Everyone’s heard of the Great Barrier Reef, which sits off Australia’s east coast, but almost no one’s heard of the west coast’s nearly-as-impressive Ningaloo Reef. And even fewer people have visited it.

Here’s one major difference between the two reefs: It takes an hour long boat trip to reach the Great Barrier Reef, but the Ningaloo Reef is so close to shore that you’ll only be about waist deep in water by the time you reach it.

We spent the day on the beach at the aptly-named Turquoise Bay where the reef’s about twenty feet off shore. Jamie likes to “frolic” in the water and believe me, she had a frolic-palooza today.

Most of Australia’s population lives on its east coast and that’s where most of the tourists visit, too. So when your boat finally reaches the Great Barrier Reef it will tie up next to a small armada in which each boat is fully-engorged with snorkel and mask-clad tourists pushing and shoving and dog paddling their way toward the nearest coral. I’m convinced that there are times when there are more tourists than fish in the water.

On the other hand, there were so few people on the beach and in the water at Turquoise Bay that I was able to count them.

We were on a perfect white sand beach that surrounded a bay filled with warm turquoise water and one of the world’s great wonders. And we only had to share it with 49 other people.

It was worth the drive.

In Cervantes, we ran into a situation that always amuses us when we’re in Australia.

We finally pulled into town at about 6:00 at night. The hosts at our B&B suggested a couple restaurants (which is made much simpler by the fact that there are only a couple restaurants in town).

We went around the corner to the restaurant that was recommended most highly and it was nearly empty. To be best of my recollection only three of maybe twenty tables were occupied. The hostess asked if we had reservations. When we said no, she said, “Sorry, we’re fully booked. We can’t accommodate you for dinner if you don’t have reservations.”

This is an odd Australian quirk. We first experienced it a few years ago when we tried to have dinner at a very nice restaurant in Brisbane. It was 5 o’clock and the restaurant was completely empty but the host said he couldn’t seat us because the restaurant was completely booked.

“But the place is empty,” I said.

“Yes, but we’re completely booked at 7:00.”

This was baffling. I said, “That’s two hours from now. All we want to do is eat. We’ll be out of here long before seven.”

“Really? Are you sure you can finish that quickly? If you’re not, I’ll have to ask you to leave when the other diners arrive.”

In America, restaurants try to turn tables as fast as they can and serve as many people as they can every night. Not so in Australia. They expect one party to fill a table for the evening.

This, and the fact that waiters and waitresses don’t get tips, may explain why service is soooooo slow here. You almost have to ask to have your order taken. You definitely have to ask them or “organize the bill” or you’ll sit at the damn table all night. They expect it.

And that, my friends, explains why we couldn’t get seated in an empty restaurant in Cervantes.

The first time Jamie and I visited Western Australia together, she announced that she wanted to see Wave Rock, a strange natural formation located out in the middle of nowhere hours east of Perth.

First thing to keep in mind: Western Australia is huge. Unbelievably huge. It’s as big as the continental United States west of the Rockies. But my role in life is to help make Jamie’s fantasies come true and in the case of Wave Rock, that meant driving about eight hours out of our way.

We got there and she was beaming. We got out of the car and meandered up the short path that leads from the parking lot to the rock. By the time we took about three photos Jamie said, “I’m done. Let’s get out of here. The flies are driving me crazy.”

I couldn’t freakin’ believe it. I had just driven several hours so she could spend three minutes taking a handful of photos?

“Are you kidding me? I told you the outback was full of big, horrible flies before we ever came out here.”

“I know,” she said. “But I never thought they’d be this annoying.”

We trudged back down the path to the parking lot, climbed back into the car and drove five hours back to Perth.

I tell you this story because much to our surprise we found ourselves driving past Wave Rock today on our trip between Esperance and Cervantes, Western Australia. I looked at Jamie and said, “It’s cold and windy. There won’t be any flies.” I paid the $10 admission fee and we again walked the 100 yards from the parking lot to the rock.

She again took about five photos and said, “OK, I’m done. Let’s go.”

