As my departure from Australia nears, the occasional person has asked what I'll take back with me to America, a question both simple and impossible. Perhaps it's only a fallacy of fiction that the endpoints and achievements punctuating our lives come gift-wrapped with some easy-to-distill lesson, some tidal change that will forever carry you in a new direction. I'm leaving Australia in two days, and still I cannot quite determine the net effect of these last 6.5 months.

I can say, though, with certainty, that I've had fun. That's not the sort of assessment you'd get from Emerson -- it sounds more like wisdom you might get from a sunburned kid leaving Six Flags -- but hey, what currency of emotion can better fill a day than fun? In Australia, I've trekked Tasmanian mountains and stumbled away from bush pub barstools. I've taken hikes along Uluru and taken rides in hyper-powered racecars. With the help of one 10-day visit from my dad, one two-week visit from my buddy Slater, and several thousand dollars from Rupert Murdoch's expense account, I've managed to visit five of Australia's seven states and territories. People tell me I'll leave Australia having explored its gaping, glorious spaces more so than most lifelong Australians. Then again, one of the guys who told me as much, co-worker John Geddes, has spent 55 years Down Under. He's never been to Adelaide. Never been to Queensland. He's spent two nights total in Melbourne. And he's visited Disney World four times.

So what am I taking back to America? We'll start with an inventory of those items easily counted. I'll return with three suitcases, filled almost entirely with clothing, shoes, toiletry items, reading material and micro-sized electronics. I'll return with one cricket ball, one authentic rugby polo jumper from the Sydney Roosters, and one cartoonish screen-printed tank top purchased recently from a pub in Cooktown, Queensland. I'll return with parts of six thorns embedded in my left thumb, a free memento from a psychotic rainforest hike Slater and I took three days ago. I'll return with a heightened coffee addiction. I'll return with a trenchant (and inconvenient) desire for relaxed company, long holidays and preposterous adventure; these are the hallmarks of Australia, the land of No Worries, a mantra whose only downside appears when you have to abandon it. In this country, as Slater noted, even the semi-serious ventures can make you smile. That bomb-sniffing dog you find outside airport customs? Yeah, a beagle.

Right now, Slater and I are in row 41, seats A and B, on a Qantas flight from Cairns (near the top end of Queensland) back to Sydney. This, I suppose, marks the formal end of his vacation and my whole Australian journey. We're both already deep under the clouds of end-in-sight melancholy. Slater has fallen for Australia, and most especially for Queensland, the state in which we spent the last 10 days.

Queensland, especially to those who live beyond its borders, is Australia's outsized frontier state. Everything there is bigger and wilder, more beautiful and more dangerous. In Queensland, savage rainforest ensnares the mountainside, which gives way to the silicon that blinds the beaches, which gives way to the reef that illuminates the water. As Slater said, in Queensland, a casual story you'll hear from a guy you've known for five minutes will trump the best story of a best friend you've known for a lifetime.

One serpentine-looking plumber we met at a low-slung pub in Greenvale, QLD, told us about a woman who was bitten unknowingly by a snake, headed out for a few beers, and ended up two drinks later dead on her barstool.

One seventy-ish man with tattooed forearms stopped us outside a national park hike entrance and for some reason provided the narrative of his defense against attack from a cassowary. To frighten the bird, he grabbed a fern branch, brandishing the greenery like some medieval knight-- though in his retelling, it was all dramatic arm-slashes through the air, and Slater and I walked away howling.

The state is so flooded by dangers that Queenslanders have no choice but to digest them as dark comedy. At one store, we encountered frame-by-frame photos of a snake swallowing a kangaroo. At one pub, we heard a story about a crocodile expiring on account of its desire to swallow a hiking boot, which lodged itself inside the reptile's mouth and prevented further consumption.

