Rachel and Mike in Australia

Downtown Adelaide

We visited Australia’s 5th largest city a couple weeks ago.  Compared to Sydney, Adelaide feels tiny.  The inner city, which is 10 blocks by 15 blocks, is ringed on all sides by parkland, giving the impression of a small town that you can walk across with ease.  I never would have guessed that it is a town of 1.5 million people.  The only thing that suggested a large population was their central market.  It was a huge smorgasbord of fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, cheeses, nuts, and flowers.  There were a myriad of different types of sausages and a number of fruits we didn’t recognize.  We decided to try the dragon fruit, which has a sort of magenta flesh and an outer look of a succulent but an inner look of a hot pink kiwi.  It was quite yummy!

The rolling Adelaide Hills great for gum trees and grape vines.

If you travel basically in any direction outside of Adelaide town center, you hit wine country.  To the south there’s McLaren Vale known for its reds, to the east the rolling Adelaide Hills for ‘cool climate wines’, and to the north the Barossa Valley, which is Australia’s best-known wine region where many a Shiraz is produced.  We drove up to the Adelaide Hills to a small town called Hahndorf.  Hahndorf was settled by German immigrants in 1839 and still has a strong German influence.  The food was perfect for a cold winter day.  We had Hungarian goulash for lunch and for dinner a sausage platter (6 different kinds!) with Hofbrauhaus beer on tap.  It was delicious!  I wish I could say we burned off the calories with a nice afternoon hike in the hills…but the rainy and cold weather kept us to indoor activities—wine and cheese tasting to be precise.  We tasted several wines that have won Australian and international awards.  Though our palettes aren’t nearly as discerning as international wine judges, we had to agree that there were some really tasty wines.

The Big Rocking Horse. Rachel's head is the small dot in the center of the rocking horse's head.

We made a detour between vineyards to visit another Aussie Big Thing (We are now up to 13 total visited).  The Big Rocking Horse stands more or less in the middle of nowhere next to a wooden toys store.  I think the Big Thing strategy definitely works here.  We never would have stopped (let alone made a purposeful detour) if there wasn’t a Big Thing out front.  While we resisted buying any wooden toys (some of which were pretty cool), we did pay the $2/pp to climb the rocking horse and purchased a couple coffees at the conveniently attached cafe.  Not a bad Big Thing experience, though it would have been truly awesome if the Big Rocking Horse actually rocked.

Mike making friends with a big 'roo.

We visited the Cleland Wildlife Park on our way back to Adelaide.  It’s a pretty big park and they have a huge array of Australian wildlife.  We saw a bunch of varieties of emus, ‘roos and wallabies.  They live in big enclosures that you can walk into and feed grass pellets to the animals.  It’s a pretty amazing opportunity to get a close-up view of these guys.  We had seen a lot of ‘roos during our drive cross country, but I still find them fascinating.  Their heads remind me so much of deers and their upper bodies have a very human-like look, but then looking at the tendons in their legs and their tails, they are like no other animal I know.

Red kangaroos are the largest species.

There were a number of other animals at the park that we had never seen before.  There were dingos, which it is thought were brought over to Austalia by sea about 4,000 years ago.  I was surprised to find out they are endangered in their pure-bred form.  I was also a bit amused to find out about the Dog Fence.  In the late 1800’s, the Aussie’s built the longest fence in the world (stretching over 3,000 mi) to protect southeastern Australia sheep herds from dingos.  The results were only partially successful.  There seem to be fewer dingos in southeastern Australia, but this has led to more rabbits and kangaroos that compete with the sheep for grazing vegetation.  I can’t help but smile at the Aussie spirit of trying to tame this wild land with really massive fences.

Our first koala!

We got to see our first koalas.  For a couple hours every afternoon, they bring out koalas (on 30 minute shifts) so that people can get an up-close view of these animals that are so tough to see in the wild.  The koala was bigger than I expected, though I suppose the ones at the park are probably bigger than average since they have to work even less than normal koalas for their share of eucalytpus leaves.  I was also excited to see our first hairy-nosed wombats.  There’s no feeding these guys, and I dare say I wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alley!

Hairy-nosed wombats...their disposition matches their appearance.

I couldn't believe how close this wallaby let us get to her considering she had a small joey in her pouch. The grass pellets must have been really tasty!

