25 May
Potts Point, Sydney
Cloudy am, Sunny pm
4530 steps today
(4420 steps on 18 May)
(5250 steps on 19 May)
(5690 steps on 20 May)
We began today out at MacQuarie Point in Sydney Harbor, where the owner of the hotel we stay at here in Sydney arranged for a group photo that will hang on the wall in his lobby. My senior colleague purchased a few copies of the photo for the college. The owner, a native of Egypt but an Australian citizen for over 50 years, then took my two colleagues and I on a tour of his Sydney. We saw many of the bays and side streets of the east side: Rose Bay, Edgecliff, Watson's Bay, the Gap, Bondi Beach, and others. We had midmorning coffee and tea at the Bogey Hole cafe nearby one of the southernmost beaches before Botany Bay. He then took us thorugh the city to the southern part, where he treated us to lunch in an Italian neighborhood. Very picturesque, and a reminder that Australia is a nation of immigrants, much as we are.
On 19 May, we changed locations from Cairns to Alice Springs, for the outback portion of our course. I look forward to this; our trek through Watarrka (whitefellas call it "Kings Canyon") is one of my favorite times on the tour. But that's a few days away. Our flight from Cairns to the Alice was uneventful -- if you read the journal last year, you know that we were about ten hour late on this flight, owing to mechanical problems -- but nothing like that this year.
We checked in to Toddy's, a somewhat older hostel that continues to deliver good service. Much to my delight, our man Steve still works there. Steve is a big burly fellow with a long red beard and a ponytail -- you'd call him an old hippie if you saw him in the States, but no one falls into that category in the Alice. They're all characters, as near as I can tell. I like Steve. He's smart and will engage you in a conversation on almost any topic. We're both fans of the writer Jeffrey Deaver, so I brought him the latest paperback, The Garden of Beasts -- I think I talked about this book already.
We spent the evening of the 19th at a didgeridoo concert by Andrew Langford, called Sounds of Starlight. You can visit his website at http://www.soundsofstarlight.com.au. He plays with a percussionist and a keyboardist, and the trio make evocative and fun music. They also get the audience involved, playing didgeridoos and keeping time with Aboriginal instruments. I had been a little nervous about this, as it had been my idea to include it and I was concerned that the students would be bored by it. But they were enthused, and I think many bought their didgeridoos later from Mr. Langford.
You perhaps do not know what a didgeridoo is. It's a long wooden tube, hollowed out by termites, that produces the classic droning sound that evokes a vision of Australia whenever you hear it. You play it by making a Bronx cheer ("razzberries") into one end of it, though there are many additional things you can do to produce a sound from it. Andrew Langford is one master of the didgeridoo, David Hudson is another, but there are many more.
We spent the next day, the 20th, on a tour of Alice Springs and some of its important historical spots. We bagan the day at Alice Springs Desert Park. It's a good way to get an introduction to the types of land we would be visiting over the next few days on our camping trip. We only had two hours there, so most of the students went to the desert bird show. It's quite an event, involving wedgetail eagles, kites and desert kestrals and barn owls, displaying their natural behavior on free flight. They're very well-trained. I had seen it last year, so I spent my time visting the kangaroos and emus, the nocturnal house, and attending a show on bush tucker: specifically, witchety grubs (eaten live), honey ants (you eat their hind parts while they're alive) and desert 'coconuts' (a moth larva trapped inside a tree gall). Great gross-out food for teh tourists; sometimes I think the Aborigines just make all this up to see if they can get some tourist to eat something gross -- I'm just kidding of course. In fact, as you will see later on, I have actually learned a thing or two worth knowing about our blackfella brother down here. but more on that later.
After the Desert Park, we went to the Royal Flying Doctors Service. This was started early in the 20th century by one John Flynn, a circuit rider minister who saw the heartbreak of floks when they could not get good medical care in the remote regions of the Outback, and put together teams of aviators and electrical engineers to develop a flying medical service and a wireless system to get emergency messages out as needed. They are real heroes; it chokes me up a little even now to think of this wonderful and dedicated group of doctors, nurses, and pilots who serve the citizens of Australia who live far away from the rest of us. There's a tv series down here about them called Flying Doctors; I'll see if I can find a link to somne info about it.
After the Flying Doctors, we went to the School of the Air, a similar service that serves the educational needs of children who live on remote cattle and sheep stations and Aboriginal villages. Our students once again put the Australian tourists to shame by making significant book donations to the School after the tour of their operations.