During our road trip -- a total of 1,277 miles, from Airlie Beach to Cooktown -- we spotted yellow diamond-shaped warning signs for dangers so exotic we struggled to guess the iconography (FIG. I). Here, the wrong kind of mosquito bite means a savage month-long illness. Petulant six-foot-tall kangaroos gut human beings. Farmers illegally dump dead cattle into the Daintree River, where crocs devour the carcasses. Those same crocodiles emerge onto the muddy riverbanks to sneak-attack feral pigs. Those same pigs use their horns to spill the intestines of bushwalkers. Those same adventurers drive down roads while facing the lingering danger of unfenced livestock, who've been known to demolish cars. And those same cars, when venturing onto those narrow lunar outback tracks known as "developmental roads," face white-knuckle head-on chicken games with oncoming four-trailer road trains.

In all, maybe the more conventional box jellyfish sting isn't such a bad way to go. You're passed out in five minutes, dead in maybe ten. (Of course, Queenslanders will tell you that some victims still scream from the pain after they lose consciousness.)

Tropical Queensland, though, is less a parody than a paradox. Coffee beans thrive here, unlike in any other spot on the continent. Farmers plant rows of avocados and bananas and sugarcane. Thirty of the world's 70 mangrove species flourish on one Queensland river, and the Daintree National Park -- the site of the hike that left my scars -- is home to more endangered species than any other mapdot on the planet. Things want to grow here; this part of the world demands life. Slater, at one point, even spotted a tree growing from the base of a termite mound, and when wood can sprout from the very headquarters of an organism that eats wood, the ironies are simply too twisted to sort out, but to say that perhaps no other place out there is so alive with death.

I am not writing this, by the way, merely to impress women (since I've survived!), though that is naturally a large part of it. From the time we arrived in Airlie Beach, Slater and I obeyed some informal ground rules that would guide our travels. Tourist-popular spots tend to be packed with eco lodges and group tour packages and little boardwalk strolls that allow for white shoes and quick photo ops. We'd have none of it. We wanted unmarked roads, unheralded destinations, uncertain trails. I reckon 10 days of that attitude largely explained how this trip became, for both of us, one of the most rewarding and memorable experiences of a lifetime. It also explains the distaste we developed for everything clean and easy.

Our basic itinerary is almost too painful to recount, just because it's all over now, and because the retelling will never convey the thrill of the actual doing, but here's the quick catalog. Last Sunday, we landed in Airlie Beach, a town of about 4,000 that caters to the grubby subspecies known as hostel backpackers and serves as a jumping-off point to a collection of islands just off the coast. Slater and I summarily spent two days camping, first on South Molle Island, then on Whitsunday Island. It all went well, and we felt like Survivormen, leathery and well-equipped with knives, hungry for adventure and spearing wild animals, and we maintained this ideal pretty much until the last night of tent life.

This was on Whitsunday Island, a landmass composed entire of national park, featuring a seven-mile beach (Whitehaven) (FIG. II) judged by those who know such matters to be the most pristine in the world. Let me confirm, by the way: It is. The land stretches in three lines of glimmering color, the juncture where a white-blue sky meets a white-gold beach and folds into green-white waves. When the sun shines overhead, as it almost always does, your eyes face the primary danger. You need sunglasses, so pure and reflective is the sand. During the afternoon on Whitehaven, I jogged almost the entire length of the beach, and for a stretch of at least four miles, didn't encounter a single imperfection -- not a shell, not a fleck of seaweed, not even a footprint.

But then night fell. Though the beach allows space for 12 campers a night -- one needs only a permit from the Queensland environmental department, obtainable for $9 -- on this particular evening, there were just two of us. Well, so long as we discount the company of poisonous green snakes, three-foot-long goanna lizards, and one bottle of Jack Daniels. (We encountered all three, fleeing from two and consuming one.)

That night, Queensland flexed its muscles. A culture of sandflies invaded the sky, turning our idyllic beachfront into some of the most hostile territory we'd ever encountered. These little insects buzzed around our heads and attacked every open inch of flesh. It was a torturous terror, really; we were in solitude, and we were defenseless. We covered ourselves in long clothing and buried our faces into our sleeping bags, but the bugs flooded every crevasse, even after the Jack Daniels finally put us to sleep.

