[Continued from Part 4a. I had to split this post into two parts.] Thu 19 Aug
So what’s the main draw of Monkey Mia? Dolphins! Being fed! For free! Just about every morning in the last 20-30 years, they’ve fed dolphins at the beach by the resort. Every morning there are between one and three feedings, and currently there are only five specific Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins that are fed, though many more often show up. Lots of people showed up too, but the dolphins don’t always cooperate to give every person a good photo-op — sometimes the dolphins get a bit aggressive and block the progress of the guides as they walk down the line. Anyway, each dolphin gets fed a few fish by volunteers picked out of the crowd, but those fish comprise only a small percentage of their daily diet.
Before we left Monkey Mia I made sure to go for a swim in the Indian Ocean too! From the photos it may look like it was warm, but it really wasn’t. 60 degrees, maybe? Now the Arctic Ocean is the only ocean in the world in which I haven’t gone for a swim (Gulf of Mexico/Atlantic in 1994, Pacific in 2004, Southern in 2004, Indian in 2010), though I don’t anticipate I’ll be checking that one off my list. Ever.
We left Monkey Mia after the dolphin feeding, and took our time seeing a bunch of neat places along Shark Bay Road in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area.
A bit further down the road was Shell Beach. It may look like it’s a white sand beach, but it’s actually made up of millions upon millions of tiny white shells.
Our next stop was Hamelin Pool, which has a shell block quarry, but is primarily known for being one of the only places on earth that’s home to stromatolites. Evolutionists claim they’re some of the oldest organisms on earth, and hypothesize that our atmosphere’s oxygen originated from them. Whether or not that’s true, stromatolites are still pretty interesting, even though they can’t exactly be described as dynamic.
On our way back down the North West Coastal Highway we had to stop for petrol at the Billabong Roadhouse, because, after all, there wasn’t another road for 140 km, much less another petrol station. In rural Australia there are occasionally roadhouses on the major roads, which consist of some petrol pumps, a restaurant, and maybe a few rooms.
We made it back to the town of Kalbarri, where we stayed at another hostel, just in time to catch the sunset at Red Bluff Beach.
Fri 20 Aug
My final full day in Australia was a good one. First we drove up to Meanarra Hill, overlooking Kalbarri National Park and the town of Kalbarri.
Then we went back to the city, and after I stocked up on Tim Tams for the flight home, we checked out Chinamans Point in Kalbarri, at the mouth of the Murchison River:
Here’s Red Bluff Beach. And when we were atop Red Bluff, we started seeing several humpback whales well off the coast:
From there we continued south along the Kalbarri Coastal Cliffs, to places like Pot Alley, Shellhouse, Grandstand, Island Rock, and Natural Bridge. I thought Pot Alley was the most spectacular place I visited on this entire trip to Australia. I could’ve spent all day hanging out there!
So after having seen 20-some whales from Kalbarri Cliffs, it was pushing 1:30pm, and we needed to get moving south. One of our few, quick stops was at the Hutt Lagoon, which is a pink lake. It’s pink because it has very high concentrations of beta carotene, the same thing that makes carrots orange. So very odd.
We had to keep pressing hard in order to make it to Nambung National Park, to see The Pinnacles. The Pinnacles are a collection of thousands of stone pillars standing in a small part of a desert. They’re very strange, but very cool. I had hoped that we could make it there at least a half hour before sunset, but we only made it pretty much right at sunset.
After it got too dark to see anything at The Pinnacles, we still had close to a 3-hour drive to get back to Perth. Eventually Bob remarked, “Oh hey, I see other cars now. We must be in Perth.” So true. Anyway, I dropped off Bob at his apartment in Subiaco, said farewell, and then drove to the airport to drop off the rental car. As I was getting out, I noticed Bob’s camera between the driver’s seat and driver’s door. Without a phone to call Bob and without enough time to drive back to Subiaco anyway, I decided to bring the camera with me and mail it back once I returned to State College. I suppose I could’ve left it with a lost & found desk at Hertz or something, but I didn’t think of that until after I got on the plane. Sat 21 Aug
I had to go through security and collect my luggage three times on the trip, because my itinerary, though it was all booked with Qantas, had me on three different airlines: JetStar from Perth to Melbourne (1am), Qantas from Melbourne to L.A. (10am), American from L.A. to Washington Dulles (9am). Annoying.
Also annoying: being stuck in a middle seat on the trans-Pacific flight yet again, and only being able to get maybe an hour of sleep total.