We ended our day by visiting the original telegraph station that gave Alice Springs it name. The man who founded the station was one Charles Todd -- many things here are named after him -- he neede a location for a telegraph station that was near a gap in the McDonnell range, that was within 200 kilometres of the nearest station to the north, and was near a source of water. He called the water he found Alice Springs, believing it was a spring -- it was a low spot in a nearby riverbed, which doon dried up. But the name stuck; the dry river eventually was called the Todd River, and Alice Springs was born.
I should explain two things about Outback rivers. You can think of them as 'upside down', in that the water is underneath the sand and rock, not on top. The Todd River is usually dry, though my senior colleague and I are among the few tourists who can say that we have seen water flowing in the Todd River -- you can read more about it in last year's journal. Of course, this year, there was none, our weather was beautiful throughout our stay in the Outback.
Tomorrow will be my last full day in Australia, and I plan on doing little more than some last-minute shopping and journal reading -- and of course telling you about our camping trip to the Outback.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Monday, May 23, 2005
The Tablelands
24 May
Alice Springs
Mostly Sunny, Mild
(step count to appear in later journal entry)
I know it's been a week, but I have had little chance to get nearby a computer with more than a minute or two to spare since then. We've covered a lot of ground.
We're at the point where the course is beginning to wind down, at least at this end. We are going to be picked up in a little over an hour for our trip to the Alice Springs airport for our flight back to Sydney. As usual, the mood has begun to settle in on the group that we've had a lot of adevntures, we've learned a lot, but it's time to go home. We'll do that soon enough.
If you plan on being in the Elmira area on Monday, May 30, you will have the chance to see what we've been doing. We will have a reception fo rthe course from 2pm to 4pm at Hamilton Hall. Light refreshments will be served. We expect to see posters and other presentations about bush tucker, bush medicine, the Sydney Opera House, everyday AUstralian life, sports, and other things. I plan on doing a poster about what Aborigines think about whitefellas. I hope to see you there.
Let me catch you up on what we've been doing. I'll try to keep everything in order, and I expect to be doing several of these over the next few days.
For our last day in tropical north Queensland, we began by driving down the coast to Innisfail to see the Australian Sugar Museum. From Brisbane to Cairns, we had traveled through cane field after cane field, and so understanding the sugar industry here seemed appropriate. Australia exports a lot of sugar, mostly to Asia. I have written before about how we Americans spend 'way too much money on sugar, and how I think you all should start complaining loudly about this. (Of course, the Aussies want to sell their sugar in the States at the current prices).
The cane fields are no longer burnt off in northern Queensland, although some burning takes place in the south, nearer Brisbane. The virtue of burning the field before harvest is that it drives out the vermin that sickens the canecutters, and reduces the amount of 'trash', the portion of the cane that is not useful to producing sugar. There's only a minimal amount of sugar lost, so this was considered a reasonable way to harvest in the past.
Of course, these day, we know that it's a pretty big source of pollution to burn off enormous cane fields, so avoiding it makes sense. With modern farming machinery, it's unecessary, and so is no longer done.
The industry seems to be in the process of retooling itself to be as environment friendly as possible. Every bit of the harvest and the harvesting byproducts that can be used finds some use, so the sugar factories produce very little waste. The trash from the harvest is used as fuel in the refining of the sugar and the other plant operations. The sludge at the end of the process, and the ash produced from burning the trash, is sold as fertilizer. Probably the only emission to worry about at the factory is the heat and some greenhouse gas.
Of course, there's a lot of runoff, though through tree and mangrove replanting, everyone hopes to stop, or at least minimize, that trend.
That leaves the cane toad, a horrible environmental disaster still unfolding. Cane toads were introduced to control the sugar cane beetle. They had no interest in the beetles, but would eat many other critters, outcompete the native species, and reproduce like crazy. They're poisonous, too; nothing in Australia can eat them -- even crocodiles can be killed if they eat too many. The cane toad is now found in every state except Western Australia, and is expected to be there eventually. There is no known way to stop them. Ouch!
After the sugar museum, we headed west into the Tablelands. Though in the tropics, the mountains shield this region, giving it a climate similar to the US midwest. It's thus an area that sees a lot of dairy production and other truck farming. There are bananas and papaya grown as well.
One of the most interesting attractions is the Curtain Fig tree. The strangler fig begins life as a small parasite plant high up in a tree, that sends a vine to the ground. Once the vine finds the ground and creates a root, the fig then sends out many more, and uses the host tree as support. This continues until the fig completely envelopes the host tree, which then dies. The process can take up to 1000 years to complete.
