Days 2: Same same but different

Australia is weird. Really weird.
Being back in Australia is a feeling I never really prepared for because I could never anticipate how it would feel.

The familiarity of it is it's own kind of strange.

"What's the accent?" Nicole, a friend I'm staying with in Denmark, WA, asks. My Australian accent, which was never strong to begin with has faded, the r sound finally entering my vernacular in an effort to be understood by Americans, and my vowles shortened. But I find myself smiling inside every time I hear the word faahkin' slapped mid sentence and relish the opportunity to say thongs without anyone guessing at my underwear.
And, like I seem to do everywhere I'm quick to make myself at home. The friends I'm staying with, who I'd hardly heard of the day before, quickly becomes family as we sit on the verandah with bourbon and cola. It's comforting to speak a language I really understand, our twisted, bastardised but beautiful Australian English - and oh wow do I speak it. To the checkout girl at the IGA, to the art store guy, to everybody who passes me by with the simple "howyagoin'" that is almost law of this land.

But at the same time I can't shake the foreigner feeling. Even though this is Australia, it is still thousands of kilometers away from home - the other side of the continent entirely. And the landscape lets me know this. This land is large, with a scale unmatched anywhere else. I spend my first full day in Denmark with friends at Madfish bay, a small, crustal clear pool sheltered from the enormous swells by small islands. I swim to the island, climbing around the vibrant, succulent filled sand dunes to wash the towering, formidable waves crash over the rockface bellow, which quickly drowns underneath. There's a ruggedness and power here that is unmatched by anything else I've ever seen.
Unlike the peaceful, humid and comfortable cairns, the western Australian country is vast, open and enormous. At Lights beach giant peaks stretch into the sky before rolling into the colourful sand dunes right down to the empty white sand below. We run for ages along the beach seeing nobody.

But it's not only the landscape that makes me feel foreign. I can't shake this feeling that I'm not sure how or where I belong in this country, and I don't mean geographically. I love this place, but I'm left with an unsettling feeling that the foreign feeling will sit with me even when I reach Cairns.
But hey, feeling foreign while collecting shells and swimming along the most incredible coastlines I've ever seen isn't really such a bad thing at all, and I soak in the beauty all the same.