Another friend has come to visit us! We’re exhausting our supply of people who can visit rather early, but that means that they get to spend a fair amount of time with both of us without having to sacrifice any of Adrienne’s vacation! It’s pretty great to be able to share a lot of what we’ve experienced here with people. (Note: Adrienne finally started working today!) This friend is also named Ben, which makes talking in the third person awfully confusing, so to make it clear: I will be referring to myself in the first person throughout this post.

Ben had already spent some time in Australia a couple years ago. Instead of showing him all of the cool things we’ve seen around Sydney, we decided to take a road trip after Christmas. Adrienne posted about our Christmas antics, but needless to say: we had a pretty amazing time. It’s been really great having some familiar faces around to share the holidays.

So. We set out from Sydney on the 26th in a car that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us barrow, packed to the bursting point with food and camping gear that Viive and Ian were kind enough to let us borrow. Viive and Ian were really the sponsors of this trip. I’m not sure how to thank them enough. As should be expected, we really had no real plans outside of “towards Melbourne, then maybe to Adelaide if there’s time.”

An hour or so after we left Sydney, Adrienne found in one of the books that she and Ben had the foresight to rent the library the park where we spent the next three days. The park had some free campgrounds, lots of animals, and Australia’s Tallest Mountain, with a peak at 2,228 meters (7300 ft) – see if I hadn’t bolded it, it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as cool. On our first night there, we saw wild(!) kangaroos for the first time, about 15 meters from where we set up camp. It was so cool! Additionally, I had my first night’s sleep in a swag. These things are awesome. They are essentially fully enclosed mattresses. Ours had a zip off flap on the top, so we fell asleep looking up at the stars without having to worry about being eaten by mosquitoes or being kicked by a rogue ‘roo. Awesome!

We continued our path through the park, stopping at various points to get cave tours, and explore a couple caves all on our own. One was even unlit! Here we saw some small bats flitting around. On the way down from Australia’s Tallest Mountain we came across an echidna waddling its way across the path and up the rocky slope.

Most of the camping sites we stayed in were nothing more than some flattened land with an onsite toilet, so it was nice when we found ourselves in a campsite with working showers and hot water! Definitely the exception to the rule. That night became more interesting when we found out that we accidentally stole someone’s campsite: the sites marked “late arrivals – 1 night only” are apparently available to be booked online. The park ranger who directed us to the sites didn’t mention that. The people were very gracious though, and everything turned out fine.

We spent a couple days in Melbourne eating some good food, staying in a motel that was far nicer than any of us expected, and looking around some great museums. The Melbourne museum lives up to the quality of museum we’ve come to expect in our time in Sydney. Very cool museum that we didn’t even cover half of in our day there.

Next we headed a bit more south to see a rain forest that promised glow worms! We went out one night to the park where they are and walked one loop around the trail while it was still mostly light one in the dark. There are some really big trees here. After night fell, if you looked into the dirt walls near the trail, you’d find little pin-pricks of blue light spaced a few inches apart all over. Oh, and on the way to the park, we caught a glimpse of a swamp wallaby! I’ve been wanting to see a wild one for quite some time. Add two more really cool species to the list of animals we’ve seen in the wild here.

Then we decided to head home. 12 hours is a bit of an awkward amount of time to drive. Definitely doable in one day, but that is one really long day. We decided to take one brief hike in hopes seeing a cool orange fungus (we didn’t, but we did get to see more, really big trees) and then drive home. This is where everything fell apart. After about 10 hours on the road, our car decided it had had enough and we blew the head gasket in the engine. At 10PM. Luckily, we were near a small town that had motels and car repair shops. Unluckily, the only motel that has 24 hour check in was fully booked, so we slept in the car. It’s easy for something like this to ruin a trip in your memory, but all of the great wildlife that we saw really made it worth it. By the way, we also saw a really cute and fearless possum at a campsite that we had all to ourselves, and a koala on the side of the road watching the cars go by. Koalas are way more interesting in the wild than in a zoo. Especially when they sit at the side of the road watching traffic.

Ah, the Huntsman. They’re big, creepy, and fast! It turns out that most of the critters here, even the dangerous ones, are quite skittish. Huntsman are no exception. It would be much easier to catch them if they stood their ground. But, rationally, they are scared of us. We could easily crush them to death. What can they do to us? A little pinch of a bite. Painful, sure, but nothing you wouldn’t get over in an hour. It’s silly, but when confronted with one there is a powerful urge to not be in the room anymore. Anywhere else would be preferable. Even Adrienne hates them, and she’d be excited to find the Sydney funnel web, (dramatic voice)Australia’s most toxic spider(/dramatic voice)! We’ve heard the story twice now of the person who jumps out of their moving car because they put the visor down to have a huntsman fall in their lap. You see, huntsman usually live under tree bark. They like dark, tight spaces. A car’s sun visor is the next best thing!

