Kia Ora, Bro this place is Sweet As

After a final few days in Byron Bay with the whole group it was time to say goodbye to my friends of 4 months. We had a great time on our last days sea kayaking and the final nights. Hope any of you guys reading this had safe travels home or to your various other destinations.

Snagged a noon flight to Auckland on Wednesday to meet the parents at the hotel in downtown Auckland. Our first full day together we went to Waikia (spelling) Island that is just off the coast of Auckland and allows some more low key island life for those that wish to commute via ferry. This little island was a great start to the vacation with the family. It had a nice atmosphere with a solid city centre that provided us with ample opportunity to delve into New Zealand culture. The only downside was a bus driver who was adamant that no one other than a New Zealander could ever understand the differences between Aussie rules, Rugby League, and Rugby Union. Whatever, wasn't offended, he is just stuck in his own little world of hierarchy that I could really care less about.

Listening to: Apocalypse Please – Muse

After our little island excursion, we headed to the downtown area of Auckland and just roamed around for the rest of the day to see the rest of what Auckland had to offer. We jumped on our flight to Queenstown the next day and picked up our rental car that we would have for the next few days. Oh right hand drive. This sticker pretty much explains everything that needs to be said on that front.

We pulled into Queenstown about a half an hour later to see a bustling resort town that was rapidly preparing for the approaching snow season (seasons backwards down here). Queenstown is a smaller, just as expensive version of Aspen minus the proximity of ski-in ski-out hotels. All of the roads to the “ski hills” are dirt roads that snake up the mountain to the lifts which are pretty high up on each peak. Qtown is where Peter Jackson and his posse spent most of their time filming the Lord of the Rings series as it is centrally located to most of the filming locations. Our first night in Queenstown was spent wandering around the town and sorting out what we would do for our three days that we would be here. We found a few good options for the following days: seeing a musical adaptation of Oliver Twist and taking an off road safari to see LOTR filming locations.

The first up was the musical adaptation of Oliver Twist aptly named “Oliver”. It was put on by the local community theatre in Queenstown and like the other musical/music acts I have seen in my time here, was surprisingly well done. It was really neat to see the story told in a different way than I had ever seen before.

After the performance, we headed out on a safari the next morning to take in the sights of a few filming locations of the LOTR trilogy that were shot on location in New Zealand. Our guide was a 5 foot tall woman with cayenne pepper running through her veins, Fran was full of energy and more than happy to tell stories of just about anything. She led us on a splendid journey through the country side of Queenstown and the surrounding areas that was second to none. We were the only three on the tour so we had some liberty to do our own thing. She even (much to my mom's chagrin) stopped by the first ever commercial bungee jump site so that I could dive head first off over the river. The bridge is 43 meters (141 feet) tall and I was able to dunk a good portion of my arms into the frigid water below.

Listening to: Wolves – Machine Head

(Will get pictures up ASAP post Queenstown) After this grand experience, we headed out for a nice drive down a river bed, with running water going through it. Fran claims that this was a “public highway” although I refuse to believe that any city council in the free world would allow a river to be used a 4WD trail. At least the Hickory City Council would never deem this as a logical idea for anyone, not without a waiver and declaration of next of kin. This wrapped up our last day in Queenstown and we were now off on a drive to Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park (pretty much like Denali vs. Mt. McKinley). We'll stick with Aoraki for the obvious reasons. For those of you playing along at home, Aoraki is where Sir Edmund Hillary trained for his and Tenzing Norgay's first ascent of Mt. Everest.

We got into Aoraki late in the afternoon and weren't able to see much due to some serious cloud cover that had the whole valley socked in with low clouds. Hoping for a clear second day in Aoraki NP we woke up to see much of the same, but on our drive out, some of the clouds began to break up over the peaks of some of the taller mountains. From what the posters in the gift shop looked like, Aoraki would be a beautiful place to see on a bright, sunny, summer day, and quite a fun hike up as well. With Aoraki NP in the books, we turned the car north towards Christchurch and for this segment, I'll let the mother figure of the family recap our experience:

Christchurch is a beautiful city with a very British feeling more than the rest of NZ! The weather continues to not be the optimal but then we remember we are here in the winter so not really prime time for tourism but that does have its perks. No waiting in long lines and getting in to all the exhibits, etc that we wanted to see. The International Antarctica Center was very interesting with penguins and a room you could suit up and experience snow and sub Arctic weather. There are many here who have not experience or seen snow. Great to see a site where there is so much international cooperation and research on protecting the continent. Off to a tourist site where you can drive an army tank! Then we catch a flight to Melbourne and begin our Aussie adventures.