Also annoying: LAX. Worst. Airport. Ever. No signs in way-overcrowded check-in areas. Broken escalators. Ridiculously long security lines. Only 10 gates and 1 restaurant per terminal. No, I don’t feel like going to Chili’s at 8:30am, even if it’s the only option.
Relatively pleasant: the gate agent at LAX giving me an exit row seat, after seeing I started my day in Perth. The flight attendant was also quite nice when she found out I’d started in Perth, and asked if she could fill up my water bottle and whatnot. The guy next to me had started the day in Darwin, returning from a business trip, so we were both in the same boat.
I met up with Tracy in LAX (she’d arrived from New Zealand), and we drove my car back up to State College after we landed at Dulles. I even stayed awake the whole time behind the wheel, despite completing a ridiculously stretch of travel with almost no sleep. Unfortunately I could only sleep for 5 hours that night when I got back to State College. Go figure. So from leaving Kalbarri around 8am until arriving in State College the “next” day at 11pm, I traveled for about 52 hours straight, with hardly any sleep!
I miss Australia already again. It was a great and memorable trip, with a ton of stuff fit in to just a few days. It’d be a challenge to keep up the same pace for another week or two though! I have no idea when I’ll be back, but I would like to go back again someday.
And now, finally, to conclude my recap of my trip to Australia back in August. I’ve been working on this post off and on for several days now. Click here to go back to Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3. In this post I’ve also included some travel tips for driving in Western Australia that I learned along the way. Bob & I fit about five days of sightseeing into just three, so it was a whirlwind trip through W.A.! Mon 16 Aug
Ali drove me to the Melbourne airport in the morning (opposite sides of the city, during morning peak hour) so that I could catch my flight to Perth. Even on domestic flights, Qantas is far superior to any U.S. airline. No bag fees, no fees for in-flight food/drinks, and they gave me an ice cream cone too! It’s almost like they’re glad to have customers. Imagine that.
When I landed in Perth at midday it was about ten degrees (F) warmer than in Melbourne, and it was actually sunny too. A very nice change. I took a couple city buses from the airport to the stop nearest Bob’s apartment, where he met me. Bob is a friend of mine from Penn State who worked as a forecaster at AccuWeather for a few years, but moved to Australia in early July to take a job as a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology in Perth. When I got there, he had only recently moved into his new apartment in the suburb of Subiaco (just a stone’s throw from the Subiaco Oval, where Australian football’s West Coast Eagles and Fremantle Dockers play), and quite a few boxes of stuff that he shipped to Australia had just arrived, so I spent some time helping him unpack and get things set up.
We went out to eat that evening at a local pub for dinner, and we got two pints — at a total of $19. Yikes. $10 pints? For $10 I can get two pitchers in State College! As Bob said, “I don’t know how people can afford a night out at the bars in Perth.” Beer was really pricey pretty much everywhere in W.A. Tue 17 Aug
Bob had to work at 5:30am, so I had most of the day to myself. Mid-morning I took a couple of trains over to another suburb and then walked to Hertz to pick up a rental car (my friend James had gotten me another great discount!). From there I drove down to the coastal city of Fremantle. Residents of Freo will get very annoyed if you call Fremantle a suburb of Perth, because they view themselves as a separate city with a separate identity. Fremantle is a port city at the mouth of the Swan River, while Perth sits 20 km upriver. Anyway, Fremantle is quite a charming small city, with a vibrant business district on a pedestrian mall. I took some time walking around the city and then around one of the beaches and breakwaters.
On my way back up to Perth I checked out the suburb of Cottesloe, which Bob said had a nice beach.
Then I briefly explored the massive Kings Park, a 400-hectare park in Perth city. I only had time to drive to a couple of the overlooks in the park, but I could’ve easily spent a lot more time in there. It’s great when cities put such a priority on big parks and green space.