So I think it really didn’t have anything to do with the flies. I think she just doesn’t like Wave Rock. Oh, I’m sure she’d deny that, but what other conclusion can I draw?

One thing has changed, however. Thanks to the miracle of digital cameras, we were now able to take selfies instead of asking a vision-challenged stranger to take our photo in front of Wave Rock.

Fremantle is Perth’s port city. It’s like Long Beach to Los Angeles.

Tonight’s a huge night for Aussie rules football (known in the abbreviated Aussie venacular as “footy”) here in Perth. The Fremantle (known in the abbreviated Aussie venacular as “Freo”) Dockers are playing the Sydney Swans in the semi-final game. The game is being played in the Subiaco Oval and the winner goes on to face Hawthorn in the Grand Final, footy’s equivilant of the SuperBowl. The city’s very excited because the Dockers have never been in the Grand Final before and almost everyone in the city is wearing purple, the Swans’ color, to support the team.

So, you may ask, what is Aussie Rules Football? Damned if I can explain it. We attended an Adelaide Crows game a few years ago and Jamie always managed to stand up and scream at inappropriate moments. The other Crows fans kept looking at her like she was insane. I couldn’t blame her for cheering at the wrong moments because neither of us could tell a good play from a bad play.

The game is a little bit like our football, a little bit like rugby, a little bit like soccer, but not really much like any of them. It’s incredibly fast and violent, yet the players wear no protection. The action is non-stop and it’s exciting even if you don’t know the rules.

The Crows fans have a special cheer in which they scream, “Add-uh-laid! Add-uh-laid! Add-uh-laid Croooooooooows!” (jumping up and throwing their arms in the air as they scream the last word). Jamie really got into it and was soon screaming along and throwing her arms in the air as if she had been a lifelong fan.

We moved to San Luis Obispo immediately after that trip to Australia. She went out on a job interview and during her preliminary interview with the company’s human resources director she learned that Hamish Marshall, president of the company and the man she’d be working for, was from Adelaide. What are the odds?

I told her that if she really wanted the job she should jump up in the middle of the interview and do the Crows’ cheer. She said she absolutely wouldn’t.

She somehow got the job despite ignoring my outstanding advice and worked for Hamish for several years. Hamish and I became friends. One day at lunch I told him this story and asked him what he would have done if she had done as I suggested during the interview.

“I’d have hired someone else, mate,” he said. “I’m a Carlton Blues fan.”

UPDATE: Final score Fremantle 99, Sydney 74. “Freo” goes to the Grand Final.

Before this trip most of what I knew about China was found in a book called Riding the Iron Rooster. It was written by Paul Theroux and tells the story of his travels through China in the 1980s, back when China was still mired in third world misery.

One of the things I remember most from the book is Theroux’ descriptions of the Chinese habit of spitting. He claimed that foreigners should carry umbrellas to protect themselves from the constant spitting they are sure to encounter everywhere in China. Men, women, children — they all spit everywhere all the time.

I read several years ago that the government was working hard to wipe out this epidemic of expectoration exhibitionism.

Well, let me be blunt. The campaign hasn’t worked. Everyone still spits. Men, women and children still hawk up big ol’ loogies and let ’em fly. The sidewalks are covered with glistening little puddles of spit.

Today I was waiting for Jamie in the lobby of Steve Wynn’s Hotel & Casino, a pretty spiffy place in Macao, when a very attractive young Chinese woman clad in fashionable, obviously expensive clothes walked toward me. I, being the dreamer I am, assumed she had spotted me from across the room and felt compelled to approach me to express her intense desires.

No. Not quite.

Instead of approaching me to reveal the depth of her passion she stopped a few feet short of me, hawked up a big ol’ loogie and spit it into the trash can I was standing next to.

So now you understand the reason for the photo accompanying this blog item. We saw this sign tonight posted in a position of great prominence at Hong Kong’s Harvest Moon Lantern Festival. I suppose it could mean that vendors cannot hawk their wares at the festival, but I choose to believe that it refers to spitting.

What do you think?