The female huntsman. Much larger body than the male, but a little shorter in the legs. A bit smaller overall.

They’re the large spider that everyone hears about from Australia. When I told people we were coming here, one of the things I heard was “that’s where all the big-spider-in-the-shower pictures come from!” I came here prepared to find one every other day. Then we didn’t. In fact, at first, the worst thing we had was a few moths. Then we got a few cockroaches (more on these later.) I relaxed. This made finding two back-to-back so much worse. In my opinion, the second, the female, was the creepier of the two. I helped a bit in the capture of the first, but Adrienne captured the second before I even knew it existed. We eventually set both free: creepiness is certainly not a death sentence. We kept the female overnight, and I figured maybe looking at it every now and then would acclimate me to it. Nope. Still really creepy, and I will definitely jump on the nearest high surface when we find another. Not that that will help much, they’re expert climbers.

And now an interesting note about cockroaches: Australian cockroaches are considered very beneficial. They stay in gardens and help fertilize and generally keep green areas healthy. The pest cockroaches that are here are all invaders. They’re mostly European, and vary widely in size. We’ve found tiny little ones, smaller than a dime, and ones larger than a half-dollar. The Australian ones aren’t fast and skittery. Apparently some people consider them good pets. The European ones are a pain to remove because they’re fast and squeeze under anything. However, we have found that stuffing a sweatshirt at the base of our door greatly reduces the number of bugs that make it inside. Hurray solutions!

We’ve been in Australia for two months now; we’ve explored beaches and forests, eaten delicious food, and experienced some of the culture. It’s been a blast! But there are a lot of little things that make living here enjoyable that are easy to gloss over in blog posts. I’ve briefly mentioned some of them in previous posts, but to exercise some of the survival skills I learned in Zombieland, I wanted to spend some time enjoying the little things.

A vine has crawled through the fence from the neighbors yard. It has these striking orange flowers.

Australia has quite a range of incredibly beautiful flowers. Some of them are strange, petal-less bulbs. Others have incredible coloration. Recently, one type of tree with brilliant purple flowers has started blooming. The flowers are so densely packed on theses trees that it almost looks like they have purple leaves. These trees provide excellent contrast when outlining other trees, and are striking when you come across a row of them lining a street. Many of the flowers here seem more vibrantly colored than the ones back home, and the patterns many of them have in their petals are very cool. Everywhere we look seems to have one sort of pretty or another for us to bask in. I guess its what we get for moving to a more tropical place!

This type of tree becomes covered in these cylindrical clusters of petal-less flowers.

My phone camera isn’t great for capturing this, but I love how the tree on the right provides nice purple accents to the rest of the trees. It’s a bit more clear if you blow the picture up.

The bird calls are much more interesting as well. There’s the Australian Raven, and the Kookaburra, and the Lyrebird, and just about everything in between. The Australian Raven has long low caws that sound like it could be a dying cat. While taking a run a few weeks ago I came across a flock of them loitering around a park, their white eyes are too far forward and they have these scraggly feathers on their neck. Truly, a bizarre and creepy bird. We heard Kookaburra more often out where Viive and Ian live. Their call really does sound as if they are laughing, and I can’t help but laugh along every time I hear them. Adrienne and I have taken to singing “Kookaburra lives in the old gum tree” in rounds when walking the dogs, wishing the Kookaburras to start up. Hopefully you watched the Lyrebird movie I linked to last time I talked about them. Adrienne and I actually got to see a male doing his dance the second time we went to the Blue Mountains! It was awesome! They can imitate so many sounds, and this one was doing a remarkable imitation of the stream it was standing near. Recently, a very strange bird call has been waking me up around 6. The closest thing I can relate it to is well oiled metal sheers. Obnoxious, yet intriguing. During the day, the birds are frequently noisy, their calls are so interesting, new, and different.

Many of the restaurants here allow patrons to bring in their own bottle of wine. It’s a pretty neat practice, and makes drinking in a restaurant actually affordable! They do charge a “corkage” fee per person, but this is usually only a couple dollars. We went to a restaurant last week on a LivingSocial deal without realizing that part of the deal was the corkage, so before our food arrived I quickly went out and got a bottle. Instead of paying 30, 40, or 50 dollars for a bottle of wine, we paid $12! Not only that, but if you plan ahead, you know you’ll be drinking a wine you like. You’re not restricted to what the restaurant carries. Do like.

There are a few little things that I can say I don’t enjoy much. First off, the internet here is really spotty. I don’t know if that’s purely because of the ISP, but we’ve had troubles everywhere we’ve tried to use it. It’s slow and frustrating. This is probably our biggest and most common gripe.