When the sun rose, we realized that sandflies had stolen our vanity. My face alone was covered with about 50 red bumps. My forehead felt like a highway rumble strip. Slater looked at me and gasped. Even a week later, I'm stuck with bloody scars from the itchy bites. A part of me thinks it's all worth the price of a story.

In great discomfort, Slater and I retreated from the island and returned to Mainland Australia, where even the most fundamental comforts felt luxurious. Soap! Automobiles! Non-synthetic shelter!

We kept moving north, often spending only a night in a given town before moving onward. To Greenvale, a town of 300 with one pub. To the Atherton Tablelands, a propped-atop-mountains topography pock-marked with waterfalls and craters. To Cairns, where we snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef, swam with sharks and paddled through an environmental underworld so energized that it almost felt unreal -- as if even an attempt to touch the coral would reveal the whole image to be a hologram, some fiction too bright for tangibility.

In our final days up north, we headed to the rainforest, a wilderness with no patience for men and their macho quotients. As one warning sign instructed, "If confronted by a cassowary: 1.) Do not run. 2.) Without turning, retreat slowly. 3.) If the bird becomes aggressive, place a solid object such as a tree between yourself and the bird. If nothing is available, hold an object such as an item of clothing or backpack in front of you and continue to back away slowly." Evidently, cassowaries cannot fly, but they can come close, sometimes using their clawed toes as weapons, "kicking with both feet at once."

The Daintree is subdivided into several touristy attractions (guided crocodile tours, for instance) and one absolute non-attraction, a deathwish-style hike straight up a mountainside, where even the terminology aims to discourage. You enter a place called Cape Tribulation and look for signs marking the Mount Sorrow Trail. Hikers here have been known to enter the thick rainforest and never reappear. As such, any ambitious adventurers are ordered to provide their names to a clerk at a nearby pharmacy, so if night falls and the hikers haven't reemerged, proper authorities can begin their search.

All national park literature begs hikers not to begin this hike after 10 a.m., because it requires six or seven hours minimum, but Slater and I headed into the entrance (which is almost impossible to find, on account of under-use) at 11. About 100 metres in, we encountered a wild pig. We thought about turning around; suddenly, the front seats of our Nissan Tiida felt like wonderful safety nets. But we kept going, deeper with every step into the tangle of malevolent, alien plant life. Fan palms (FIG. III) created an exotic ceiling that shielded most sunlight. Vines wrapped along the hilly path -- which was so thick that it hardly existed -- and most branches were criss-crossed by thorns and prickers. We needed three miles, and almost three hours, just to reach the top of the mountain. We needed three more hours to descend. When we emerged from the forest and saw the Nissan, we screamed with joy and hugged. Slater noticed the soles of his shoes had ripped. That night, we headed back to town, found a restaurant that served kangaroo and crocodile, and chatted up a girl from England who was traveling through Australia by herself. The idea of Home sent us into states of semi-mourning.

Chances are, returning to the US was always part of this deal for me. I didn't come here to escape anything. I miss my family. Life without familiarity is exciting as hell, and wonderful and refreshing, but difficult to sustain. That's why I'm ending my G'DFT blog -- which has been a privilege to write for these months -- with this entry. It's time to come back to the US, start a new job and return to that world of ambitions and consequences. In whatever comes next, I just hope to remember that fun itself is rich and legitimate, not just some allusion we're doomed to chase and never touch. Knowing that makes the world quite a delightful place to inhabit, reptilian dangers be damned.

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Last day of work. The payroll window clerk on level one already authorized my final expense report, and the Tely HR rep already confiscated my News Ltd. ID card. In exactly 89 minutes, I lose privileges of my newspaper e-mail address, a divestment that denies me of all future press releases from Cricket Australia. Well, I'll miss all that.

