Weekends as an Australian Chameleon
About the author: Michelle Howard’20 is an FSI Global Policy Intern at the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in Sydney, Australia. Michelle is currently studying Bioengineering at Stanford University.
For the past month and a half, I’ve been enjoying a double life here in Australia. Monday through Friday I am a corporate sheep that each morning follows a herd of others in black and blue suits, each with eyes glued to the iPhone in hand, onto a stuffed train. Monday through Friday I am silent from 9am to 6pm. The earbuds in my ears and long lines of code on my two massive computer screens scream to anyone walking by that I am deep in a problem-solving zone, and will crawl out only to eat, go home, or mess around with Talia. Monday through Friday I am a chef in a kitchen of six; upon arriving home after work, I am chopping onions and boiling rice and experimenting with culinary tips from one of my six roommates. Every night is a vegetarian’s attempt Japanese, Italian, Colombian, or Lebanese, depending on which roomie happens to be around that night.
The weekends, however, I undergo a metamorphosis. Like a butterfly bursting forth from a cocoon, I spread massive wings and fly far, far away from Sydney to explore other parts of the continent. One weekend I am driving along the Great Ocean Road of Melbourne, stopping only to walk along beaches or warm my fingers with fresh scones from a little café nestled at the base of the Apollo lighthouse. The next, I am driving through the forests of Kangaroo Island, scouting for koalas up in trees or echidnas on the side of the road. My adventures are walking along mint-green waters on beaches speckled with seal pups (it’s breeding season!), kayaking down still and silent rivers, sand-boarding through the Little Sahara, journaling in fantastically-shaped granite caves overlooking the deep blue sea. The weekend after that, I am face-to-face with a barracuda. He blinks, as If to ask what I am doing 60 feet under the waves inside of his coral home. Scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef is Mother Nature’s Disneyland, where I meet Nemo and Dory and Gil.
The rest of my weekends are early Saturday mornings to catch trains or buses that take me far outside the city to hike in the Blue Mountains, walk along Bondi beach, or explore the thickets of the Royal National Park near Sydney. These are sunny days for packed lunches on beach cliffs and long silent stares at the purest shades of blue offered by our planet.
My final adventure is a visit to the most significant religious vestige in Australia: Uluru. A massive rock, its natural etchings and caves and deformations are the scriptures once read and followed by the indigenous inhabitants in this small part of the Outback. I walked along the perimeter of this bible; it is red rock uninhabited by any form of life (save for the shrimp colonies living in small puddles at the very top), but it is alive in every sense of the word. This adventure was particularly long — four days of bushcamping involved collecting firewood, sleeping in swag underneath the Milky Way, and baking “bush bread” in a stone pot over burning coals.
From high heels to hiking boots, I am a chameleon who’s turned many different colors in many Australian environments. Now on a flight back to San Francisco, my skin is its ordinary shade, but the colors it’s taken on are now rainbows in my mind’s sky that will forever shine bright.