Then I picked up Bob from work and we made our way to the Brand Hwy (Hwy 1) heading north to Geraldton, about 4 hours away. Between the northern suburbs of Perth and Geraldton, there’s pretty much nothing (a recurring theme in rural Western Australia, lots of nothing!). We got a little lost temporarily while trying to find the Brand Hwy — we didn’t really study a map closely because we figured there was pretty much only one road north out of Perth — but it was all good. We stayed at a hostel in Geraldton, just in time to get to the neighboring Thai restaurant for dinner right before it closed. Geraldton is basically the last outpost of civilization for a few hundred kilometers north on Hwy 1 (north of Geraldton it’s called the North West Coastal Highway). W.A. travel tip #1: Stay supplied with snacks and water. When entering Geraldton from the south, there’s even a sign warning travelers of limited water north of the town, and that they should therefore stock up on supplies. Wed 18 Aug
Bob & I didn’t spend much time in Geraldton, hitting the road north again in the morning on our way to Kalbarri National Park, a couple hours away. W.A. travel tip #2: Road trains really aren’t that scary. In Bill Bryson’s book, In a Sunburned Country he gave harrowing accounts of road trains, making them seem like these monstrous semis that take up most of the road. In reality they’re pretty tame, just two semi trailers hitched together, for the most part. And they stay in their lane too. They’re kind of long if you want to pass them, but overall they’re not nearly as intimidating as I thought they’d be. The only thing on the road we had to pull over for was at the turnoff for Kalbarri, when a car motioned for us to get over to the shoulder; behind it was a massive mining dump truck being hauled on a trailer. It was HUGE.
As we entered Kalbarri NP, we observed that the landscape inside the park didn’t seem much different from the landscape outside it: acres of brush as far as the eye could see. Other than the few overlooks down side roads, there wasn’t a whole lot to see in the inland portion of Kalbarri, yet there were “camera” signs and pull-offs periodically, which we whizzed by at 70 mph. We really couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be picturesque from those pull-offs, because nothing looked any different from any other areas!
There were some really cool areas in Kalbarri NP, however. The first of these was called Hawks Head:
The second was called Ross Graham. Here we hiked down to the (mostly dry) riverbed of the Murchison River, and climbed up the cliffs on the other side. It was a neat place!
From there it was on to The Loop, which is 20-some kilometers down a dirt road from Kalbarri-Ajana Road (the only route through the park). There’s a several-kilometer loop hike from the carpark there, but we didn’t have time for that unfortunately. So we checked out Nature’s Window (the most famous place in the park), and hiked a little bit further to enjoy some very nice views of the loop in the Murchison River.
From there we drove to Z Bend, but it was too far a hike from the carpark to the overlook; we needed to get back on the road if we wanted to make it four hours up to Monkey Mia before restaurants closed. We did manage to get to the resort a few minutes before the front desk closed, and the only food available was a small but kind of pricey pizza at the bar. Oh yeah, and $7 bottles of beer. What a deal! W.A. travel tip #3: You know you’re in the middle of nowhere when there’s not even a single dirt road for 140 km! Be prepared, it’s incredibly barren out there.
In related travel tips… W.A. travel tip #4: Petrol stations often close early, so don’t let your petrol get too low! After the Billabong Roadhouse (more on that later), there was a couple hours of nothing until the next town, Denham. Our petrol light came on as we rolled into town, but we couldn’t find a station that was open. So we stopped at a café and I asked the proprietor if there was an open petrol station in town. He looked at his watch, saw it was 7:30pm, and said, “Nope, sorry mate, they closed at 7.” He said the “pump” in Monkey Mia, 25 km further down the road, was no doubt also closed. Anyway, we knew we could make it to Monkey Mia and fill up in the morning at the town/resort’s only petrol pump — we had to go into the gift shop to ask them to turn it on for us! W.A. travel tip #5: Bring CDs or an MP3 player or something. Radio stations are scarce, and a cause for celebration when they come in. When a radio station faded out, we’d hit seek, and let it cycle through the frequencies for however long it took for another station to come in range (half an hour? an hour?). Unless the song was truly awful, we kept it on because it was preferable to silence. And with radio stations being rare, even “Dance, Baby, Dance” became listenable, haha. W.A. travel tip #6: Keep your eyes peeled for local wildlife, feral or native. When renting my car from Hertz, I was warned not to drive in rural Western Australia at night, because “it’s not a matter of if, but when you’ll hit a kangaroo.” We didn’t see any wildlife on our first day/night of driving, but we saw some on the way from Kalbarri to Monkey Mia. Around the turnoff for Shark Bay Road (to go toward Denham and Monkey Mia), we saw quite a few feral goats near the road. And then as darkness was approaching we did see a couple of wallabies hopping around. Just enough to make us keep our eyes peeled constantly. Over the next couple days we also saw some sheep, kangaroos, and a shingleback on/near the road, but we managed to avoid hitting any of them.
[I had to break up this post into two parts. I guess I exceeded the character limit because of all the photos/links. Click here for Part 4b.]
