Sydney, Day 1

According to some people, you can't go to Australia without visiting Sydney. This idea had been pounded into Kelly's mind as well as a bit in my own. It's the largest city in the country and home of the picturesque opera house, which, arguably, is Australia's best known landmark.

By the time we were able to make concrete plans about when to take this vacation all the flights had significantly gone up in price. We considered renting a car but everyone who heard this idea said not to drive. Apparently, the scenery is incredibly boring along the Hume highway. Kelly wanted to see it anyway, and with a rideshare I found on Gumtree (a site akin to Craigslist) it was about 1/4 the price of flying, so we drove up north.

Everyone was right about the view. There was a whole lot of nothing. It was beautiful as the sun set on rolling hills... but that was only for a few minutes of the 10-hour drive.

We arrived in Sydney around 5am and slept in the car for a couple hours before heading out. After stopping for coffee and breakfast, we took the scenic route to our hostel to drop off bags. I was incredibly excited to walk through Hyde Park (and the day after the suburb of Haymarket) as a reminder of my Chicago home.


The Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park was gifted to the city with funds bequeathed in J F Archibald's will. The fountain is meant to commemorate the efforts of France and Australia in World War One--a peculiar statement as it was given to Australia by an Australian, not the French. Archibald was enamored with the French and even changed his name from John Feltham to Jules François. He was also co-owner and creator of the misogynistic, racist, anti-clerical Bulletin news magazine. Quite a character behind such a beautiful fountain.

As we walked along small streets to get a feel for the city, one block quickly switched from rows of buildings to a large cliff with apartments on top. No other cliffs were around; it was quite strange.

Beautiful purple Jacaranda trees lined many of the streets; their fallen flowers decorated footpaths like confetti.

It had been a while since I'd traveled with another person and my style of vacationing didn't always mesh well with Kelly's. She's more inclined to browse through various shops; I'm far more interested in stopping read plaques. Over the course of our trip I tried to stop less frequently and decided to photograph the plaques to read later so I wouldn't cramp her style.


The hostel we stayed at had spectacularly painted doors for each of the rooms. Some were superheroes (Wolverine), some were movie characters (Harry Potter, Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's) and others were abstract designs. They also gave each guest a map and book of coupons upon check-in, which we made good use of.


After dropping off our bags, Kelly and I went out to see The Rocks, Sydney's oldest district. England granted land and convict labor to men willing to settle in the new country. In 1788, the first group of men and convicts arrived in Sydney. There wasn't a prison until 1819, when the Hyde Park Barracks were built, and even then it was only some convicts who slept in the prison. Rather, the convicts stayed in cabins they built in a separate area from the settlers.

Governor Macquarie wanted Sydney to become less of a penal colony and transform into a city. The trade and shipping industries aided the town in growth. By 1840 convict transportation to Sydney had ceased and about 35,000 people resided in the city. Sailors became frequent visitors and pubs popped up everywhere, often with a seafaring name. As the population grew, more schools and stores were also built. "Ragged schools" were made for destitute children and named as such to discourage parents who could afford to pay for education.

Now the district is home to a variety of restaurants, small shops, museums and art galleries.

Kelly and I headed off to Featherdale Wildlife Park in one of the western suburbs. Wallabies and kangaroos roamed freely through the park, as did various birds that Kelly was scared of. Actually, she was scared of the marsupials as well. After passing through one of the gates, I was surprised to find my feet were almost touching a kangaroo's nose. It had bent down behind the gate so I didn't see it before almost walking into its face.

There were also fairy penguins, wombats, Tasmanian devils, echidna, koalas, dingoes, emus, quolls, quokkas...



We spent our evening admiring lightning while aboard a ferry going north across the harbor, then continued to gaze upon the sky show from the beach at Manly.

Strahan

Initially, I’d planned to only be in Strahan for one day. Due to a failure to turn on my cell phone alarm, however, I missed the bus to Hobart. And because it only comes every two days I was stuck in Strahan.

The extra time allowed me to take a hike I’d wanted to do the day before. For some reason the path was closed. It was raining all day, which seemed appropriate for walking through rain forest. Hogarth Falls were beautiful.

On my walk back through town that afternoon, one of the bikers was standing on the footpath by the tavern. He recognized me from the night before and invited me to join the group inside for drinks and watching the Melbourne Cup on TV. Admittedly, none of them seemed to care much about the horse race but had placed bets on it anyway. It was miserable outside so we stayed at the tavern talking sports, art, politics and so on.

The next day I created several sand sculptures. It began with a suggestion of two platypuses. Those two weren't enough to occupy much time--and by this point I'd done everything I wanted to do in town--so I made a turtle and a snail. There were a couple little girls playing with their dads on the playground nearby, so I asked them for advice on what to make next. The girls got fairly excited about a dinosaur and wanted to help. One of them promptly stepped on all of the animals I'd made thus far while the other piled some wet sand into a mound with me. They stuck around for a good fifteen minutes before getting bored and moving on. I finished the dinosaur and think it ended up pretty good.