We thought that 46C would stand for quite some time as the record for the hottest temperature we had ever experienced.  No dice.  Last weekend the temperature peaked at 48C in the sun (118F) where we were.  The high temperatures are part of the reason the fires in Victoria, Australia were so bad.  The bushfires were outside of Melbourne, which hit its highest temperature since records began in 1859.  Bushfires are not uncommon in Australia at this time of year.  The country is so dry that sparks from a power tool, cigarette butts, or lightening strikes can start a fire.  However, you rarely hear about fires causing many deaths.  A number of factors seem to have conspired to make last weekend so deadly: the high temperature, drought conditions, and gale force winds that shifted directions from their predicted path. Victoria has a fire policy of either “leave early” or “stay and defend.”  Many people in Victoria have fire protection plans, involving things like water storage, back-up generators, and sometimes trenches or cleared areas around their houses. A number of the survivors and casualties from last weekend had successfully “stayed and defended” during previous fires.  The intensity of this fire was well above average.  Some fled after realizing they were no match for the fire, but fallen trees and accidents due to poor visibility in the smoke made escape routes difficult to come by.  The bushfires dominated the news all last week here, and there were many heroic and tragic stories.  With so many people killed and close to 2,000 homes destroyed, it is a weekend that will be infamously remembered.

We live one state west of Victoria in New South Wales and are about 500 miles from where the worst fires were.  New South Wales had a fire warning on for the weekend, and several fires did occur but none like those in Victoria.  The recent danger to worry about in New South Wales is shark attacks (two in Sydney in the past week).

Kangaroo River in Shoalhaven Gorge

We spent last weekend on the water, but thankfully on a river where there was no danger of sharks.  We went canoeing in the Kangaroo Valley, which is about a two-hour drive south of Sydney.  With the extreme heat, we were very glad to be able to spend a fair portion of the weekend in the water.

Perhaps surprising given the valley’s name, we didn’t see any kangaroos, but we did get to see some exciting Australian wildlife.  Saturday evening a goanna was hanging out around our campsite.  Goanna’s are monitor lizards (so are komodo dragons) and look like big iguanas.  The one who seemed to want to join us for dinner was about 1 m long, but they can get to be 2 m long.

Goanna making himself at home in our campsite

Apparently, they eat lizards, snakes, insects, birds, and eggs, but this goanna seemed awfully interested in our spinach and mushroom risotto.  You can see how close he was to one of our tents.  They walk really funny, swinging their legs out to the side before moving them forward.  Mike tried out his National Geographic videography skills so that you could see, but the subject wasn’t terribly cooperative.

We were paddling on a section of the Kangaroo River above a dam, so the water was more like a lake than a river and required constant paddling if you wanted to make any progress.  Unless of course, you have MIT engineers in your boat who like to sail.  The wind picked up on our paddle out on Sunday and was blowing the same direction we wanted to go, so out came one of the tent flys.  Aimee and I were the masts and Mike and John held the two canoes together and steered…and a sailing canoe was born.  It was surprisingly effective, and a nice break for our shoulders!  You may think this was pretty smart, but even smarter, a bunch of people who were on the river in kayaks had brought umbrellas. They would open the umbrellas when they had a good wind blowing in the right direction for an instant sail that was easy to put up and down.  One of the added benefits of the sails was also that they provided a bit of shade from the hot sun.

Tent-fly canoe sailboat

No trip across Australia is complete without crossing the Nullarbor. The Nullarbor is a flat, almost treeless plain (name derived from Latin for ‘no trees’) that stretches for 1200 km from east to west and is the world’s largest piece of limestone.

Trees thinning as we approach the Nullarbor Plain

Crossing the Nullarbor remains a feat celebrated by tourist memorabilia (we’re proud owners of a magnet) as even with paved roads it is a bit daunting to see the signs signaling 100-200 km between towns…and towns out here are just roadhouses, which are gas stations, restaurants, mini-marts, and hotels/campervan parks all in one. The settlements historically consisted of one family and children attended school over the radio.

The day we were setting out for our Nullarbor crossing, the Ranger at Cape Arid National Park warned us that it was supposed to get hot the following day — up to 44C. We were a bit worried at how well our eastern european heritage and the 20 year-old van would handle such a high temperature.

46C is no fun!

Never ones to shy away from a challenge, we rose early the next morning and set out. The temperature never got above about 38C, so we thought we had survived the worst heat of the trip unscathed. Apparently the Ranger’s forecast was a few days off because the heat caught up with us. Two days later the thermometer in the shaded cab of the van peaked at 46C (115F)! We were using a 12L carboy for drinking and cooking water and it typically lasted 3 days or so. In 46C, it lasted only one. Between the two of us, we drank ~10L of water and 2.5 L of juice over the course of the day. Luckily, it was a dry heat so putting cold cooler-water soaked towels on our head and neck provided some relief.

