A trip down under

Crossing the Nullarbor by bus allows
visitors an unusually close look at the
Australian desert.

Australian snapshots: Scenery in
the Nullarbor, Quorn’s “hotel row,”
the city of Wyalla.

THE ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP
The first stroke of luck was my trip across the Nullarbor Plain, Australia’s huge, southern desert.

Since I arrived in Australia, I’d been trying to figure out how I was going to get across the Nullarbor, and actually experience it. A train would whiz across in two days; a bus would whiz, too, but slower.

Then one night, at the Augusta- Baywatch Manor hostel, at the southwestern tip of Australia, a retired couple from New Zealand told me about the bus tour they’d signed up for online. A late-night call to Craig Haslam, owner of Nullarbor Traveller (www.thetraveller.net.au) had me booked on the tour as well. Haslam even agreed to have me picked up in Norseman. “That’s where we pick up the Eyre Highway for the Nullarbor,” he explained.

Nine days later, the Nullarbor Traveller bus, pulling a camp trailer with swags (packs of personal belongings), tents, food and luggage pulled into Norseman, and I started my 2,000-kilometer adventure across the Nullarbor to Adelaide.

Kylie Johnson, our driver / guide / cook / mechanic – who also has a degree in environmental science – was an encyclopedia of information about the natural wonder that we were crossing. And she could cook: Every night, we chowed down on a one-pot meal that would’ve made Emeril drool with envy.

My first night under the glorious stars was spent at a sheep ranch that rented camping space,and a communal kitchen and showers to “roadies.” Our best nights, however, were those spent bush camping so far away from light pollution that we could see stars from horizon to horizon.

An average day had us up at sunrise, knocking down and storing our tents, grabbing a quick breakfast, and hitting the road by 8 a.m. to bus from experience to experience: limestone caves; sand dunes the size of pyramids, which Johnson taught us to sandboard down; an aboriginal reserve; stops along the Great Australian Bight at dolphin- and whale-watching lookouts, as well as at white-sand beaches and seaside cliffs that gave new meaning to the word spectacular; an off-road dune buggy trek; mountain walks through million-year-old canyons and old-growth eucalyptus forests that put us up close and personal with Mother Nature’s handiwork; and encounters with koalas, emus, wombats, lizards, snakes, bats, spiders the size of my fist, grasshoppers the size of my thumb and, of course, ’roos.

Sunburned, dust-grimed and exhausted, we arrived in Adelaide and were deposited one-by-one at our lodgings.

HOT ROCKS AND MAORIS
I had flown from Sydney to Auckland, figuring I’d use my week in New Zealand’s biggest city to decompress from non-stop traveling. Three days there, and I’d hit all the major tourist sites and museums, and climbed a couple of the city’s extinct volcanoes, too.

I asked the person running the Auckland City hostel’s travel desk where I could go to experience smalltown New Zealand. “You've got to go to Rotorua,” she said. “It’s not that small, but it’s so neat.”

Once again, luck was on my side.

The next day, my backpack and I were on the early-morning bus to Rotorua. By 2 p.m. I was checked in at the local hostel – Kiwi Paka – ready to explore its backyard, Kuirau Park, full of bubbling mud holes, sulfur-belching ponds and gurgling hot springs. “Don’t test the water,” advised the hostel’s manager. “Those springs are hot enough to boil eggs.”

Rotorua (and the land for miles around) sits on top of what was once an active volcano: eons ago it erupted and then subsided, leaving a shattered crust – through which gasses, steam, and boiling mud and water escape – and the crater lake upon whose shores Rotorua is built. (The best place for a view of the city, lake and surrounding countryside is the Rotorua Museum of Art and History’s lookout.)

Much of the city’s hot water, heat and electricity are thermally generated. Everywhere you go in the town and the surrounding area, you run into mud pits, hissing steam vents, bubbling hot water pools, geysers and, along the lake’s shore, ground so warm that the local gulls use it to incubate their eggs.

But hot rocks aren’t the only things Rotorua has going for it: It’s been a major Maori settlement since the 1400s. Australian snapshots: Scenery in the Nullarbor, Quorn’s “hotel row,” the city of Wyalla.

This is the place to learn about the Maoris. At Te Puia and the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute, you can get a feel for traditional culture and crafts (and see kiwis, too – the national bird of New Zealand). At Tamaki Village and Mitai Village you can spend an evening listening to Maori songfests and enjoying Maori hangi (a method of cooking in outdoor pit ovens). At Ohinimutu, a present-day Maori community built on some of the most thermally active land in the area, you can stroll neighborhood streets and byways where everyone seems to have a soaking pool in their yard.

And, due to the fact that there are several institutes teaching traditional crafts, it’s also the place to pick up native crafts at very reasonable prices.

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