nomad

peace margs

Devil's Lair Estate and cellar

photo courtesy of my kiwi bruh blair

western australia's pretty sweet. perth seems like a nice, clean, and relatively young city to live in. 3 and half hours down the coast, on the most southwestern cape of aussieland, is margaret river, where i'll be making wine for the next 2 months. it's hot, dry, and beautiful. typical of popular images of australia, the dirt's a rusty red and the sky feels deep blue and vast. you gotta watch out for kangaroos on the road (they'll fuck up your ride, alotta people have bars mounted on their front ends) and white sharks are a serious death threat on the beaches. bugs in the trees conduct a constant orchestra of noise and you can actually see stars bright in the night sky. margs has a population of around 4500 and i'm a ten minute walk from town so i'll probably just get by without buying a car out here. i'm renting a room from my boss, one of the wine makers at devil's lair. it's turned out to be a pretty sweet deal, he and his girlfriend seem chill enough. i also met the other american dude on the crew. he's a slo grad with a winemaking degree, well-traveled, and seems to be a dedicated surfer and aspiring wine maker. 8000 miles from home, it's definitely good to kick it with another californian. aside: inflation's a mother fucker. the mining industry in WA has kept australia's economy the most resilient among developed nations throughout the global recession. result: 14-20 dollar six-packs. $45+ cases. on the upside, everyone makes a solid wage.

back in Kuta for one beautiful sunset

no cars, no motorbikes, no problem

cruisin out of padangbai

gili t was definitely the highlight of my short trip to Indo. just an hour and a half via fastboat, the gilis are three small islands that are just off the northern coast of lombok, the next major island east of bali in the indonesian archipelago. i stayed on the biggest of the three, gili trawangan; you can walk the perimeter of it in less than 2 hours. there aren't any cars or motorbikes on the island, only horse drawn carriages and bikes. there's vegetation on the gilis but they're practically desert islands. it was pretty much dry and beautiful the couple days i was there. i hear it could be pouring on bali and bone dry and sunny on the gilis. another upside, no 5 0 on the gilis. while you can get a life sentence on bali for smuggling drugs, you get offered weed walking down the dirt covered cobblestone main drag and almost every bar down on the island serves up their own concoction of a 'special drink'--shroom shakes. there was even surf on the south side of the island. supposedly a fast right that breaks 1 to 3 meters, there wasn't much swell at the time, which was perfect for me. the reef was super shallow but the waves were pretty mellow, so i got to catch a few both days. i stayed in a quiet little bungalow right off the beach and had breakfast on the sand in a bamboo platform shaded by a straw roof. gili t didn't seem to be much of a secret, it definitely had its fair share of sunburnt euro tourists. but without any motorized forms of transportation and accessible only by boat, it felt amazing. the closest thing to island paradise i've experienced.