This photo makes Macao look like a very nice place. Do not be fooled.

I’d be willing to bet that most people have never heard of Macao. It’s always been Hong Kong’s poor cousin, another former European colony that’s now been returned to China.

For some reason I cannot explain, I’ve always been far more fascinated by Macao than by Hong Kong. It seemed more exotic, maybe because it was a Portuguese colony instead of being a stolid, boring British colony.

And now Macao has gained some cachet because it’s Asia’s new gambling mecca. Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson have pretty much abandoned building new casinos in Las Vegas, but they’re building like crazy in Macao.

So I talked Jamie into taking a one hour hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong to Macao. “It’ll be cool,” I said. “We’ll go over in the morning, walk around and see the sights, grab some lunch and come home by mid-afternoon.”

Bear with me as I digress momentarily.

Most of you know that we’re leavng California and that we’ve been looking for somewhere cool to settle. We’ve visited Boise, Idaho, Fort Collins, Colorado and McKinney, Texas.

I work with a great young art director named Chris Sutton who lives in Las Vegas. One day he asked me in an email what cities we were looking at and I sent him a list that included Reno, Nevada. As a Vegas resident, he took umbrage at that so I asked, “What’s wrong with Reno?”

He sent back this reply:

You asked me what was wrong with Reno. The better question would be “What’s right with Reno?”. The answer is nothing.

It’s a small town with nothing to do besides the old, dirty hookers at the brothel, terrible food and lackluster, rundown casinos that are barely holding on by the $4.99 Prime rib buffet.

Well, having now visited Macao I can say that Reno is to Las Vegas as Macao is to Hong Kong.

Wynn and Adelson may be making billions of dollars here, but I can’t figure out how. Macao seems kind of tacky and run down, the casinos are empty, and there doesn’t appear to be any of the energy that Hong Kong’s so famous for.

Our lunch at Wynn’s Hotel & Casino was delicious, but we didn’t see any old, dirty hookers. In fact, as far as we know, we didn’t even see any young, clean ones.

So depending on how you feel about hookers, Macao probably tops Reno even if it doesn’t top Hong Kong.

I mentioned in an earlier blog item that our friend Richie is Buddhist. In fact, it should be noted that he’s probably one of the world’s very few Cajun Buddhists.

Richie’s wife Jill calls him her little Buddha. Well, Jill, today we went to see Hong Kong’s Big Buddha.

Big is not just a figure of speech. This buddha is really big. He’s 111-feet tall and top of that he sits on top of a mountain.

The thing is, seeing the Big Buddha is not easy. Getting to the monastery required a 40-minute subway ride followed by a 30-minute bus ride up a series of switchbacks. And just when you breathe a sigh of relief because you’ve finally reached the monastery, you find out that you still haven’t reached the Big Buddha. You still need to climb a stairway with 238 steps. Then, of course, you need to do all of the above in reverse to get home.

You’ll be happy to know, Richie, that we threw all our spare change into the collection boxes located in several convenient locations around the Big Buddha.

Those monks don’t monkey around when it comes to money.

Call me crazy, but I thought we could walk into Tiananmen Square and recreate the photo of the lone Chinese man standing in front of the tanks. No tanks, of course, but I thought it would be fun to have a photo of myself assuming the man’s famous pose.

Unfortunately, you can’t do anything “lone” in China because there are 1.3 billion Chinese and maybe even more tourists. And a goodly percentage of them can be found in Tiananmen Square at any given moment.

Another thing you can’t do in China is perform a Google search. The Chinese government is still a Communist dictatorship and they censor the internet. I was unable to access Google to search for that famous photo until we got here to Hong Kong.

I thought I could get around the Chinese censors by sending my friend Ray a cryptic email asking him to “Use that popular search engine to find the famous photo of the lone guy standing in the famous square and send it back to me”. He sent me the photo, but I was unable to open it.

There are lots of other sites I was also unable to access in China. CafePress, which hosts my T-shirt business, was unavailable. YouTube, which I think is owned by Google, was unavailable. A bunch of other American news sites were unavailable.

