A new wombat friend

I'll tell you more about my adventures in Tasmania later (and by later I mean earlier in the day on a future date), but for now I'll give you a glimpse into the trip. Here, a wombat (a new friend of mine, bottom right) sits overlooking a valley and the mountains beyond. Quite a nice wombat, if you ask me.

Travels along the Great Ocean Road

I spent this weekend travelling along the southern coast of Victoria (one of Australia's six states - the important one because it includes Melbourne - for those of you who are a bit hazy on your Australian geography) with Arcadia friends as part of an Arcadia-run excursion along the Great Ocean Road. The trip was lots of fun, mixing active and beautiful in the perfect blend.

We set off from Melbourne Saturday morning shortly after 8:30 and began with a long, peaceful drive to a small town named Forrest. Along the way, those of us who weren't sleeping played Contact, a wonderful large-group pass-lots-of-time game which involves long words and crossword-puzzle-like definitions. (Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely.) Here and throughout, I got lots of opportunities to catch up with all my fellow Melbourne Arcadians in one place, which I loved.

Once in Forrest, we split into two 11-person groups by chosen mountain-biking intensity. My group, the higher-intensity of the two, headed off on a bike ride for the late morning. We had a great, long ride with lots of hills and a couple of windy passages along narrow (i.e. barely wider than the bike) dirt tracks. I managed to be that one who fell off (twice), but this was not a bad thing as I learned from it that 1) it does not always hurt to fall off a bike (in fact, it didn't hurt at all and I was left with only copious streaks of dirt along my leg as tell-tale proof of my momentary lapses in verticalness), 2) I'm very good at falling in slow motion (as per witness accounts of both occasions), and 3) perhaps I'd better stick to road biking as my primary form of bicycle encounter. To my credit, the first fall was along a very narrow, windy passage (when I ran into a two-foot tree trying to avoid a root) and the second involved a large rut.

Speaking of encounters, our afternoon (after lunch) was primarily occupied by lake time. Swapping with the other group, we headed to a nearby lake for a quieter activity: platypus spotting. Half of us headed out in the canoes, which were tied together like a raft, while the other half enjoyed a walking track around the lake. We did indeed find a platypus while canoeing. It was just over a foot long and swam rather like a crocodile: its head and tail were visible above the surface but the rest was hidden and it was prone to sudden dives after which it would surface half a minute later 30 or more feet away. We kept a nice distance from our platypus friend so as not to frighten it and got to watch its antics for about 20 minutes. During this time, we kept near-silent so as not to prompt it to go into hiding. Thus we spent lots of time sitting on a silent lake platypus-watching. Pretty cool.

After we'd switched groups and walked around the lake (very scenic... lots of trees), we headed back to our transport and further along the coast.

Our next stop was at the famous Twelve Apostles rock formation (of which fewer than 12 remain due to the constant pounding of waves on the rock bases). The evening light was perfect and I got to take lots of pictures, which I have never not enjoyed. It was incredibly picturesque:

After a full day, we drove to the town of Port Campbell, where we spent the night in cabins near the bay. We enjoyed a delicious barbeque dinner at the campgrounds, then turned in for some rest before an early wake-up (after taking a few minutes to wander down to the night-dark bay, of course).

Today commenced at 5:17 AM, at which (lovely) time I got up, prepared myself for the day, wandered down to the bay with friends, then headed to Lyndon's cabin (Lyndon being our fearless leader, of course) for breakfast at 6. After breakfast, we began our morning adventures with a wander along the scenic trails of Loch Ard Gorge.

The gorge lent itself to some of my favorite Australia pictures thus far. Example 1: the view from above:

Example 2: standing in the gorge:

After that amazingly pristine stop, we continued on to the Barron River. Here, we wandered along a riverside path searching for koalas in the trees. Koalas are easier to spot than platypi, since they don't move nearly as much. They spend 18 to 20 hours per day sleeping. This was my second encounter with koalas in their natural environment, my first having been the previous day as we headed down the path to go canoeing. We got to see perhaps six koalas chilling in the trees, one of whom even moved his head around a bit and stared at us across the river.

