Australia: Week One and Two

Our first week in Melbourne was pretty laid back. The group spent the first day moving into our single dorm rooms at Mannix College, a dorm off of Monash University, and later spent the afternoon checking out Melbourne’s city centre. The city of Melbourne is big, having a population larger than all of NZ, so I felt a little out of place on the trams and trains. Regardless, the Queen Victoria Markets were fun to meander through and it was fun to spend time with the other Oles.

            While at Mannix we were fed breakfast, we received a $10 stipend for lunches, and we had to fend for ourselves for dinner. Skiba, Todd, Ian and I got creative from day one and starting up our own restaurant in the small kitchen of the dorm. For the next week we “borrowed” fruits from the caf to go along with our peanut butter/nutella toast for lunch. We ate homemade stir-fries every dinner, which looked and tasted so good that we had people asking us if they could buy some off of us. We ended up only spending $15 each for the whole week of food. This was good because we were therefore able to fund our past time of choice: Dooley’s. This was an Irish bar at a hotel-motel in the furniture district of Melbourne which catered to people over the age of fifty that like country and mid-nineties music.

            During the week we had various lectures on anthropology and ecology. At times they were pure review and boring, but a few were very interesting. One professor spoke to us about the 30 years he spent living with an aboriginal community in northern AUS, documenting their language and culture as he went. He is currently one of three people left to know the language fluently, but he is having success with the younger generations in reinstalling their culture into the community, which was formerly forbidden to practice their beliefs by the whites of the area. On Wed. we went to an animal sanctuary in Healesville. We were able to see many animals, which included; emus, koalas, roos, wallabies, various birds and even two baby Tasmanian devils.  On Friday we went to a small biodynamic vineyard and winery, which was fun to compare to Seresin Estate. Though they practiced some of the preparations characteristic to biodynamic practices, the owners were scientists and therefore a little skeptical.

            We left Melbourne on Sunday and bussed down to Queenscliff. We are spending this week studying marine biology at The Marine and Freshwater Discover Centre. Monday was spent listening to lectures, Tuesday we had our first field research, in which we investigated inter-tidal species and their distributions along the shore. In one tide pool we found a Maori Octopus, which was exciting since the people from the centre said they had only seen one before. We started Wednesday off by canoeing through Swan Bay. I was able to catch not one, but two bandjo sharks with my bare hands in the shallow water of the bay. They look a lot like sting-rays, but are a harmless member of the shark family. We saw bigger ones, but the ones I caught were probably around two feet long. On Thurs. we went on a boat tour of St. Phillip Bay. We collected a sample of floating debris in the bay and analyzed the contents. We found many feather stars, a few crabs, wandering anemones, sea squirts and even three or four sea horses. On Fri we are going snorkeling at what they call "Pope's eye", and we are planning on diving during our free time on Saturday. After this, we're heading back to Melbourne for the week. 

         Now that we are actually out in the field I am really enjoying the trip. The first week spent in a foreign school classroom wasn't that much fun, but as long as I am able to break up the lectures with field work, I think I'm going to have a good semester. 

Todd made a new friend. 

Classy blokes sampling wine

Oles at work. We are looking through the brown algae that we collected behind the boat. We found feather stars, anemones, brittle stars, sea horses, crabs, and even a few little fish. 

Team Footscray: Disection Champions. 

Australia!!!

I finally made it. I have been waiting over a year for this semester abroad to begin and it’s finally here. Let me tell you, it is a lot less stressful not having to plan my life on a daily basis. It is also really comforting being with Oles again. Though I now miss being totally immersed into the English culture, being with the Americans is a relief. Before I begin describing how my first few weeks in AUS have been, I really should fill you in on the last of my adventures of NZ. Oh boy, they were eventful.