The Curtain Fig is an example of just how extensive this can be. It's huge! the size of an office building. It's the result of a fig at work, and a host tree falling over into a second tree, which in turn fell over into a third tree. There are, in fact., four trees involved in its creation. And it's not done, the Curtain Fig will continue to grow -- people will be coming to see a much larger one milenia from now.
Well, I must surrender this machine now. Watch for my next entry on Alice Spring.
Alice Springs
Mostly Sunny, Mild
(step count to appear in later journal entry)
I know it's been a week, but I have had little chance to get nearby a computer with more than a minute or two to spare since then. We've covered a lot of ground.
We're at the point where the course is beginning to wind down, at least at this end. We are going to be picked up in a little over an hour for our trip to the Alice Springs airport for our flight back to Sydney. As usual, the mood has begun to settle in on the group that we've had a lot of adevntures, we've learned a lot, but it's time to go home. We'll do that soon enough.
If you plan on being in the Elmira area on Monday, May 30, you will have the chance to see what we've been doing. We will have a reception fo rthe course from 2pm to 4pm at Hamilton Hall. Light refreshments will be served. We expect to see posters and other presentations about bush tucker, bush medicine, the Sydney Opera House, everyday AUstralian life, sports, and other things. I plan on doing a poster about what Aborigines think about whitefellas. I hope to see you there.
Let me catch you up on what we've been doing. I'll try to keep everything in order, and I expect to be doing several of these over the next few days.
For our last day in tropical north Queensland, we began by driving down the coast to Innisfail to see the Australian Sugar Museum. From Brisbane to Cairns, we had traveled through cane field after cane field, and so understanding the sugar industry here seemed appropriate. Australia exports a lot of sugar, mostly to Asia. I have written before about how we Americans spend 'way too much money on sugar, and how I think you all should start complaining loudly about this. (Of course, the Aussies want to sell their sugar in the States at the current prices).
The cane fields are no longer burnt off in northern Queensland, although some burning takes place in the south, nearer Brisbane. The virtue of burning the field before harvest is that it drives out the vermin that sickens the canecutters, and reduces the amount of 'trash', the portion of the cane that is not useful to producing sugar. There's only a minimal amount of sugar lost, so this was considered a reasonable way to harvest in the past.
Of course, these day, we know that it's a pretty big source of pollution to burn off enormous cane fields, so avoiding it makes sense. With modern farming machinery, it's unecessary, and so is no longer done.
The industry seems to be in the process of retooling itself to be as environment friendly as possible. Every bit of the harvest and the harvesting byproducts that can be used finds some use, so the sugar factories produce very little waste. The trash from the harvest is used as fuel in the refining of the sugar and the other plant operations. The sludge at the end of the process, and the ash produced from burning the trash, is sold as fertilizer. Probably the only emission to worry about at the factory is the heat and some greenhouse gas.
Of course, there's a lot of runoff, though through tree and mangrove replanting, everyone hopes to stop, or at least minimize, that trend.
That leaves the cane toad, a horrible environmental disaster still unfolding. Cane toads were introduced to control the sugar cane beetle. They had no interest in the beetles, but would eat many other critters, outcompete the native species, and reproduce like crazy. They're poisonous, too; nothing in Australia can eat them -- even crocodiles can be killed if they eat too many. The cane toad is now found in every state except Western Australia, and is expected to be there eventually. There is no known way to stop them. Ouch!
After the sugar museum, we headed west into the Tablelands. Though in the tropics, the mountains shield this region, giving it a climate similar to the US midwest. It's thus an area that sees a lot of dairy production and other truck farming. There are bananas and papaya grown as well.
One of the most interesting attractions is the Curtain Fig tree. The strangler fig begins life as a small parasite plant high up in a tree, that sends a vine to the ground. Once the vine finds the ground and creates a root, the fig then sends out many more, and uses the host tree as support. This continues until the fig completely envelopes the host tree, which then dies. The process can take up to 1000 years to complete.
The Curtain Fig is an example of just how extensive this can be. It's huge! the size of an office building. It's the result of a fig at work, and a host tree falling over into a second tree, which in turn fell over into a third tree. There are, in fact., four trees involved in its creation. And it's not done, the Curtain Fig will continue to grow -- people will be coming to see a much larger one milenia from now.
Well, I must surrender this machine now. Watch for my next entry on Alice Spring.
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