Our next stop was the seaside town of Anglesea. We had a leisurely lunch followed by a full two hours of surf instruction. Yes, I went surfing. Lots of excitement. My surfing skills were rather limited (as I would expect), but I did manage to stand up on the board twice and made it up onto my knees many more times than that. I also managed to have lots of fun being in the water and moving fast along wavetops. As an added bonus, we got to wear wetsuits.

Our trip concluded with the drive back to Melbourne, where we returned to UC (and other places of residence) for dinner and warm showers. Now, having been awake for close to 19 hours, I sleep. Sleep too will be amazing.

Spring break in photo form

If you were wondering what spring break looks like, this is it:

Friends from Melbourne (other international students, three from my ten-person Melbourne Welcome orientation group) jump for joy on Whitehaven Beach during our Whitsundays sailing trip. They were travelling together, but my day with them was a chance encounter of the best sort.

Zoolunteering

Yesterday, I went to the zoo. 'Wait, Becca,' you say, 'don't you volunteer on Thursdays? I'm confused.' Why yes, reader, I do volunteer on Thursdays and I appreciate your attention to every detail of my ten-time-zones-away schedule. Yesterday, however, I got to volunteer at the zoo.

Our usual Thursday CVA (Conservation Volunteers Australia, in case you've forgotten over spring break) project is at Point Cook, where we cut down boxthorn and pick up litter. This week, Point Cook cancelled so we got a special trip to the Werribee Open Range Zoo instead, joining a CVA group of half-day volunteers (taking part in CVA's more-flexible-hours Green Gym program) at the site. The Melbourne Zoo, located in one of the parks bordering the university, is rather small and is unable to fit lots of large animals. Melbourne's home for those large Australasian friends (lions, elephants, giraffes, and more) is the Werribee Open Range Zoo. Situated a 40-minute drive outside the city, the Werribee Zoo has much more space to spread and allow the animals to roam relatively free.

What did we do at the zoo? Pretty much the coolest project ever: we planted giraffe food.

It turns out giraffes eat wattle, a plant common to Australia, so we spent our morning planting rows of little (perhaps 4 inches tall) wattle plants in soil fertilized by (seriously) rhino poo. In four to five years, these wattle plants will be about 5 feet tall and the top can be cut off and fed to giraffes. The plants will then regenerate once and the regrowth can provide giraffe food for a second year. Rows near ours contained wattle planted in each of the previous years which will also help feed the zoo's giraffe population (currently 4 males, 2 older (11 and 17), 2 1-year-olds).

After lunch, all of us CVAers got the amazing treat of taking a free tour of the zoo. A safari-style tour bus took us right into most of the enclosures, so we got to drive within a few yards of rhinos, hippos, zebras, our new giraffe friends, and lots of kinds of antelope. We learned about one male zebra (that's 'ZEH-bra' here, not 'ZEE-bra', since Aussies say 'zed' rather than 'zee') who was moved away from the rest once he lost his dominance in his group and was housed with the antelopes instead. Our guide described the zebra's 'identity crisis' in that he now seems to think he's an antelope at times, even joining in standing guard over the females while they sleep. It was fun to see the zebra chilling with his antelope buddies after we heard this story.

The tour was phenomenal and afterwards we got to see even more cool stuff, taking a half hour to wander through the rest of the exhibits, seeing lions, leopards, and adorable monkeys. (The Green Gym-ers headed home after the tour, but the 6 of us there for the full day were up for a wander.) I found it fascinating to watch the monkeys dig into the ground with their hands, their intelligence evident in their facial expressions. One monkey tried to take over another's digging spot and was promptly picked up and removed by his friend. He returned, however, and eventually won out as his friend wandered off in feigned boredom before returning to digging a few inches from his original spot.

The zoo was a great surprise on a rainy day and I got the once-in-a-lifetime experience of helping plant food for giraffes. All in all, a pretty cool day.

Now I'm off to the Great Ocean Road for the weekend. More about that on my return.

Be well!

Sometimes we run

Hello hello!

What, you wonder, have I been up to since spring break? Good question! Last week was largely spent getting back into classes, going to lectures about sport, sports coaching, and other such things. (It's easier to love going to lecture when these are the topics covered.)

