This is Whispering Wall, which is located not too far from Angaston. It’s actually a dam, but I guess Whispering Dam doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Why, you might ask, do they call it Whispering Wall? Because you can stand at one end of it, whisper something and it can be heard perfectly by someone standing 450 feet away at the other end of the wall. Sounds impossible, but it’s true.

Check out the photo closely. Can you spot Jamie over there at the other end of the wall? I whispered something to her just before I took the photo. She heard it and responded.

Unfortunately, she has insisted that I not provide any details of the conversation.

Use your imaginations.

 

This is an Aussie Burger. It may be the one thing Jamie loves most about this country. I think they’re disgusting, but she adamantly disagrees. In her mind, they rank right up there with the Sydney Opera House and riding camels on the beach in Broome.

When they put one down on the table in front of you, it may look like a typical American hamburger but do not be fooled. Look under the bun and you’ll find three very odd ingredients that no self-respecting American chef would put on a hamburger — a fried egg, shredded carrots, and a slice of beet root. Yes, you read that correctly. A slice of freakin’ beet root.

Yuck.

Our Aussie friend Hamish Marshall owns SLO Brew, a very cool pub and restaurant in San Luis Obispo. Jamie loves to eat there because he has Aussie Burgers on the menu.

I eat there in spite of it.

This is an Australian iced coffee. They’re so good that I’d be faced with a difficult decision if forced to choose between Jamie and one of these little treasures.

Rest assured, this is no American iced coffee where they just refrigerate regular coffee and maybe put some ice cubes in the glass. No, this is something entirely different. Entirely better. As if it were created by superior beings who came to earth just to give us this precious gift.

Start with espresso, pour in a little milk, add big scoop of ice cream, then top it all off with whipped cream and sprinkle a little chocolate on top.

Sure, the scenery in Australia is incredible and the people are great, but iced coffee is the best thing in the whole country.

This is our fourth extended stay in the Barossa Valley, our home away from home in Australia.

The Barossa (yes, the Aussies refer to it as the Barossa just as they refer to Alice Springs as The Alice, to Western Australia as The WA, and to two other regions of The WA as The Kimberley and The Pilbara. It’s just one of those strange little Aussie-isms that cannot be explained) looks a lot like San Luis Obispo. It’s a long, wide valley surrounded by green hills (or yellow ones, depending on this time of year). Vineyards carpet the floor of the valley and creep up the edges of the hills. It has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.

There are no cities in the Barossa, just a few charming old villages scattered here and there among the vineyards. Nuriootpa has 5700 people; Tanunda, where we’ve always stayed in the past, has 4500; Angaston, where we’re staying this time, and Lyndoch have 1900 each.

The Barossa is a wonderful place and we really do feel at home here.

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.

If you look closely you’ll see the word “Train” on the left side of the front bumper on this big rig. On the other side, which you probably can’t see, it says “Road”. Please be introduced to a prime example of the Australian Road Train.

In America we call ’em big rigs or 18-wheelers. But mere big rigs aren’t big enough for the roads in the outback. The one shown in the photo above may have three trailers, but it’s not even a particularly impressive version of a road train. They often add an extra trailer, sometimes two extras, and who knows how many wheels, and ship vast quantities of stuff cross country. This one is filled with cattle who are going off, as Jamie would say, to the cattle spa.

You’ll be barreling down the highway and suddenly come up behind one of these monsters. Be very careful when trying to pass because they’re long. Really long. And it’s easy to misjudge how much time and distance you’ll need to veer into the opposite lane, speed up and pass one, and get safely back in the correct lane.

I told you Coober Pedy is an odd town, but this should confirm that opinion. Much of the town is located underground in abandoned opal mines. For example, this is our hotel, which was the highest rated one on TripAdvisor.com.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not just an abandoned mine shaft. They’ve gone in and cut out rooms and hallways and squared off the edges to make the rooms look like rooms, and they’ve shellacked the walls and floors and ceiling so that there’s no dust.

There are still veins of opals running through the walls, but they’ve covered them with sheets of plexiglass so you can still see, but can’t touch them. They actually warned us not to do any digging in our room and said they’d know if we tried because all the sounds are magnified through the walls.

It’s really kind of cool. And I mean that both figuratively and literally. It’s a constant 68 degrees underground day and night, winter and summer. And that’s a big improvement over the scorching temps that you’d face outside in the summer.

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.

Coober Pedy is a town that exists only because it sits on the world’s largest source of opals. As you drive into town, each side of the highway is flanked by thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of pyramid-shaped piles of dirt. They’re created when opal miners drill 80-feet deep round holes straight down into the earth.

After digging out any opals they find, the miners abandon the the holes, leave the piles of dirt behind and and move on to dig new holes nearby.

Kind of bizarre, isn’t it?