000,000 of them out there.

Some of the wild ones have been tamed and are now used to pry money out of tourists like Jamie. She loves them. On previous trips, we’ve ridden them at sunrise at Ayer’s Rock and at sunset on Cable Beach here in Broome. This morning we completed the trifecta by riding them at sunrise on Cable Beach.

Camels, of course, can go days without drinking, a feat that’s impossible for most Australians. If you know what I mean.

I used to love Maui so much that I thought I’d retire there but that dream ended when the island began turning into a smaller version of Waikiki. Too much traffic, too many tourists, too many condos, and the last straw for me, a Costco. I missed the small town Maui that I loved so much on my first visit.

That explains why we love Broome. It’s a small town (population 16,000) out in the middle of nowhere that looks and feels just like Lahaina looked and felt 30 years ago. But because it’s so far off the beaten track, I think it will stay this way as long as I’m around to see it.

Tonight we went to Broome’s Sunday night market. The main street was closed down and vendors moved in to sell their wares. There were exotic foods, hand-made jewelry and clothing, funky longhaired artists, and everything else you’d expect to find at a tropical market.

A cool band was playing down at one end of the street, right outside the gritty bar where all the local guys hang out. Giant fruit bats were swooping overhead. Warm tropical breezes were wafting. And everyone had smiles on their faces.

And to top it all off, a drunken old aborigine woman came over and held hands with me after telling me that the young guitar player in the band was her boyfriend.

Maybe he is, but I still think I have a shot.

There’s a frog in our toilet in Broome, Western Australia. I’ve tried to get him out, but he’s a clever little bugger and always manages to climb into an inaccessible little crevice where I can’t reach him.

We’re staying in a wonderful resort hotel called the Bali Hai. We stayed here five years ago and one of the reasons we came back is because we loved the outdoor bathroom that came with our room. Now don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not an outhouse. It’s very cool. We’re in the tropics here and the toilet and shower are outdoors, accessible only through a door from our room, so we can shower out in the warm, inviting tropical breezes. And, of course, the fact that the toilet is outdoors also makes it easier to understand how and why a frog has taken up residence in it.

But let’s pause briefly for a little back story:

Terry Deal, one of the first people we met in San Luis Obispo, is a demented son of a bitch, which may explain why he married Sandy, a psychologist. Being married to Terry must be like living in a case study for her.

A dozen or so years ago, before we moved into our new home, Terry was telling Jamie all the things she would enjoy about life in Edna Ranch. Then he said, “But there’s one thing you have to watch out for. Rats in the toilet.”

Jamie was horrified, which was exactly the reaction Terry wanted, so he continued.

“They climb up the sewer line into the toilets. So if you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, always turn the light on to make sure there’s not a rat in your toilet.”

Terry is a wonderful man, Jamie thought. I have immense respect for him. He wouldn’t make up something like that.

I, on the other hand, thought, Of course he would. He’s Terry Deal. Making crap up is one of his specialties. His ability to make the preposterous sound reasonable is one of the things I love about him.

Well, damn it, the woman has been turning on the light and waking me up in the middle of the night for twelve years now. I’ve told her that there are no rats in the toilet but she chooses to believe Terry because (a) He’s an esteemed educator and author, (b) He’s a doctor, and (c) He’s not her husband.

So that brings us back to the frog in the toilet in Broome, Western Australia.

Thanks to Terry Deal, Jamie is afraid to use the toilet. She’s fears that the frog will bite her on the butt. Or worse.

I hope you’re happy, Terry.

Jamie loves eco-lodges, but as far as I can tell, “eco-lodge” is a term derived from ancient Latin that means “You’re going to pay a small fortune to sleep in a tent and then pay through the nose for any additional services.”

Five years ago we stayed at a fabulous Australian eco-lodge, El Questro, in the northeast corner of Western Australia. This was when I first started to get sick, but didn’t yet know I had Lyme Disease.

We drove for nine hours to get to there. And when I say “we” I mean “I”, because Jamie is terrified of driving on the other side of the road. I was sick as the proverbial dog by the time we arrived. Our “luxurious tent cabin” was not yet ready for us, so we found chairs in the outdoor lobby of the eco-lodge. I felt terrible and went to sleep immediately.

An hour or so later they came over to tell us that our “luxurious tent cabin” was ready for us and that we should walk to it so we understood where it was located before we attempted to park our car.

As we were trudging through the sand, I felt awful and I guess that was clear to Jamie. She said, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Where’s the luxury?” I whined. She, being he dutiful wife that she is, completely ignored my plaintive cry.

Well, it turns out the luxurious tent cabin wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was very nice. El Questro was spectacular and we had a wonderful time.

And that brings us back to our current eco-lodge.

We’re in the middle of a heatwave and it was 108 degrees when we checked into this particular eco-lodge (which shall remain nameless). I once again found myself trudging through sand to get to our tent cabin. I was less than impressed, but Jamie immediately proclaimed that the resort was everything she had hoped it would be. I pointed out the mold on the tent’s ceiling, but she told me to shut up and stop complaining.