Over the weekend, I ran a half marathon (13.1 miles or 21.1 kilometers) at the Melbourne marathon. The weather was beautiful, which made for a pleasant race. The course was mostly flat, which made it rather more boring than it would have been with some hills sprinkled in, but we got to run around a lake for about 1/4 of the distance, so that was enjoyable.

My race started at 8 AM, so I got to watch a friend begin his full marathon at 7 (we had headed down to the course together at the lovely hour of 5:40) before dropping off my bag of warm clothes and such and heading down to the start line. Just over 2 1/2 hours later, I finished with a lap around the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) which concluded with a run under the finish arch. The MCG is one of the biggest sporting arenas in Australia, so it was great to be able to finish the race there.

The best part? When you complete a race this long (which took, in my case, 2 hours, 35 minutes, and 18 seconds), they give you a medal just for finishing. I like that.

Since then, I've been walking a bit slower as my leg muscles readjust to life in the real world. Hopefully, they'll be good by this weekend, when I have an Arcadia excursion to the Great Ocean Road (just outside Melbourne). Swimming each afternoon has helped my recovery, as have the 2-hour naps I've taken both race day and the two days since. Mmm, sleep.

As usual, life is lots of fun here. Great classes, new experiences, and lots of friendly people with whom to share it all.

Have a wonderful week!

Day 18 (aka Back to School Day 1)

Salutations!

Due to the nature of my travels (backpack + hostels = amazing), I have had limited internet access over the past couple of weeks. Now that I'm safely back in Melbourne, I get to share with you all the rest of my spring break adventures. We left off on a hazy Friday in Airlie Beach, so I'll continue from there.

Saturday (nine days ago), Lara and I hopped on another Greyhound bus for the ride up to Townsville. Before the bus ride, we explored the morning markets, which had fun crafts and clothing and such. As the bus was an hour late, we could have perhaps had more in-depth exploration time, but we instead sat in a full bus shelter in the middle of a parking lot enjoying the music and scents drifting out of the nearby beachside markets.

After a long (5+ hours), largely uneventful bus ride, we arrived at the Townsville ferry terminal. This was the perfect drop-off spot, since the ferry was our next destination. We rode the ferry out to Magnetic Island then took a bus to our hostel on the northeast corner of the rather large island. (For a sense of size, it took about 25 minutes to traverse the east coast of the island by bus.) We checked in and settled into our bungalow accomodation, then walked down to the beach for dinner, sitting in the sand, and watching the second rugby league semi-final. It was in this game that we discovered the amazingness which is Melbourne Storm rugby (the Storm being Melbourne's one elite rugby league team).

Sunday morning, we woke up at 5 AM to head down to the beach to watch the sun rise. This involved lots of serenity and beauty, both of which I quite enjoyed. We then took a two-hour nap from 7 to 9 before checking out of our hostel, leaving our bags, and heading back down to the beach. We wandered through Horseshoe Bay's morning markets (Australia has tons of amazing markets) then sat in the sand for awhile before making our way slowly back to the bus terminal for our final Greyhound encounter. We spent the entire afternoon and much of the evening on this next bus, travelling further up the Queensland coast from Townsville to Cairns.

Monday was another bright-and-early morning, as we woke up shortly after 6 to make our way down to the docks for a cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef. We took a day boat out to the boat on which we'd spend the night, then spent the rest of the day snorkelling. Between our overnight and our day-boat return, we snorkelled the reef six times in two days (at three different sites). The snorkelling was amazing. Highlights include tons of gorgeous fish and coral of almost every imaginable color, seeing a reef shark (they're small and generally dislike hanging around people, but I was lucky to watch one pass by a few meters away), and following a sea turtle with Lara as it swam across the coral. There's not a much more idyllic spring break moment than watching a sea turtle float placidly over beautiful coral on a warm day on the Great Barrier Reef.

Tuesday was spent, much like Monday, out on the water. When we returned, we found Jodi (Lara's roommate and my wandering buddy) in our hostel room and joined up with her and Cassandra (my roommate) and Isa (another Arcadia/Melbourne friend) for dinner. We enjoyed one of the many $10 meal deals which abound in Cairns before heading out for a bit prior to sleep.