After a short stint in Christchurch, we caught a plane across the Tasman Sea to Melbourne (read: Melbin). This being my second time in the city, I can't say I felt like I had been before, as we spent just over 2 days in the city during our first time through and a good bit of that was spent in class and the harbour, preparing/waiting for our boat to fight gale force winds so we could get to Tasmania. Back to the present, we spent our first night in Melbourne looking around the Yarra River walk. (Flanners, Syl, and Ladelman if you are reading this, we inadvertently ate at that same food court we ate at before the concert). Let me finish the random shoutouts here, Bui, I'm doing 5k (I will switch back, I promise) at just under 7 min/mi pace. Stoked for this fall. Anyhows, we took our second day to grab the free city circle tram to get a view of the city and head over to the City Museum. This museum was the Science Centre and Discovery Place, rolled into one and pumped full of Floyd Landis grade HGH and blood doping agents. There was an impressive exhibit for the Titanic which I can only assume was a well funded travelling exhibit. Tons of artifacts were well displayed and even a part of the ship's hull had been recovered and placed on display. We wandered around and even saw Phar Lap (google it) in all his taxidermy glory. Also a really neat exhibit that showcased a local design school's finalists for a product design competition. Once we finished with the museum we headed back to the hotel to grab what little sleep we could before our 6am flight the next day for Cairns (read: Cans).

Listening to: Tuesday's Gone – Lynyrd Skynyrd

We arrived mid afternoon on the 21^st in Dunk Island. Google “Dunk Island, QLD” and you can skip this next part of rambling. Dunk is a small island south of Cairns that is a 30 minute flight away from the city. It sits about 2k (just over a mile) off the coast of the mainland but is quite a considerable distance from any form of serious civilisation (like most of Australia). The place was really well built even though we found out it (like Darwin, for those sorry souls reading this consistently) was wiped out by a cyclone about 5 years ago, Larry to be exact. We took a trip on the 2^nd day out to the Great Barrier reef where the folks would go snorkelling and I would get some more diving in. We took the hour boat ride out to the reef and anchored in a deep part of the lagoon and no sooner had we anchored than the other 3 divers and myself were leaping head first (kidding) off the boat. We got to have 2 dives with 40 minute bottom times thanks to the shallow depth (10m/33ft). Thanks to a lingering cold I sucked 200bar of air on the first dive in just about 35 minutes. With some tips from the dive master I got the full bottom time on the second dive and even got some really neat skin diving done in between. Up to about 3 hours of total bottom time now, not sure if that makes me more certified or as SRR aptly calls it certifiable. We played catch with 2 different types of sea cucumbers and got to lay on the bottom by two different sea turtles. Who much to my dismay do not speak with surfer drawls like the ones that frequent the East Australian Current in Finding Nemo. Sigh.

Listening to: Don't Leave (When Winter Comes) - CunninLynguists

After we took in the reef for the day we headed back to our island abode. Dunk was a really welcome respite from the travelling that we had been doing over the past 10 days. Sitting by the beach and having a beer with lunch was receiving no complaints from me at any point. Our time at the island was a great experience with only about 20 other guests on the island at any given point but we are off to Sydney now for the final leg in our journey. This country will make you smile and drop your jaw with its beauty and hospitality but it will cause a brain haemorrhage and various other gastrointestinal disorders with the high cost of living and lack of cheap (yeah not free) internet. That's my excuse for not posting this update until now. Sorry for those of you who were hoping for a consistent update during our adventure. Hope the US of A is still in one piece for our return trip home and I am stoked out of my mind for some good “reverse culture shock” since apparently my life is going to come to a screeching halt when I realise that the US is a different country from Australia and that I have fallen face first out of the looking glass. That's all for now.

Cheers!

-zuey, rick, and trudy

Racing Toads, UFOs, Crocs, Sweat, and Billabongs

Wow it's almost been a month since I spilled my thoughts on this thing. Here it goes.

Sitting in Darwin International waiting on a flight back to Brissy seems foreign as it feels as if I have just landed in the tropical realm that is the top end of the Northern Territory. Much like its Canadian cousin, the NT is sparsely populated with an equal knack for inhospitable conditions. The wet seasons brings massive monsoon storms from the tropical waters of the equatorial Pacific and the dry season renders the land cracked and dry with the months of June through August average less than one day of rain a month. Needless to say I picked a hell of a place to work for the weather bureau.

My first day at work (back on April 6th) consisted of running around meeting every single person in the station and trying to explain what I was doing in Australia (SIT kids you feel this pain) and then why I was at the Bureau. Everyone there was extremely welcoming and helped me in any way possible. I will spare you the details of what all I learned there as most people could care less why monsoon troughs cause rain to fall over the top end and leave the southern parts of the territory dry. At any rate, I enjoyed my experience thoroughly and if any of you guys find this through Facebook or other means, thanks for all of your help while I was in Darwin.

The weekends in Darwin left nothing to be desired as I had various activities that fell into place to create a surreal experience and allowed me a window into what it is like to be a true “Territorian”. On my first weekend, I headed over to one of the numerous Darwin markets that gain national fame for their amazing fresh fruit and inordinate variety of fresh Asian cuisine. Darwin is a very diverse city that over the years has been called home to natives of Fiji, Samoa, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Timor, and pretty much any other country that is on a peninsula or a Pacific island. These markets were my heaven as I have never seen so much curry, vegetable fried rice, and woks on stoves creating amazing smells and tastes.

