If failure is the best teacher, as any experienced business owner will tell you, then a certain hostel in Brisbane deserves the fast-track to tenure. Seldom does a place teach you so much about sound hospitality practices by doing everything wrong. Cloud 9 Backpackers on Upper Roma St. is such a place.

In a roadhouse deep in the central Australian outback, Dinky the Dingo has been entertaining travelers for years.

At an unremarkable corner of the Cultural Center of Uluru, there’s a binder holding hundreds of sorrows, regrets, and apologies.

Read enough of them and they start to sound the same:

I was so enchanted by Uluru that I wanted to take a piece of it home. I realize now that it was wrong. Please return this rock to its rightful place.

The Red Heart of Australia is akin to nothing else. There’s the harsh arid climate and the vast distances between places. For hours on the road all you see is red dirt and bushes. It feels like an unforgiving wasteland where the world’s unlucky and unloved go to die.

It’s absolutely beautiful.

Because it’s so remote, it’s entirely unique. The people are friendly yet jarringly frank and to the point. The life is simpler and you still feel that pioneering spirit in the towns and roadhouses. You realize the glory of its natural features, like Uluru, Kata Tjuta and the waterholes, only when you see them up close.

A peculiarity of modern video games is that you never truly die. The player is given unlimited chances to succeed, no matter how many times he may plummet down a canyon.

A vaguely related peculiarity of rocks is that they don’t care how soft your flesh and brittle your bones are. This tenuous association was foremost on my mind as I grappled the cubic face of Ormiston Gorge, an ancient geological beauty deep in the scorched red heart of the Australian outback.

Sydney reminds me of a beautiful country girl who moved to the big city and is still unaware aware of her incredible power.

It’s a world-class city with all the adornments, the trimmings, the taut features, the parts it keeps hidden and that surface at short lapses in poise. It wears beautiful colonial buildings, stately homes, sculpted parks, bustling harbours. It has scraggly bourgeois corners, artsy bistros, steamy pubs.

And yet, it lacks that pointed haughtiness of cities that have long ago joined the league of global burgs, or of urban belles who receive daily reminders on being lusted.