Sydney

After Fraser, I went to a day of my classes back at uni with Margaret, then hopped on a flight down to Sydney that night. Our first day in Sydney, we went to the aquarium downtown, which was neat. They had a lot of cool animals there, my favorites were the sea dragon (like a big elaborate seahorse), sharks, and the weird fish like the stonefish (most venomous fish, and it just sits on the ground looking exactly like a rock waiting for you to step on it), pineapple fish, and the cow fish (look up some pictures, they are small fat fish with really neat designs. Really goofy looking when they swim around too). It was a really cool, I would say just as good as Monterey Bay Aquarium, but with more diverse fish and animals. We got to see a comedian at the Sydney Opera house that night too, his name was Reginald Hunter (born in the US South, now lives in the UK), and he was pretty funny. It was in a small part of the Opera house (I didn’t know there was more than one hall there, but it is a massive place), it was cool exploring that area. We also met some law students going on a party cruise that were dressed all crazy (the theme was ‘search and rescue’ or something like that – firefighters, nurses, flouro spandex people…), and they invited me to a BBQ at their place and to go out in the city with them on Sunday which was cool. People are so nice here, its awesome. You know them for 5 minutes and they’re your best friends. Good stuff.

Day two in Sydney was a full day for sure. We got up and went on a ferry ride around Sydney Harbor where a woman told us about the history of the area and pointed out really expensive houses that belong to Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, a guy that owns TV networks, and other such people. We also went by a nude beach and a harbor housing military ships. After that, we caught a bus and checked out the Paddington Markets for awhile, then walked to Darling Point, a neighborhood where we met with one of my grandma’s friends from when my Mom and her family lived there (when my mom was 6 she lived in Sydney for a few years). This woman had an amazing view of Sydney from her apartment, and we had tea with her and hung out for awhile. We walked back down to the bus terminal from there and went to Bondi Beach. It was a cool area, but it was cold and a bit rainy out, and my family did not want to spend too much time there, so we caught a bus back to downtown after about an hour. I would like to go back and spend more time there at some point, as well as Cogee Beach, which is a few kilometers down the road.

On our third day in Sydney, we took a train out to the Olympic Park and biked around on the trails there. It was an area that reminded me of Mountain View of Foster City, there were lakes around, and it had a similar feel to it. It was a good break from the city, and also cool to get to see the stadiums where the Olympics were held. They also had pillars with all the Australian athletes listed, and video footage playing from the games. It was cool and got me excited for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. We got back to downtown Sydney in time to see the flying fox colony (fruit bats) take off from the trees in the botanical gardens. There are tons of them, and they just all go out flying looking for fruit at dusk, it’s a pretty cool sight. We also went walking out there the next morning, and saw them hanging around in the trees. They look like fruit or giant seedpods hanging from all the branches. Their wingspans can get up to 4.5 feet, which is pretty massive, it looked like Halloween with them flying overhead. After that, we went off to the airport, and I flew back to school. It was definitely an awesome time, I was really happy that my family got to come visit.



Pictures are: view from the harbor in Sydney Harbor, the opera house, dolphin riding at Bondi Beach, Margaret at Margaret St., and my new favorite picture of me and my sister. I dont even know how to describe the emotions being expressed, but I love it.

Family Invasion and Fraser Island

My family flew into Brisbane the Sunday that I got back from my field trip, and I met up with them the next afternoon after taking a midterm! Busy times. It was fun cramming for finance on the bus ride back from Heron for sure. Anyways, it was awesome to see the parents and Margaret in Australia. It threw me off to see them just show up at the bus stop at UQ, just not used to people from back home showing up right there at my uni. Very cool though. We hung out at Union for a bit with people from my floor and ate lots of raisins (I got a huge shipment of dried fruit mix, hella awesome). They brought Hershey’s kisses too, and the Australians were all very excited about having those (they don’t have them in Australia). We walked around campus a bit and had dinner with one of Mom’s friends that has recently moved to Brisbane. It was a good night.

