Fitzroy Park

Yesterday Jen and I had a bit of a lazy day. She wasn't called in to work, so we spent most of the morning just reading, chatting with folks back home via our computers, and basically bumming about. But we did have a list of things we wanted to get done, so around noon we took off for downtown. The last items we both needed/wanted for our outfits for the Melbourne Cup next week were purses, and we'd had our eye on some purses at the Victoria Market for the last little while. Of course, it wasn't until we actually GOT to the Market that we remembered that it was Wednesday - and the market is closed on Wednesdays! GAH.

Next we headed to Chinatown, in the hopes that we'd be able to find the sort of bags we were looking for at one of the shops there. No luck. Melbourne's Chinatown is pretty small but a fun place, full of restaurants and little shops. I kept finding myself saying "I can get that in Toronto for less!" though. Case in point. I've been looking at buying a fork/spoon/chopstick set for the last year or so. These kits cost $2.50 or so at Smart Maple in Toronto. In the stores here, the same kits were being sold for $45!!! (No, I'm not making that up!) So another fruitless round of shopping. GROAN.

Jen had been promising to take me to Fitzroy Park for quite some time now, so since we were in that neck of the woods anyway, that's where we headed next. It's a beautiful park, but it sure has some odd things in it. Like the Fairy Tree - whose trunk had been carved with all sorts of fairies and other magical creatures. Cute, but the magical effect was a wee bit ruined because the tree itself died a number of years ago and is now just a big decorative stump! The branches had to be all cut off for safety reasons. There was also a model Tudor village, a cool sculpture of various forms of sea life, and a swing set that bears a passing resemblance to a giraffe. Jen and I took a whole bunch of pictures and you can enjoy them by checking out my "Melbourne - Part Two" album on Facebook. (I'm liking the fact that Facebook, unlike Blogger, allows me to post as many pics as I feel like!)

Personally, I liked the slide the best. It was shaped like a dragon. You climbed up his neck and walked across his back, and then slid down his tail. It was cool. Unfortunately there was a young family in the playground (imagine that) and sure, it's OK for their little kids to have fun too, but it was fairly obvious that all we wanted was one clean photo of the dragon slide and they wouldn't move out of the way. GRUMBLE. The photo I've included here is pretty good, though!

After wandering around the park for about an hour, we decided it was time to go and try to complete our 'to do' list, which included paying off Jen's hospital bill from the stitches she had to get back in September. Would you believe that we got to the hospital about 10 minutes after the cashier's office closed for the day? GROAN. Not our day at all!

Since yesterday was a Wednesday, it was also trampolining night. Our streak of strange luck continued throughout the evening. I continue to struggle to do any tricks that involve twisting my body. Last night I managed to do several perfect 360's in a row, but then when our coach was watching, I couldn't do them at all. I'm also working on cradles (basically back drop, half twist, back drop) - and crash-landed one so badly that I figured I'd better stop trying them for a while. GAH. Jen was faring no better. She's been working on ball-outs and is having a hard time sticking the landing - and last night was no exception. Suffice it to say that we both came home tired and sore after all the walking we'd done and then all the bouncing! On the other hand, at the end of the evening, while we were waiting for Mark to finish up so he could drive us home, Jen and I were approached by one of the ladies who's in the adult gymnastics class that meets at the same time we're trampolining. She came over and complimented both of us on our bouncing skills, and told us that we were improving nicely! I wasn't even sure what to say besides thank you - it was so nice to be noticed/complimented by a complete stranger. Kinda made all the night's frustration worth it.

Tonight we fly to Sydney to meet up with Ruth and Carroll and to go abseiling in the Blue Mountains. Jen and I are also going to be running a campfire for a Guide group in Bondi tomorrow night. So it's going to be an eventful weekend! I won't have email access while I'm away, so my next update will be when I return on Monday.

Ian Potter Art Gallery

I finally, FINALLY managed to get to the Ian Potter Art Gallery, found in downtown Melbourne. I've been trying to get there for the past three weeks. First I was exhausted from all my touring in Tasmania. The I was sick. Then I went downtown to the art gallery and was refused entry because I was carrying a backpack. I tried going again yesterday, carrying my satchel this time, to discover that the gallery is closed on Mondays. AGRH. But I finally got in today. Ironically, after all that, I didn't have enough time to go through all the exhibits, but what I did see was definitely worthwhile. Fortunately the gallery is free admission so at some point later on this year I'll be able to go back and see what I missed today.

Although I spent a good amount of time wandering through the various rooms and looking at the paintings, I was really captivated by this particular sculpture. Perhaps it's because of the juxtaposition of the organic and the mechanic. Perhaps it's because the "mom" and "baby" scooters are just so cute! But for whatever reason, I kept wandering back past this sculpture (it was situated prominently in one of the foyers). Finally I decided I should pull out my camera and take a picture of it. I wasn't at all sure if I was even allowed to take pictures in the art gallery (considering all the grief I had just getting here, I didn't really want to be asked to leave - again...), so I kinda did it on the sly.

This led me to wandering back through the galleries and taking stealthy pics of the other artworks that I really liked. The best of these pics are now found in my Melbourne album on Facebook. They're not the best photos I've ever taken, but since I was doing it rather sneakily when I was pretty sure nobody was looking, I think they turned out pretty good.

I also really liked some of the landscape paintings in the gallery. They have a whole wing dedicated to showcasing artwork by Australian artists who were living in the colonies here when the country was just starting out. Some of them did their best to record on canvas the way life truly was at the time, others painted idealized scenes of pastoral harmony - which are a far cry from the reality of the day. It was really interesting reading some of the blurbs by the paintings. This is one of the few art galleries I've been to where the blurbs do more than just describe who painted each piece and what materials they used. Beside many of the historical paintings especially, the gallery included information on how historically accurate the images were, a bit of history about the people or the events portrayed, or even a little bit about what inspired the artist to paint what they did.

I met up with Jen down by Flinders station at the end of the afternoon. She was working at a tough school again today. In fact, she's becoming concerned that this school likes her, and that they're going to keep calling her back, when she'd much rather work pretty much anywhere else! So I met her at the station with a Boost juice (see? told you I was becoming addicted!) and we finished shopping for our outfits for the Melbourne Cup next week. Now we're all outfitted with hats, dresses, blouses, etc. etc. All we need to do now is find a glue gun so we can add the feathers and other decorations to our hats! That'll likely be a project for next Monday, once we return from Sydney.

Tonight I Met a Murderer at the Comedy Club

OK... so before anyone has a heart attack or anything, let me reassure you that everything is fine. I just came back from one of the weirder evenings of my life, is all!

Our house mate Brandon had scored a whole bunch of free tickets to a local comedy club, so he invited everyone to come out and enjoy an evening of stand up comedy acts. Figuring this might be an interesting way to learn a little bit more about Aussie humour, Jen and I decided to tag along.

The headline act for the evening was a guy named Chopper, who is apparently famous in Australia for murdering a number of drug dealers and getting away with only a light jail sentence. He is called "Chopper" because during his time in jail, he cut off his own ears as a way to get moved out of his cell block, apparently because all of his cell mates wanted to kill him. Stranger and stranger!

Let's just say that most of the comedians who were on the bill tonight were not to my liking. In general the humour was very crude and relied mostly on an abundance of swear words and lewd references in order to draw laughs from the crowd. There were actually many times during the evening where I thought the comedians went right over that fine line between risque humour and offensive material. But hey, the evening was free, and just like when you go to a bad movie, I kept hoping it was going to get better. In reality the first act was by far the best. Jen and I aren't sure if this was because the first comedian was British and therefore we better understood his jokes, or what.

Chopper came on as the last act of the evening (apparently he appears at this comedy club every Monday night). The title of his act was "I'm all ears", in reference to the fact that he hasn't any. (It took me until the tram ride home to get that joke!). He was accompanied onto the stage by a burly bodyguard who was SCARY too look at - every inch of skin on his face, neck and hands was covered with tattoos. I'm pretty sure the rest of him was also inked, but there's no way I was gonna go and ask him! The bodyguard prowled the stage throughout the act, watching the audience closely. It was really unsettling and to be honest, completely killed (haha) any humour that might have been going on - he was simply too distracting.

During Chopper's act, the MC would read out questions that had been supplied by the audeince, and Chopper would answer them, sort of like a biker-gang version of a "Dear Abby" column. It was really strange. I didn't find it at all funny. After the show, Brandon told us that Chopper is usually funnier than he was tonight, but that apparently tonight he was completely stoned out of his mind. I'm not sure if a sober Chopper would've been much of an improvement. I kept getting distracted by his bodyguard; there were a few times during the act where the bodyguard went right up to the MC and draped an arm over his shoulders. I'm not sure if this was to enocurage the MC to get on with the show or what, but the MC was clearly nervous and uncomfortable having the bodyguard so close. Heck - I was nervous and uncomfrotable with the bodyguard on the other side of the room! At the end of the evening, I declined to have my picture taken with Chopper - after all, it would've cost $5! :-)

The night also proved to me once more that old saying about comedy clubs - never, ever sit in the front of the room! Thankfully our table was about halfway down the room from the stage. But the poor folks in the front were picked on rather mercilessly by each of the comedy acts. I was more than happy to be in the background!

So yes. All in all, a very strange evening. In fact, I'm pretty sure the best part was the tram ride home. There were eight of us there from my house, and we giggled and told jokes and picked on each other like teenagers pretty much the whole way home.

Hallowe'en Party

Last night Jen and I threw a Hallowe'en party for our housemates. Hallowe'en is not a big deal here at all, so we figured it was our duty as Canadians to share the culture of the North American Hallowe'en traditions.

In some ways, this proved to be quite a challenge. Although Hallowe'en decorations and costumes are on sale here, it's certainly not like what we'd find back home, with whole stores given over to spooky and scary items. We had to hunt pretty hard to find what we wanted - spider webs, streamers, and hardest of all, pumpkins! I keep forgetting it's spring here; and of course, pumpkins really are a fall fruit. We went into one fruit store where we found pumpkins, but they were pale orange or even white and looked... well... anemic. They were also selling for $1.99/kilo, so when we worked it out, that meant an average sized jack-o-lantern pumpkin was going to cost us something stupid like $18! At another store, we found actual orange pumpkins, being marketed this time as "Hallowe'en pumpkins", and they came in a see-through plastic bag with a jack-o-lantern face already on it (presumably for you to use as a guide if you wanted to carve your own pumpkin). They were selling for $20 each! No thank you. In the end we bought five little gourds and used them to make little mini jack-o-lanterns, and they were quite cute!

The next challenge was the food. We'd agreed with our housemates that everyone would contribute some food to the party, and Jen and I had planned to do some 'fear factor' type dishes. We made worms and dirt, a kitty litter cake, and severed fingers made out of hot dogs and potato chips. We also made a blood-red punch and cooled it off with ice in the shape of severed hands, courtesy of some of Jen's first-aid gloves which we had earlier filled with water and frozen. We weren't able to make everything we wanted, though. For example, the kitty litter cake recipe requires tootsie rolls, which aren't available here. And Jen has a recipe for a really gross jello dessert made with lemon jello and mini Oh Henry bars. (See if you can work out what THOSE are supposed to be!) Unfortunately, there are no Oh Henry bars here, nor any other chocolate bar that would make a good stand-in, so we had to give that one a pass.

