Cow Statue in Rockhampton

The Great Western Hotel is owned by Australian country music star, Lee Kernaghan.  Its marketing material describes it best:

“Located in Rockhampton, Australia’s Beef Capital, The Great Western Hotel is one of Australia’s most renowned and iconic hotels.

First Licensed in 1878, the 130 year old Great Western Hotel has been the meeting place for many generations of Central Queenslanders and tourists alike. Now in the 21st century it is a national tourist destination. Built on 4115 square meters, the Great Western Hotel pays tribute to contemporary Australian bush Culture with its walls showcasing the history of local people and surrounding areas.

The Great Western Hotel has always been known for providing great steaks and cold beverages. It features 4 Bars, an award winning Steakhouse, air-conditioned Gaming Saloon and Boardroom along with a Western Retail store. The undercover entertainment venue is the largest in regional Australia with seating in excess of 2,000 people.

The Great Western is the only known hotel in Australia with a covered rodeo arena and entertainment venue. This makes this unique hotel a constant hive of activity with Rodeos and an ever increasing array of entertainers.”

Honestly, our steak dinner was not that great.  The concept of the steakhouse/watering hole is so exceptionally well done in Queensland (I mean exceptionally well executed, not well done since I’m a medium rare gal myself!), so an average steak really stands out.  But, we grabbed a couple of XXXXs and established a beachhead for the rodeo festivities. 

The buckin’ broncos kicked off at 7:00 p.m. sharp, but the people-watching kept us more than occupied before the show officially started.  Andy and I were both struck with the authenticity of the entire atmosphere — how familiarly rural and country-western.  The travel guidebooks describe The Great Western Hotel like the movie set of a spaghetti western.  But, it was just like being in Ft. Worth or Amarillo or Tulsa … right down to the hats, belt buckles, rodeo clowns, the down-home announcer, and even the advertisements for country music radio stations, auctioneer services, earth-moving rentals and quarry supplies.  This rodeo ring is not just entertainment or schtick, but a real stop on the international professional rodeo circuit – we’re talking about competitive bull-riding!  A Friday night at The Great Western Hotel can make or break a rodeo cowboy.

The Infamous Great Western Hotel in Rockhampton, Queensland.

After the competitive riders finished, the ring opens up to kids (tons of help and supervision, very cute too) and drunk patrons (hysterical).  Evidently, America’s litigiousness and love of personal injury attorneys hasn’t made it to Central Queensland yet.  A couple of guys from New South Wales had apparently a lost a bet on State of Origin and their punishment was public ridicule while lasting about a half second on the bull.  Luckily, we needed a designated driver so I was sober, but I fear if we were both on the sauce, Andy would’ve taken a spin.  What could possibly go wrong?

The rodeo kids were hysterically cute. I loved this guy going for the style points!

After the rodeo festivities concluded, we moved inside to watch the U.S. versus Slovenia match.  At that late hour, only hard-partying locals were left which was interesting and stereotype-reinforcing.  We got some pretty strange looks from this crew … evidently not much of a soccer crowd! 

With about 30 minutes left, the score was Slovenia 2 and U.S. 1, and the bartender decided to close and kicked everybody out.  We jumped in the car and raced to the after hours bar about 5 blocks away.  At 2:30 a.m., bad drunken karaoke was in full swing, but the match was on the television so we elbowed our way to a good view.  The U.S. tied it up (and had the winning goal wrongly disallowed), and Andy thwarted two different pick-pocket attempts … definitely time to head home.

The Beach at Mooloolaba from the Boardwalk

With a population of about 10,000, Mooloolaba is 60 miles from Brisbane making it an easy beach getaway.  The word, Mooloolaba, is probably derived from the Aboriginal word “mulu” meaning snapper fish, or “mulla” meaning red-bellied black snake.

