My how a month flashes by! I've had a great month of March. My cousin Carrie flew in to Australia at the beginning of the month, and I met her down in Sydney for the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. We had a full day together before the parade, so we saw a few of the Sydney sights that Mara and I didn't get to see last year. We started our day off with tea at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, which is a lovely spot located near Darling Harbour. The gardens were opened in 1988 and were named to honor the relationship between China and Australia. They are really quite a nice spot to sit down and chill out -- and the fresh scones we had with our tea were fantastic!
Next we wandered over to the Sydney Aquarium. It was pretty fun -- I finally got to see a platypus for the first time! They are such weird animals. The one in the aquarium was much smaller than I thought they were -- about the size of a ... (I'm having trouble here because nothing is shaped like a platypus) ... small cat? The aquarium also had plenty of freshwater fish to keep Carrie busy (she works on rivers in
Massachusetts), and cool stuff like eels, big lobsters, freshwater crocodiles, and little penguins. A new exhibit that I was pretty excited about was the
dugong tank -- where you can walk through underwater tubes and watch the aquarium's two
dugongs. Jeremy and I got to see several (more like 40 or 50!) of these in the wild off the coast of Brisbane, but I had no idea what they looked like. They're adorable -- I love this picture of one swimming over Carrie!
After the
aquarium we walked over to The Rocks to grab an early dinner at the seafood place Mara and I loved, Fish at The Rocks. They have a great
earlybird special, and we took advantage of it! The meal was divine, just like the last time.
The next day (Saturday) was parade day, so Carrie and I prepared early and headed over to Oxford Street to scope out a good vantage point. We had both heard that you needed to arrive really early to be right against the fence, and we were determined to nab a good spot! Before we did we went into lots of 'Dollar Store' type shops looking for the perfect parade outfits. Carrie found this fabulous feathery pink hat and boa, and I forced her to wear them! Too funny. (for those of you who don't know Carrie, she would normally NEVER be caught in pink) I think we finally settled at one towards the start of the parade route at 2:30PM, and the parade didn't start till 7:30 or so! There was lots of interesting people-watching to be done, so time passed by pretty quickly. I chose this time to introduce Carrie to the
Bundaberg Ginger Beer, which, if you love ginger, is FAR SUPERIOR to ginger ale. It's the best, and I think I got her hooked!
Once the parade started it was high energy all the way! It seemed like hundreds of floats passed by, and the people walking in the parade always ran over to the sides so that we could get a close look at their costumes. Some were really elaborate...and some were almost non-
existent!
The Surf Lifesavers were my favorite! They did a great dance routine and were so funny in their
speedos!
We had a great time, and stood on Oxford Street until 10:30PM! Needless to say we were exhausted at the end, so we ended up going straight back to our hostel to sleep. The next morning we each had flights up to Cairns, so we headed to the airport. My flight was a few hours earlier, so I arrived in Cairns well before Carrie. We had decided to stay with Rod and Julie at
Zimzala again, so Rod greeted me at the airport when I arrived. Instead of driving straight to
Zimzala, he took me to the local fruit market first, where I helped him shop for the fruit for our breakfasts that week! Afterwards he brought me home and directed me to get in my '
cozzies' (short for swimming costume = bathing suit) and hop in the pool. He immediately made sure I had a glass of champagne in one hand, and suddenly everything felt right!
The next morning Rod presented us with another amazing fruit plate to start our breakfast. I had been looking forward to this ever since I left in November...so I was really excited to finally dig in! On this plate we got
rambutans, custard apple, plum, watermelon,
cantaloupe, pear, grapes, mango, honeydew, pineapple, and
dragonfruit.
Mmmm...heaven!
Our first day in Cairns we headed out to the Reef, on the same tour that Mara and I took back in November. It was an awesome day! Perfect weather, and lots of beautiful fish. The Maori Wrasse, Wally, was also hanging around. We got a few pictures with him, and he even came to visit us on our scuba dive (that I convinced Carrie to do!). He is SO beautiful in person...beyond words! The green and blue pattern on his head is just so intricate and striking.
We did as much snorkeling as we could -- staying in the water till they forced us out! We saw tons of beautiful fish. I absolutely love snorkeling here, the different types of fish are just breathtaking and so numerous! Everywhere you look is something different and MORE beautiful. I hope everyone gets the chance to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef one day.