We decorated the house with the usual cobwebs and fake spiders. We created dead body outlines on the floor and used red lipstick to write spooky messages on the glass walls and mirrors in our entranceway. We also had a great big enormous spider that we were supposed to hang from the ceiling, but we couldn't figure out how to hang it. We took lots of pictures and I can't post them all here, so you can go to my "Melbourne" album in Facebook to see the whole collection.

We also introduced our guests to some traditional Hallowe'en games. I wasn't entirely too sure how these would work out, since we're all adults and all. Not all of my housemates work with kids for a living, so I wasn't sure how they were going to react to kids games. But everyone seemed to have a great time! We ate donuts hanging off strings from the clothesline, mummified two people, and carved jack-o-lanterns. Jen entertained with spooky stories and we ate roasted pumpkin (well, gourd) seeds. So all in all, a great evening!

This morning we woke up to HOWLING winds (as in, "Auntie Em, Auntie Em, there's no place like home!") and don't really feel like going outside until we really need to. So instead, we're gonna watch a movie and just basically laze around.

The only other thing of note is that Australia has now moved out of daylight savings time - so it is now a 15 hour difference between here and home. And in a week, when North America moves into daylight savings time, it'll be a 16 hour difference - and making phone calls is going to become an interesting challenge!

Happy Birthday Jen!!

Happy birthday to Jen,
Happy birthday to Jen,
Happy 30th birthday dear Jen,
Happy birthday to Jen!

Yep, today was Jen's 30th birthday, and as such she now officially joins those of us who are too old to get a working holiday visa in Australia. Good thing she already has one! This also means the next time we head off on one of these crazy traveling adventures, we'll be on even ground, visa-wise. Ah, the joys of getting old. :-)

Seriously though, I'm pretty sure she had a good day. Today Jen was working at a school where they had specifically requested a Canadian supply teacher for their year 5/6 class. In fact, they asked Resource Ed for Jen by name, because they had heard she was an experienced teacher. We were both a little worried that this might mean the kids were going to be a real handful, but apparently they were wonderful kids and she had a great day.

I, on the other hand, had a lot of free time today. This was planned! I amused myself for a couple of hours by decorating Jen's half of the room with streamers, "30" stickers, and birthday banners. You can see some of my handiwork in this photo - and you'll have to take my word for it that I did decorate the rest of the room too, including Jen's couch, desk chair, and wardrobe. When she got home from work, she walked in to see all the decorations and her presents, cards and letters arranged nicely on her bed. Ta da! My personal favorite are the maple leaves which were sent by Jen's mom... how cool is that? (We're actually a little surprised they made it through the Australian quarantine folks... they're really strict about plant material entering the county!) We're trying to figure out a way to attach them to the walls without having them crumble to bits.

To end off a great day, Irene and Tarra joined us for dinner. Tarra brought St. Lucia Pizza (YUMMY) and Irene brought mud cake and strawberry cheesecake (also YUMMY). And Jen's favorite movie in the world, Sahara, was playing on TV tonight, so we ate pizza and cake and watched the movie.

So happy birthday Jen. I wish you nothing but happiness as we continue this crazy adventure together!

Victoria Market

I've actually been meaning to write a little about the Vic Market for about a week, but it just never happened. This is THE market here in Melbourne - there are several other smaller markets scattered around the city, but they don't hold a candle to Vic Market. The place is HUGE! For those of you who have been to the St. Jacob's Market near Kitchener, the Vic Market is at least as big - but situated right smack in the middle of the downtown.

Like St. Jacob's, there are stalls that sell fruits, veggies, and all sorts of produce imaginable. There are two separate buildings for meats, deli, and fish. (These buildings are smelly. I try to avoid them.) Most of the market is open-air, though. Shelter from the sun is a big issue here, so like many open-air spaces in the city, the stalls are sheltered by massive corrugated tin roofs.

Jen and I are doing pretty much all of our fresh fruit and veggie shopping at the Market. I know I've already complained in earlier blogs about how expensive food is here. Well, the Market is the only place we've found so far where the prices are closer to what we're used to in North America. We also like the fact that if you go through the produce section of the Market just before they close for the day, you can find some really great deals (since the vendors would rather get rid of their stock than pack it all up).

I love walking through the produce section, but it's a little overwhelming. At each stall there are usually these big burly guys, bellowing out their deals at the top of their lungs, trying to draw the crowd's attention to them. Add a bustling crowd of shoppers and it can be a little claustrophobic!







Of course, just like any market (and especially one that attracts tourists like this one), there are tons and tons of stalls full of Australiana. In some ways, this is a good thing. Almost all the typical Australian souvenirs can be found here, and usually at way better prices than you can find at shops in the city. On the other hand, much of what you find here is complete cheese and total garbage. I have become a bit of a "souvenir snob" over the years - I won't buy souvenirs anymore unless I know they were made in the country/place I am visiting. Which puts everything shown in this picture on the "NO WAY" list. Including the digeridoos! I went into the Koorie-run cultural centre and gift shop the other day (the Koories are the local group of Aborigines here) and they had a display about buying fake digeridoos. Apparently some souvenir shops are importing fake digeridoos, which are being manufactured in Indonesia, and marketing them as authentic. Good grief. So now I think I know how to spot a real one from a fake! I haven't decided yet whether or not I'm going to buy a digeridoo - I mean, it's not like I'm about to become a digeridoo player, and it'd just be one more thing to gather dust in my house. I am admiring the Aboriginal artwork I'm seeing, though!

Shopping for Hats and the Shot Tower Museum

Jen had a day off today, so we took advantage of it and traipsed all over the city. We had a huge list of things to get done - I bought a new power cord for my computer (one that has the right end for use here in OZ; my little adaptor plug keeps sparking whenever I pull it out of the socket), picked up train tickets for an adventure we're going on in a few weeks, went to the library, etc. etc. etc. One cool place we ended up in our wanderings was the Shot Tower Museum.

We stumbled on this museum completely by accident. We were in the middle of a mall in downtown Melbourne, looking for a Boost Juice (I think I've become addicted to their smoothies - but they're healthy so I'm not worrying about it). We came up to the top of an escalator to find this HUGE tower, inside the mall! It's completely enclosed by a glass tower, something like 20 stories tall. Intrigued, we went inside to find out what it was. Turns out this is a museum, showcasing the development of Melbourne's downtown over the last 150 years or so.

The building itself is a shot tower. It was originally used to manufacture gun shot. Apparently the molten lead was carried up in a bucket to the top of the tower, then poured through a huge colandar-like device which spread the molten metal into separate streams, which then beaded into shot as they fell down the length of the tower. When the newly made shot reached the bottom of the tower, it was collected, run through a polishing machine to get rid of rough surfaces, then packaged up and sold. Who knew?

There were some cool displays inside the museum, but the one we liked the best was an interactive video that allowed you to manipulate images of present-day Melbourne and compare them to the same spot from the 1890's. For those of you who have access to my Facebook page, go check out the video that I posted.

Although it was an interesting side trip, the Shot Tower Museum was not the main purpose of the day. Jen and I have decided that we need board shorts so that the next time we go to the beach we can do so in appropriate Australian style. So we were really downtown to check out the department store Target, hoping to find board shorts there. And this led to another random side adventure - hat shopping!

Hats are a big deal here. HUGE. Ever since arriving in Melbourne we have been wandering in and out of shops, looking at fancy hats. The dollar stores carry them, so do all the hippest designer boutiques. The reason is simple - it is horse racing season, and any lady who's going out to the races needs to dress up real fancy, and that includes a fancy hat! For the last couple of weeks we had been hoping that we might somehow be able to get tickets to the Melbourne Cup, THE premiere horse race in Australia. Unfortunately it's all sold out, so no races for us. This hasn't stopped us from admiring all the fancy hats in the stores though!

Well, I'm not quite sure what got into us this afternoon, but we were having way, way too much fun playing in the hat section in Target. I swear we tried on pretty much every fancy hat they had. And since I had my camera with me (as I always do these days), one thing led to another, and, well, I now have a new photo gallery on facebook full of hat shots! Some of the hats were just plain fancy, some were just plain ridiculous, and many were somewhere inbetween. But you can judge that for yourself. Come and check out my hat photogallery, and please leave us comments on the various styles. The question of the hour is, which hat should Jen wear if she were able to go to the Melbourne Cup? Your votes and comments are important, so have fun!

St. Kilda Beach

I think it's fair to say that today's adventures more than made up for yesterday's - um -rant. :-)

We woke up this morning to a brilliant blue sky, a fair breeze, and temperatures above 30C. I'd like to point out that unlike SOME places I've lived (like, say, Toronto and Ottawa), Melbourne's heat is almost always dry. This meant we could actually ENJOY these scorching temperatures without any humidex whatsoever. Let me tell you, 30C and dry is WAY more enjoyable than 30C and humid. (I might actually get to like it here.) At any rate, we did what any self-respecting Canadian who finds themselves in such a situation would do - we spent the day at the beach.

St. Kilda's is a suburb of Melbourne. At the turn of the 19th century it was a rough and seedy place, and certainly not for the likes of fair ladies such as Jen and myself. Fortunately, in more recent times it has become a major tourist hub for the city, what with the attraction of the beachfront and all. We caught the tram out and arrived there around 11am.

After a quick wander up and down the main drag of St. Kilda's, we headed for the beach, where we sat for about an hour, just soaking up the sun. (Exhausting work.) Yes, Mom, I wore my sunscreen. And my sunglassses. And my hat. And I drank lots of water. Honest. All around us more and more people were joining us on the beach. This photo doesn't really do it justice; there were beach towels and bodies as far as the eye could see.

Even with all our precautions, neither Jen nor I could stay out in the sun for very long, so we decided it was high time to take a break from all this excitement and go and find some lunch. (More exhausting work.) We ended up at a restaurant called "Grill'd", which promised the best burgers in town. They didn't disappoint. For all the Ottawa folk reading this blog, it was a little like The Works but with fewer choices. The burgers were fabulous though. What I'd really like to rave about, however, were the FRIES. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but WOW can the Aussies do good french fries (although they're called "chips" here). Anyway, at Grill'd, they make their own chips and they're seasoned with sea salt and rosemary. DELICIOUS.

The main drag along the beach is an interesting place. Jen wasn't kidding when she said that every second shop was a cake shop. Along with excellent fries (ahem - chips), Australians LOVE their baked goods. I think I may have already mentioned that even the cheap bread here is delicious. Let me tell you, it was really difficult to pass by all those cake shops without stepping inside, but somehow we managed.

