Animal Adventures

Today's story is about the aquarium and the wildlife park in Darling Harbour, Sydney. Now there are aquariums all over the world, and the 38 dollar admission price of this one did not place it particularly high on my list of must dos. Make it free however, and everything changes.

Josh's parents lent us their passes to the two animal attractions, and we spent the day checking them out. The aquarium was first on the list. We bypassed the line with our member cards, and went right in. The first stop was getting our picture taken in front of a green screen by aquarium staff. They do this for everyone, three different poses and try to sell them to you for exorbitant prices at the exit.

Most aquariums have roughly the same assortment of swimmy things, and this was no exception. It had the usual crow of fish, but it also had some very uniquely Australian critters. There were rays and dugongs and sharks of all shapes and sizes. all sorts of pretty fish, and wait for it - platypus!

They are truly one of the strangest creatures I have ever encountered. They are much smaller than I thought, weighing no more than a few pounds. There were a whole crowd of them all swimming in this one tank, maybe five or six of them. They were busy catching food. These shrimp looking things with a silly name.

We stood for some time watching them swim around and eat. They really are weird. One of only two mammals which lay eggs, and one of only a few with venom. A duck bill, a beaver tail, and all manner of assorted random parts all attached to their small bodies.

Anyhow, after the aquarium we went next door to the wildlife park. This was not the zoo, but a small little establishment in the center of the city. Here, almost all the creatures were uniquely Australian. There were slithering creatures, flying creatures, jumping creatures and man more.

We saw the deadliest snake in the world, the eastern brown snake, and many other one which will kill you in a matter of minutes. There were totally harmless but none the less huge moths and butterflies. The things which really captured my attention however were the kangaroos, and the koalas. The kangaroos at the wildlife park are small grey kangaroos, and they also have wallabies  It was a pretty hot day, so they were mostly just chilling out, laying down and relaxing. Really cool to see them though. A few were hopping around, such a weird, but very efficient way of getting around.

There was a very chilled out kookaburra there as well. They have enormous heads. It is funny to see the birds that you hear in the morning. The sound and the bird are somewhat incongruous.

I think however the coolest thing there was the koalas. If you have ever seen a koala stuffy, that is pretty much exactly what they look like. At first I did not believe they were real. Even the one which was eating. They are the most harmless looking creatures I have ever seen. They just curl up into a ball in a fork of a tree and sleep. Sometimes they wake up and have a little nibble of eucalyptus before going back to sleep.

There were probably about ten koalas there, half male and half female. They look a little bit different, mainly the nose is different. It would have been worth paying just to see them.

There were also some crocs and other assorted things, but we were running short of time and needed to catch a train back to were Josh lives.

All in all a very good day. So cool to see these amazing critters I have seen in pictures so many times, even if it was just in a wildlife park. I have now seen some of the snakes, spiders and creepy crawlies in the real world, as well as kangaroos, and wallabies  I would really love to see a koala in the wild, but unfortunately they are very threatened and hard to find.

Anyhow, that is that!

My New Beach

This is my new beach. I live less than a few minutes walk away from it. It is an incredible tropical beach with palms right down to the shore. One can walk for ages, and last night I did. It is beautiful.

I could see the rain coming up from the city, a very menacing tropical thunderstorm to be exact. You can tell when the rain is going to hit, and when it does you want to be inside.

Taking shelter under a hotel entrance, here is the rain. It is hard to demonstrate in a picture just how hard it was raining. If one were to stand out in it for thirty seconds, all their clothes would have been soaked through entirely.

I took a taxi home.

The Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are spectacular. Mountains is perhaps the wrong thing to call them, speaking as a person who comes from a place with some pretty nice mountains. What they are is flat tabletop highlands, about 700m high. They have sheer drops off the sides which go down hundreds of meters to the forest below.

They are near enough to Sydney, less than a couple hours away in fact. Josh and I drove up there for a little day trip. When we left Sydney, the weather was a bit iffy. By the time we started ascending into the mountains, it was looking worse and worse by the second. By the time we got near to Katoomba, the town were were visiting, the visibility was less than a hundred meters in driving rain and fog.

We arrived to the first lookout on Cliff Drive. We were both a bit bummed that it was so cloudy and foggy, but at least the rain had let off. We hopped out of the car, and noticed a couple of people over by a stone wall looking very much like they were searching for something. As soon as we got out, they walked way down a trail.