On Wednesday, Lara, Jodi, and I walked to Cairns' botanical gardens. It was a hot day and the gardens were about an hour from our hostel, so we decided to keep to the short loop (about an hour long walk) once we got there. We climbed lots of steps on the loop up to a couple of beautiful lookouts over the city. We enjoyed our lunch at one that looked out over both Cairns itself and the airport, where we could watch planes taking off and landing. The gardens themselves consisted primarily of open forest with some bamboo forest and such mixed in as well. We returned to the city along the Esplanade, an oceanside walkway, and I spent a quiet evening in the hostel recovering from many active hours in the sun before we all met up again to sit by the pool before bed.

Thursday began with our final early pick-up, a 7:05 AM bus tour up to the Daintree rainforest. The tour took us to a number of scenic spots throughout the morning, including Cape Tribulation. Cape Tribulation is notable because it's the spot where the Great Barrier Reef comes into the shore and the rainforest meets it at the water's edge. Both the reef and the rainforest are world heritage listed sites (a big deal), so Cape Tribulation gives you the opportunity to put one foot in the water and one on land and thus simultaneously stand in two world heritage listed sites: both reef and rainforest. Pretty cool. We had lots of fun on the tour chatting with Will and Dawn, two fellow Americans who had been on our same reef overnight.

In the afternoon, Lara and I got an early tour drop-off since we were staying in the rainforest for two more nights. We checked into our hostel, which was both charming and fabulous. The hostel, named Crocodylus, is literally in the rainforest itself, each bungalow accomodation surrounded by giant trees, vines, and wildlife. We wandered down the road to an ice cream shop just over a mile away (I got to try goji berry ice cream, which was delicious), then returned for dinner at the hostel restaurant (the nearest food store being over 10 miles north of us).

Friday was spent wandering up the road a bit further to both a picturesque cafe for lunch and another ice cream shop. This one, the Daintree Ice Cream Company, is cool because the fields along which you walk to reach the shop are filled with the trees from which the ice cream flavors are made. Many of the trees were labelled - macadamia, mango, and more. This time, we got to try delicious ice cream samplers, which included black sapote (a chocolate-flavored fruit), wattleseed (wattles are a very common plant across the country), coconut, and jakfruit (a greenish-shelled fruit larger than a pineapple). In the evening, we returned to our hostel for a night walk through the rainforest. Our guide, Possum, explained lots about the trees and plants to us and we got to see three adorable sleeping birds and lots of spiders in intricate webs on our multiple-hour, flashlight-guided trek through the trees.

Saturday, we made up for our lack of large-animal sightings on the nightwalk during an hour-long loop through the rainforest behind Crocodylus. The Orange Rope Trail took us on a loop through the trees guided by numbered signs along the way and a thin, orange rope which ushered us along the trail. During our walk, a big lace monitor lizard, perhaps four feet from head to tail, scampered across the path in front of us and into the trees. Along with hundreds of mosquito sightings, many of them on our bare arms, we also saw a feral pig with four or five squealing piglets. The pigs were in a dried-up segment of creek bed when we spotted them, but quickly made for the far treeline when they heard our footsteps along the path. The giant monitor lizard was my favorite sighting of our rainforest ventures, but all the animals we saw were pretty cool. Some of the plants, such as the fan palm, which can live to be 2 1/2 to 3 THOUSAND years old, were also rather amazing.

In the afternoon, we joined that day's version of the tour we'd left two days earlier for the final segment, a stop at the Daintree Discovery Centre then the drive back to Cairns. At the Discovery Centre, Lara and I did all the mid-level and aerial walks through the rainforest before climbing up the five levels of the canopy tower to the top lookout over the treeline. We enjoyed getting to see the rainforest from above after days surrounded by it. In the evening, we went out for a final spring break meal in Cairns then watched a fire show done by a street performer on the Esplanade.

Sunday, we got up at the lovely hour of 3:30 AM for a shuttle to the airport and a 5:45 AM flight back to Melbourne. The flight was quite smooth and we were settled back into dorm life by early afternoon. The rest of the day was spent procrastinating, reacclimating to College life (by College, I mean UC), and watching the rugby league Grand Final. As it should be, Melbourne won.