Our friend Tarra (who came with us to Tasmania) joined us on the beach for a second round of sunbathing after lunch. Yes Mom, I reapplied my sunscreen. And I wore my hat. And drank lots of water. Really! Jen and I were admiring the numbers of girls on the beach wearing board shorts and bikini tops, and we've decided that this is the beach look we're gonna go for. I am definitely NOT a fan of showing off my thighs in public, but as the year continues to heat up, we will be spending a good chunk of time on the beach. I've also realized that the two piece bathing suit that I brought, I really can't wear here. Why? Because it's by Roots, and has the Roots logo prominently on the front of the top piece. The problem? In Australia, "roots" is a really raunchy, dirty term for having sex. So I don't exactly want to go around advertizing that on my chest for the rest of the year! A new bathing suit is definitely in order.

So... after another hour or so of snoozing on the beach, Jen and I were finally hot enough to decide to give the water a try. HA! Turned out the water's not exactly warm yet. It was like walking into an ice box! Neither of us got wet above the thighs. (I know, I know, once again I can hear the chorus of sympathetic clucks and sighs from all my Canadian friends. Come on now. I know you share my pain!)

When we finally got home late this afternoon, our housemate Irene (another Canadian teacher) had made us dinner - so we sat down to an awesome veggie lasagna, home-made garlic toast and caesar salad (complete with veggie-friendly caesar salad dressing, how cool is that?). Suffice it to say it was a pretty darn near perfect day. Hooray!

Going to the movies - the hard way

This is where I need to remind myself that this is supposed to be a year of adventures. :-)

Tonight Jen and I went to see the movie "The Seeker - The Dark is Rising", which is based on a book by the same title by Susan Cooper. You would think that such a simple task as going to the movies wouldn't warrant a blog entry, but you'd be wrong!

I guess it all started when we tried to find a movie theatre that was playing the movie. The theatres here don't go by helpful names such as "Cineplex" or "Famous Players" (I was actually more than a little surprised to find that these two movie mega-companies hadn't made it to Australia yet). Seems that all the theatres around Melbourne are independent. It's also been impossible to spot the theatres that we know must be in the downtown core somewhere - again, unlike in Canada, what megaplex theatres there are don't appear to be in the city centre. There are no huge billboards or movie posters visible in the downtown at all - so at this point, if there's a theatre in the city centre, I have no idea where it is.

Jen spent about an hour on the internet doing various searches, trying to find theatres that were relatively close to us. Melbourne is a HUGE city with about eight zillion little suburbs, so this proved to be quite the challenge. Then it turned out that all the theatres even remotely close to us weren't showing the movie, so she had to search further afield. Finally she found the movie playing at a place called Highpoint Mall. Then the next challenge was trying to figure out how to get there. In Toronto, we have this handy map of the entire city that shows ALL the TTC bus, streetcar and subway routes - all on one piece of paper - so you can figure out (a) where you are, (b) where you need to go, and (c) visualize how to get there. There is no such thing here in Melbourne. We have a "Melways" book which has a ton of maps for Melbourne, but there is no single transit map for the city. You can get a map of the trams OR the trains, and NOT the buses at all. Suffice it to say this can make planning a cross-town trip rather challenging.

The next stop was to the Metlink website, which has this handy trip planning feature. The idea is you type in your starting address and your destination, and the website plots out for you exactly what combinations of buses/trams/trains will take you where you need to go. I would like to point out that the Metlink website is not always accurate, as Jen found out earlier this week when it gave her the wrong directions to get to a school she was working at. But what other choice did we have? We dutifully wrote down the directions, and headed off.

Things went well at first. We caught the #19 tram on Sydney (this is the tram we seem to take a lot, as it heads straight downtown) and took it to Melbourne Central Station, where we had to transfer onto a train. Got down onto the right train platform to find out that there was a delay, and the train was running late. No problem except that about eight hundred thousand other people were also gathering on the platform waiting for the train, and it was getting uncomfortably crowded. Once the train finally arrived we got all packed in like sardines. I was glad we only had to go two stops, since the guy holding onto the pole with me had pretty darn bad BO and there wasn't exactly anywhere either of us could escape to. Like I think I mentioned yesterday, there are times here where I really do miss my car.

Stumbled off the train at Footscray Station and had to find the #223 bus. The instructions we had were to exit onto Irving Street and get on the bus. There were NO SIGNS to Irving Street! We wandered all around the neighbourhood, reading the numbers on the innumerable bus stops - no #223. Finally we ended up RIGHT BACK IN FRONT of the train station to discover that yes, we had been on Irving Street all along, just walking in the wrong direction. We finally found the right bus stop and as luck would have it, the 223 pulled up almost immediately. Our luck was changing, or so we hoped!

Nope.

We sat on the bus for 7-8 minutes, watching the neighbourhood slide by (I've decided that all of Melbourne except the actual downtown core is made up of junky bargain shops, random teeny cafes, and cheesy clothing stores), when the bus driver pulls over at a stop and announces that this was the last stop on the route. Jen and I look at each other - the bus route was supposed to end at the mall, and we were in a random suburban neighbourhood with houses and a McDonalds but definitely no mall! We told the driver we were trying to get to Highpoint Mall and he told us we had to get off the bus and wait for the next bus on the route to come and get us, and that it would take us to the mall. What choice did we have? Off we got.

While waiting for the next bus, we consulted the mini area map that was at the bus stop. To our horror we discovered that we'd gone the wrong way on the bus route! Essentially, where we had picked up the bus outside the train station was in the middle of the route, the mall we needed was at one end, and we were now waaaay at the other end of the route! Let me be perfectly clear here. There was NO INDICATION about this AT ALL at the bus stop by the train station. As far as we could tell there was only ONE stop for the #223 at the train station. Apparently there were two - we somehow missed the one we were supposed to be at. At any rate, there was nothing we could do about it now, so we waited, fuming, for another 10 minutes or so until the next bus picked us up and finally, FINALLY took us to the mall.

We were now officially late for the movie, so we had to book it to get into the theatre. Highpoint Mall is the first North-American style mall that we've seen at all on our travels here so far - you know, with big glamorous signs, flashy lighting, and a nice big parking lot totally surrounding the building. The one thing that was missing was any exterior indication of where the movie theatre might actually be in the mall. The rest of the stores were closed for the night, but the building itself was open, so we went inside and tried to find the cinema. All the information bulletin boards in the mall were electronic and had also been shut off for the night, so no help there. Eventually we flagged down a mall security guy, who told us we needed to go down to level one to find the theatre. We were on level three - we managed to get down an escalator to level two, but all the escalators to level one were blocked off. Gah! Then we were directed to a lift (elevator) - and there was a set of stairs by the lift. Not wanting to waste time, we went down the stairs - to find them also blocked off at the bottom (why the HECK they weren't also blocked off at the top is beyond me!!). Back up the stairs we went, into the lift, back down again, and we were finally, FINALLY at the theatre. We arrived just at the end of the trailers and hadn't missed a thing.

And would you believe, after all that, that it was a terrible, TERRIBLE movie??

If you've read Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series, do NOT go and see this movie. Heck, even if you haven't read the books, don't waste your time on the movie. It's been a while since I read the books, but even I knew that the plot was totally off. Jen was absolutely HOPPING MAD by the end. Let me give you a brief rundown of some of the issues we had with the movie:

• Will did not have a lost twin brother.
• The bad guy (the Rider) was not scary in the least.
• The side plot with Will's dad having done research into the nature of Dark and Light - where the heck did THAT come from?
• The entire movie seemed to be made of slow 'spooky' shots which were nothing of the sort.
• The way in which Will found out about his powers and how to use them were completely wrong.
• The way Will found the different Signs was completely wrong.
• There was a girl character in the movie whose job was to betray Will to the Rider; she is not in the books AT ALL.

I could go on and on and on! We ranted about the movie the entire way home.

Oh, the way home...

Another one of the many joys of the Metlink system here is the inconsistency with which the various buses/trains/trams run. So in order for us to get home at a reasonable hour, Jen and I had to take a completely different set of trams and buses than we had to get out to the mall in the first place. We walked out from the mall about two blocks to Rosmond Street to pick up the #57 tram back towards the city centre. We had to run to catch it, but catch it we did! (Jen remarking while we ran that she shouldn't have worn her flip-flops, hee hee!) Our instructions from the Metlink website told us to get off at stop #35 and catch the #472 bus at Mirriam Street. (There's a logical thing - all the tram stops on a given route have a stop number printed up in nice big bold numbers so they're easy to see - so even if you can't find the street signs to guide you, you know where you are on the route by the stop numbers.) Well we got off the tram at stop #35, and the tram pulled away - and there was no Mirriam Street to be found. At all. We looked up and down this dark and creepy stretch of road and there were no obvious cross streets. What to do now?

What we ended up doing was sticking our heads into a late-night pizza place and asked for directions. The guy behind the counter told us that Mirriam was two blocks down the street, so we thanked him and headed on down. About this point I found myself thinking, why did we need to get off the tram where we did? Where we were heading was likely at least one more tram stop away. And why would the Metlink system have us get off the tram to catch a bus at a place where there was no cross street?

I think by now you can guess that the road two blocks down was not Mirriam. Nope. In fact we walked another six blocks or so and still no Mirriam. We were still following the tram tracks at this point, so we decided we'd just hop back on the tram and ride it all the way downtown, and catch our trusty #19 home from there. And that is what we ended up doing. In total we spent 3 1/2 hours in transit, and only about 100 minutes actually in the movie. Definitely not the most productively spent evening! We've decided that we can't trust the Metlink website ever again; we'll still use it to help us trip plan, but we'll be checking all its recommendations against the Melways map book - even if it is a pain!

From Jen: And the movie was really, really bad. I cannot stress this enough. It was horrible. I had to go online and read if Susan Cooper had sanctionned the changes or if I would have to write a strongly worded letter. She doesn't like the adaptation to her book so she will escape, this time.

From me: I like what Jen said at the end of the movie even better: "Watching this movie makes me feel like my soul threw up just a little."

I think I am missing my car

Yep, the title says it all. It struck me today, as I was making my way home from downtown Melbourne, that I am missing my car. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for public transit, and Melbourne sure has an intricate system of buses, trams, and trains - but really, at the end of a long day, being packed into a tram like so much sardines just isn't all that much fun. TOO MANY PEOPLE. Turns out I enjoy the 'alone' time I get when commuting in the car! The trams and trains here have irritating seats - they're set in pairs of benches, one bench facing forwards, and the other facing backwards, all down the length of the car. Pretty much nobody wants to be in the rear-facing seats, which means that as the tram fills up, you can get a crush of people in the aisles and free seats that nobody will sit in. Also, the pairs of seats that face each other are so close together that if four people do sit down in them together, their knees all touch. Ick. I know that when you ride on public transit you do have to be a bit more forgiving about personal space, but still!

I wouldn't want to drive in the city anyway. Despite my best efforts, I am still disoriented by which side of the road the cars drive on. I was downtown today and switching from one tram route to another, and had to consciously stop and think about which part of the platform I needed to be on in order to travel in the right direction. Also, the rules for cars turning corners in the downtown core are bizarre to say the least. Along roadways with trams, cars who want to turn right (remembering that this would be the same as wanting to turn left at home, meaning you're cutting across lanes of oncoming traffic to do so) have to turn right from the LEFT-hand-most lane. Which makes no sense to me at all - it means the right-turning cars not only have to cross all the lanes of oncoming traffic, but also all the lanes of traffic on their side of the road as well. I have yet to find someone who can explain why the rules are this way. Apparently it has something to do with ensuring that the tram lines are always clear and the cars don't block them (like Toronto, the tram rails run down the middle of the roads). I'm just amazed there aren't more accidents! The locals seem to get how to make these turns, for which I am grateful.