We also got to spend a lot of time with the female wrasse, who is the smaller (yet more colorful) version of Wally. She was great! If you waved your hand at her from above, she'd make a beeline straight for you, and bang her mouth against your hand, sometimes pushing it up out of the water. She seemed to love it, and approached me at least 20 times! She would even follow us around if we stopped. You'd be snorkeling around looking at something fantastic, and suddenly she'd be bumping into your arm from underneath you -- quite surprising! I saw her 'stalking' Carrie and watched from a distance as she proceeded to scare the crap out of her! It was great, I remember thinking, "
geeze, this is really cool."
On our second day in Cairns Carrie had convinced me to go white water rafting on the Tully River, which has several class IV rapids. I had never been rafting before, and had no idea what to expect. I did, however, know that a tourist had been killed (and another sent to the hospital in critical condition) on one of these trips about a month beforehand, so I was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing! Carrie kayaks and is on rivers all the time, so she was pretty excited.
We ended up having a great day. The weather was beautiful, and most of the rapids were fun to go over. Early on we passed by this huge boulder, which our guide made each of us jump off. I've never jumped from such a tall height (about 20 feet) and he made me go first!!! So mean.
Carrie and I both fell out of the boat at one rapid, and I remember coming up to the surface only to realize that I was trapped underneath the boat -- not a good feeling! What was more scary to me was watching a guy from another boat fall out, and become trapped at the base of a huge, raging rapid. He was clinging to a rock, barely hanging on, when we all realized that another boat was about to come over the rapid and
slam on top of him. This was the type of rapid that boats were getting stuck in for minutes at a time, so we all immediately knew this was a bad situation. You could tell our guide started to freak out a little (never a good thing!) and at the last moment he threw out a safety rope that the guy somehow managed to grab. Phew! After seeing that and injuring my hip on another rapid, I decided that this was fun but not something I'm going to be doing every weekend! I'll leave that to Patrick (my other cousin, Carrie's brother, who is a river rafting guide in
Massachusettes).
I flew back to
Brissie the next day, and Carrie stayed in Cairns for one more day before following me. We had
initally planned to head straight to Fraser Island, but had to push our trip back a few days because a pretty powerful cyclone had recently passed through the area. So, we hopped in the rental car and I took Carrie down to the Gold Coast Hinterlands. This really is a great area and the more time I spend there the more I love it. It's about 45 minutes from the city, yet suddenly you're surrounded by lush temperate
rainforest and beautiful rolling hills. It's great. We ventured to a part of the Hinterland that I hadn't visited before called
Tamborine, where we stopped to do a bit of
bushwalking. We ended up opting to check out the new '
skywalk' instead of going on a
bushwalking trail after the lady at the visitor center warned us about leeches, yuck! The
skywalk is a brand new steel walkway that starts high up in the
rainforest canopy and slowly winds down into the
rainforest below. It's pretty cool, and the scenery is beautiful as always.
After the
skywalk Carrie and I drove over to this cool cheese factory/beer brewery, and had lots of cheese and a little beer for lunch! It was perfect. After our little lunch we headed over to a place that I've read about in all my guidebooks, but hadn't visited. The
Tamborine Mountain Distillery is one of the coolest little places I've visited so far! From their website:
"In 1992, we moved from Tasmania for a change of climate and lifestyle. We found this property with its many fruit trees on
Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and decided to settle. As we did not want to use chemical sprays on our fruit, we discovered that our products did not meet with market requirements. For a four person family, we had too much fruit, so we needed to ‘convert’ it into something which would make this small property productive.
‘Fermentation for the purpose of distillation’ was the goal – and so the small
potstill was born!!"
The distillery is Australia's smallest operating pot still distillery, and has won lots of international awards for their liqueurs, vodkas, schnapps and
eaux-
de-vie. There are so many different things to try, it's a bit overwhelming! A tasting is $6 for 6 of any of their products, and is included in the price if you decide to purchase something. We tried strawberry liqueur, lemon myrtle vodka,
limoncello,
wattleseed toffee liqueur, violet liqueur, and Australian grasshopper liqueur (chocolate mint). You can see by the picture how many choices we had -- each bottle behind is is a different flavor! I could have spent all day there!!
To finish the day we drove over to Springbook to visit Best of All Lookout. Unfortunately, it wasn't at its best, and we were actually in the middle of the clouds when we arrived at the lookout. It made it a bit spooky feeling! When we left Carrie nabbed this great shot of a Pademelon on the side of the road. They are a type of wallaby that are like veeeery tiny kangaroos, so cute!