On one of his famous Queensland driving tours, Graham has taken us to Mooloolaba twice already, so it was already old hat when we arrived.  We were also pretty hungry.  During the passage, I tried to light the stove to prepare our lunch and the propane tank is dry.  Grrr … if it’s not one thing, it’s twenty others — we just got the stupid refrigerator going!

Caloundra from the sea on the quick passage from Scarborough to Mooloolaba

We parked the boat in Mooloolaba Harbor in the mouth of the Mooloolah River which is well-sheltered in the lee of Point Cartwright.  Immediately we saw a familiar boat and sure enough, we were greeted by Cutty Wren, who we haven’t seen since Moorea (and Fatu Hiva and Cartagena before that).  We checked in with the marina, walked the beachside trail to town (complete with turkey vultures and magpies), hit the Mooloolaba Surf Club for some beers and shrimp cocktail and sat on the verandah watching the surf life-saving club train in their red swimsuits. 

With so many examples from popular culture like Baywatch and the Beach Boys, most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that the beach lifeguard culture was born in Australia around 1907 as a response to several drowning accidents at Sydney-area beaches.   Surf lifesaving clubs are a very popular tradition throughout Australia with some 305 clubs patrolling over 400 beaches with 24,968 members as of 2004.

A “Lifeguard” is a paid employee patrolling the beach.  A “Surf Lifesaver” is a volunteer who provides additional support during periods of high beach traffic (summer, unseasonably warm weekends, public holidays, etc.), organizes community programs such as swimming lessons, and sponsors festivals and competitions.

Established in 1922, the Mooloolaba Surf Club is one of the oldest surf and life-saving clubs in Australia.  It’s the epicenter for the town’s social calendar and even publishes an annual report.

The entrance to the marina in Coffs Harbour is a little tight.

Originally called Korffs Harbour, Coffs Harbour was settled in the late 1860′s and the jetty was erected in 1892 for the logging industry.  Honestly, there’s just not that much to it … lots of retirees, families on long weekends, lesbians and owners of mountain bikes that cost more than a car.  I walked the main parts of town, browsed the shops, had a coffee while overlooking Coffs Creek … that’s about it.  I understand that during the summer, there are probably more outdoorsy things to do, but otherwise, there’s just not that much to it.  There’s also a zoo, botanical gardens, and other family-friendly activities, but we’re just not into stuff like that.  The small harbor is pretty nice, and I had the entire public jetty and the small beach all to myself.  I tried to sit and read, but that didn’t last very long since it was quite blustery.

Evidently, Coffs Harbour’s main attraction is a gigantic banana statue thing, but it’s too far to walk from the marina, so we didn’t go.  We probably should’ve, but I just couldn’t force myself to spend money on a taxi to go see a giant banana.  Plus, we all know how Andy feels about bananas!  

This evening, we went to the Coffs Harbour Yacht Club for TGIF Happy Hour – AUS$3.00 schooners and free munchies between 5:45 and 6:45.  It was actually pretty fun.  The telly was on, and the sports segment of the local news was running highlights of the Coffs Harbour lawn bowling club.  Is that local news, or what?  We then went to the main strip in town where there’s two Thai restaurants, two Italian restaurants, two seafood restaurants, and two Indian restaurants.  We made the mistake of going to the one Chinese restaurant which was pretty bad.  It was obviously a mistake to go to the restaurant lacking a local competitor in its genre.

So, Coffs Harbour is nothing special and the weather warning has expired.  We’ll probably head off tomorrow morning, although we need to check the tide tables and the depth at the channel entrance.

Spectacle at the Dock in Newcastle

We spent Sunday night at a nice and pretty famous inn called Peppers in Pokolbin, where we had a surprisingly good degustation menu for dinner … scallops, quail, and veal, all very nice.  We also enjoyed delicious dessert called “Night at the Movies” with savory popcorn-flavored sorbet, Coca-Cola jello, malted milk balls, sweet Sprite sorbet with pistachios, and a couple of other chocolate items with creative twists on candy treats.  Very yummy!  We then passed out watching an Australian 60 Minutes special on the American Amish. 