Actually, in general I'm quite happy to be walking all over the place around the city. I am slowly learning the streets and landmarks. Although that's another thing that's reversed here - where the street signs are posted on the corners of intersections. This means I can't always find the street signs to tell me where they are (they're always around, I'm just looking for them in the wrong parts of the intersections; it's amazing how much is hard-wired into us from a young age, about where to look for things like this!). But I've always been more of a landmark navigator anyway.

Today I took my map in hand and set out on my own to find Fitzroy, a funky neighbourhood that's to the east (ish) of the downtown core. I must admit I was a little disappointed with the adventure. I made my way downtown with no problems, but when I went to switch trams at La Trobe Street, I discovered that there was a tram stuck on the tracks (of course in the direction I wanted to travel!). Since no trams could get around this particular spot, it meant there were no trams heading in my direction and I ended up walking about 30 minutes to get to the edge of Fitzroy. The touring map I had promised me a funky district filled with retro stores, little cafes, and other fun things... but the reality wasn't quite what I was expecting. Kensington it wasn't. Queen Street it wasn't. I did find one funky shop full of designer kitchen ware which I liked (you know, all the stuff I'll never be able to afford - I particularly liked the knife block shaped like a man, and you inserted the different knives into different strategic points in the body - like the head and the heart. Ha ha.). I also walked into a neat little environmentally friendly store which had a great book selection. But that was about it.

I had originally ventured to Fitzroy because last week Jen had made references to how "strange" and "totally wrong" Fitzroy was. I returned home this afternoon completely puzzled - it was just another neighbourhood in the city, from what I could tell. But apparently she was talking about Fitzroy Park, not Fitzroy the neighbourhood - and I had been nowhere near the park. She's promised to take me there herself another day.

Feeling better - mostly

When I woke up this morning, I was actually hungry (first time all week), so I knew I was finally on the mend. Hooray! I was still feeling cautious, however, so I took it easy on the food and hung around the house all morning, just in case I needed to make yet another dash for the bathroom. I know, I know, more information than you really needed to know, but still - getting sick is one of the challenges of travelling. Jen tried to comfort me earlier this week with stories of how she's been sick in lots of other countries, most notably Peru, but strangely enough that didn't really help. :-)

We've decided that we likely caught a nasty virus from another one of our housemates. Originally we feared it was food poisoning, brought on by something that we served at our party last Saturday - but then everyone would've likely been sick at the same time. Turns out now that our first housemate was likely already ill at the time of the party, Jen and I succumbed two days later, along with the Dutch girls down the hall... and since then three other housemates have also, um, experienced this little flu. (By the way, using the term "flu" is confusing down here - at home the flu is a specific disease, but here it's used interchangeably to mean either a cold, a viral infection, or actual flu - so sometimes it's a little hard to figure out what people are talking about.) To be honest, I feel a whole lot better just knowing that it probably wasn't food poisoning - how embarrassing would that be to have poisoned our housemates at our welcoming dinner?

It's been a long time since I've had the luxury of being sick, if that makes any sense. One of my few consolations over the last couple of days was knowing that I wasn't inconveniencing any co-workers by being home sick, and that I didn't have to worry about leaving lesson plans or any of that stuff. On the other hand, this little mis-adventure has left me exhausted and dehydrated, so I'll pass on a repeat performance, thank you very much!

I finally decided about 2pm that it was safe for me to leave the house and do a little bit of exploring around the neighbourhood, something I've been meaning to do for the past week or so and just haven't gotten around to. Most of Melbourne is built on a grid system (another way it reminds me of Toronto), so I basically walked in a big square down Blyth to Lygon to Brunswick to Sydney and back to Blyth. All in all I probably only walked for about an hour and a half, but it was almost too much. By the time I'd made it to Lygon and Brunswick (the furthest I could possibly be away from my house on this route), I was wiped and needed to rest for half an hour before I could continue. But continue I did! Brunswick and Blyth are both residential streets (at least along the stretches I walked), and Lygon and Sydney are long strips of shops, with trams running along them in either direction. Unfortunately I'd left my Metcard (bus pass) at home so I couldn't just hop on a tram and go home, I had to walk.

Now that I've had some more time to get to know my new neighbourhood, it really does remind me in many ways of home. Melbourne is a cosmopolitan city, with many different races and cultures represented. Just north of us along Sydney is a very Muslim area - and the dress stores there are fantastic. Just south of us along Sydney the community is mostly Greek and Italian. There are sushi restaurants, bubble tea places (hooray!), and tons and tons of little bakeries. I swear the Australians make the best baked goods in the world. Even the 'cheap' bread is excellent. It is difficult to pass the bakeries without sticking your head in, between the delectable smells wafting out into the street and the yummy goodies in the window. Fortunately, yet another one of my housemates works at one of these places, so we're pretty much guaranteed some good eats every once in a while. There are tons of discount stores in our area, which is great since we're definitely on a strict budget this year.

I still haven't managed to take the neighbourhood pics that I wanted to - thought about it this afternoon but I still wasn't feeling 100% and I found myself concentrating so much on my energy levels that I never once pulled out the camera. Perhaps another day.

Jen and I finished off the day by going trampolining, as we will every Wednesday. Unfortunately we didn't get to play in the huge pit of foam cubes tonight, so I never bothered to pull out the camera. Mark, our coach, is a real taskmaster and had the two of us sweating and working hard. Jen mastered her back pullover (yikes, in my opinion), while I struggled to do simple 360's and full airplanes. Stupid twisting. Any tricks that involve twisting sideways I have a terrible time doing. But I know it'll come in the end. I wasn't sure I was going to bounce at all tonight, since my stomach was still rather delicate, but gave it a try. I was doing well until the very end of the evening, when one too many attempts at learning a 3/4 front flip left me nauseous enough to want to throw up. So, wisely, I stopped. We'll leave that one to next week. :-)

So here's hoping that tomorrow I'm back to 100% - I am so ready to get out and explore that it's beginning to drive me crazy, this whole being sick thing. Gah!

Our house in Melbourne, part one

OK, so I'm still at home sick, and getting pretty bored too. I wanna go out and play! But based on how I felt this morning when I got up, I realized pretty quick there was no point in me leaving the house. It's mid-afternoon now and I'm feeeling moderately better, so here's hoping this is the last day I have to stay home for a while!

I decided it was high time to take you all on a tour of the house where Jen and I are living, so here goes:

This is our house, 6 Balmer St., Brunswick, VIC, 3056, Australia (yep, that's the mailing address. Feel free to send us mail. We love mail.)

This house is quite modern compared to the others on our street - and when I'm feeling better, I will go on a photo tour of the neighbourhood to share some of the cool architecture that surrounds me. In the meantime, though, this is home. Like most houses in Melbourne, ours doesn't have a front yard. Instead we have a paved courtyard in front of the house. Some of my housemates have cars and one has a motorbike, so it's nice to have lots of parking space. That, and Australia has been in severe drought for many years, so people aren't really encouraged to have lawns. They use up too much water.

12 people live here, including me and Jen.
When you open the front door of our house, you're greeted by - that's right - the gym! Complete with treadmills, exercycles, weight machines, and a nice plasma TV so you can keep yourself amused while you sweat. On the other side of the hall there are yoga balls and mats and the steps used for step aerobics.
This is our kitchen. It's HUGE. I think it's kinda funny - they took the time to put in three giant fridges/freezers, but there's only one stove. Each of us has an assigned shelf in one of the fridges and one of the freezers, and also an assigned food cupboard. There's lots of dishes, pots, pans, and pretty much everything you'd need. Most people cook on their own, but folks like Jen and I who share rooms tend to cook together.
And this is our main common room. Again with the flat-screen TV! I've never had one before, and there are three in this house! This is right off the kitchen and so is the logical place for people to congregate, eat, socialize etc. There is a second, smaller common room upstairs right beside Jen's and my room, with only two couches and a smaller TV. We like it better 'cause (a) it's warmer and (b) very few people use it. So it's kinda like we have our own living room just outside our bedroom!

Our house in Melbourne, part two

This is our backyard. It's quite big. The brick at the back of the yard has an outdoor fireplace on it. I have absolutely no idea what's in the metal shed on the right, but my guess is that's where they keep the maintenance equipment. We have a gardner come in and take care of mowing the lawn etc. - he was here today. There are also two gas BBQ's (they're just out of view beside where I stood to take the picture). All of the trees are fruit trees, although I couldn't tell you what they are - the fruits aren't ripe yet. But the house next door has a lemon tree, and it's so cool to be able to pick lemons right off its branches!
This is our sketchy, sketchy bathroom. Compared to the rest of the house, it's like they ran out of money to remodel or something! There are eight bedrooms in the house, and therefore eight bathrooms - and this one is assigned to Jen and me. All the other bathrooms have nice tiling, wooden cabinets, etc. Not us. While the shower stall is nice and big, what you can't tell is that the drain for the shower is OUTSIDE the shower stall - so when you shower you get this nice little river of water across the bathroom floor to the drain, which is just out of sight in the foreground. Gotta remember not to put any clothes down!

And this is our bedroom - or at least, half of it! I'm standing beside Jen's bed to take this picture. Her side of the room is essentially a mirror image of mine. All in all I would say we have almost as much space in this room as I did in my old apartment in Toronto, which isn't bad. The room came with all the furniture and the beds, although we did have to provide our own bedding (not a problem, since there are eighty kajillion discount stores out on Sydney Street, a couple of blocks away).

Sick

I had great plans for today.

I've been taking it easy for the last week and I had decided that it was time to go out and really explore Melbourne. This city is at least the size of Toronto (I'm pretty sure it's bigger, actually) and has tons of funky neighbourhoods to explore, and tons of museums, art galleries, and so on and so forth. Plus it's Monday, the skies were bright blue, not a cloud in sight, and 27C (the warmest day we've had here yet!). So since Jen hadn't had a call for work, our plan had been to head to St. Kilda, a section of town I understand to be somewhat like Kensington, but with a beach.

Doesn't that sound like a great way to spend the day?

Instead, both Jen and I spent the entire day in bed. Or, in my case, running to the bathroom! We're not sure if it was something we ate, but it's highly suspicious that we're both sick at the same time. Two nights ago we hosted a party for our housemates, as a way to get to know them a little. Last night we were at a Thanksgiving dinner for all the Canadian teachers who are down here with Resource Ed, and had turkey and stuffing and all that good stuff (well, Jen didn't have the turkey, but still). At any rate, we've both been laid low with headache, cramps, and other fun symptoms. Whoo hoo. Suffice it to say it's been a pretty crummy day.

It's almost 7pm now and I am finally feeling well enough to risk sitting upright for more than a few moments at a time. Good grief. It's been a long time since I've been this floored by illness. I kept reminding myself that at least I wasn't at school, or having to worry about leaving plans for a supply teacher, or any of that stuff! I guess you could say it's been a long time since I could "afford" to be sick.