On Sunday it was time for us to head towards Fraser Island. Carrie and I hopped back in the rental car and headed north, stopping at a couple of the Sunshine Coast beaches including Moolooaba and Noosa. We made our way to Hervey Bay just as the sun set, and managed to find our accommodation for the night after just a bit of searching!
We set out early the next day for Fraser Island. Our fist stop was the rental company, Fraser Magic, where we picked up our beautiful teal Landrover 4x4. The company provided us with everything we needed to camp for 2 nights, so all we needed before hopping on the barge was some ice! Here is Carrie patiently waiting to hop on the barge to Fraser Island.
I was a bit nervous about driving on the island, since I never got to during my first visit here. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world, so all of the driving here is done either on inland sand tracks or along the eastern beach. Since our barge dropped us on the western side of the island, I got a quick lesson on inland driving right away! It was a bit hairy at first, but I got used to it really quickly. This kind of driving makes everything else seem totally boring! It's great fun.
Our first stop on the island was Central Station, which used to be the base of a large logging operation. There is a wonderful little boardwalk going down to a stream and through the rainforest here. The rainforest on Fraser is so impressive and beautiful, and it's hard to believe that all of this grows on top of sand. The forst was filled with cicadas when Carrie and I walked through, so the noise was totally deafening.
Our next stop was Lake McKenzie, the beautiful tourquoise lake that's flanked by a white sand beach. It was perfect, and Carrie and I spent a lot of time chilling out in the water here.
When we finally got out, we decided to stop here for lunch. This lace monitor (directly below me) would NOT leave us alone as we ate. I was convinced that he was about to jump into my lap and rip the sandwich from my hand! They are found all over the island and we saw several during our trip.
From Lake McKenzie we drove to another of the freshwater lakes on Fraser, Lake Wabby. This lake is slowly being encroached by the huge sand dunes to the left. Someday it will disappear completely. The water here is not as pretty as Lake McKenzie, but just as inviting if you can make it down the huge sand dunes!
After Wabby we headed out to the eastern beach (also called 75 Mile Beach) and found a cozy little camping spot on the other side of the dunes. We had a fantastic Aussie dinner of snags (sausages) with fried onions on a slice of bread with ketchup and bbq sauce. Yuuuuum! The only downer about camping this time around was the HUGE marsh flies (like big horse flies) that literally swarmed us as the sun went down and came up.
This is a picture of the beautiful sunset that night. Once the sun was gone, so were the flies, and Carrie and I sat out on the dunes and watched a huge storm just south of the island. The sky above us was clear, so we could also look up and see the Milky Way. It's perfect on Fraser Island.
The next morning Carrie and I headed inland again to avoid some rocks that were exposed on the beach after the cyclone. We decided to kill some time and visit a 3rd lake, Garawongera, because the tides were too high to drive on the beach until pretty late that afternoon. On the way to the lake we passed a 4X4 pulled off on the side of the road with a completely flat front tire. Seconds afterwards we came upon a huge obstacle in the road! The roots of a tree on the right side of the road had been pretty washed out and were exposed and separated by huge holes. The road was also on an incline, so in addition to the huge holes, the car also had to climb 4 or 5 feet UP! Carrie was driving and immeidately stopped and looked at me!! Haha! I got out to investigate and figured I'd give it a shot after rearranging some logs that someone had cut in an effort to make it passable. The video is my victory!!!
Once we got to the lake we spent a few hours hanging out there. We saw another lace monitor, this time robbing a turtle's nest and scarfing down the eggs he'd unearthed. After a few hours we headed back to the carpark to have our lunch. We both decided to use the toilet facilities first, and headed into one of the stalls, locked the door, and saw this hiding behind the toilet
paper.
Then I turned around and saw this.
Ah! It was HUUUUUUUUUUGE!!!!!! Larger than my hand -- closer to a dinner plate! This is a Huntsman spider. From the wikipedia page, they are "frequently very large" yet "not regarded as dangerous." HOWEVER (and this is my favorite part), "they are able to travel extremely fast, often using a springing jump while running, and walk on walls and even on ceilings. They also tend to exhibit a "cling" reflex if picked up, making them difficult to shake off and much more likely to bite." *shudder*
After Lake Garawongera, Carrie and I made our way back out onto the eastern beach and headed north. Along the way we spotted several birds of prey, including this beautiful White Bellied Sea Eagle.