Kangaroos remind us a lot of deer. They are most active dusk until dawn and have an unfortunate habit of getting hit by cars. Initially, all our kangaroo sightings were road kill. This was sobering enough for us to make every effort to be finished driving by sundown. On several hikes we managed to get pretty close to some roos. We started a hike in Kosciusko National Park around 3 pm, which I thought would be too early in the afternoon to see any roos (sundown was around 8:30 pm). Boy was I wrong! We had barely been on the trail for 5 minutes when we startled 3 or 4 nearby roos out of their sleep. We watched them hop away and started to continue on. We looked out across the valley and saw that our presence had apparently disturbed more roos than we thought. There was a whole mob of roos hopping across the valley. They just seemed to keep coming. We must have seen at least 100 roos. It was an amazing sight right out of National Geographic. It inspired me to try and capture some roo footage to share with all of you. There were several attempts, the best of which is below…but suffice it so say, I don’t anticipate to receive any job offers from National Geographic.

The last Australian phenomenon that we really enjoyed on our drive was that of ‘Big Things.’ We were first introduced to the concept of Big Things when we went to a screening of the film Big Dreamers at the Australian Embassy in DC. The film is a documentary on the building of the Giant Golden Gumboot in Tully, Australia.

The biggest Big Thing we saw.

Tully’s economy was mainly based on sugarcane farming and when less-expensive Brazilian sugar hit the Australian market, the town’s economy didn’t fair well. Some members of the local Rotary Club decided to give the town’s economy a boost by increasing tourism by erecting a giant Golden Gumboot (in honor of Tully being the wettest town in Australian–it received 7.9 m of rain in 1950). At the beginning of the movie we thought this was a novel, if not the most logical, idea. However over the course of the film, we learned that Big Things are all over Australia. The first one, the Big Banana in Coff’s Harbor, was built in 1964. Some towns embrace their Big things while in other towns the Big Things have fallen into disrepair. Big Dreamers made a special place in our hearts for Big Things, and we tried to stop at all those along the way. Some were better than others, but all provided a story, and what more can you really ask for?

The oddest Big Thing we saw.

We have the rest of our photos from the trip up on Google Maps now: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100268592381595196808.000460d2637162a1f7cbd.

It’s funny how you learn things about home by living somewhere so far from it.  Being in Australia has reminded me what a sterilized culture modern day American is.  There are far fewer attempts in Sydney to separate oneself from the outdoors.  We were surprised in our first month or so here how cold Sydney felt.  The houses aren’t insulated the way homes in the US are and they don’t typically have central heat (electric radiators seem to be what most people use).  There are big gaps at the bases of two out of the three doors that lead to the outside.  And in one bathroom and one bedroom there are small windows that just have screens–there’s no glass.

Glass-less window. Other visible 'features' are the hole in the ceiling and the orange linoleum floor.

Granted that Sydney doesn’t usually get freezing weather, but considering how it felt in late spring, I would not want to hang out in that room in the dead of winter.  My first Australian purchases were a scarf, heavy sweatshirt, and a wool quilt, and I was very thankful for all of them on more than one occasion.

Houses in Sydney often don’t have A/C either.  Now that the weather has warmed up, we’re opening the windows frequently.  Unfortunately the two small windows that don’t have any glass are the only two windows in the house that have screens.  I think you could argue that in the US we are overly worried about separating ourselves from nature, but I’m still having a hard time understanding why, in a country that has some of the world’s deadliest insects, you wouldn’t put screens on your windows.  The lack of sealing has introduced us to some of the native fauna.  We’ve had quite a number of wild beasts wander into our house: flies, mosquitos, ants, regular cockroachs, flying cockroachs, spiders, beetles, caterpillars, a cat, lizards, slugs, mice, and rats in our house…and that’s in just 9 weeks and only the ones we’ve actually seen.

The ones that have mystified me the most and which prompted me to write this blog are the slugs.  I’m used to seeing slugs only in really wet places…usually outside after a big rain.  One morning here I went to fill the kettle with water for my morning tea and nearly leapt out of my skin when I looked down and saw a gigantic slug on the sink basin.  I think it was the biggest slug I’ve ever seen.  The day before it had rained and Mike had been cleaning our oven shelves outside.  The rag he had been using was also on the sink basin, so I figured the slug must have been on the rag.  How else could this giant slug make it into the house and up onto my sink?  Well, I don’t know but a couple nights ago as I was getting ready for bed I went into my office.  It looked like there was a twig on the ground but when I got closer, I realized it was actually slug.  The office is the middle of 3 rooms downstairs, and it and the room next to it that goes to the outside are carpeted.  I was amazed the thing had made it across that much carpet.  I can’t say I know what slugs eat, but surely it wasn’t in my office, so I thought it would dry out overnight and die.  As I lay in bed contemplating what on earth had prompted the slug to come inside and where it had come in, I thought that I ought to take a picture of the thing for the blog.  I went back downstairs and I’ll be damned if in the elapsed 20 or 30 minutes, the thing had disappeared.  These Australian wildlife are impressive!

