Word: outbacker
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...through water that would flood a Falcon. The $58,000 Blizzard has a Nissan Patrol chassis, engine and gearbox, but nothing else about it is ordinary. It's Mad Max in a suit: stylish, smooth riding, thanks to adjustable shock absorbers, but tough enough for anything, from the Outback to the Apocalypse. That's too tough for Australian transport authorities. "They say it's too intimidating for on-road use," says Watson. (Most of his clients live on farms or overseas; his Blizzard variant has dealer license plates...
Driving south from Port Augusta, travelers could be forgiven for missing the sign to Ray Myers' hobby farm. On a sunny morning, the lead smelters of Port Pirie shimmer on the horizon to the south like an outback Venice, while to the north, the Flinders Ranges begin their majestic roll. They were partly what brought Sydney-born Myers, 64, to the area on holiday in 1966, and his love affair with the landscape has continued ever since. "Change color every hour," he says...
...Instead, like most business travelers, I was confined to restaurant food, and in towns the size of Jamestown (pop. 15,500), that means "casual dining" establishments. Before the era of chain dining - of Applebee's and Outback and that graybeard T.G.I. Friday?s (founded 1965) - business-traveler dining was different. I like to imagine that a gentleman in a Cary Grant suit stepped from his plane (itself stewarded by a pillbox-hatted attendant who had served gin martinis) and drove to a local place to eat crunchy fried chicken and flaky blueberry pie. I like to imagine the gentleman then...
...corner of the Australian Outback, it finally happened. At the bottom of a tunnel near Barramundi Gap, warm water was seeping from the rocks. That was a clue to a find that now produces about 100,000 carats of dull-brown rough every day and has about 1 trillion carats left to give. The Argyle Diamond Mine is the richest in the world in terms of the sheer number of stones, but they are small and dingy, mostly the color of breakfast tea. They seemed destined to end up as knife blades, dental tools and drilling bits...
Holman was a prodigiously restless world traveler in the early 19th century, a time before Ambien and JetBlue when the world was a dangerous, miserably uncomfortable place to travel. He circled the earth, traversed Siberia, roamed the Australian outback and the Brazilian rain forest, climbed Vesuvius during an eruption, hunted elephants in Ceylon and slave ships in the Atlantic and wrote best-selling books about it all. He did all this despite a grave handicap: he was blind...