On Monday, we had breakfast, did some wine-tasting, and met three guys, all Ph.D. candidates in math, in the area after a convention in Sydney … one from South Africa, one from Colombia, and one from Switzerland.  All three were wickedly smart and super interesting.  We had a lovely late lunch together, and then Andy and I drove home to Newcastle.   

Back in Newcastle, we took advantage of having the car, drove around a little just sight-seeing in general, and ended up at the local brewery at Queen’s Wharf for some televised rugby league, beer, and burgers.

First, we went to the Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club for an adult beverage.  It’s a very nice place, and chock full of local boaters.  Andy and I were eavesdropping on the conversation going on at the table behind us.  They were in a heated discussion about the Gold Coast and how it is culture-free.  We hear this a lot, and of course, the same criticisms are frequently made about the United States.  And I think it’s all pretty harsh.  I mean think about it … places like Sydney and Los Angeles are just never going to be Rome or Istanbul, but that doesn’t mean that they’re culture-free. 

In a way, Australia has a much better excuse than the United States.  Captain Cook and the Endeavor landed in 1770, but the First Fleet didn’t arrive until 1788, and that was for the penal colony.  Plus, Australia is far more remote than the U.S., especially by the standards of early days.  And, exploration and travel across Australia was far harsher than the experiences of American settlers moving west.  To this day, large parts of Australia are still uninhabitable even with technological advances. 

Newcastle Knights Super Fan -- and much warmer rugby league spectator!

My point is that I think Australia has evolved into a very distinct culture given its youth as a society and its many geographical and topographical challenges.  As we further eavesdropped, one guy tried to make the point that China has no real culture either, just a long-standing civilization.  I still haven’t figured out what that craziness actually meant or what it has to do with Gold Coast, but I thought it was pretty amusing.      

We then went next door to have a bite at the local restaurant which happens to be one of the best in Newcastle, and it was really good.  We hopped into a taxi and headed out to the ground.  I immediately realized that I was going to be too cold, so we swung by the team shop and I instantly became a Newcastle Knights super fan by double bill-boarding with hat and scarf.  After a convincing Knights victory, we cabbed it home, had dessert and decaf at the local, and went to bed.  Tomorrow we’ll rent a car and head out to the Hunter Valley wine country.

Universal is a relatively new and highly esteemed restaurant that offers smaller dishes … not smaller as in there are 10 courses so each course needs to be small, but three “too-small-to-be-shared” courses plus dessert is recommended.  The food borders on “experimental” and as such, some courses were better than others.  My biggest criticism is that the restaurant feels a little too hip for its own good.  It’s very modern and minimalist with orange ambient light and house music, but the funniest affectation was the description of the menu.  Since you choose several smaller-sized courses, there are no appetizers and secondis and mains per se.  Instead, as was explained to us, the dishes are ordered sequentially based on “palate weight.” 

Now, Andy, in particular, and Andy and I together, have eaten in some of the best restaurants in the world.  Andy reads about food, wine, chefs, gastronomy, new techniques, and restaurants very often.  Both Nick and Jacqueline are very foody people, and are quite plugged into the Sydney restaurant culture.  None of us has ever heard of “palate weight” before.  I found it to be needlessly poncy, but excellent fodder for endless jokes.

In any event, good fun was had by all!  Unfortunately, Nick had to go to work the next day, so he had, ahem, significantly less fun that the rest of us!  As such, Nick and Andy made plans for some male bonding for tonight, so I probably won’t be seeing much of Andy tomorrow!

I must say, though, that pub culture and mate’s night out are two of my favorite parts of Australian life.  I simply love that adult men in Australia regularly go out to the pub with their male friends.  Mate’s night out sometimes revolves around sports, but not always.  Mostly, they just talk and enjoy catching up over a pint.  The female significant others are not jealous or threatened by it, and they have their own friends and schedules.  Children understand that adults have lives of their own, and that the world does not revolve around their rearing and their schedules.  No one feels pangs of Puritanical guilt that they should instead be checking items off of their to-do list in their busy busy busy lives.  They are simply enjoying a beer and more importantly, nurturing interpersonal relationships, and everything else can wait.  American men could learn from this practice.