The next morning, we started off on an excursion to Fraser Island. Our guide picked us up in the morning and we started our drive up the Sunshine Coast to Rainbow Beach, one of the ferry points out to the island. There were 10 people in our group stuffed into a Land Cruiser. We had a 3.5 hour drive up the coast, a 10 minute ferry ride, and then we were driving on the beach on Fraser Island. Fraser is a very cool place, it was probably one of the best places I have been in Australia, there is just so much on the island to do and see. You drive around in 4WD trucks on the beach and on the tracks that go inland through the island. Fraser is the largest sand island in the world, the entire thing is made of sand, but there is so much diversity throughout the whole place. There is a beach around the perimeter, a rainforest in the interior, and many freshwater lakes and creeks, tons of them are crystal clear and absolutely amazing. You can swim in the lakes, but not the ocean, because there are tons of sharks and stingers in the water. The first day, we drove up the coast of 75 Mile Beach (note miles, not kilometers, strange.), and stopped at a creek that you could walk around in. We also got to dig up these clam-like things called pippies that you can smash open and eat right there. They were really good, and we had 3 or 4 of them each (us and a Spanish guy that was in our group), which really surprised our guide, Justin. He said that people normally don’t want to try it at all, and usually don’t like the taste if they do try them. But they were awesome, just really fresh sushi. We also went by a shipwreck off the coast, colored sand dunes, and hiked over sand dunes to Lake Wabby where we went swimming. It was all really cool, the hikes were sweet, the 4WD rides were fun, and the scenery was amazing.

The other people on our tour were a bunch of characters for sure. There was a guy from Spain (Jose), a woman from Finland, and a family of 3 Brazilians (2 parents that only spoke Portuguese visiting their daughter that lives on the Gold Coast). Jose was cool, he was fun to talk to and a really nice guy. Finland was a bitch and a half, she complained about everything, and was really pushy about having everyone else take photos of her with her camera. All she talked about when she wasn’t complaining about the weather or how she didn’t get sleep or any of the other million things that didn’t meet with her Finnish standards was how she was in Australia for a diving competition. We could have done without her, but it was all part of the experience I guess. The Brazilians mostly kept to themselves, as they were all speaking another language, but apparently they were complaining a lot too. At least we couldn’t understand them, so we didn’t have to listen. The father, Ulises, was a hairy fat guy that wore a speedo the whole time we were there, from breakfast to dinner, and refused to wear pants at any time for some reason I do not understand. I made a point to not have to sit near him in the truck, it was quite traumatizing. Our guide joked to him and Jose (that had similarly skimpy swimsuit), that speedos are actually illegal in Australia, and that people who wear them are said to be ‘smuggling budgies’. My mom was pretty amused by that one.

The second day we got up and went on a hike through the rainforest, which was really cool. All of the trees grow in the sand, and there is a creek that goes through the forest that is absolutely silent because there are no rocks in it to disrupt the water. It’s impressive that all the plants grow on this huge mass of sand. We drove to another lake and went swimming there for awhile, it was very beautiful and we were just about the only people there. Some rain clouds looked like they were coming in, so we took another drive to a different part of the island for lunch, where we got to see a lake that was a red/yellow/orange color because ‘tea trees’ grow in the water and have stained it to be like that. After that, we drove back down the beach and headed back to Brisbane. It was a really cool trip, we didn’t see any dingoes, which was too bad (there are a ton of them that live on the island), but we heard that they like to steal things, so maybe it was okay we didn’t run into any because they might have kidnapped Margaret.

Pictures are: Family in the rainforest, Margaret in the rainforest, Mom and I with a huge tree trunk, and a picture of us in one of the lakes that had been stained a dark color by the tea trees.