After some white-knuckle soft sand driving, we made it all the way up to the Champagne Pools carpark! Woohoo! We made our way down to the pools, where I proceeded to play with the hundreds of sea squirts along their edges. They're so fun to squish!
Carrie and I also stopped at the Maheno wreck and Eli Creek before making our way south again. We found another nice camping spot, this time deciding to let the sun go down before we cooked dinner to avoid the flies. What a dinner it was! Carrie was in charge this night, and we had pasta and tomato sauce with broccoli and carrots, garlic bread, and goon. It was splendid! My mouth is even watering right now just thinking about it!
The next morning we woke up to find dingo tracks ALL AROUND our tent! They even tried to dig up the scraps from our dinner, cheeky things. The sunrise was really beautiful, and Carrie nabbed this shot before we ate our brekky of scrambled eggs and bacon.
We were up nice and early, and decided to go on a dingo hunt before we did anything else that day. We had actually seen a dingo on the first day, but drove quickly by it figuring we'd see more later on. Luckily we came upon this littlle fellow (or lady) scavenging along the dunes in the early morning. We watched it for a few mintues before leaving him to find his breakfast.
Our plan for the final day was to drive back inland and head to another small lake before meeting the barge later on that afternoon. Unfortunately our trusty teal 4x4 had other plans in store! When we reached the most remote point in our drive that day, the car decided to spring a massive oil leak. It got so bad that we knew we couldn't drive it any longer, and decided our only option was to walk towards the nearest 'town', which was 8.3km away. Ooooh, how naieve we were. Fortunately a car came along after only a few minutes, and they Aussies inside were generous enough to give us a lift to Kingfisher Bay. Once we saw what we had in store on that walk, we realized we NEVER would have made it before sundown! Needless to say we were extremely thankful for being picked up.
We were all worried that the rental company would try and charge us for the car's breakdown, and were pleasantly surprised when they picked us up at the ferry and told us they were refunding us a day's rental and waiving the fact that we didn't get to fill it up with gasoline. Awesome! It all worked out for us, as we were so exhuasted that we were happy to be on the road back to Brisbane a few hours earlier than anticipated.
On Carrie's last day I took her to Lone Pine, of course! The highlight for me was getting to see their new Tasmanian Devils -- this one was pretty bored :o)
Carrie got the standard koala cuddle!
The next day I sent my cousin packing -- hopefully after the trip of a lifetime for her. I had a great time, and I'm so glad I got to share Fraser Island with someone who really appreciated it.
Carrie's been gone for a few weeks now, and I've slipped back in to my regular life here. We're continuing to make progress with the breast cancer study, and I've actually just gotten the scanned data back from that this week! So, my analysis begins this weekend and it feels great to have work to do. What's even better is that Jeremy is scheduled to arrive early on Monday morning!!! I can't wait to see him. We've got some small plans while he visits, and I definitely want to take him to the distillery while he's here, so I'll make sure I keep everyone updated on our adventures. Make your schnapps and liqueur requests now!
Happy April!!!
Living here has been awesome, and I'm so thankful to them for letting me stay here. I'm also glad I got the chance, because I've gotten to know Mark better and really think Leah picked a great husband :o) Also, Leah is a FANTASTIC cook. We've shared lots of really tasty meals, and played Scrabble and Uno at night. It's been really nice, and a total change from Scott's apartment where I was usually by myself. Also, Leah is pregnant with a son, Henry, and it's been awesome to be around watching him grow and feeling him kick! Here are the happy couple, taking their weekly photograph of Leah's growing belly:
Last week my friend Melinda and I attended a benefit dinner for a non-profit run by one of Scott's mates. He invited us to come, and I'm so glad we bought tickets! What a fun night -- there was a sit-down dinner, silent and live auction, and a live band. I won a football signed by the local rugby team, the Brisbane Broncos!
On Saturday all my friends got together to wish me farewell, and I had a great time partying with everyone:
Me and Jess, Sophie's flatmate
Me, Scott, and Bernadette (his girlfriend)
Me and Melinda
Me and Etel, one of my SPH classmates
Me and Rhona, another classmate (this is when we were saying goodbye, yuck!)
Tara, Rhona, and Me