I thought I saw a GPS with them and I said that I bet they were Geocaching. We checked on Josh's phone, and sure enough there was a cache in the wall. We started looking for it, and after about ten minutes of unsuccessful looking, we saw them coming back up the trail, but they were waiting as if for us to leave. I called out to them and asked if they were geocaching, and they said that indeed they were.

We joined forces and chatted with them for about a half hour. They were from the Netherlands. It was pretty neat to chat. Just as we were about to give up, Josh found the cache, and we all logged it. They headed on their way, as did we. The short trail they had hid down leads to the actual lookout. We went down there and as we walked up to the edge, the clouds began to lift. It was amazing to see them disappear and reveal the incredible view they had been hiding.

After quickly stopping to get another cache, we headed along the Cliff Drive to the tourist center and the Giant Staircase. Basically it is a giant staircase which goes all the way down the cliff to the bottom, then there is a hike through the forest to a cable car back up.

From the top one can see the Three Sisters. Three rock monoliths which stick out from the edge of the escarpment.

The giant staircase is exactly that. It has something over a thousand steps, all very steep and many hewn out of the rock. It winds its way through the first of the Three Sisters, then down into the dense forest below.

It is about an hour and a half to the bottom of the cable car. The ideal way to get back up is via the railway, in fact it is the steepest railway in the world at over 52 degrees. It was closed for repairs though when we were there which was a bit disappointing. At least we did not have to walk back up the stairs!

Up on top again we walked back to the car and headed home. This was the view from that walk.

That was our trip to the Blue Mountains. They are spectacular, and I highly recommend a jaunt that way if you are ever in the Sydney area.

Next on the list of posts is the aquarium and the wildlife park. Here is a taste of what there is to come.

After Australia Day

Ok, here goes nothing. Or something. That expression has never made sense. It has been a while since I have put up a proper post, and I am sure you have been waiting for it. Here it is. Do not worry, there are more to follow. Instead of one gigantic post I am going to do several smaller ones.

I am writing this from Cairns in Far North Queensland. I have been here for four or five days, and it is hot. The temperature is high, but it is made so much hotter by the humidity. Using the Canadian Humidex calculator, it looks like the average day see the humidex hit the low 50s, and on a warm day it hits the high 50s. So when I say hot, I mean hot. Today was a cool day compared to most. It was cool enough that I considered a sweater this morning. The humidex now in the early evening is 42.

I am not going to talk much more about Cairns as of yet, apart from putting up a couple pictures from the flight in, a flight over the Great Barrier Reef.

That second shot is looking directly towards Cairns just minutes away from touching down. It is beautiful here, and I will get to talking a lot about it later, but for now I am going to take us all the way back down to Sydney.

We pic up the story after Australia Day. By this point, my first three days in Australia had included three barbies, two poker nights and one Australia day, a great start to any Aussie adventure. Now, I am not a hundred percent sure that this will all be in chronological order, most of it should be there.

This is a replica of Captain Cooks ship. This is actually from a different day than the one I am about to describe, but it works. It was a dark and rainy night. Well it was actually morning. It was morning and it was raining. My friend Josh and I were trying to figure out what to do, and what we ended up deciding on is going down to Darling Harbour.

We tried to get into the aquarium and the wildlife park, but to no avail. Both were super busy. We went instead to the maritime museum across the bridge. It was pretty cool on the inside, but it was the ships outside that really made it fun. They had a veritable fleet of heritage vessels. Three of them were open to visitors. We first went to the ship above.

The first thing I did upon boarding it was make friends with a very large red head. Here is me with that head.

It is a very cool little ship. It spends most of its time sailing around crewed mostly by people who come aboard for a week or two to live the life. It was really pouring rain, and an open deck ship is quite wet. I love old sailing ships. They are beautiful. Even this one which has a squashed look to it.

The old navy ship was next. We were already soaking wet so we wandered around the outside decks for a little while, looking mainly at the big guns.

The inside was as utilitarian as any navy ship. As we walked past the ships store, we overheard a mother say to her very young kids "Thats where you get your cigarettes". Good thing to be telling the kids.

Next on the list was a submarine. Submarines are very menacing looking, even when they are old and deactivated. They are also really cramped. Here is me going down the hatch into the sub.

After that we headed back home and had a relaxing afternoon doing not to much at all, but not before we stopped at McD's and lamb, yes lamb burgers.It was actually a little depressing how good it was....