After creating some art, I went to look at the two galleries. They both had some amazing woodwork as well as paintings, photographs and glass. Most of the wood pieces were crafted from Huon pine. The native tree has an incredibly fine grain, growing miniscule amounts per year, and has thus been highly prized by craftsmen since settlement. Most pine forests were hard to access and high in the mountain bush, which is one of the reasons why the railroads were built to the west from cities like Hobart and Launceston. Had the pines not been so difficult to log and transport there would probably be none left. After a while they realized how slowly the trees grew and that some in the forests were over 3000 years old. Now the piners only use trees after they have fallen naturally. It limits high production of Huon goods but still allows for their use.

The rest of the day was mostly spent birdwatching and drawing. Minimally exciting. Incredibly restful.

Waitakere & Te Henga 9.26.2009

There are several beaches in New Zealand with black sand. The nearest to Auckland are on the western side of the island, and city train service runs to the edge of the Waitakere Ranges. A hike through some forest on my way to the beach sounded like a great day.

However, the Waitakere train was the only train not operating that day. It was replaced by a bus service going along the same route, which took about half an hour longer than the train would have. The end of the route landed me in Waitakere city, a very small town that I had to walk through on the way to the coast. There weren't any information centers or hiking trails particularly close to where I reached the edge of the national park, so I walked on the side of a road that went through the ranges. There wasn't a clear footpath so every few minutes when I heard a car, I'd step into the little ditch off the pavement and wait until the car whizzed past.

Even with the cars, it was a pleasant hike through a peculiar mix of forest and farmland. I'd be walking along, admiring the trees and listening to parakeets when suddenly a lamb would interrupt with its loud bleating. There were also horses, cows, chickens and even a couple emu--but they weren't as plentiful or annoying as the sheep. Apparently, New Zealand has a very large wool industry.

After walking for about an hour and a half, the walk was no longer fun. I was getting annoyed by the farm animals and bored by the scenery. All of the trees and ferns looked just like what I'd seen miles before. So I got out my iPod, but the cars interrupted any zone I'd get into with the music.

After a while, a woman pulled up and offered a ride. I gauged the situation: Her daughter was in the backseat, and the floor had pieces of paper and various toys strewn about. I accepted her offer. They were going only a ways farther down the road, but she drove me all the way to the beach. The daughter was adorable. We had fun with the windy, hilly road and pretended it was a roller coaster. Her mother even drove faster over the hills to give us a bit of a jump.

Te Henga (Bethell's beach) was beautiful. Black sand mixed with golden sand, creating ribbons on the ground from the waves.

There was a small inlet on the beach that only the large waves would flow into. It formed a sort of lake around one of the hills and had its own little beach on the other side. Signs were posted to beware of quicksand. Admittedly, this excited me. So I waded into the pool. It felt like regular sand. There were some parts significantly lower than the surrounding sand, and a strong current flowed through this inlet sucking water back into the ocean. I took another step and felt my foot start to sink. It only enveloped my foot an inch or two above my ankle, so I kept going and made it out of the small patch.

The personal beach I had just reached did not have waves coming over the sand. It was an ideal location for a castle; rather, it was an ideal location for a dark lord's citadel. I decided that evil rulers need to have more representation in the realm of beach art. Some kids saw me on the little beach and waded over as soon as I left. A boy stepped very carefully inside the walls of the citadel while his sister stood by. It looked like they were going to play with or destroy it, but he simply stood inside the sculpture (perhaps pretending to rule?) and then went back into the water.

The walk back to the bus stop took about three hours. Some teenage boys whizzed by and shouted. They laughed after I jumped. Otherwise, the trek was uneventful.

Pt. Leo 9.19.2009-9.22.2009

One of my housemates has a family beach house at Point Leo, which is south of Melbourne on Mornington Peninsula. The beach had almost everything I love about beaches: shells, sand and not too cold of water. There were sections of the beach that were littered with tiny shells of all different colors. Some of them were quite glorious green, others pearl, red and brown.

The sand was perfect for sculpting. Over the course of four days, I made two castles and a sand octopus.
There was was a storm on the first night. I sat on the deck of the house wrapped in a blanket and holding a cup of tea, watching the lightning and listening to the rain fall.

In the morning, I woke up early to make breakfast for everyone. Several of us went to the beach in the afternoon for some body boarding and swimming. It wasn't too warm out and the water was cold--a combination that made me not stay long. The next day, however, was warmer and resulted in a much more pleasant swim.

The second morning I woke early to take a walk and see the tide pools. They were unimpressive. No starfish, no urchins or anemones, nothing different from the daytime beach other than a few types of sponges and seaweed I hadn't seen before. So after tide pool wading I continued the walk through a small marsh and spotted a few herons.

My evenings were spent gazing at the sky. In anticipation of the trip, I had printed out a southern hemisphere star chart with all the constellations. Coloring it also gave me something to do on the car ride down.

Because it rained the first night, the ground felt like a wet sponge. The second I stepped foot in the yard water gushed out around my shoe. There was an open field across the road and maybe a hundred meters over. It was away from the light in the house and ideal for stargazing. But the father I got, the harder it became to see because (stupid me) forgot a flashlight. Instead, I was equipped with a blanket and a cup of peppermint tea. After I staked out a good spot, I folded the blanket into quarters and laid it on the spongey grass. The thickness worked well enough to withhold the water, so I curled up on top of the blanket and tried to identify the constellations with the star chart by the dim light of my cell phone.

There were also plenty of games played, my favourite of which was probably Cities and Knights because we were in a hexagonally shaped house.