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. 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. It’s very cool. 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.

Let me sum up how much Jamie didn’t like Port Hedland: When we stopped at the Sandfire Roadhouse to top off our gas tank, she said, “We should have stayed here instead.”

Fact is, we almost did exactly that. When I was planning this trip I saw that we had a short day driving to Port Hedland so I looked at the map and tried to figure out if there was another place to stay a couple hours further down the road.

The Sandfire Roadhouse looked promising, yet hideous. I Googled and Googled but could find neither an email address nor a telephone number. Since I had no way of contacting them, I erred on the side of caution and opted for lovely Port Hedland.

Who knew we’d prefer an aptly-named place like the Sandfire Roadhouse to the region’s largest town?

This is another one of those times we drove all day without seeing anything large enough to be defined as a town. But we did come to a roadhouse every hundred and twenty kilometers or so.

This is the Pardoo Roadhouse where gasoline cost $7.80 per gallon. Who cares how much it costs? Just let me fill my tank so we can get out of here as quickly as possible.

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.

Some Australian towns have very odd names. Like this one.

The flat, dry outback is not what you expect to see when you arrive in the tropics. Where are the palm trees? Where are the beautiful native girls? Where are the mai tais?

On the other hand, the outback can also be hauntingly beautiful. Especially in the morning and the evening.

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.

This has nothing to do with our trip except that we saw this commercial on Aussie television last night and both said, “That’s a great commercial.” It was especially powerful for Jamie because of her work in Special Ed.

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.

Shaquille O’Neal used to give himself a lot of nicknames. The Big Aristotle, The Big Maravich, and The Big Baryshnikov to name just a few. If we asked The Big Nicknamer to give one to Western Australia, it would probably be The Big Empty.

The population of Western Australia is about 2.3 million. But when you consider that 1.7 million of them live in metropolitan Perth, that leaves just 600,000 people spread out across the rest of this immense state. And since most of those folks live to the south of Perth that leaves the great northern section virtually unpopulated.

For example, today we drove 480 miles from Kalbarri (population 1600) to Exmouth (population 3200) but never passed through another town along the way. Not one. Just empty outback. Oh, sure, there was a roadhouse (otherwise known as a gas station) every hundred miles or so, but nothing else.

The only city of any size north of Perth is Geraldton, a booming regional capital with only 25,000 people. We won’t hit another town that with that many people (Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory) for the next 3,000 miles.

The Big Empty, indeed.