So, we woke up Monday morning at 5:30 and Bob drove us the three hours to Westport. We finally made it to the west coast! We start hitching after grabbing some groceries and hitched a ride down to Punakaiki with a Scottish couple. The drive was really interesting since the man is an author on the book of Revelation, having a book which was an Amazon best seller for the past three years (I think his name was Peter Heron if you want to check him out). He and his wife had some radical things to say, as they expressed their concerns for the US and the EU and talked about the new world order.

We were in Punakaiki by noon and headed straight to the start of the Inland Pack Track of the Paparoa Ntl. Park. Before entering, we talked to a ranger at the I-Site and she informed us that we had an eight-hour hike ahead of us if we wanted to spend the night in the park. By this time it was already one, so we decided that it was time to start hiking. The rainforest changed back and forth between fern trees and beech trees, and the majority of the trails were swampy. As we got deep into the forest, the trail turned into a riverbed. We followed the creek, which got larger as we followed it into a gorge, for the last three hours of our hike. At one point we stirred up three feral goats, so I guess we weren’t hiking the never-ending trail alone. Our turnoff to our campsite was in an area where the river was wide, fast, deep and cold. We tried forging through but once we got to our chests in water we had to rethink our plan. We were stumped since we had cliffs on both sides of us. At one point we even contemplated building a raft, and then bridge to get to the other side of the river. The sun was setting fast and we were cold since we had had to make more than 50 river crossings over the past few hours. Luckily we found an area to cross upstream, so we crossed and climbed a rock face to get to the other side.

We camped in a spot called the Ballroom Overhang and were surprised that we weren’t the only ones spending the night there. Right before we went to bed, a possum showed up at camp, and we were informed that they were NZ’s biggest pest. I thought we scared it off, but after going to bed Ian and I realized that our night spent in our sleeping bas was going to be a long night. We were sleeping outside, and there wasn’t any good place to hang our food so we keep it in a stuff-sack between our two sleeping bags. This was a mistake. The minute we went to bed until 4am was spent trying to kill/deter the possum from crawling over us to get our food. Once I woke up with him inches from eyes, right between our two heads. We decided to declare war and armed ourselves with rocks, sticks, knives and flashlights, but it took us until 4am to finally injure him enough to keep him off us.

We started off our Tuesday morning by hiking out of the park, but before we left we decided to take a detour to explore a cave, which was situated in the bluffs. This was my first time spelunking in a non-tourist cave, and I loved the feeling of not having anything but a flashlight to navigate the 25 min crawl deep into the cave. We spent the rest of Tuesday around the little town and slept in a hostel that was situated in the rainforest.

On Wednesday we woke up early to rain. It was pouring cats and dogs, but we still needed hitch to hike the 45 min south to Greymouth by 1:20 to make it to our bus. The two hours that we had to spend hiking/waiting for a lift in the cold rain were long, and may have even been the low point of the trip, but lucky for us we were able to get a lift. Some dude was driving alone and said he was bored and we were the first hitchers that he saw. He ended up know Bob Dawber, so we had a great time describing to him our time WWOOFing in NZ. We didn’t think we’d even get a ride, let along a ride from someone who used to work for the man we spent the last week with, so at this point our moods changed instantly. We made it to Greymouth with an hour to spare and rode the bus through the Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass back to Chch.
We were finally back and ready to relax. Our bus made it to Chch by 6:30 and took the bus 45 min south to Natalie’s flat. Unfortunately she wasn’t there, but her flat mates found us the luggage that we had left behind and even allowed us to spend the night. We spent Thursday walking and bumming around the Chch centre and ended up spending another night at their house. On Friday we went to the Chch Museum and spent the night on the airport floor. Our flight departed NZ at 6:20am on Saturday and we were in Melbourne, AUS by 8am. At this point we were running on adrenaline and ready for our next adventure to begin.

We did this for roughly two hours, following the river which was also the path

A neat area of the gorge!

This was about 20 min into the cave (notice the water). We turned off the lights and just listened for a few min. Too bad there weren't any glow-worms. 

The view as we rode the bus over Arthur's Pass through the Southern Alps