We sat by the pool and ordered drinks. When the waiter delivered them he said, “We didn’t have any coconut milk, so I made the piña colada with skim milk. Let me know if it’s ok.” One sip was enough to tell that it wasn’t. When we complained that the other drink, the one named after the lodge, didn’t taste very good, either, he said, “Yeah, that one’s not very good. I don’t know why they keep it on the menu.” And then he charged us $16 for each of them.

That small, but lovely pool overlooked a stunning golden sand beach that we later shared with just one other couple and their two small children. But eventually you have to leave the pool and the beach and return to your tent cabin. The one that has no television, no internet and no air conditioning. It does have a rusty fan that recirculates the air, but recirculating 108 degree air does not provide much comfort, much less luxury.

We went to sleep with the fan blowing full speed, but doing nothing to alleviate the heat. Yet somehow, by the middle of the night, it was so freezing ass cold that we had to turn off the fan and throw another blanket on the bed.

I could go on with a litany of bitches, but I won’t. Let me just sum this story up with what Jamie said by the morning of day two:

“I’m done. Give me my creature comforts.”

Everyone in favor say, “Aye.” Ahhh, it appears we have a unanimous decision.

This is a photo we took as we were leaving Port Hedland, Western Australia. In case you can’t tell, there’s a long, long train going from left to right in the photo. It’s a nearly endless line of box cars heading inland to be filled at the region’s numerous mines.

I’ve had to handle some difficult advertising accounts in my career, companies that made products I didn’t believe in or products that were inferior to their competitors. In retrospect, those accounts were easy. The guy I pity is the poor son of a bitch who has to create advertising for the Port Hedland Tourism Board.

I’m sure the people who live here think it’s a nice little place, but they are wrong. They can only think that because they’ve never been anywhere else.

Let me back up a bit. You probably don’t know this, but Western Australia sits on the richest deposits of minerals on earth. Swing a pick in any direction and you’ll probably strike a vast deposit of gold or iron or nickel or diamonds or copper or coal or damn near any other valuable mineral you can think of.

The Chinese economy is booming, which has created a nearly insatiable appetite for Aussie minerals. Port Hedland exists, as far as I can tell, purely as a port to ship them to China.

We were driving along in the middle of nowhere, a hundred kilometers or so south of Port Hedland, when all of a sudden we came upon a huge Chinese-owned iron ore processing plant alongside the highway. The empty highway was suddenly filled with trucks. There were signs directing us to different mines and processing plants every few miles. There were clusters of manufactured homes to house the miners and related workers. We even read that the Chinese are building an entire port from scratch just to ship the minerals home.

So we spent the night in Port Hedland. I’m sure that the town existed before the mineral boom began, but I could not begin to explain why. And this opinion has nothing to do with the fact that our room, which was advertised as having a “ocean view” had, in reality, a view of some stinky mudflats. (Damn advertising guys.)

The town is crisscrossed by new roads and new power lines leading to new mines and new factories and new port facilities. It was all new and yet it sucked. Badly.

Let me make this perfectly clear: If you ever hear me say we’re going to Port Hedland on vacation, please put a bullet in my head. It would be considered an act of kindness and no court in the world would convict you.

Western Australia is Australia’s largest state. But unless you’ve been here, unless you’ve seen the vast empty expanses, unless you’ve driven the highways and byways for yourself, it’s impossible to comprehend how immense it really is.

Australia and the continental United States are roughly the same size. I mentioned in an earlier post that the state of Western Australia is as large as the continental United States all the way from the eastern slopes of the Rockies to the shores Pacific Ocean.

If Western Australia were an independent nation (and many of its residents seem to think it either is or should be) it would be the tenth largest nation on earth.

Russia: 6,591,027 square miles
Canada: 3,854,082 square miles
United States: 3,717,727 square miles (3,119,884 sq miles in the continental USA)
China: 3,704,426 square miles
Brazil: 3,285,618 square miles
Australia: 2,967,124 square miles
India: 1,269,009 square miles
Argentina: 1,068,019 square miles
Kazakhstan: 1,048,877 square miles
Western Australia: 976,790 square miles

Before one of our earlier trips down under, we told our Aussie friend Hamish Marshall that we were going to drive west from his hometown of Adelaide, South Australia, across the Nullarbor Plains, all the way to Perth, Western Australia. It’s like driving from New Orleans to Los Angeles except that there’s nothing but flat, empty desert in between. He was incredulous. He looked at us in horror and said, “That’s what we have airplanes for, mate.”

Most of it is absolutely flat and empty, but some parts are spectacularly beautiful. Take the Bungle Bungles, for example. It’s a 173 square mile national park that’s covered with thousands of eerie, beehive shaped hills. It’s really an incredible sight. But Western Australia is so big and so empty that no one knew the Bungle Bungles existed until a documentary film crew stumbled upon them in the 1983.

Google Maps says we’ll drive 6,000 miles on this trip. Of course, that doesn’t include any side trips or any of the times we get really lost and miles off course.

In other words, we should end up driving about a million miles.