If you in the heat of the day dare to step out of the shade long enough turn your back to the sun and watch your shadow, you’ll find out that it moves from the right side to your left over the day. Yes, in Australia you’re on the southern hemisphere. The shadows wander the wrong way and pretty much everything else is likewise different to other western countries. The history since the first settlers arrived on the continent until today is relatively short, a little more than hundred years. But this time was long enough to develop a very own culture. Beside the fact that everyone back then was an immigrant, contributing in a more active or passive way by bringing in a cultural background to the community, I guess it was the land itself that shaped the people most. Australia is the most extreme country I travelled in many different ways.

In backpacker accommodations, there are two excellent ways to get in contact with other travellers: First, talk about the food others have for breakfast. To point it out once and for all, I love my Swiss Muesli and I will always love my Swiss Muesli and if you don’t drown it in a massive amount of milk it isn’t a Swiss Muesli even if the package tells so! If in this huge country it’s not possible to get proper bread and if you refuse to buy “Swiss Cheese” because there’s nothing like “Swiss Cheese” at all in Switzerland, because we’re famous for having hundreds of different cheeses and a genuine Gruyere has definitely NO HOLES in it, than I will just eat my Swiss Muesli. It’s not the topic of this article but as I have brought you here, buying something labeled Gruyere doesn’t make it much better, even if they didn’t put silly holes in it. That’s like drinking beer just for the alcohol. Even if you know that all the beers in the world taste more or less the same, why should you spend an agio to buy a Corona? Because a Corona got soul in it. So we folks in Switzerland don’t buy just something that looks somehow similar to cheese, we select a specific producer. Like you would select a wine for its grape and vineyard. If it’s not for the cheap escape. Honestly, I give absolutely nothing about if a muesli is branded “Swiss” or not. The mixture of wheat, oat, nuts, raisins, dried fruits or whatever is just an excellent source of energy that doesn’t break when it gets hot and it doesn’t take much precious space in the saddlebags. I’d have bought a “Tahiti Muesli” if there was one and, now the main reason, was cheaper than the “Swiss Muesli” in its dark blue package. Somehow the “Swiss Muesli” was in its simplicity always a much better deal than the fancy low-fat-high-fiber-happy-life stuff. That brings me straight to the second topic travellers in Australia talk about: Australia is extremely expensive. Though to fill an uncomfortable silence, you can always start complaining about prices. This topic never fails because the prices are rocket high for just everything and buying something in a combo seems to be a price plan for junk food chains exclusively. Nearly entirely any other activity or service is charged piece by piece. Paying airport taxes along with your air ticket doesn’t mean you get a free transportation from one terminal to the other in Sydney. No, the buses are run by another private company and please, five dollars fifty thank you to the driver. In cash. As small as possible. That’s fine if you leave the country and you have currency left. This can be a hassle if you just arrive and try to get the fifty cents out of an ATM.

Getting upset about prices makes no sense, you just have to take it as a fact. Although there are a few things that tease my common sense. For example that I can buy Australian apples for less money in Europe than in Australia itself. Or that in some roadhouses the water price is three times as high as the price for gasoline. To see it from another angle: If the mining companies pay, say, 200 dollars allowance per night to their workers, would you ask for less than 160 dollars per night as a motel manager? No, what is much more inexplicable, from a Central European point of view, is when you start thinking about the quality provided that you get for your money. Let me put it this way: Since I was travelling in Australia I’m very much convinced that one day I will build my own house. With my two left hands, so to say. Everything and everywhere it looks like a trainee tinkered a little bit in his first week. The houses, well back home we wouldn’t use the word house for something like that, are usually something quite similar to barracks used as picnic and meeting rooms you see next to bigger construction sites. Except that construction site barracks have proper safety locks. I’m not complaining about that, it’s just what I observe. Only once I strongly complained about paying 23 dollars for an unpowered campsite on a campground with no special facilities. The compromise we agreed after negotiating that I donate ten bucks to the Royal Flying Doctor Service instead of paying for the two square meters of grass was a very good one I guess. The inexplicable for me is why the Aussies accept living in places that get blown away by every stronger storm because they don’t have a basement but massive energy consumption because isolating a wall against heat or cold seems to be an unknown technology. Why don’t they themselves get bothered that the hot water is coming from a tap on the other side of the sink than the cold water?

One explanation why the Aussies are how they are could be the extreme land itself. Let me share my thoughts. Never before I rode through such a harsh wilderness as down under. Never before I experienced these extreme distances between service stations where you can find supply like water and gasoline, some food and if you are lucky even frozen ice cream. Everywhere else I travelled before, if there is a street, there’s life. Whether it’s in the steppe of Mongolia or at the edge of the Sahara desert in Africa. Usually it takes less than ten minutes until a shepherd spots you and catches up for a chat. Patagonia is partly wasteland but never that big and the climate compared to the alternately extreme hot and dry and extreme wet months with huge flooding is mildly spoken peanuts for a real redneck. Even with today’s technology, as far as it reached Australia already, life in the outback is a tough one. Nature, with its fascinating and unique diversity of plants and animals, many of them poisonous or big-mouthed-sharp-teethed, is one thing. A major factor however is the lands size itself combined with the low number of inhabitants. It’s the empty loneliness that teaches you patience. You just can’t go quickly to buy a bolt if it’s a distance of 100 miles to go there. Everything takes its time, panic means reducing life expectancy because it forces false decisions. If the tide drifts you away probably the tide will wash you ashore later. If you don’t panic and waste all your energy on a fight you never going to win.

In areas with such a low population density you’d expect absolute freedom, liberal, open minds like the country is wide and open itself. Well that’s what I expected at least and that’s what I’ve been told from Australia freaks back home. Live experience should have made me suspicious; admittedly I failed to foreseen how it really is. It’s true that if you stop at a rest area on the road side you can let down your pants just where you are and break the seal if it’s that what you’re up to. Nobody will say anything apparently because there is no one else then you. Taking a piss in public, even if there’s nobody watching you, is a political statement. With this gesture you manifest one thing: That you rule this place. And that’s what you’re facing when travelling through Australia. No, not urinating males, but in no other country I was confronted with so many rules and regulations. If there’s a wall, there’s a notice stuck to it telling you what is forbidden on, next, in front or behind it together with the approximate penalty in case of breaking this rules. People seem to be relaxed because they know to have an escape from all this rules or because they’re making the rules themselves. In contrast to European cities where we’re close to be absurdly liberal as a result of a long tradition as overcrowded, multicultural, fast changing society, Australia is almost absurdly conservative for 2011.

I’m grateful for every day I could spend on this continent. And Australia is grateful as well I guess because I spend not only days but also a lot of money. Every day held surprises, positive and negative ones. At the end the positive outweigh by far. In my ignorance I couldn’t know better, to visit Australia as the last continent turned out to be pure luck. It took all of my travelling experience, all of my driving skills and the hell of a good motorcycle to explore this country exactly the way I dreamed of and the way it is: Wild, rough, demanding, rewarding. Thank you, Australia!