Rachel and Mike in Australia

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

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 2:39 am and is filed under Creature Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.