But with that said, I sure hope we're both feeling better tomorrow!

(And yes mom, all I'm eating for dinner is a bowl of soup and a glass of flattened sprite. Yumm-m-y.)

Australian TV Commercials

I've spent much of the last few days just taking things kinda slow and actually catching up on my TV watching. Jen and I are now officially hooked on the new "Bionic Woman" series, which plays here on Thursday nights. I'm also taking a stab at watching "Heroes", although I never did see the first season, so right now not a lot of the storyline makes sense. My housemates Yo and James are both big Heroes fans and have promised to bring me up to speed on the show. Hooray!

Having the time to actually watch TV is a bit of a novelty for me. There are only five channels here (unless you want to pay for more, which our landlord doesn't, so five it is), so the choice of shows to watch is a whole lot more limited than what I'm used to at home. Lots of British shows play here, and the Australians seem to have made a whole series of spinoff shows from the big American reality shows - so there's Australian Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, and Australian Bingo Night, just to name a few. I've watched more 'reality' TV in the last week than I have in the last five years. And no, Vicky, there's no Survivor here - at least not yet. :-)

I'm actually finding myself highly amused by the TV commercials here - they're hilarious! I've pasted in a few links to share with you, so you can see what I mean. I seem to be spending a lot of time giggling like a schoolgirl.

Pure Blond beer commercial

National Australia Bank commercial

Honda CRV commercial

Farmer's Union Iced Coffee commercial

Well, that's a start, anyway. There are many more but I currently can't find them on You Tube. If I do, I'll post 'em here!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I know I'm a week late but tonight Jen and I will be joining up with the other Canadian teachers working down here in Melbourne for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Which means I need to get off the computer and go and buy a pie. Bye for now!

More pictures from Tasmania - Bay of Fires and Mount Field National Park

I really like this picture just as a picture! The colours here are a little more true to what they were in real life... brilliant turquoise blue water and white, white sand. We picked up a zillion shells on the beach - they will be an interesting challenge to get home in one piece!
This is Russell Falls in Mount Field National Park. Apparently the water is usually much lower than how we saw the falls... all the postcards in the shops show graceful little trickles falling over the rocks. But there had been nothing but rain, rain, rain for the whole week before we got to the Park - so the waterfall was raging! This was another difficult image to catch - there was so much spray coming off the waterfall that I didn't want my digital camera exposed for too long... and there was so much lush green growth around the falls that it was hard to show how tall they were. The entire vertical space in this picture has moving water in it.
This is a Swamp Gum, the tallest-growing hardwood trees on earth. This sucker was something like 90m tall. Imagine walking through a forest filled with these - I spent a lot of time with my neck stretched, looking way, way up. I was happy when we found this tree standing somewhat on its own, free of surrounding foliage, so I could take a picture. The trunk of this tree at its base was probably as big around as a small car. At least.
Jen and I posed for a picture on the alpine moors on near the summit of Mount Field. This picture was taken maybe a 25 minute drive from the previous two shots. We drove our trusty car Bruce up the mountain - we didn't have time to hike up and I'm not sure my knees would've liked the hike anyway. We were astonished at the sudden changes in ecosystems as we drove up the mountain. We started in lush rainforest (like the picture with the waterfall), then into drier, more open forest (like the picture with the swamp gum, but the trees weren't quite so big), then short scrubby trees, then this - all in the space of a 20 minute drive. Incredible.

More pictures from Tasmania - Wineglass Bay

This is the mountain we had to hike up and over to get to Wineglass Bay. The photo doesn't do it justice. It was sorta like trying to take a picture of the CN Tower up close and personal... the steep angle required means that you can't truly appreciate how HUGE it is. The terrain was really rocky with all these huge boulders...
...like, for example, this one, which looks like it's trying to eat me! And this was just a small one compared to some of the others we encountered along the path as we huffed our way to the top. But again, although I tried to take pictures of the huge boulders, the perspective on the trail just wouldn't allow it. Besides, by the time we were even halfway to the top of the climb, I was in so much pain (stupid knees) that I wasn't really focussing on much else. :-)






This is at the lookout point at the top of the climb, and Wineglass Bay is in the background. We didn't have the best weather possible for seeing the Bay in all its glory... when the sun is shining, the water is brilliant blue and the sand is brilliant white. We had clouds and a setting sun, so the colours are a bit muted. But you do have to agree that the view is still spectacular. And WINDY - although that doesn't show so much in this picture... there's a reason I'm wearing my fall coat!













We decided to hike down the far side of the mountain so we could say that we'd stood on the sands of Wineglass Bay. So what's the first thing Jen does when we get there? Takes of her shoes and socks, rolls up her pant legs, and takes off for the water! Notice how she's also wearing a toque - it was COLD. I was quite happy to stay on the sand. We were the only people on this incredible beach except for a lone nature photographer. Wow.

More pictures from Tasmania - Port Arthur

When we went to do the ghost tour at Port Arthur, one of the places we stopped to listen to stories at was the old convict church. I thought it was a really beautiful building - even though it was just a ruin. The church burned down in a huge fire about 100 years ago, so all that's left are the stone walls and the bell tower - no roof, no flooring, nothing. We stood inside the church on a nice lawn of grass. The sun was long gone and the sky had turned that eerie deep blue which happens just before true darkness. I snapped this photo not really expecting anything good, but WOW am I happy with it! It'll be getting printed off for sure once I'm home.
When we returned to the campground where we stayed that night, we found the place literally hopping with these little guys - pademelons! We originally thought they were wallabies, but they're a smaller relative of 'em. They were really tame and pretty stupid - this dude hopped into the road right in front of our car and then stopped moving. He wasn't frozen in the headlights at the time - he casually bent down and was nibbling at something on the ground, blissfully unconcerned about the car not three feet away from him. I eventually got out of the car with my camera and went to take his picture, at which point he hopped off the roadway and onto the grass, where he then graciously posed for me.

Pictures from Tasmania - at last!

Looks like I might have finally figured out how to do this with multiple pictures... so here's hoping! It appears that I can only upload four images at a time, which is why the system was having such conniptions before. So I'll do a series of short posts with the best of the best of my Tassie pics:

Hastings Caves

In the Hastings Caves... this is a giant stalagmite (rock formation growing up from the floor of the cave). There's a stalactite above it and the water drips down off the stalactite onto the stalagmite. Minerals in the water precipitate out and harden to form these crazy shapes. This stalactite is likely thre times as tall as I am - but I couldnt' get right up close to it because there was a barrier in the way.
This is looking up at the ceiling of the cave... you can see all sorts of stalactites pointing downward. It was a little unnerving... I kept wondering exactly how "solid" all those needle sharp bits of rock really were, and whether or not they were going to come crashing down on my head at some point. I did learn that many stalactites are hollow! The water runs down a channel on the inside of the stalactite and then when it reaches the tip and drips off, that's where the minerals get left behind. Cool.


Me, Jen and Tara in the cave - just to prove we were actually there!

Trampolining

So, Jen took me trampolining tonight. For the few people reading this blog who may not already know this, Jen dragged me into trampolining two years ago in Toronto and I've been doing it ever since - once a week - as a class, with a coach and everything. I will never be an Olympic athlete, but it's fun and challenging and I am learning to overcome my fears - slowly!

The trip to the trampolining club is a long one. We have to take a tram from our neighbourhood all the way downtown to Flinders Station (the Melbourne equivalent of Union Station) and then take a train way out to Nunawading station, then walk for about half an hour. All told it's pretty much a 2-hour journey! Fortunately Mark, our coach, has decided that it's unacceptable for us to take public transit all the way home (we wouldn't get home until almost midnight that way!) so he's driving us. Yay Mark!

The trampoline classes are part of a larger gymnastics club, so unlike the club I go to in Toronto, there are all sorts of other pieces of gymnastics equipment set up too, and only two trampolines. However there's only five of us in the class and I like the system Mark has set up. First you climb up to the trampoline closest to him and he gets you to work on a specific skill, then when your turn there is over, you bounce over to the second trampoline and practice. So I feel like I spent a lot more time on the trampoline tonight than I ususally get to do. The trampolines are not recessed in the ground at this place, like I'm used to, but surprisingly it wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be to climb up and be bouncing 3 feet off the ground.

The crazy part came near the end of the evening. Off in one corner of the gym, there's a huge pit (about the size of the supertramp at the club in Toronto, for those of you who know where Skyriders is) full of cubes of the foam they use to fill the crash mats. The cubes are about 20-30cm on a side. It's kinda like a ball room for grownups. Beneath the massive amount of foam cubes is a foam floor. And on the side of this pit is a mini-trampoline and a tumbling track. The idea is to practice your flips and other big tricks on the mini-tramp or tumbling track and end up in the cubes - a nice soft landing. WELL, let me tell you it's bloody hard to get out of the cubes once you're in them! Each time I did a flip and landed in the cubes, I swear my butt sank all the way to the bottom of the pit, which left my arms and legs sticking up in the air - and totally drowning in foam cubes. It was a real struggle to free myself and get myself upright. In the end Jen had to lower a big blue crash mat into the pit so I could grab its edge and struggle up that way. Then she tried to reassure me that EVERYONE looks silly climbing out of the pit. Small consolation! The funny thing is, I kinda liked the crashing into the foam bit - just not the climbing out part.

Unfortunately I forgot to take the camera tonight, but I'll do my best to remember it next week so you can all see what we were dealing with. Craziness.

Jen has her first supply teaching job tomorrow - she's covering a Kindergarten class (or, as they call it here, a Preps class). So we'll be up early to see her off. I'm sure there'll be some good stories to share tomorrow!

First impressions of Melbourne

OK, so for some unexplained reason, Blogger is currently refusing to allow me to upload pictures, which is annoying because I know that not everybody reading this has access to my facebook account (and no, my dear former students, I'm not telling you how to find it, either!). So for now the pics from my Tassie adventure will have to remain in limbo. I am working on a solution, so keep checking back.

In the meantime, I figure it's high time for me to write a little about Melbourne. After all, I've officially been here for three whole days and haven't really said much. The truth is I've been taking a bit of a break from touring. I think I'm a wee bit tired. Jen's been trying to remind me that I'm supposed to be relaxing on my holiday, so that's what I've been trying to do. Since coming back from Tasmania, I've been sleeping in (all the way to 7:30), lolling around in my PJ's in the mornings, and reading, reading, reading. The new school term started here this past Monday, but so far Jen's not had any work yet (she's basically employed as a supply teacher). So we've had time to move at a slower pace, but also to get out and do a little bit of exploring together.

Jen had already been in Melbourne for three weeks by the time I got here, so she already knows the city and our neighbourhood pretty well. I like the way she describes the place: it looks and feels so much like Toronto, but it's as if everything is skewed just a little bit - like you're looking through an imperfect mirror. When you walk out from our house to the closest main street, Sydney, it's easy to be fooled into thinking you're on Queen Street or Eglinton in Toronto - but then you blink and realize the traffic is flowing backwards to what you're used to, there are different brands of items for sale here, the trees and architecture are just a little bit off (ok, a LOT off if you're looking at a palm tree!). It's eerie. I'm hoping to walk around my neighbourhood with the camera and take some pics of the houses here - they're so beautiful/cool/different and yet so similar to home at the same time. But first I've gotta see if I can get Blogger to load my pics again!