A Darwin Sunset

 

My next weekend, I headed out to see the Darwin Symphony Orchestra in their first concert of the 2010 season. They were welcoming in a new conductor/director from Amman (I think?) and he was more than willing and able for the task at hand. The concert was great, especially the fact that the DSO is a community orchestra that only has one member who is a professional player. I sat beside two very funny ladies who kept me on my toes throughout the concert and were more than happy to lend opinions on current events and what I should see in Darwin during intermission. It was a great time all around. I also headed out to a free water park with some of the staff at the bureau in the suburbs of Darwin which was sponsored by the NT government. It has 3 slides that were about 3 stories high and a water playground for the kids to hang out on with a giant bucket that dumped heaps of water down on unsuspecting parents or the kids who flocked to it as soon as it began to tilt on its axis.

On my third weekend I got to meet Liams' (my roommate) Aunt and Uncle along with their daughter and a family friend. They took me out into the tidal mangrove forests that is coastal Darwin. The NT news usually runs a story at least once a week that involves some sort of croc attack or sighting that occurs in these waters. With the best being a front page picture that shows a “fisho” (fisherman, Aussies love to abbreviate even the shortest words) with a friend swimming back to their boat as a croc is no more that 10 feet away swimming in a eerily similar direction to that of the swimmer. One word of warning, the NT News makes the Hickory Daily Record appear to be the Wall Street Journal. A headline that was run after a well known NASA balloon that had received news coverage just a day earlier crashed into a car was “Unknown spacecraft crashes into car” with little silhouettes of white aliens in the background. I really wanted to meet the editor of the paper as it was truly a delight to read and the editorials and the “txts to the editor” put most of the stories in the paper to a laughable shame.

I digress, a lot. At any rate, I got to go mud crabbing in the mangrove forests that allowed me the opportunity to catch three of these elusive buggers and eat them later on in the night along with an amazing ham hock soup that Meg whipped up while we waited at the house. This was a great time through and through and thank you Meg for your gracious Aussie hospitality!!!

My last weekend, after finishing work and my paper was a 3 day trip down to Litchfield and Kakadu National Parks. I had been trying to plan this since I had known I was going to Darwin but everything fell into place on the second to last week of my trip. The trip left at 6am and headed straight into the heart of Litchfield NP. We got to swim in a fair amount of water holes that put anything I have every swam in to shame, except for a handful in Tasmania. The beauty of these secluded places was unreal and it was damn near hot enough for the water to be boiling but the fresh water spilling off the waterfalls that graced each spot allowed for a cool refreshment to the mid day sauna that is the NT outback. Not to leaving anything for want, the “Saloon” at our camp site the first night hosted cane toad racing. Okay, quick history, cane toads were brought in to eat bugs that were damaging Australia and they overtook the bugs, populated like rabbits, and are now a national past time for hunting innovations. The ways of eliminating these little demons (they are poisonous, but this shouldn't surprise you since pretty much everything here kills or maims you beyond all belief) includes but is surely not limited to shotguns, cricket bats, 7 irons (although long irons are preferred for distance events), bricks, and cars. These guys are put into a bucket, with numbers on them, and like true Aussies everyone bets on which one should get out of the circle first , twice, just to make it fair. After they serve the purpose of amusing drunk fishermen and tourists, they are put to rest by the bar staff.

Listening to: The Dragster Wave - Ghinzu


After a great day in Litchfield we headed down to
Kakadu for two days of swimming, 20,000 year old rock art, and croc watching. Kakadu is the biggest NP in Australia by size and is mostly a vast expanse of tropical savanna that seems like instant death for any unlucky motorist or someone just very lost. I really wanna see Bear Grylls give Kakadu a fair go. We took our troop carrier/apocalypse vehicle/off road bus through many trails that are just normal roads to Aussies but would cause most American 4WD owners to have an inadvertent bowel movement. The rock art in Kakadu is amazing and to think about the shear age of them makes you feel very small. More swimming in spectacular billabongs was to follow before we headed out on a croc cruise. Now before you get too excited, we were in a National Park, so they cannot bait the water to entice the crocs or make them jump out of the water with the old meat on a stick trick so no crazed pictures here. Just some eyes and spikes peeking out of the water to give us just enough to know they meant business.

Picture section: Kakadu and Litchfield

After a long drive back to Darwin, I finished up the last of my work and got my life packed up again to head to the airport today for my flight back to Brisbane. Crashing at Owen's for the last time tonight then catching a train back to Byron Bay to present my project. I can't believe I have 6 days left on the program, but after that headed to New Zealand to meet the parents for a soon to be great vacation through NZ and back into Oz for round two of Sydney and Melbourne with a stop at the reef for some serious aquatic adventures. Ready for some cooler weather in NZ and then geared up for a good time back in NC for summer!! It's been real Darwin.


Cheers!!
-zuey