Finishing here feels strange, but only because finishing here doesn't feel like anything at all. I have no emotion. No melancholy, no delight, nothing. I've left other jobs and felt sentimental, but for some reason, I'm drawing a blank here. Most likely, that's because 1, I'll see most of the newsroom Thursday night at the Aurora Pub, so I have no goodbyes for the moment and 2, I've spent so much energy anticipating upcoming travels that my capacity for more emotion is pretty much nil.

The Tely, I know, took a risk by sponsoring my work visa and allowing me into their newsroom. After six months, most editors think it all worked well -- though I have a sneaking suspicion that many advocated for my hiring just for another potential goodbye drink-off. I have no doubt, though, that this job helped me more than I helped my paper. As I've indicated before, seeing a place as a reporter allows for intense experiences; it allows for an authentic education. You don't just travel to places listed on the Virgin Blue getaways itinerary. You don't just meet like-minded tourists on big Explore Oz luxury buses.

I suppose if I owe the Tely any debt for this, my liver will absorb the cost of payment.

Until Thursday, I just have to get ready for Slater's arrival. Tomorrow I'll clean my apartment, take care of some ungodly errands (several tax-related), pick up a rental car, blah, blah, blah. Strange to think that poor Slater will be spending the entire corresponding day in the air. When he lands Thursday morning, the final chapter of this whole Australia adventure begins.

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Sometimes, returning after a trip causes new observations about your home -- in this case, Sydney. After three days in Cobar, I developed a refreshed recognition of Sydney's strengths. You can buy milk on Sundays, for instance. You needn't drive 315 km for the closest hardware store. Internet exists, just like air conditioning.

That said, my time in Cobar ranked as one of the most memorable -- and most rewarding -- experiences of my time here. Sure, trying to keep pace with a team of bush rugby players probably cut 10 years from my life expectancy, but in the end, I got what I wanted: The chance to learn something entirely different.

Cobar, I can tell you, is far richer in virtues than in conveniences. Conversations among those in town never really stop; they just resume, over days and months, at different locations. The New Occidental Pub is probably among the best three or four drinking establishments I've ever seen, with a friendliness of high-proof intensity.

That's where I met one woman, 28, a lifetime Cobar resident, who went her first 26 years without leaving the countryside. When she finally got to Sydney, curious to see it, she spent the first day there crying because of the rudeness and chaos.

That's also where I met a bloke named Honest Don, one of those archetype roughnecks who always had a three-day beard (I know because I saw him every day) and doesn't quite trust you unless you're drinking two beers at once. You can talk to Honest Don about pretty much anything, but he'll always enforce the same general theme, which is that human beings have been on straight decline since about 1934. Honest Don could probably kill a mountain lion with his bare hands.

Below, I've attached the story I filed for the Tely about rugby in Cobar. It'll be my penultimate byline in this newspaper. Final day of work comes tomorrow. Thursday, Slater arrives. Much to look forward to, and much to write about. I'll try to keep up. In the meantime:

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By CHICO HARLAN

Twenty-four hours before the Cobar Camels would travel to Bourke for their first rugby test of the season, one of the Camels' two coaches, Tony Ellison, wrapped up a training session by addressing his team -- a roster whose best performances in the year prior had come exclusively at the pub.

"Don't go crazy on the piss tonight," Ellison told the guys. "Let's change the culture here."

Some 15 Camels, ages ranging from 17 to 50, stood in a loose circle on the rugby field just outside of town. The last lines of sunlight had just dipped behind the oval's rickety grandstand box, painted with a Camel and the words, "Desert Rugby." The Camels listened to Ellison and nodded their heads, saying nothing. For the moment, Ellison's speech opposed 50 years of tradition; Cobar's rugby union club was generally dedicated, often ill-fated, but always well-lubricated.

"Listen," Ellison continued. "I know I'm hypocritical. Many times I'd drink right up until kickoff. But that was dumb. I hurt myself and my team. We are here to win, and we're not going to win unless we change."

More nodding. The other coach, Greg Black, stepped forward and revealed a burst of good news. The team had a full side for Bourke, 15 guys, because enough miners didn't have to work. "But," he said, "we're short a prop and a second row. So if you know anybody, bring them along."