We keep running into little differences between here and home that remind us we're in a foreign land. For example, there are Subway restaurants here - but they don't have sub sauce. Ketchup is called "tomato sauce" and it looks and tastes quite different. There are no Burger Kings in Australia, but there is a chain called Hungry Jacks which uses all the same logos and serves the same food (and we think is actually owned by whoever owns Burger King, but why it's not called Burger King here is beyond me). When I asked Bill and Ruth whether there were Wal-Marts here, they looked at me with that blank "what are you talking about, you crazy Canadian" expression (hee hee), but then the next day they took me to a "Big W", which is DEFINITELY a Wal-Mart - again, all the same logos and layouts in the store, but the name is changed.

Yesterday Jen and I were on the hunt for construction paper, so that Jen could prep some art projects she's hoping to do once she gets into a classroom. (Unlike in Canada, supply teachers here are expected to come with a day's program planned... the classroom teachers are not responsible for leaving dayplans. NOT FAIR!) We went everywhere. We tried Office Works (a bit like a Staples), with no luck. We went to discount dollar stores, no luck. We tried a K-Mart, no luck. In desperation we stuck our heads into an art supply store, with no luck. The man running the art store didn't even know what construction paper was! Well aware that sometimes things go by different names here, we tried describing construction paper to him. He searched and searched his stock but had nothing even close to what we know as construction paper. We were flabbergasted, to say the least. How does one do art with kids with no construction paper?

Tomorrow ought to be interesting. Jen has found a place to trampoline, so I will be going along (for free for tomorrow!) and likely joining up for trampolining lessons, like I was doing back home. The difference is, the trampolines here are set up off the ground and not surrounded by the padded floors that I'm used to. Wish me luck - I might need it!

A Week's Worth of Adventures in Tasmania

Apologies to everyone in advance. If you don't have a lot of time to spare, stop reading this right now. This post is gonna be a long one! Jen's added her comments on the trip - they appear throughout in bolded italics. So as long as you've got some time, sit back and enjoy!

Also, for whatever reason, Blogger isn't allowing me to post pictures - so I'll try again at a later date to share the pics from this adventure. Gah.

SUNDAY, September 30

Let's see... where to begin... let's go back to last Sunday, Sept. 30, when I was last in Sydney. I caught an early morning flight to Melbourne and landed at the airport here at about 8:30am. Jen was supposed to meet me at the airport but she missed a connecting bus and was still in transit when I called her to let her know I'd arrived. No problems, I figured. This'd give me enough time to go collect my luggage, get a cup of tea, and find the bus stop where she'd come in to meet me.

Well. The luggage carousel had issues. Most people came and got their luggage, the carousel was empty, and it eventually shut off. Problem was, I didn't have my luggage - but then again, neither did about 20 other people, so I felt a little better. We waited for what seemed like forever until an airport technician came to look at the problem. I guess there was a piece of luggage jammed in the belt, because in the end they had to move all our luggage onto another belt before we could get it. The long and the short of it is it took me almost an hour to get my luggage. I headed for the bus stop around 9:30.

Missed the bus. I swear the Melbourne airport is one big conspiracy to make you spend money. I could've hopped on the Sky Bus (for a measly $15) to go straight downtown, but then would still have had to get on the local transit system to make it to my new place. Ugh. Anyway, through a series of frantic phone and text messages to Jen, we finally managed to meet up – I basically sat at the airport at the bus stop until she came to get me. Hooray!

Then it was a 2-bus ride to our new place, 6 Balmer St. I will write more about the house at a later date. It’s pretty nice but I haven’t really met any of the other folks living here yet, and am feeling rather shy. We basically dumped my stuff in our new room and took off again to go and get Jen’s stuff from where she had been living, about a 25-minute walk away. Wow, the house she’d been living in for the past three weeks was a pretty serious hole. It was a prison!!!!!! It smelt like pee! I was finally liberated and moved to the nice place. If you can, check out her facebook page for some sketchy pictures of the Miller House. We met her former housemates Jess, Tony and Tarra, grabbed Jen’s stuff, and headed back to Balmer St. We stayed home long enough this time to unpack our stuff and stow away our suitcases, and then Jen took me downtown for a quick orientation/tour.

The rest of the day passed in a bit of a blur. I was feeling the beginning of a cold coming on, and it was a cold and windy day, and I was a new kid in a new house and a new city. I think I’ve retained enough information from that whirlwind tour to not get myself totally lost when I next go downtown, but that’s about it. That’s a lie, Becky is going to get a lost. I am just waiting so that I can laugh and come get her. My first impression of Melbourne is that it is very similar to Toronto. Lots of trams (streetcars), little shops, big skyscrapers, and a cosmopolitan population. Melbourne seems to be much more diverse than Sydney, a little less touristy, a little more down-to-earth. But we shall see. It is also bloody expensive but has a great chocolate shop!

We ate dinner at Jen’s old house on Miller; it is apparently tradition in these rooming houses here that the rest of the house hosts a dinner for the outgoing person. It’s also tradition for new folks to host an introductory dinner in their new place, so Jen and I will have to start planning that too. Fiesta time but we are not paying for the booze! The Miller house was very chilly, and I could feel my cold worsening all evening. Jess, Tony and Tarra were all very nice and we did have a lovely dinner, but I couldn’t wait to get home to bed.

Tarra came with us to our place on Balmer; she went with us to Tasmania and it made more sense for her to sleep at our place overnight because of the joy of having to catch a very early train. And oh, how early it was!

MONDAY, October 1st

We were up and out of bed at 4am on Monday morning – with me hacking up a lung. Apparently it was time for me to have my annual fall (spring?) cold. I would like to point out that this was my birthday, the day I was getting up so ungodly early. I would like to point out that it was saving us 12$ each and that everyone agreed that it was a good idea to do this because we wanted to do this trip as cheaply as possible. Tarra and Becky were both being sucks because they didn’t get their daily dose of caffeine. Sucks!
So, after having had only about three hours of sleep, we were up again at 4am and out the door to our Tasmanian adventure at 4:30! We had about a 15-minute walk to the train station, where we caught a train downtown, then switched to another train, then to a bus. We couldn’t take the nice, short, easy route that Jen had used the day before to come and get me – oh no, those routes don’t operate early enough in the morning. We arrived at the airport around 6:20am, and our flight didn’t leave until 8:15. There was no other way for us to get to the airport on time.

The flight to Tasmania was only about an hour long. When we arrived in Hobart, it was pissing rain and the wind was howling. I began to dread that this was the weather we were going to have all week! I think I’ve been cold forever. All of my layers put together didn’t stop the wind cutting through. We had to pay $20 to take the shuttle bus from the airport into town (again, no other choice, it was too far to walk and no other public transit), and got dropped off outside the Montgomery Inn, a youth hostel. We checked into the hostel, dumped our bags into storage, and set off to explore Hobart.

We had a few shocks as we explored Hobart. First thing we tried to do was rent a car. I don’t know what big exciting event was happening in Tasmania, but almost every rental place we contacted was completely booked. Yikes! We eventually found Select Car Rentals, a rather sketchy place that rents older cars, and we rented from them. So for the rest of the week we drove around in Bruce, an older-model Nissan Pulsar. Bruce had a teeny weeny fuel tank (like probably 30L), a wonky driver’s seat and no power steering (this is because Becky doesn’t drive standard, if we had a standard car it would have had power steering), but at least he drove reliably! This was, after all, to be our first experience driving on the left side of the road. We arranged to pick Bruce up from the rental place first thing the next morning.

The next shock was the price of food! Food everywhere here is expensive, but doubly so in Tasmania. Imagine our horror when we walked into a local grocery store to buy breakfast items to discover that produce and other staple foods like bread were four times as expensive as we pay in Canada. There is NO WAY I can swallow buying grapes for $14/kg. Or $10 for a coffee and muffin. YIKES. Food was definitely going to be an issue on this trip. We put off the food shopping for a while and tried to explore some more. This is because we went to a sketchy grocery store that didn’t have a lot of selection. I had to pat Tarra hand so that she didn’t freak on the manager.

The pissing rain and howling winds had not let up, so spending any time outside was not fun at all. We ended up ducking into the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, which had the double benefits of (a) being right across the street from our hostel, and (b) being free entry. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon there. It’s not a big museum, but it did have some interesting exhibits on Tasmanian animals, minerals, and history. We loved the Antarctic exhibit. I hadn’t realized (although it sure makes sense) that Tasmania is a popular jumping-off point for Antarctic expeditions, and that many of the world’s most famous explorers have come through here. You could play with snow in the Antarctic exhibit, tempting but I didn’t make a snow ball.

Once we’d had enough of the museum, we decided we really did need to find some groceries. Our plan was to buy breakfast and lunch stuff at the store, and then to go out each night for dinner. Problem was, there was no ‘real’ grocery store anywhere near Hobart’s downtown core, where we were staying (the one we’d stuck our heads into earlier was more like a corner store). And we didn’t have the use of the rental car until tomorrow. So in the end we hiked about eight zillion kilometers out to North Hobart to go grocery shopping. It was well worth the time though! Then we ended up at a little Japanese restaurant for dinner (mostly because it was the only place we’d managed to find where we could eat for under $15), enjoyed noodles and green tea, and headed for bed.

This was my very first time staying in a hostel. In the end I’ve decided it’s much like going to camp, where you may share a bunk room with people you don’t know. But we had a clean room with warm beds, showers and TV available, and a kitchen where we could store and prepare food – all for about ¼ of what you’d pay for a hotel room. We shared our room with a girl from Korea who had come to Tasmania to learn to speak English. I thought she was VERY BRAVE! She’d come all that way by herself, and was now basically stuck in a small town where she didn’t know anyone and didn’t fully understand the language for six whole months. Wow. Kinda makes my wanderings look easy! She also hadn’t found a place to stay yet for the next 3 months and she was going to spend the next day trying to find someone to room with.

And that’s how I spent my 34th birthday. Jen still owes me a cake. There weren’t any at the Japanese restaurant. Jeez, we are in Tasmania for your birthday, suck it up!

TUESDAY, October 2nd

Well, we knew the time was coming sooner or later, and today was the day. One of the purposes of this Tasmanian trip was to learn how to drive on the left hand side of the road. The funny part was that none of us was particularly excited to be the first one to drive! That’s because it is on the side of the freakin road in the city! Did I mention it was the city with a lot of cars around and one way streets. In the end Jen volunteered that’s right I took one for the team, I navigated, and off we went. The first little while as we drove through Hobart was nerve-wracking, but she did OK (Ok?, I did freakin beautifully, no crashes, no screaming and no one in the fetal position during the drive) and soon we were on our way to our first destination, the Hastings Caves and Thermal Springs. The drive through this part of the Tasmanian countryside was so beautiful – the region is apparently known for its apples so we passed lots of orchards in full bloom. (I keep forgetting it’s spring here until something like that reminds me.) What was interesting was that the orchards were, for the most part, surrounded by these huge nets, I guess to keep out pests.

