Getting Around Australia With Planes
Sunday, July 12th, 2009Australia is a land of contrasts - topographical, cultural, physical, meterological and visual. About 40,000 years ago, the Aborigines were the first to settle. They lived as hunters and gatherers for this entire time, living with a close link to nature, although backburning and other poor agricultural techniques have since been realised to have caused significant deforestation, salinification of the soil and elimination of much of the natural diversity of the landscape. Such a poor ability to interact with nature, despite it being so important, helps explain why much of Australia is now unsuitable for sustaining life. Interestingly, this provides one of the few examples of where the native population damaged the land more than later waves of settlers. Their way of living developed into a complex culture based on oral tradition and intricate social bounds, which was almost destroyed by the second wave of settlers, who were able to populate the land with much more success.
Australia is a nation in its own right, it is also a technically a continent, with large differences between regions. It has a reputation as a land of leisure, with sun, sea and an enviable ‘Crocodile Dundee’ outdoor lifestyle, but this is just a very narrow conception of a continent. The reality however, is that most people work all day, and then spend the weekend running around trying to pack life into the 2 days on the weekend. Only the homeless and tourists have time to sit around on the beach, or laze away days watching sport on TV.
All our China adventures are on our blog — http://ChinaHopeLive.net — which is basically just a coping mechanism thats masquerading as a digital scrapbook, giving you a window into our experiences as a Canadian-American couple trying to live into and love and some days just survive China.
After the sincere recommendation and persuasion of many friends, I finally decided to pay a visit to Sanya, a seashore city in Hainan Province. However, my actual purpose was to find a large and free place for me to breathe some fresh air, so that the sadness and pressure in this big city can be temporarily alleviated. And the friends around me kept saying that Sanya is the best, so I was tempted finally.
