Australia trip 4

November 20th. I snorkeled twice this morning, from Taka. I had thought I would do a “discovery dive” with an instructor, the second time. In the end, though, I snorkeled. I have seen LOTS of fish. Potato cod, trumpet fish, parrot fish, clown fish, red snapper, butterflyfish, shark, giant clam, nurse shark, bannerfish. I swam with Nick, then with Matt. At the end of the cod feed, Hiro brought the feed box up so the potato cod came nearly to surface, where I could see it. Yea! Now I am sunbathing. None of us should be sunbathing, of course. Bad for the skin.

Afternoon snorkeling was shorter, the Lighthouse Bommie, south of where we were in the morning. I saw a sea turtle! It was a hawksbill turtle. First I saw it gliding along the edge of the bommie. Then I cleared my goggles, and it was beginning to rise closer to me. I saw it surface a couple of times before swimming away from me. I practiced diving while snorkeling. I’m really bad at it, but it was fun. Snorkeling here while others scuba’d, was like playing in the bathtub instead of swimming.

I saw Nemo, 2 Nemos, early on, but then they disappeared. I saw a large school of narrow, silver-white fish with narrow orange stripes along the dorsal ridge (2 or 3). I saw another large school of yellowtail fusilliers, blue fish whose yellow tails resembled less-than or greater-than signs. After we were done at Lighthouse Bommie, the guests watched the crew put the dive ladders away. We saw a young hawksbill turtle and an olive sea snake surface next to our boat. Wahoo!

photos from australia trip 3

Australia trip 3

Wednesday, November 17th. Today began with rain, like Monday did. We had arranged to go on a guided hike, but the tour guide was late picking us up. When he arrived, he assured us that, by the time we got to the trail head, the weather would clear. It did. Yea! We had a 3-4 hour hike in and out of the Grand Canyon in Australia’s Blue Mountains. John, with Wildframe, was a terrific tour guide. His area of study is biology, and his hobby is raising orchids, plus he takes tour groups through this canyon more than once a week. He knows about most of the plants and animals there, and is humble enough to say “I don’t know” when confronted with a new species. Truly, the difference between taking the train to the summit and hiking on our own, and using John, was that John drove us from the hostel, he shared greatly of his knowledge of the area, and he was friendly and kind.

There are several canyons that all seem to meet in the middle, and there is an area where mountains give way to table lands. We walked down below the cliffs, which were at about 3,000 feet. I don’t know how deep this Grand Canyon is, but it took us about 2 and a half hours to walk to the bottom of it, stopping frequently to ask questions and take pictures. I wish I could show a picture of one of the orange crawfish we saw. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get close enough to get a good picture. We learned the difference in the appearance of the tree fern and the king fern. We learned what iron stone is. We found out that where iron stone forms a layer between layers of sandstone, sometimes a swamp forms above, and then beautiful waterfalls appear below. We saw lots and lots of eucalyptus trees, different kinds, and we learned about how eucalyptus responds to forest fires. We saw different kinds of acacia, and also banxia. We saw parrots and cockatoos, and carrawongs, and Australian crows--which sounded just like cats.

Thursday evening, November 18th. We’re at the Cairns Central YHA, waiting for Pizza Hut to arrive with 30 pizzas. It’s $5 pizza night! Lots of hungry young men and women’s hopes for an early dinner were dashed when the receptionist announced that Pizza Hut was one hour behind schedule. 30 pizzas!

Tomorrow, at 5pm, we will leave for Cod Hole and the Coral Sea (Osprey Reef). Brad will scuba dive, and I will snorkel or laze about on the boat. We’ll be gone until Tuesday at 2:30pm, and we probably won’t have internet access. Have a lovely weekend!

Australia trip 2

Tuesday, Nov. 16th. We went to Watson’s Bay, and also bought touristy stuff. The ferry trip was a highlight. Our hats almost blew off. There is a cliff at Watson’s Bay, Camp Cove, where you can see the Pacific Ocean. It’s historic significance is first as the place where people would watch for ships, and then as a fortification. Now it is a national park. The cliffs are beautiful, the drop looks huge. Lots of plants I hadn’t seen before. There were signs that people are planting young plants in areas where there is only dirt now. Maybe young native plants.

I don’t know if we really bought aboriginal art gifts, but they were advertised that way. I liked the quilting squares and the coasters. I did not like the kangaroo scrotum pouches.

We keep over-eating. It’s hard when the portions are big and the menu is tempting. Today was pancakes and eggs, then fish and chips. The price of the fish and chips was astronomical-40 AUD!!!!

The hostel offered $5 burgers for dinner, so we had those and met some of our fellow travelers. Now we are doing laundry and drinking sparkling shiraz. Tomorrow we have a guided hike in the Blue Mountains. Thursday we probably check out on time (10am) and then leave for Cairns in the afternoon.

Australia Trip, Part 1

It’s five a.m. and I”m awake. Brad is trying to sleep. I went to sleep sometime after 7pm. I woke up at 9:45, 3 and 4. I’m fine. It’s just an adjustment to be in a time zone so far from home.

I got into the Sydney intl airport at about 8am yesterday, local time of course. Brad waited outside the security area while I was asked about foreign plants, controlled substances, and so on. I have a new stamp in my passport now. Yea!! I’ll have to look at that sometime. When Brad got me, we took the train to Central Station, near Sydney Harbour. The train had cars where some sections were double-decker. More coolness! We got off at Central, and walked to Cumberland Street, where the Sydney Harbour-the Rocks YHA youth hostel is located. I love it here. Although the room has no shampoo or tv, it has everything else. It’s quite similar to rooms I had in Finland hotels.

I took a shower, rested, then we headed out. It began to rain and rained until I fell asleep in the evening. We ate silly food yesterday. I had pancakes for lunch, and Brad had eggs benedict. At dinnertime, Brad had a dark chocolate milkshake while I had a Belgian waffle with dark chocolate-dipped fruit.

We shopped. There’s a bookstore near here with a selection of books that I like. I’d like to have the entire collection transported to my home. Then I could weed out the titles I don’t care for, later. Somebody at this store likes the Penguin publishing company a lot. There were two different Penguin series available. This was how I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It may be simply that because Penguin is British, there's more traffic in Penguin books here. Back home, I live near a distribution point for Random House, and there is a large percentage of Random House books in our local bookstores.

I found a brown, broad-brimmed hat that I like. The humidity here means that, when I wear the hat, my hair makes a kind of half-sphere under the hat. Not really, but I do have very puffy hair in this weather. It’s like Baltimore in May or June.

It’s late spring here. There seems to be a lot of wisteria in Sydney, including a dark purple kind that is new to me. There are conifers and palms growing side by side. Brad and I walked to the Botanic Gardens. This collection has a lot of plants from other parts of the world, and I wasn’t always able to tell which ones were from where. We stopped to smell many roses. There was also a giant honeysuckle. The birds we saw were fun surprises. There are magpies here, which I have also seen in my home state of Washington, and in Finland. We also saw something like an ibis, and a smaller bird whose habits reminded me of a killdeer, except that it didn’t walk on the ground much. There were pigeons, and some kind of local gull. Also a duck that looked a lot like a Mallard, but wasn’t one.