The Camels headed back to town on this night, a Friday, feeling emboldened for the 2008 season. In the previous session, fundamentals looked strong. The coaches preached about basic rugby, ball protection and scrum structure. At least for a few hours, the Camels provided little indication of their predicament: They'd finished 1-13 in 2007. Old legends referred to the current group as "a bunch of sheilas." They shared their oval with a blind horse named George. The foremost team rule required players to jointly consume one bottle of Brown Muscat wine before games, and another bottle at halftime.

Unlike the rival rugby league club in town, the Camels provided no pay for players. During the annual league-union match last April, the league guys beat the Camels, 66-5, a misery that could only be medicated by large doses of Tooheys Old at the New Occidental Pub.

During the club's early years, a revered era of coexisting misbehavior and dominance, the Camels established the writ large standards that modern men could only die trying to replicate. To fund a 1963 exhibition trip to New Zealand, players headed to the bush to hunt feral pigs and goats. In 1965, players built their own clubhouse, laying bricks by hand, and implanting some with empty beer bottles. Between 1967 and 1976, Cobar won six Western Plains premierships. Some players commuted 400 km round trip just to attend training.

In the last 30 years, though, Cobar has won the Grand Final of its competition -- normally comprised of eight clubs -- just once. The primary reason for Cobar's existence, mining, provides a primary reason for the Camels' struggles.

Cobar is a boom-or-bust town, its population (4,918, per 2006 census data) dependent on the price of the copper and gold buried beneath the red soil. Some 75 percent of the rugby club works in one of Cobar's three mines, which require rotations of four 12-hour shifts followed by four off days. Those who elect to play rugby, then, opt for extreme sacrifice: Some Camels emerge at 7 p.m. from a work shift in sauna temperatures at 900 metres underground and then head straight to footy practice. Two contract workers recently forfeited $17,000 a piece in work just to make every game. The average Cobar miner receives 17 shifts off every year, so dedicated those to footy, not family, forces some uncomfortable priorities.

When Black, 43, the Camels' all-time leader in games, was named coach this year, he went a month without telling his wife. She learned the news when she read it in the paper.

The oldest Camel, Butch Eves, 50, a CSA mine operator, suffered a shoulder injury last year that ended his player career but perhaps preserved his marriage. "My wife was going to leave me if I played again," he said. Still, he trains with the team because he likes to bust heads.

"The mines haven't helped the club," says Peter Payne, a former Camel who's organizing the club's June 50th anniversary celebration. "Everything is more regulated now. You play your sport on the off time. Initially the mines were lenient, but not now. It affects us dramatically. One week we'll have 15 blokes playing, and two weeks later, we'll have bloody near a new 15."

Stress about such matters is mitigated by the team's role as a social club -- an acknowledgement that sport, at least in Outback NSW, doubles as communal ritual. Blokes with black dirt under their fingernails drink "black beer" at the New Occidental, the Camels' de facto home. They wear footy jumpers, which they call their "drinking uniforms." The club's goodwill toward the town indicates its expertise: At the Cobar Easter Show, the rugby guys run the bar. At the annual music festival, they run the bar. At the Louth races, they run the bar. Incidentally, the Camels are no longer in debt.

By Saturday, Cobar had all the tools necessary for Bourke. The club had a renewed spirit, thanks to an infiltration of debutants, including a new town butcher and a Kiwi. They also had a fully-loaded bus, packed up front with 24 bottles of water, nine diet Cokes, four ice bags, several kits of medical supplies, and 156 cans of beer -- just more than 10 per man, all for the trip home.

Before the bus began its 160-km march up the Kidman Way, Black stood at the front of the vehicle and explained a few rules. "No skulling on the bus this year, guys," he said. "And no spirits on the bus, too. Sorry, but that's a rule."