We did pop out later that afternoon. We went to the park just down the street. The normally dry creek looked like this.

It is phenomenal how much water can come out of the sky in a very short time. That day Sydney got over 100mm of rain, and up here in Queensland there were places which got more than triple that amount in one day!

Next up, the Blue Mountains.

Beach

This is a beach, and this is me on that beach after swimming at the beach. It is a nice beach.

A Little Update

I know that I have been very sporadic in my postings. There is a reason for it. It takes a very long time to write a post the way I want to write them, and I dont like to do it half way. I have simply been doing to many things over the past little while to write a post. I am currently working on writing one, but that is only half the story, I have to upload and format all the pictures, and then get them all into the post.

Anyhow, here is a brief synopsis of what has been going on since last I wrote. I went to the beach in Sydney, I popped blue-bottles on the sand, I saw live kangaroos, I saw a kangaroo on my plate. I have found things which were hidden, scrambled under a bridge paralleling the sea, and seen spiders so fearsome I ran away. I have gotten rid of a farmers tan, I have gotten a farmers tan back like never before. I have seen blue mountains and black cockatoos. I have seen incredible rain and incredible sun. And I have not written a blog post, but I will.

The Road to Down Under!

It has once again been a while since I did any serious writing here, but that was not without good reason. The last big post I did was from Verona, Italy. Now I am in Sydney, Australia. I have seen friends on two continents, walked in five countries on three continents, woken up with -14 temperatures and gone to sleep with +30 degree temperatures. I have simply not had the time nor the internet access to write a proper blog post. I am going to attempt it now.

The problem is where to start. I don't know if I should continue sequentially and write about Swiss adventures, or if I should jog forward to real time, and talk about Switzerland once I am settled into a routine at school. I think that I might just take the second option.

As I just mentioned I am now in Australia. I did not just teleport here from Switzerland however, there were many adventures in between. After saying goodbye to Tiffany in the Luzern train station, I had a lovely train ride to the other side of the alps through the Gotthard Pass

After arriving in the very Italian city of Milano, I wandered about the amazing train station there for a few minutes, before purchasing a ticket and hopping aboard a train bound for Verona. About half way along the line, it started to rain. At first just a little, and then a lot.

Now I did spend a month in Verona, so I do know my way about fairly well. I am not however telepathic, nor was I very prepared for arriving there. I was staying with my friend Julie. She had moved since last I was there, and had sent me her address and phone number. Which I had looked at and promptly forgotten to write down. I remembered that the address had a "3" in it, but that was about it.

I did know the general area of the city that it was in, so I started walking in that general direction, wandering about looking for internet. Free wifi is very difficult to find. What little I could find required you to have a cell phone to text the password to. I did not have that, so I could not use any of those. After nearly 2 and a half hours of wandering in the rain which was slowly turning to snow, I found a copy place that had computers, and I was able to use the internet there.

I met up with my friend and all was well. I had a lovely few days in Verona. I did a lot of walking around and seeing the sights. I cannot remember if I mentioned this before, but in Switzerland, Tiffany and I started Geocaching. We found about 30 caches in the last few days of my stay, and I continued that in Verona. It is a neat way to see new parts of a city, and to see a city in a new way.I think I found nine caches in Verona.

Here are a bunch of pictures from around town.

Anyways, I spent three nights there. I caught up with a few friends, had a few drinks. Well a lot of drinks....prosecco is very yummy. It was very nice to see everyone, and to see the city in a little bit of a different way. It was also kinda strange to have a very short visit to a city I have spent so much time in. It was not really like seeing a new place, because I had seen most of it before, but it was sorta new because I was once again surrounded by Italian.

After Verona I headed north to Bruneck in the far north of Italy. It is deep in the German speaking area of Italy. I stayed with a family with whom my family is very close. I spent four or five days with them. It was very very nice to see them all again.

I did a lot of just hanging out, reading, and playing with the little guy. We also went skating, sledging, and on these crazy ski/sled things. We went for an hour and a half hike up a mountain with these crazy one ski sled things and it took less than ten minutes to slide back down.