Thank god for the First Amendment. As long as it lasts.

Despite the fact that this is the 19th anniversary of our first date, Jamie walked out of the bathroom this morning and announced that she’s leaving me. I know this comes as a huge shock to our friends and loved ones and I’d like to give you more details, but I’m unable to do that until I tell you this story:

When I was fourteen my family took a driving vacation across the country. We timed it so that we could go to a Los Angeles Dodgers game in Cincinnati and I even talked my dad into staying in the same hotel in which the team stayed. It was called the Netherlands Hilton.

My dad was a Dutch dairy farmer which by definition means he was tight with a buck. Our typical vacation accommodations were some low-priced, no-name motel along the main highway. So we knew that a downtown, brand name hotel like the Netherlands Hilton would be a move up in quality, but we didn’t know how big a move up.

When we rolled up to the hotel’s front door, a uniformed valet came out and drove the car away. That immediately made my dad wonder what he had gotten himself into. When we walked into the lobby my mom and dad’s eyes bugged out. It was huge. It was ornate. It was beyond anything they had ever experienced.

My mom turned to my dad and in complete horror said, “Bill, let’s get out of here.”

I, being sophisticated far beyond my fourteen pimply-faced years, tried to act as if I was used to walking into grand hotel lobbies. I tried equally hard not to let anyone see my legs shaking.

There is, of course, a point to this detour into history:

No matter how far and wide I may have traveled, no matter what degree of success I may have achieved, and no matter how sophisticated my friends may be, I am still my father’s son. The old saying “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” really is true. In other words, I have no trouble admitting that our hotel in Shanghai, the Waldorf Astoria, is not only far beyond my expectations, it’s far beyond my comfort level. This level of luxury just isn’t me.

With that in mind, let’s get back to the headline: Jamie announces that she’s leaving me.

She didn’t say she was leaving me for another man. She said she’s leaving me for our Waldorf Astoria toilet. And I don’t blame her.

This is the fanciest toilet I’ve ever seen. When you open the bathroom door the toilet lid raises automatically. The seat begins to warm automatically. A soft light turns on automatically. And it flushes automatically. It has a control panel that would look at home in a jumbo jet. It’s so smart that it may win a Rhodes Scholarship. And to top it all off, the little son of a bitch has apparently whispered sweet nothings in my wife’s ear and caressed her anatomical nether regions. And it has cuckolded me in the process.

So although I will miss her tremendously, I wish Jamie the best in her new life. She clearly deserves something better than what I am able to provide. I’m sure she and the toilet will have a long, wonderful life together.

I’m sure you join me in wishing them well.

Hot pots are a very popular dish in China, but especially here in Chengdu. Jamie had no idea what a hot pot was, but decided that we should try one for dinner.

She found a restaurant that specializes in hot pots just around the corner from our hotel. We went in and sat down, but realized pretty quickly that we were in trouble. The menu was entirely in Chinese with no English translations and none of the waitresses spoke a word of English.

Two of those waitresses — Sisi and Gaoxia — were unbelievably cute and they tried soooooo hard to help us. One of them pulled out her cell phone and brought up a translation app. We eventually worked it all out and each ordered a hot pot.

So now I guess I need to explain exactly what a hot pot is. It’s a pot that’s split into two halves. Half the pot contains a very spicy broth and the other half has a more mild one. Our table had a burner for each of our pots and they worked our broths to a low boil.

The waitresses started bringing things to the table and motioning that we should add them to our pots. Things like fish heads, meat, cabbage, lettuce, tomato, yams, and a few other items we were unable to identify.

It was hot. Really hot. Jamie and I were both sweating. We’re not sure if it was caused by the spicy broth, the heat generated by the boiling soup, or the stress we were both feeling.

At one point Sisi and Gaoxia took pity on us and brought spoons to our table. I used mine, Jamie didn’t use hers.

It was so much fun. The waitresses were great sports. They ended up going down the elevator with us to continue our Google Translate conversation.

So what’s our verdict on hot pots? Tasty. But next time, we’ll tell ’em to hold the fish heads.