Completed in 1855, the first-ever transcontinental railroad was created to transit gold speculators from east to west since it was much easier and safer to travel by sea than through the rugged terrain of the middle United States.  Gold Rush traffic provided Colon with enormous prosperity as hundreds of thousands of transients paid outrageously inflated prices for essential goods and services.

The transient nature of those passing through Colon, and the isthmus in general, lent to a Wild West culture throughout Panama.  While some Forty-niners were pioneering and adventurous hard-workers by nature, others were highly unsavory characters:  Gold Rush-obsessed, desperate, excessively and even homicidally greedy, and swindling and thieving with nothing to lose.  As the railroad backed up and transit wait times increased, Colon bottlenecked and travelers combated boredom by drinking heavily, oftentimes while armed.  The associated violence and riots and crime are notorious stories to this day.

Even with the Wild West stories and the ultimate bust of the Gold Rush, the importance of the Panama Railroad should not be underestimated.  The need, convenience, and benefit of a transit option that eliminated the need to sail around Cape Horn had been long known.  Many different projects and speculators tried and failed to accomplish this goal.  At $8 million (in 1850’s dollars) for 47.5 miles, it remains the most expensive-per-mile railway ever built, requiring five years and taking 12,000 lives.  At the height of the railroad’s prosperity, many world and political circumstances rather suddenly changed, including heavy taxation by Gran Colombia and the 1869 completion of the Union Pacific Railroad across the United States, both of which permanently undermined the railroad’s importance.

Ironically, the construction of the Panama Canal undermined the prosperity of the city of Colon.  The city and its residents, particularly in the last 50 years, have not benefitted from the billions of dollars continuously flowing through Panama.  The country as a whole reports a GDP of over $26 billion (in 2006), and a 7.2% unemployment rate (granted with an oversupply of unskilled labor, and an undersupply of skilled labor).  The most recent information that I can locate specifically about Colon is from November of 2002 shortly after several days of riots and looting in the city’s center.  That source claims a 40% unemployment rate in Colon, and more current estimates place unemployment as high as 75%.  Additionally, Colon has some 52 murders per year … a shockingly high rate for a city of only 200,000 people and a far cry from the urban, thriving, and sophisticated Panama City just 50 miles away.

Many different reasons and rationalizations exist for this tremendous disparity.  First, immigrant entrepreneurs dominate the skilled, and sometimes even the unskilled, labor force.  Massive foreign investment brings its own prejudices.  Rumor has it that the outsourcing of major Canal operations to the Chinese has absolutely clobbered the unskilled labor force in Colon.  The Chinese companies brought in their own workers for nearly every job function … even for prostitution I’m told.

From some sources, my own experience, and anecdotal evidence, racism plays a fairly serious factor.  Colon’s current population is largely descended from black people who came to Panama from the West Indies (some by choice, some by trickery, some by force) to work on the Canal.  As such, many would argue that Colon’s economic state of affairs is basically ignored by the Panamanian government which provides incentives for foreign investors without labor stipulations, and creates stimulus packages for other Panamanian communities.

Additionally, in reading several sources, my opinion is that many government officials shirk responsibility and solidly place blame on the city’s residents as lacking initiative and dignity.  I personally find this to be pretty unfair.  When people have no work, no money, no education, no hope, and no opportunity, they steal and take drugs.  No different in Colon than anywhere else.