We arrived at the Hastings Caves and went on a 45-minute guided tour. I’ve only included a couple of pictures here, if you know how to find it, go to my facebook page for the whole deal. This was the first cave I’d ever been in and WOW was it cool. (It was a cave, 'nuff said.) The Hastings Caves are unique in Tasmania in that they are formed from dolomite, instead of calcite, which I guess is more common. It was so cool. They had the lighting all rigged so that only the portion of the cave that we were currently in was lit up, and everything else was in darkness. I hadn’t thought of it before, but even the minute amount of light that is brought in by the tourists alters the cave’s natural environment, which has been developing in complete darkness for the past 40 million years. We saw some fantastic stalactites, stalagmites, and other rock formations like sheets and straws. It was wonderful.

There were no bats in this cave, but there was apparently lots of other wildlife, mostly insects. I’m just glad that we didn’t run into the Tasmanian cave spiders, which are prehistoric in body plan and up to 18cm long! We did see some spiderwebs but that was it, which was fine by me!

After the caves, we went to the thermal springs, to go and bathe in the pool there. The water was advertised as being a balmy 28C, but there’s NO WAY the water was that warm! The air temperature was probably about 12C, and the water might have been all the way up to 18C, but no warmer than that. We stayed in long enough to say we’d been in, but that was it. And the change rooms were FREEZING COLD – especially the floor! There was also only 2 showers, so once again Jen took one for the team and waited on the cold, cold floor in her bathing suit for the other two to have their nice warm showers first. Nothing here is heated unless absolutely necessary – it is much more common to find space heaters for the rooms, and never central heating (or air conditioning!). I swear I spent this whole adventure cold. Having a cold sure didn’t help!

We had eaten lunch at the thermal springs, so now it was time to head off to our evening destination – Port Arthur. To get there we had to drive an hour and a half back the way we had come, back through Hobart, and another hour and a half out the other side, down the Tasman peninsula to Port Arthur. Port Arthur is notorious as the penal colony where convicts were sent if they reoffended after being sent to Tasmania in the first place. It was a very modern-thinking prison for its time – at Port Arthur they tried not to just punish the convicts for their wrongdoing, but to mend their ways through counseling, religious worship, and vocational training. Not that it really worked, but at least they tried. Anyway, it’s a fantastic place. We were booked in for a 6:30pm ghost tour, so we had to boot it to Port Arthur in order to get there in time.

Problem was, we hadn’t yet found a place to stay for the night. There were no YHA hostels listed for the Port Arthur area (Jen and I are now members of Youth Hostels International, so we get discounts at their hostels and a bunch of other places – including the tour we did at Port Arthur!). In fact, the guide book I have for Australia listed very few accommodations in the area. We figured we’d get to the town and then see what was available. The only trouble was, there WAS NO TOWN. Port Arthur is JUST the historic site, and there’s no town around it at all – but it’s marked on the map as having a town on the site. ARGH! Anyway, the lady at the info counter at Port Arthur pointed us back up the road to a small campground, which was advertising ‘backpacker’ accommodation. So back we went.

The campground itself was very nice – but the backpacker accommodation turned out to be a bunkhouse, with each room having three TRIPLE bunk beds. No sheets, no nothing. Thank goodness we packed our sleeping bags! We tossed our stuff in the room, locked the door, and headed back to Port Arthur for the ghost tour. Tarra called it the “orphanage” and I agree with her. It was sketchy and it took forever to figure out how to work the lone, tiny, teeny heater in the room. She also sang snippets of Annie.

The tour was really good. Our tour guide was a pretty good story teller and told us tales about some of the residents of the town from the 1860’s. At the convict-built church we learned about how, when it was under construction, one convict killed another in cold blood and then was tried and hanged for the murder… and apparently this was a common occurrence because convicts who had lost all hope would make deals with each other, where the one would kill the other. The trick? By committing murder and then being executed, both convicts end up dead, but their souls are not put in mortal peril since they did not commit suicide. They therefore retain hope of eternal salvation. I got to carry the lantern the entire time but they didn’t let me keep the lantern at the end which is unfair. I also got to be at the end of the tour group and it was my job to herd the stragglers along. It was a perfect job for a teacher.

There were other stories too, and they were certainly creepy… we all jumped while we were in the dissecting room underneath the surgeon’s house, where we learned how convict bodies were sometimes used for anatomy lessons, and the gruesome details of how the bodies were cut apart for study, and how they were disposed of. Ick.

Once we’d finished the tour, Jen, Tara and I were all sufficiently creeped out! We drove slowly back to the campsite, partly because we weren’t really looking forward to sleeping in that icky room, and partly because we were afraid of hitting a wallaby on the road. Almost all the mammals in Australia are nocturnal and we’d been warned not to drive after dark if we could avoid it. I refused to have my first experience with Australian wildlife to be scrapping it off the front of the car and trying to figure out how much it would take out of the car insurance.

But when we pulled into the campground, a wallaby (or at least we thought it was a wallaby at the time) bounced across the road in front of the car – and stopped! It was damn stupid, whatever it was. This led to about 45 minutes of us creeping around the campsite very slowly in the car, looking for marsupials. They were everywhere! We found out later that what we had thought was a wallaby was actually a relative called a pandemelon. They were so tame I could get really close with my camera – and I did! In fact I had to, because at one point, one hopped in front of the car and stopped and wouldn’t get off the road! I got out with my camera to take pictures and try to shoo it away. How cool is that? Jen and Tarra and I were all giggling rather hysterically by the time we got back to the bunkhouse – we had just done the equivalent of stalking raccoons. But it’s definitely way cooler to stalk the wildlife in a foreign country!

I thought our long day had finally drawn to a close, but no. Another group of backpackers had taken up residence in the room next to ours – three (pretty darn good looking) Irish boys and a German girl. We ended up talking with them on the porch outside our rooms for two more hours! So we didn’t get to bed until well after midnight – and then shivered our way through the rest of the night because the heater in our room was not so helpful. They had hired a car from the same place as us and named their car “Erica”. They thought that we needed to name our car as well so we christened the car “Bruce”.

WEDNESDAY, October 3rd

We woke up pretty early on Wednesday morning, mostly because it was so flipping cold in our room. Most of the space heaters here are set to only run for so many minutes, and then they switch themselves off. While this is a logical safety precaution, it is a pain in the butt when it’s been a cold night! We ate yummy caramel muffins in our room as we packed – we wanted to get out of there as soon as we could. Then it was back to Port Arthur for a guided day tour.

Port Arthur is not nearly so scary in the daytime, but still an awesome place. The site was huge – we could have easily spent the entire day exploring, but didn’t have the time. And apparently only 20% of the original colony is still standing. We toured the penitentiary building, the insane asylum, and the ‘separate prison’, where the worst criminals were kept. All creepy and very interesting. All the architecture was beautiful, and I had to keep reminding myself that everything we saw was built by convict labour. How ironic is it that the prisoners had to build their own prison?

Anyway, we finally took our leave of Port Arthur around 11:30, and took off up the east coast of Tasmania towards Freycinet National Park. It was my turn to try driving, and let me tell you, it takes some serious adjusting to driving on the other side! For one, it felt like there was a vast space on my left hand side, and I was constantly driving off the left shoulder of the road (just a little bit) because it was hard to judge the distance on that side. (The fact that Tasmanian roads are so narrow with NO SHOULDERS AT ALL doesn’t help.) Second, I found myself only using the right-side mirror, and not the rear-view mirror at all. This is because as a left-side driver, we’re so trained to constanly flick our eyes up and to the right to catch the rear-view mirror. Third, the transmission was on the ‘wrong’ side. But most annoying was that in our car, the windshield wiper controls were on the left-hand stem on the steering wheel, and the signals were controlled by the right-hand stem. This resulted in me (and everyone else) constantly turning on the windshield wipers when we were trying to signal a turn. This is apparently only switched in SOME Australian cars, which is even more confusing. I’m just glad we had an automatic car – I think having to learn manual at the same time as all the rest of this might have driven me batty!

We decided to take a short cut down some of the side roads. This turned into quite an adventure as the side road quickly degenerated into a dirt track, which felt barely wide enough for one car, let alone two! (It was much easier driving on the left when there was a nice white line painted down the middle of the road to let me know where the car shouldn’t be!) The road was insanely twisty and windy and hilly and with crazy switchbacks. Suffice it to say that by the time we got to the other side, I had white knuckles and was no longer afraid of driving on the left! But the detour was totally worth it – the scenery was beautiful with huge gum forests, pastoral farmland, and occasional glimpse of the brilliant blue ocean. We didn’t die! Woohoo!

We got to Coles Bay, just outside the park, around 2pm, and signed into the hostel there right away. Good thing we did, too, ‘cause it sounded like we got the very last beds available! We stopped only long enough to sign in and claim our beds, and then we were off to the park. The goal was to get to Wineglass Bay, one of the most famous beaches in Tasmania. Turns out that there’s a significant hike up a HUGE mountain and down the other side to get to the Bay. We climbed something like 1000 irregular stone steps up to the pass and again down the other side to the bay, and then back again to get back to the car. I had my knee braces on but let me tell you, that was one painful hike. I kept myself going by reminding myself that (a) I was in Tasmania, (b) the beach at the far end would be worth it (and it was), and (c) at least I wasn’t doing this hike with a canoe on my head.

The hike was spectacular – there were all these huge boulders we had to pass which looked like a giant had dropped a bag of marbles or something. We encountered a wallaby (a real one this time) at the lookout at the top of the pass, and saw dolphins down in the bay on the far side. The sand was big-grained and white. The bay itself curves in a perfect arc – and we were the only people down there except for one lone nature photographer. It was awesome. Who was the only person to go into the water? That’s right, it was me even though it was cold, it was necessary.

The sun was setting by the time we finally got back to the car (it was about a 3.5 hour hike by the time all was said and done), and we headed back to Coles Bay to find some dinner. It was creepy – the town was totally dark! There were no streetlights, and no lights in most of the houses, either. It got to the point where I jokingly told the others that we’d found a nest of vampires. Where WAS everybody? Well, we found ‘em eventually – they were at the ONLY restaurant/bar/café in town! It was not a tavern, it was a cafeteria. I don’t care what the sign said. It took a while for our food to find us, but it was really good. Afterwards we stumbled back to the hostel and practically fell into our bunks, we were so tired. Poor Tarra had a hard time sleeping, because the lady in the bed under her snored worse than I do! (Jen and I had elected to sleep in the bunk bed at the other end of the room, with the theory that at least the two snorers would be together and Tarra might get some peace. Not so much!) She complained that the bed shook, the lady snored so much. It probably did.