About two hours later, though, the team arriving to play Bourke -- a reliably strong side -- had borrowed a veil of professionalism. New jumpers, yellow with a green V across the chest, lent a look of formidability. Players talked about winning, about how, with so many mates unable to play because of shiftwork at the mines, they too needed to view the match as a job.

Evidently, their job on this late afternoon required a beating. The Camel forwards struggled with technique and drew penalties. Bourke scored three tries in the first quarter and never relented. The Camels showed some fight, and even some flashes of genuine potential, but by match's end, they walked off the field with an assortment of bruises (banged knees, bloody foreheads), having scored just one try to Bourke's nine.

"We played well in patches," Black said to the guys before they left Bourke. "Bourke is a good team."

The good news: This had only been a trial match; the season won't begin for another month.

The better news: The Camels demonstrated clear improvement from last year, when they lost to the same team, 112-3.

And the best news: Black, still standing on the grass oval, XXXX can already in hand, glanced at the horizon with a devious grin. "No matter how bad you get beat," he said, "you get a bus trip back home."

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Right now I am in Cobar, NSW. (pop: 5,000). Crazy experience. I have had a few free minutes here and decided to use the internet at the local library to fire off a quick update.

I drove into town yesterday. The place was already expecting me. For that, I could thank a story on the back page of the Cobar Age, headlined, "Camels set for fame after media hype." Ohgod.

Anyway, Cobar is about one square kilometer of hard-drinking humanity dropped into the middle of red ore and tumbleweeds. The town has three mines, which employ most of the people. It also has a Chinese restaurant. And several caravan parks. The gas station serves a full range of takeaway and sit-down meals. I believe there are at least 10 licensed drinking establishments here. One, called the Great Western Hotel, is evidently known for having the longest wrought iron railing in the state.

Upon arrival in town, I met with the president of the rugby team here, a bloke named Jarrod who is about 6-foot-6. He was already wearing his rugby jumper at 4 p.m. -- a drinking uniform, he called it. Hours later, we were at The New Occidental Pub, where at least half of the Cobar Camels footy players were lining the bar. The New Occ was a classic workers' pub, unforgettable really. Salty nuts sat in jugs along the bar. Peppy middle-aged bartenders (all female) poured the coldest beer. Faint 80s music played on the jukebox. Just about every other person in the place had an Akubra hat and a beard large enough to hide a VW.

Perhaps a foregone conclusion, but it was a long and legendary night. In a way, at least by morning, I was a bit touched by the whole thing. Cobar, after all, is a place where most of the men pull four-on, four-off shifts -- which means that half of the guys in the bar are on long weekends, and the other half are just counting down the free evening hours until they go back underground. The whole scene at the bar felt almost like ancient ritual, healthy for the soul, a giant and collective purge of stress. Everybody knew everybody. Conversations and laughs just seemed to stop at night's end and simply resume the next day at the same barstool.

Funny thing happened at the bar, too. I started talking to one bloke, a stubby guy named Stuart Long, and he said, finally, "Meet me tomorrow morning. I'll take you down in the mine."

I was startled.

"Don't I need authorization for that? Will that actually work?"

(I should mention that during my life as a journo in Pittsburgh, I'd tried -- and failed -- for months to pull off the underground mine experience.)

Well, here in Australia it only took a chance meeting with a guy at a bar.

So this morning, I met Stu just outside the Peak Gold and Copper Mine, some 10 km outside of town. I was handed a visitors' tag, coveralls, a hardhat and an emergency breathing apparatus that I was never told how to use.

Then, down we went. Way down. We spiraled down this dark tunnel in a vehicle until we were about a mile underground. Spooky gushes of mud intermittently shot out of the mineshaft ceiling. The place was sauna-hot. I needed earplugs to defend against the chaos of the heavy machinery. I spent about an hour down there, eyes wide, and though there was no direct journalistic "reporting," I hope the experience can somehow help me understand what it's like for these guys on the Camels. After all, many of them finish these 12-hour shifts and head straight for three hours of rough footy practice. Time off is precious in the mine world, but most guys on the team exhaust all vacation time to travel to road games.