We had heard the rumors about Colon and wondered how bad it could actually be.  Everybody’s got a story and it usually involves larceny on the lower end, and severe violence on the upper end.  Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s bad … very bad.  We had to head into town to pay the generator repairman for services rendered, and it was very bad.  From what I saw, not a single building stands sturdy and maintained … literally everything is dilapidated and deteriorating.  Seemingly every block has at least one huge brick of rotting garbage as tall as a two story building.  Groups of likely unemployed people mill about and congregate under the occasional shady stoop just passing idle time.  Children without shirts or shoes play amongst gutters and garbage.  Every single business has pad locks and chain link fences and barbed wire and bars on the windows and security.  It’s positively tragic.  I did not find the Free Zone to be much better.

Luckily, Shelter Bay Marina is a little oasis.  The internet connection is fairly reliable, the electricity is compatible (i.e. the boat plugs into shore power just fine), the Balboa beer is cold, and the food is pretty darn good.

Wait … did I say oasis?  I meant to say prison.  If they had decent food, cold beer and internet access in prison, prison would be a lot like Shelter Bay.  Located on the grounds of an abandoned U.S. military base (the former Fort Sherman), the marina is 30+ minutes from anything else and you really aren’t free to leave in any true sense of the word.  And the staff (prison guards?) know this, pretty much setting world records for indifferent service (Bruce at the boat yard being an exception so notable as to require mentioning).

Shelter Bay Marina is not in Colon proper, but I think that some of those transient, Wild West tendencies are still at work here.  Right now, the Canal is horribly backed up, wait times are preposterous, and the transients are drinking a lot.  Like the old days, they are heavily armed, albeit only with hair-trigger tempers, crabbiness and know-it-all attitudes instead of rifles.  I can’t say that I blame anyone too much — the Canal authority has rather blatantly shown their antipathy towards private yacht traffic by allowing passage for only 3-5 boats every other day (there is absolutely no justification for this), and most everyone at Shelter Bay is anxious to start a new and exciting portion of their journey … not to sit and roast, basting themselves with beer, in Central America’s lower large intestine.  Basically, Shelter Bay Marina is a place where pissed-off people are incarcerated on a U.S. military base that’s intentionally highly isolated from the society that surrounds it – sort of like a certain place in southeastern Cuba, but minus the torture.

Nonetheless, we have met some very fun people and continue to check some action items off of our list.  I enlisted the help of John and Shirlee on S/V Solstice to sort out the remaining details of the single sideband radio and our SailMail account which is a very welcome development before we embark into the great wide open.  We also hauled the boat out of the water and had the bottom painted.  After 6 months in the, ahem, “nitrogen-rich” Bahia de Cartagena, this massive and heart-stoppingly expensive job was necessary.

We both had some trepidation in leaving the boat, which is now more like our home than anyplace else, for an extended period of time.  Luckily, as a matter of convenience, price and quality of service, Cartagena is a pretty terrific place to store a boat long term.  On the recommendation of marina manager John Halley, we hired a boat sitter named Alberto who was responsible for watching the lines, airing out the boat on a regular basis to minimize mold and rot, scrubbing the bottom to keep nasty barnacles away, and generally acting as project manager for a list of repairs about 50 items long.

After a long sleep, we awoke to find the boat in encouragingly good shape.  We have yet to go through our to-do list one by one with Alberto the boat sitter, but I’m fairly confident that the conversation will go well.  Unfortunately, the one problem that we’ve discovered since our return involves a stowaway of sorts.  Yes, sadly, Spectacle has acquired a minor roach problem.  We don’t seem to be full-fledged infested and the critters are both small and scarce, but it is nonetheless more than a little unnerving.

Club Nautico is just as we remember, and there’s quite a buzz around here as many boats prepare to head toward the Panama Canal and begin the Pacific Ocean crossing.  When we left Cartagena last summer, it was the rainy season – blisteringly hot and intensely humid, interrupted by frequent downpours.  Having returned in the dry season, the days are temperate, breezy, and dry (comparatively speaking).  As I sit here writing this post, I’m looking out on the marina and beyond … it’s a sunny and beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.  The clubhouse is full of boaters from all over the world … drinking Aguila or Club Colombia beers, playing dominoes and Scrabble, and passing time in anticipation of the passage to Panama.