Heron Island Field Trip: Extreme Research

This past week, I went on a pretty long journey up the coast for a field trip for my marine science class. We left at midnight on a Wednesday, drove for 7.5 hours, got to Gladstone (a random port city, there is a port there and not much else), waited 3.5 hours at the park there near the jetty for the ferry to come, took the ferry for another 2 hours, and finally arrived at Heron Island. At this point, everyone was really tired, but just pulling up onto the dock to this place got us all excited. (Most people were really happy to get off the boat as well, it was a bit of a rough ride and some people got sick). Coming onto the island was great, it was a beautiful day and Heron itself is amazing. It’s about a kilometer long and a kilometer wide, so it’s a very small place. My school has a research station there, and there is a resort on the other side. There are a few trails in the middle, but that’s about it. We had an orientation talk and got a quick lunch from the most hardcore Nazi cafeteria woman ever, she was seriously the angriest, most hateful Australian I have met. I don’t know how you could be so pissed off about working on an amazing island, and cooking for adults even, it’s not like you are in a middle school full of jackass kids. Meal times were 30 minutes each, and she had all the food put away within the first 10 minutes, just so she could yell at you about being late to the meal. Anyways, she was crazy, but we finished eating and went out snorkeling right away. This session was mostly to make sure people could swim allright. It was relatively low tide, so the water was quite shallow, but I got to see some cool fish and coral.

When we had free time, I would either walk around and just explore the area or find someone that wanted to go snorkel or swim and go do that. Those were probably the best times to go out, because it was only a few people in the water and we ended up seeing a lot more (probably because the animals didn’t notice you as much as when there were 50 people in the water). I went with this one guy Tyler from Vanderbilt a couple times, he was pretty stoked on being in the water all the time so it was easy to just go find him and snorkel around. We went out at dawn on the last day and ended up seeing 4 turtles (green turtles and loggerheads), an 8 foot wide ray, and a wobbegong shark. On another trip with him we saw 15 huge rays in the sand all in the same area (and a shovelnose ray/shark – its like a shark with a flat ray-like head), and they all got up and ‘flew’ away right in front of us, it was awesome. I also saw a reef shark, he was about 7 or 8 feet long, and that was really cool. They don’t attack people, which is always good. There were also tons of really colorful reef fish. We also got to go out at night and snorkel with flashlights in the water. We had to tie glowsticks to our snorkels too, it was sweet. We saw a turtle and a shark and some other fish, but it was mostly just awesome swimming around in the dark looking for things. The stars there were amazing too. There was no light pollution or anything else to block your view, and you could see the Milky Way very clearly. We were out stargazing at the beach one night, and saw the Southern Cross, and that lead to a conversation that made me very ashamed of one of my fellow Americans. This girl did not know that the seasons were reversed from the north and south sides of the globe, nor did she know what the equator was. She was looking for the North Star, and was shocked to find that it does not appear in the southern hemisphere. It was impressive.

This island was the most lively place I have probably ever been to in terms of animals. It was just crazy to me how this little piece of land so far out in the water had so much life on it. Not only is the ocean just packed with marine animals; there are birds all over too. There are about 4 species of birds that live on the island, and they totally take over the area. There are 80,000 of one of the species alone (I can’t remember the name) that live there, and they have wild orgies all night. It was so weird falling asleep, because it would be semi-quiet for a few minutes, then the birds would erupt making all these weird noises. They sounded like dogs howling and babies crying and just strange noises all around our tent. There are also these black birds that live there called mutton birds (they have another name too but I can’t remember it right now), and they have apparently evolved without having landing skills. They seriously just fall out of the sky and crash into buildings. I was sitting at a picnic table one night, and one of them fell on the roof of the building next to me, rolled off to the ground, and was just lying there dazed for a bit until it collected itself enough to move on. It is bizarre. We were even warned about them in the orientation speech, and they were not joking. This girl I was walking next to randomly screamed and ducked, and one of these birds shot past right where her head had been and crashed into a wall. I don’t know how these birds are still a species.

This whole trip was pretty much snorkeling. We had a half day of research projects (my group counted clam populations in different areas. In case you were wondering, there is a higher density of clams in the outer reef than the inner one. Crucial scientific information.), but most of the rest of the time was just spent in the water checking out the Barrier Reef. The lack of work might have been because the tutors did not know what to do with us because our course coordinator did not show up until the last day, but I am not complaining. It was really cool, and a great opportunity to see a place that most people would never get to visit because it is a research station and you can’t just decide to go there. Probably the best field trip ever, it definitely tops going to the top of Parking Structure A and looking through the haze at the stars in the Los Angeles sky for my Astronomy GE.


Pictures are: a massive ray hanging out in the sand, shot of the island at dawn from the water, one of the retarded birds, a black tip reef shark, and a green turtle.