Trust me, when I emerged from underground, all I wanted was a hot shower. I think I had a little gold residue under my fingernails, but I probably washed it away.

Oh well. You can't really lament lost earning power when the salted nuts are free.

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The exact problem with some of Australia's most intriguing outback spaces (what, exactly, is out there?) is the answer, which is nothing. That's why most tourists, and for that matter, most Australians, never occasion to leave this country's de facto Boardwalk -- the coastal serenity that safeguards all the major cities and most of the must-see landmarks.

There are some distinct suggestions, then, that towns like Bourke, NSW, receive few visitors. The town's Web site (www.visitbourke.com) denotes local taxi service information by listing of two mobile numbers, one for a guy named Lonnie, the other for a guy named Stan.

The rare traveller who pushes beyond the 300-km radius of Sydney finds himself, indeed, in the hairy frontier. You can even play around on Google Maps and decipher as much. The gaping forgottenness of New South Wales connects a few straight roads with a few dusty Main Street-type towns; the rest of the land is left to the lizards and the dry riverbeds.

I bring this all up only because my last week of work at the Tely -- final work date is April 1 -- will somehow allow me to travel through my state's netherworld. I leave tomorrow for Dubbo, six hours away, right at the junction between the arid region and the desert. After a night at the Cattleman's Ranch, and possibly after a dinner at the Billabong Reef and Beef, I'm off to Cobar -- a mining town of roughly 5,000 known for its chiefly for its rugby and its demoralizing suicide rate.

Cobar is the focus of my reporting, by the way. I'll be writing a piece of the rugby team there, hopefully with the backdrop of some fascinating social issues. I'll drink with the rugby guys on Thursday, spend some quality time with a few blokes on Friday, and attend their game (two hours north, in Bourke) on Saturday.

Originally, the Saturday game was scheduled to be played in Dubbo. But the president of the Cobar Camels called me and mentioned that the match and location had switched; "We're playing Bourke!" he roared. "The local rivalry!" And like that, I received the opportunity to make it up to the last northern outpost of humanity -- a town that 19th century Australian explorer Charles Sturt once deemed "unlikely to become the haunt of civilised man."

Over the next few days, I'll take plenty of photos to document the travels. Can't yet predict the availability of Internet access, much less the availability of drinking water and consumable canned goods, but if the opportunity surfaces, I'll provide some G'DFT updates mid-trip.

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One reason why it's easier than ever to be an American living in a foreign country:

March Madness On Demand. (www.ncaasports.com/mmod)

Listen, I feel confident saying that, at least until the next annual Apple convention, the NCAA Tournament is the best thing humans have ever invented. Sliced bread used to be No. 1, perhaps, but then the tourney came along and vanquished it like some trembling 16th seed.

But every year, watching the tournament presents a couple problems. CBS sometimes sticks you with the local games when, somewhere far away, a No. 2 seed is fighting for survival in overtime. Or, sometimes, you've got two games racing simultaneously to the wire, and you're left only to follow one of them in that translucent grayish box on the corner of your TV screen.

Maybe you've suspected that we deserve better.

The solution is here. March Madness On Demand allows anybody -- even blokes in Australia -- to call up a real time NCAA scoreboard and click, instantaneously, on whatever game suits the fancy. You can get Craig Bollerjack one moment, Gus Johnson the next. You can spend four straight games in Tampa. Or you can hop from Raleigh to D.C. and back. I daresay, following the tournament via On Demand beats watching the games on television.

Fears that I'd miss everything were greatly overstated, it turns out. In the past couple days, from the office computer in the Tely, I caught the final two minutes of any close game around. (So long as it happened in the evening time slot in the U.S.; afternoon games finished here before sunrise.) By the way, my bracket's still intact. Fared quite well, actually. I nailed the WVU-over-Duke pick. I'm in something like the 96th percentile. Clearly, I'm telling you this because there's still one downside to following the tourney while abroad: It's much harder to find people interested in your bragging.

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