The street numbers here are also quite confusing. I haven’t been able to figure out what the pattern is yet, so if we’re looking for a particular address Google maps is a much better way to find it than by trying to find which way the numbers increase or decrease (the numbers may increase on one side, but decrease on the other.)

It wasn’t particularly nice out last Friday (Sept. 21), so we decided to go to the Australian Museum. It isn’t that big, but we still didn’t have enough time to see everything. The exhibits we saw were interesting and well put together. We mainly spent our time in the skeleton exhibit, the bird and insect exhibit, and I spent an hour or so in the dinosaur exhibit. Along with the normal animal skeletons mounted around the room for the visitors to inspect, the people who built the skeleton exhibit clearly had some fun with their job:

Yeee-Haw!

Ahh, a nice evening at home with the pets.

The bird and insect exhibit is a large balcony to the skeleton exhibit with taxidermied Australian birds in the wall cases and Australian insects in the display cases around the interior railing of the room. Adrienne spent the majority of her time here, taking pictures and reading about the birds and insects. They had some spiders spin webs in little boxes to put on display which was pretty cool.

The dinosaur exhibit is fairly up to date and had some nice skeletons. It also had this great series of information about different time periods (click these to read the information about the period):

The late Triassic, ~225 million years ago. This is the first time period that they showed. The Earth is mostly one giant continent.

The Earth during the middle Jurassic ~175 million years ago.

The continents start becoming what we know of them today around 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous.

Around 75 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous, there were apparently large seas cutting down the middle of the Americas, Africa, and Russia. The mass extinction event that killed the Dinosaurs happens about 10 millions years later at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Ah, Big Blue as we know her now. Wait, what’s that? There are still Dinosaurs?! That’s right, we think that some of today’s birds evolved from Dinosaurs like T-Rex and Velociraptor.

So next time you’re out an about and see a bird, think about this:

Dinosaurs probably had feathers…

… so when will the birds turn on us?

And by the way, Australia used to have a giant wombat (my backpack is there for scale). It was probably very goofy looking (this is a possible reconstruction).

Last Tuesday we took a train to the Blue Mountains, a national park on a very old mountain range a couple hours outside of Sydney. The park is very large; it spans at least three stops on the train. We hiked a trail to the Wentworth Falls part of the national park, and then one of the many trails in the Wentworth Falls area. It was spectacular.

Adrienne found a really beautiful tree that had been cut and was laying over the riverbed.

The first trail we walked starts in a park near the train station and runs alongside a small river. Other than the river, the area felt pretty dry.  A lot of the vegetation was brown or leafless and there were places that had burned relatively recently. It was still quite beautiful, with some cool sandstone walls, pretty birds, and there are many waterfalls along the river’s path. I even got to see a snake slithering away after Adrienne walked passed its hiding spot.

The sandstone walls can form some pretty amazing sculptures.

You can see the trail here, the area felt very dry.

A waterfall about half way to the Wentworth Falls National Park area.

As we got into the Wentworth Falls area, the vegetation started to become more lush, the ground more damp, the humidity increased, and the waterfalls increased in size. And then we got to a lookout. Oh boy, was it stunning. I was frozen in place, staring out over an enormous valley, on top of a ~300 foot cliff. The valley is flanked by vibrantly colored sandstone walls, and headed by a giant waterfall, Wentworth Falls. We continued walking a path that took us along one of the walls of the valley, and every time I looked out over it, I was awestruck. The place is beautiful.

My first look over the valley. Wow.

Another view of the valley from a bit higher up.

This view was taken after we had walked to the right side of the other two pictures a bit, looking out to the left.

There is a path that walks across the top of Wentworth Falls. These waterfalls are are the top, facing away from the valley.

This is looking out over the valley, with the previous picture behind. The path had an amazing warning sign on it, see Adrienne’s post for that.

After continuing down the trail, we got a great view of Wentworth Falls.

This should give some perspective on how big the waterfall is.

One of the overhangs along the trail.

The path we continued on is called the Undercliff/Overcliff hike, part of the hike goes through a bunch of cave-like overhangs that have been created, presumably, by thousands of years of erosion from the water that runs down the walls from above and plant growth (complete conjecture on my part.) The hike also goes along the top of the cliff wall (Overcliff) and gives incredible views of the valley below. On the Overcliff part of the hike, we ran across a few birds. The first was two female superb lyrebirds, they have really big feet they used to dig up brush looking for food. If you’ve never heard of a lyrebird, go watch this video. As long as we stood still, they didn’t seem to mind us and went about their business. Look for Adrienne’s post about this trip to see pictures of them.

A crimson rosella sits near a hole in a tree.

The second was a pair of crimson rosellas. They were flitting around a hole in a tree that may have been their nest. Adrienne went into the bush to get some good pictures of them. What we saw of the Blue Mountains was amazing, and we’re going to go back to check out some other hikes later this week.