As my new friend the exterminator said, “You can’t worry too much about it.  That’s Australia.”

Sodas and coffees may be smaller here, but the slugs aren't!!

I went down and met Mike in Tasmania at the end of his cruise (which with some pestering I think he’d write a blog about) for a long weekend. I can’t say Tasmania was somewhere I would have thought about visiting if not for Mike’s cruise. I didn’t even know it was a state of Australia; I thought it was its own country. It was started as a penal colony of the penal colony — a place to send re-offenders to do some of the hardest labor of collecting timber and mining coal. I’ll write more in another post about the history and beauty, but for now, I’ll cut to the charismatic megafauna.

The devil looking longingly at some small children right before feeding time

We visited the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park, which has a bunch of bizarre Australian animals including kangaroos, wallabys, and of course Tasmanian devils. The devils are perhaps the most ferocious of the marsupials. One of the rangers was telling us that the Tasmanian devil jaw is 90% as strong as a crocodiles (human’s jaws are an order of magnitude weaker). We were there for a feeding, and the devils had no problem chomping right through wallaby bones. It was pretty gross! When they’re not tearing apart carcasses, they’re really cute animals, about the size of a beagle. Apparently devils used to be found all over Australia, but now they’re only found on Tasmania and that population is really struggling because of a cancer that has emerged in the last few years. The cancer can be transferred between animals during fighting or mating and kills an animal within about 5 months.

Two cute devils

They also have a bunch of kangaroos and wallabys (that look like small kangaroos). They have this big enclosed field that you can walk in…and that’s where the kangaroos and wallabys are…just hopping right around you (probably around 75 total). If you are there at feeding time, the rangers let you feed the animals, so Mike and I both had kangaroos eat out of our hands! It was neat to get so close to them. They weren’t overly interested in being fed by humans, which part of me thought was a really good retaining of their animal instincts. Mike pointed out though that it’s probably more a function of them being very well fed. There were a number that had joeys, ranging from seemingly newborns that looked like a little hairless greyhound head poking out of the pouch to full-on teenagers where I could just see a foot sticking out but that had to have been nearly a third the size of the momma kangaroo based on the added bulge. It made carrying around a human pregnancy look like a piece of cake!

Unfortunately the camera battery died after this shot, so it's the only 'roo shot I got.

P.S. So after my complaints about the way they do things differently here on the last post, I have to be fair and say that I much prefer airport security here. You don’t have to show your ID a hundred times (or even once with self check-in) and you don’t have to take off your shoes or sweater!

Look at those devilish grins!

Disclaimer: Vegetarians and animal lovers may find the following text and images disturbing.

On Sunday we were feeling a bit like celebrating after finding an apartment. At Oscar’s house there’s a beautiful gas grill. So we thought, what more appropriate way to celebrate than a good Aussie barbeque. We headed to the supermarket to get stuff to grill and were checking out the various options, when one jumped out at us: pre-marinated kangaroo kebabs. Now, at this point I gave a little pause. I mean, I think of kangaroos as happy hopping creatures symbolic of my new homeland. Mike on the other hand was sold. He was really excited to try the kangaroo and pointed out that it was cheaper than beef and it came with a green eco-label…so how could I argue? Yes that’s right, my first sighting of any of the native Australian animals was on my dinner plate (makes me feel like a bit of a barbarian). Actually that’s not quite true; we had previously seen an Ibis in one of Sydney’s parks. Anyway, we grilled the ‘roo kebabs, which were pretty good, tasted mostly like beef. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make them a regular part of my diet, but now at least I can say I’ve tried. I have a feeling that before long, Mike’s going to want to try another Australian tradition of ‘eating the shield.’ Australia’s coat of arms consists of an emu and a kangaroo and both are fair game for human consumption. If you’re totally grossed out, let me give you a few of the facts provided by the green label about why ‘roo eating in a good choice for the environment:

1. Kangaroos are soft-footed animals, so damage to the land is far less than that of sheep and cattle.
2. Kangaroos need less food than sheep and cattle, and can better adapt to drought conditions.
3. Kangaroos don’t produce methane the way sheep and cows do. Methane is an greenhouse gas and apparently methane emissions from farm animals account for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas production. Report author of “Paths to a Low Carbon Future” Dr Mark Diesendorf said reducing beef consumption by 20 per cent and putting Skippy on the dinner plate instead would cut 15 megatonnes of greenhouses gases from the atmosphere by 2020.

If you’re still grossed out, I promise that if you come visit we’ll make sure the only kangaroos you see are at the Taronga Zoo!

So many beasts to choose from...

Mmmm...kangaroo kebabs!

Mike and the Ibises in Hyde Park