THURSDAY, October 4th

We had decided late last night that today we would get up really early (groan) so we could make it up to the Bay of Fires before we had to take Tarra back to Hobart. She had to work on Friday, so had to leave us on the Thursday. (The reality is we didn’t plan this very well; she should have flown back from Launceston, not Hobart – that way we wouldn’t have to double back on our route.) So we were up and out of the hostel by 6:30 am (we actually woke up the hostel staff accidentally; the office wasn’t supposed to open until 8am! Oops.) and on our way. We ate breakfast in the car on the way. Tarra is an excellent traveling chef. She can whip up a sandwich out of nothing.

In Bicheno, we stopped randomly because there was a small sign at the side of the road for a blowhole (which wasn’t, I’d like to point out, indicated on our TOURIST map). This was really cool! A blowhole is an opening in the rocks at the beach where the ocean gets forced up through the hole as the tide comes in. Since, in the Pacific, the ocean is constantly rolling with swells, so water came shooting through the blowhole every minute or so. It turned out to be rather hard to photograph, though. At the biggest swells, the blowhole shot water at least 30 feet!

We made it up to St. Helens by 8:30 in the morning, much earlier than we had expected. (It is very difficult to judge how long it’s going to take you to get anywhere in Tasmania; with the roads being so windy and hilly and all.) We ducked into a grocery store to refill our breakfast and lunch supplies, and enjoyed a hot drink at a local coffee shop. Then we were off to find the Bay of Fires.

The Bay of Fires is so named because the first European explorers to see it sighted numerous Aboriginal fires along its length. It is another incredibly beautiful long stretch of pristine white beach, with low scrubby sand dunes behind, then sweeping up into farmland. Again, we were the only people out there. The wind was whipping up wickedly and it was pretty darn cold (again I was wearing almost all my layers), but at least the sun was out and the water was an incredible brilliant blue.

Tarra took a bit of a nap on the sand, contemplating the waves, while Jen and I walked pretty much the entire length of the beach. We picked up a ton of seashells (hard habit to break) as we walked all the way to the end of the bay, likely at least 3-4km down the beach. Then when we turned around to walk back, the wind was in our face and it felt like we were being sandblasted! My legs felt like they were going to fall off and Becky got caught by the waves and got her shoes wet.

There was some pretty awesome wildlife, too. On the rocky headlands at either end of the bay we found numerous small lizards basking in the sun, although they quickly scurried for cover when we approached them. I saw terns and gulls and white Australian pelicans soaring overhead, and one huge bird that might have been an albatross, although it was too far away for me to get a good look. We will let Becky have the one about the albatross because it was her birthday week but it was just a seagull. Shhhhh! We saw pied oystercatchers and other shorebirds too, and some really funky sea stars. Overall it was definitely a great morning.

By 1pm we knew we had to be on our way so we could get Tarra to the airport on time. We drove back to Hobart on highway 1, a different route than we’d taken to get up to the Bay of Fires, just for a change of scenery. This is also the main north-south road on the island and so was the closest thing to a wide, North American style highway that we’d found. The middle of Tasmania is made up of huge rolling hills that have mostly been cleared for farmland, so we passed endless fields of sheep and horses on our way. It also had cell phone signal and radio stations with music since Bruce only had a tape deck and we had forgotten to bring out tapes. We dropped Tara off at the airport around 3:30, then Jen and I headed off to find a place to stay for the night. Our plan was to head to Mount Field National Park in the morning, which was somewhere on the far side of Hobart (again), and we didn’t want to stay in the city. So we drove out into the countryside on the far side of Hobart and came across the small town of New Norfolk. It was here that we decided to stop for the evening.

By the time we got to New Norfolk, the tourist information centre was already closed. We found a telephone number with the note “backpackers welcome” taped to the door of the information centre, so we called it and ended up staying overnight at the Garden Hotel. The hotel had only been open (reopened, actually) for three weeks, and the place was completely deserted when we got there. It was run by a very nice old man, who gave us our pick of rooms (would’ve been shared accommodation if anyone else had actually been there) and showed us the rest of the facility. What a great place! I’d definitely stay there again.

We had noticed on our way into the town a big complex of old, abandoned buildings, and Jen asked our hotel man what they were. He told us that they used to be a hospital and asylum, but had been closed many years ago. Although there had been some plans to refurbish them and use them as retail space, that had fallen through, and so they were just sitting there empty. For whatever reason, he had a key to get into one of the buildings, so he took us on a tour. It was eerie and a little sad, these big old beautiful buildings, with great architecture, sitting there with their insides gutted and half-rebuilt. It had been an asylum because of all the inbreeding in the town because no one ever left or came to stay.

Jen and I needed to find dinner by this time, so we headed for the main drag of New Norfolk to find, once again, that the entire town had curled up and gone to sleep by 5pm. Nothing was open! We finally got pointed to the “best pizza place in town” (New Norfolk is NOT a big place; just how many pizza places could there be?) and ordered pizzas for dinner. We went back to the hotel to eat and discovered that we were no longer alone at the hotel – another pair of backpackers (honeymooners from Oregon) had arrived and were staying in a room down the hall. We sat in the common room together and ate our dinners, then they retired to their room and Jen and I enjoyed a night off, watching TV. It was hard to keep our eyes open, we were so tired, but we made it all the way to the end of the premiere of Bionic Woman. This is a show I’ll definitely be following this year!

FRIDAY, October 5th

We enjoyed sleeping in, in our warm and cozy beds, until 8am, then headed to the common room to eat our breakfast. The couple from Oregon had already left the hotel, so we were completely on our own again. All I have to say is thank goodness for TEA. Like all the other places we’d stayed, this hotel was not heated, and the outside temperature was maybe 10C. Although we had a heater in our room, the common room was definitely cold. I don’t think I’d truly appreciated the wonders of central heating before coming to Australia. I promise I will never take it for granted again, once I return to Canada!

The destination for the day was Mount Field National Park, about a 45-mintue drive away from New Norfolk. Once there, Jen and I hiked along several beautiful trails through incredibly lush rainforest. Mount Field is famous for its waterfalls, among other things, and we enjoyed three of the falls – Russell Falls (supposedly the most photographed falls in all of Australia), Horseshoe Falls and Lady Baron Falls. We also walked the Tall Trees track and saw the tallest hardwood trees in the world. These are swamp gums, which grow almost as tall as the redwoods in California. The one pictured here was as big around as a small car and about 90m tall. WOW. Did we ever see a platypus? No! Promises were made and not kept!

The rainforest we walked through was amazing. Everything was lush and green and wet. There had been quite a lot of rainfall in Tasmania recently, so the streams were all flowing really quickly. That was a bit of a bummer because we were so hoping to spot a platypus in the wild. No luck, unfortunately. When we got back to the visitors centre to buy postcards, we laughed at the pictures they showed of Russell Falls, with graceful slim trickles of water sliding over the rocks – the waterfall we saw was a glorious raging torrent!

We had some time before we needed to be back in Hobart, so we decided to drive up the mountain to see what it was like at the top. How incredible that was! We drove for about 20 minutes up these crazy, steep, switchbacked, narrow dirt roads, and ended up on an alpine moor – complete with snow and scrubby growth. And it was COLD! We ate lunch in the car, just drinking in the beautiful view. Then it was time to (carefully!) drive back down the mountain and head back into town. Becky wanted to build an inukshuk just to mess with the locals' heads.

When we had been exploring New Norfolk yesterday, we’d come across a really cool poster advertising an exhibit of 19th century nature art in Hobart – so when we got to Hobart, we tromped around town until we found the library (it was closing in 10 minutes, we didn’t tromp around town, we ran and nearly mowed over a few people to make it there before it closed for the night and it wasn’t open on Saturdays) where the exhibit was, ‘cause I really wanted one of the posters. Turned out that the exhibit was free, so we went in and enjoyed it too! Cat – you would have LOVED this. It was all about the beautiful, anatomical drawings done by the naturalists and explorers of the 19th century. The library itself was really neat too – it had displays of all this 200-year-old furniture, books, and other artifacts. Well worth the visit.

We ate dinner at the same little sushi place we’d eaten in on our first night in Hobart, then strolled around the harbor for about an hour before heading back to the hostel to go to bed. You could tell that both Jen and I had had about enough of sharing bedrooms with other people – there was a lady we were sharing with this night that we didn’t really want to talk to (all she did was whine), so we stayed out as long as we could so all we’d have to do when we got back to the hostel was go to bed. I was also surprised at how much of a difference it made that it wasn’t windy – again the temperature was probably only 10C, but unlike our first night in Hobart there was no wind, and it was quite pleasant to stroll around. (Well, either that or I was finally getting acclimated to Tasmania’s crazy weather!) She made me get ice cream. After all the moaning about the cold, she bought ice cream. Nutter!

SATURDAY, October 6th

Jen and I had to head back to Melbourne today, but we’d booked the later flight on purpose. Each Saturday, Hobart hosts a huge open-air market at Salamanca Place. For those of you who’ve been there, imagine the St. Jacobs Market suddenly materializing on a typical downtown street for a day. It was a wonderful place, full of great (cheap!) food, local handicrafts, and all sorts of neat things. I caved and bought my first ‘real’ (i.e. not a postcard) souvenir of the trip – a glass fish to add to my growing window aquarium. It took forever, she would wander by and then think about it and then wander away and then back again. We wandered around the market until almost 3pm. I also really liked the random art exhibit we found… put on by a local private school, and displaying the artwork of kids at the school from kindergarten all the way through to grade 10. Very cool.

We caught the shuttle bus back to the airport around 3:30 and let me tell you I was more than happy to (a) sit down and (b) be somewhere warm. I swear I’d been cold for a week at this point. It was pretty heavenly to just sit in the airport lounge and sip a mug of tea, even though it was ridiculously expensive. We discovered when we arrived that our flight had been delayed by about a half hour, so we had a lot more time to kill than expected. Jen found some internet terminals and we each paid for 20 minutes of internet time, which allowed me to catch up on some of the eight kajillion emails I got while I was away (thanks for all the birthday wishes, by the way!).

We finally boarded the airplane around 6:30 and were back in Melbourne around 7:45 – to find that the last local city bus had left for town around 6pm. GRR. So we ended up having to take the (EXPENSIVE) Sky Bus into downtown Melbourne, then walk two blocks and take a tram back out to our suburb. On the way we picked up some subs for dinner – by now it was about 9:30pm and all we really wanted to do was go to bed. I was so happy to see our house! I was on a rant most of the time about Skybus and Subway but Becky just laughed at me.

There was, however, one more surprise waiting for us. We opened the front door of our house to find a ton of little kids (????) music, and a serious party going on! Apparently it was Lorenzo’s (one of my new house-mates) 40th birthday – and it felt like half the planet was in our house. We were so tired that it was all a little overwhelming, and we snuck up the stairs and went off to bed. The problem was that our bathroom (each room in this house is assigned a bathroom) was down on the ground floor – right by the kitchen – and so we needed to go down into the middle of the party in order to get ready for bed. Keep in mind that I had had basically no chance to meet any of the folks I’m now living with, I was exhausted and grouchy and wasn’t really in the mood to socialize. So unfortunately I went to bed last night feeling more than a little un-neighbourly. Things got better today though. But I’m going to save that story for tomorrow – ‘cause really, this blog is already long enough!