Things to love about Australia

Things to love about Australia, a list in progress:

--The sky is an open canvas of blue.  It stretches above the landscape far and wide; over and until.  I’ve never seen sky like this in the Northern Territory.  This may also be due to the fact that there is nothing, I mean nothing, to interfere with the sky here.  

--The air is clean, crisp, and fresh.  When I stand outdoors, brace my back with my hands, and look up, up, up. . .  I can see all the way to Heaven.

--On our first night, the moon rose completely full, a giant orb just above the tree-line, white light washing everything.  As it moved across the sky, settling in the west, it remained bright and clear as a large bulb, uncovered and hanging from an invisible wire overhead.

--And of course, the stars!  Brightest I have ever seen.  Big lights against the night’s canvas.  BIG Big Dipper, the Southern Cross, and the man in the moon looks just like a seated rabbit from this angle.

--The birds are everywhere.  When Michael dives us out in the car, he drives the speed limit. 110 kilometers on the main road.  Suddenly, because there is no traffic, and he can, he will suddenly throw on the brakes and point left through the passenger’s window, maybe right out his drivers window, or sometimes straight ahead through the windshield.  There’s always a bird.

Michael and Denise are both birders, experts.  Denise has written definite books about birds in the Top End.  She and Michael can find them, point to them, identify them, recognize their vocalizations, and tell us anything we might want to know.  Nicole is no slouch either.  She did, afterall, spend many months on assignment from National Geographic driving every inch of Australia and camping out of her Land Rover one year.
So many kinds of birds!  Some I know well:  the osprey or the egret.  Some I’ve heard of but never seen until now:  kookaburra and giant, multi-colored parrots.  Others are brand new and marvelous: the thickknee or jabiru.  I love the birds.