Ethan Dylan Siegel's Website

June 16. Hello from Sydney. Since we last updated our journal, we have spent another week in Sydney and a week in the Outback. We had a great time in Sydney, it's a really diverse and interesting city. We spent most of our time in Sydney walking around and exploring all of the different neighborhoods. The city is quite spread out and we walked for hours every day taking in the sights, visiting markets, checking out beaches and enjoying being city folk again for a little while. Sydney is called the City of Harbours and we took a few ferries as well, seeing the Opera House and Harbor Bridge from the water, and trips to Bondi Beach and Manly Beach. We saw perhaps the coolest sunset ever on our way back from Manly. Sydney has one of the best aquariums in the world, and we spent a few hours there watching the sharks, rays and some less scary marine life. It was cool to be able to identify some of the same fish that we saw out at the Great Barrier Reef a few weeks ago. The nightlife in Sydney was also quite fun. We spent the week canvassing for a good party and wound up at a club called Tantra on Saturday night, for a party called Dig Deep, where the best DJs in Sydney are invited to dig deep into their collections and pull out their all time favorite music. We also spent a fair amount of time at Star City casino, since our luck in this hemisphere has been absolutely unbelievable. We used some of our winnings to fly to the Outback and add a week to our trip. We flew to Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory. This area is called the Red Centre because it is quite arid and the dirt is red. Everything is hundreds of miles from everything else out there, with nothing in between except tumbleweeds. You are supposed to drive with enough water for two days in case your car breaks down, since it might be a couple of days until someone else comes along. Most of the roads are unpaved, and the rental car companies are a bit uptight, telling you that you are not insured between sunset and sunrise (because of all the animals on the road), or on unpaved roads at any time. This, of course, is completely unrealistic, so you take your chances. It gets as hot as 120 degrees in the summer, so we picked a good time of year to travel there, with days in the high 70s and evening in the high 30s. We saw none of the world's most dangerous snakes, although most of them are here somewhere. We did, however, take a sunrise hot air balloon ride, which was a once in a lifetime experience. Not because we'll never ride a hot air balloon again, but because the Siegels will probably only see one sunrise by choice, and that was it! Seriously, though, it was really cool to be in the desert at 5:30 in the morning, helping set up the balloon and getting in the air just as the sun began to peek over the horizon. We saw kangaroos, wild horses and other animals waking up and starting their day. On another day, we went for a camel ride down the dry Todd River. The river has no water in it, but they insist on calling it a river. Once a year, there is a boat race, where people cut the bottoms out of boats and run down the river. This is the Outback after all, so entertainment choices are a bit limited. We spent the rest of our time in Alice Springs exploring the MacDonnell Ranges, a series of mountains, chasms, gaps and gorges that run east and west out of town. At a gorge at the end of West MacDonnell Range, we ran into a three year old English lad, Henry, who was looking for a princess. After giving Lane the once over, he announced, quite surely, that Lane was not in fact a princess. After some coaxing from me, and considering it once more, he answered me decisively with a single word -- "Nope" -- that ended the question once and for all. If he had been a bit older, I would have asked him if he had taken into account the Jewish American variety of princess. But, we'll leave that for his dad to explain some other day. After Alice Springs, we drove to Uluru, which is a few hundred miles south. Uluru is a GIANT rock that just pops out of the totally flat desert. It is 1000 feet high, and up to 2 miles deep underground. It is one of the most sacred sites to the Anangu aboriginal people, who believe that their ancestors have inhabited the area around the rock since the beginning of time. We walked the circuit around the rock (six miles), and watched the rock change colors from Brown to Orange to Red to Purple as the sun set over the Outback. Truly amazing. We have one more night left in Australia before we leave for Thailand. Time seems to be going faster and faster, and we can't believe that nearly eight weeks in Australia have passed and that we have been on the road for more than three months. We're looking forward to a complete change of culture as we head to Southeast Asia. We've sent home half of our belongings and have downsized our bags in anticipation of the traveling conditions becoming a bit more challenging. We'll be in Bangkok for a week seeing the city and trying to make some plans for the remainder of our trip. We hope that everyone is having a great summer. We are healthy, happy and having a great time. Keep in touch!