After many a fine meal, and much good company, it was time to leave, and head out to Munich to fly to Australia. There was some amount of drama attached to the departure. I was catching a bus from Brixen, about an hour away from where I was staying. The bus would take me directly to the airport. It left at 6:15 am. We woke at 4:30 or so (the temperature was about -14), and got in the car at 5:00. We promptly backed up and got well and truly stuck in the snow. About five minutes of trying to free the car later we jumped in a second car and got on the road no problem. We were heading along, and I noticed that the fuel gauge was firmly in the very empty part of the dial. We kept whizzing past gas stations, when finally Astrid asked if I had a ten euro note, since she had been planning on taking the other car with a full tank, and therefore had no cash. I did indeed have a ten euro note. We stopped for a rapid pit stop, and then got back on the road. The only trouble was that I no longer had the cash to pay for my bus. Astrid made a call to a friend, and once again we had to stop to pick up a bill from her friend. Thank you to that friend by the way. We then made it to where the bus would stop.

All was well after that. It was a nice little minibus which drove through Austria, and into Germany to the airport in Munich. I had a bit of a wait there as I was quite early, though that was the only bus which would get me there on time. It was a beautiful cold clear day in Munich. It was an uneventful wait, and eventually I hopped on the plane. It was parked at a remote stand, so we had to take a bus, then walk up the stair truck which was kinda cool.

This was my last view of the continent of Europe after just having left the ground in Germany.

Eating breakfast 37000 feet above Ulan Bator.

My longest flight up until then had been a 9ish hour Paris to Miami flight. This beat that by an hour. We took off and headed to meet the sunset on our way to Beijing. I watched a movie, and a couple tv shows, then tried to sleep. The flight was almost empty so I had my two window side seats to myself. I dont thing that I managed to actually sleep, but it was a very nice overnight rest for a few hours.

Just before landing in China the sun rose. It was beautiful. Beijing's terminal three is also an amazing building. It is one of the nicest airports I have ever been in. It is a great airport for watching the planes come and go, and for walking, and for lying down. The chairs are comfortable, and they even have these recliner chairs all over the place which are brilliant. The one and only downside is the music. There is an extraordinary set of speakers spread all through the airport which give perfect surround sound wherever you are. At first it was very nice. The classical piano and orchestral music making for nice background noise. The trouble arose when it became apparent that there were only about ten songs which were played over and over and over....on a short layover that would be no problem at all.....a ten hour layover like mine though, and you rapidly begin to wish bad things upon the speaker system....

My ride to Sydney.

I had a nice little nap in the early afternoon, and after what seemed like many hours, mainly because it had actually been many hours, I boarded my next flight. This flight was almost full. I did however have what I think was a pretty good seat. It was not a window seat, but it was one of the ones at the front of a cabin, so there was tons of leg room, and it really didn't feel like I was surrounded by people. I could get up without disturbing anyone as well which is nice. That flight was even longer. 12 hours. In terms of the longest flights that is not that bad, but in normal terms, that is a long time to sit on a plane. After five hours of sitting there, there are still seven hours to go.....

All in all it was not bad at all. It was again a night flight, and again I dont think I actually slept, but I did have my eyes closed for a good part of it. The sun rose, and after a little hold, we landed in Sydney in the bright sunshine and the middle of summer.

I was near the font of the plane, and I made my way to immigration rather quickly, had virtually no wait at all, and after a bit of a wait for my bag, was waved right through customs without even stopping. I met my friend Josh, and we headed outside into the summer sun. We drove downtown, and ended up parking a little outside of it at his university. Which is beautiful. This is why we did not park downtown.

We took the bus down George Street. We jumped off and walked the last little ways, then went for a stroll around Circular Quay to the Opera. It was so crazy to actually be in that place, one of the most photographed in the world, one which I have seen countless time in pictures. The harbour bridge is stunning, and it was just a lovely day. It was a lot warmer than it had been back in Italy. About 47 degrees warmer in fact. And it was actually a lot cooler than it has been here.

We went for a wander, had some cool beverages, and after a few hours hopped back on the bus and drove back to Josh's place. On the way we stopped at the Olympic park. It was really cool. The stadium there is huge!

After having a nap for a little bit, we went over for a bar-b and poker night with a bunch of Josh's friends. It was a ton of fun.

Yesterday was Australia day. Around noon we headed into Darling Harbour to see what was going on. We had a bit of a wander around, all decked out with Australia tattoos, and silly mexican hats. For supper that evening we had another bar-b. It was very tasty.

I got to meet a gigantic stick bug as well. They are frigging weird.... And huge! She just kept crawling up my arm!

And now I am having a nice slow morning writing this post.

I cannot believe I am here!