And now for Part 3 of 4 of my Australia trip recap, closing out my time in Melbourne. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2. Wed 11 Aug I said my farewells to Rob & Simone in the morning, and then took my gigantic suitcase with me on the tram down to The University of Melbourne, for the second of my research seminars. Several profs took me out to lunch at the University House (the same place that Ash, Tracy, Mike & I met with Malcolm and Sandy on our first day in Melbourne about ministry stuff). The seminar itself went well (though we had to wait for a class to clear out of the room that had been reserved for the seminar). I’d say there were about 20-25 people there, so I thought it was a good turnout, especially for not being in their usual Friday afternoon seminar slot. It seemed like my talk was well-received overall, and I was asked quite a few questions after the talk (someone later told me they thought it was a record for number of questions after one of their seminars). Following the talk I met with a couple of grad students, including a student named Muhammad who I knew from attending the WRF Tutorial at NCAR in Boulder back in January 2008, so it was great to see him again and catch up a bit. There were a couple other meetings with post-docs and profs, too. I was quite pleased with how my seminar and visit there went!
When I was all done with meetings and whatnot, I shuffled off, still toting my giant suitcase, taking the tram down to Flinders Street Station, and then the train over to Mount Waverley to go to my friend Jillian’s house for dinner — she’d invited several CU folks over for burritos. They weren’t quite Mexican burritos, but rather an Australian take on burritos. First, in addition to the usual marinated chicken, lettuce, tomatoes and onions, there also were sauteed mushrooms, pineapple chunks, and either sweet chili sauce or bbq sauce (there wasn’t any salsa). And the tortillas were lightly crisped in the oven before serving. They were still really good, but not quite like burritos I’m familiar with from, say, Qdoba. 😉 Anyway, it was great to have another evening hanging out with my Monash CU friends. Hopefully it’ll be fewer than six years before I see them all again, but it’s a long, long way between the U.S. and Australia. I’ll say this, though: Facebook has made keeping in touch with long-distance friends much, much easier! My third hosts on this trip were my friends James & Alison, who live in the far southeastern suburb of Hampton Park, about a five minute walk from the Hallam railway station. Alison is a primary school teacher, and James currently is a chaplain in a local public high school (the relationship of the Australian government and schools with religion is worth another post by itself, if I get around to it), though until a year ago he was the national youth director for the Christian & Missionary Alliance church in Australia. I met them a few days before I went to Australia in 2004 because they were visiting the States, and Alison’s parents know my parents (her parents, who are Australian, spent a few years pastoring a small CMA church in western Minnesota), and they were pretty much my adoptive family while I was studying at Monash. They even stopped by Penn State for a quick visit last April when they were visiting some family and friends in Michigan and Pennsylvania (and yes that photo was taken at The Creamery at PSU).
Ali came to pick me up after the dinner with my CU friends in Mt Waverley, and it was great to be at their house. They have several pets, including a couple rabbits (Fudge and Bubbles), a sugar glider (Cookie), a shingleback lizard and a couple bearded dragons (they were in accidental hibernation for the time being because James forgot to plug in their heat lamps, hehe). I was told that if Bubbles woke me up during the night by making a racket in the next room that I should just say, “Bubbles, stop!” and he’d stop, haha. Fortunately I never had to yell at Bubbles any of the nights I was there. 🙂 Thu 12 Aug
I had to get up pretty early to take the hour-long train ride from Hallam to Southern Cross station, so that I could make it to the Bureau of Meteorology Building by 9:30am, in time for my 10am seminar at the Centre for Australian Weather & Climate Research. My host was Beth Ebert (I cited a couple of her papers in my 2009 journal article), and she commented that I had picked up a little bit of an Aussie accent. I took that as a big compliment. 😀 Anyway, that seminar went quite well too, with 20-some people in attendance (which was particularly impressive because it was the third seminar of the week), and once again lots of good questions afterward. I didn’t have any meetings set up afterward, but some scientists stuck around a few extra minutes to chat. I thought CAWCR seemed like quite a nice working environment. Beth told me that while they don’t have post-doc positions, they do sometimes hire people straight out of their PhD for three-year terms. So that’s definitely an option I’ll be on the lookout for when it comes time to apply for jobs.
The BoM Building is just west of the CBD in Docklands. I’d never been to that part of the city before, so I spent some time walking around there. It’s always fun to explore new areas. I also love taking photographs of marinas.
When I was in Point Park in the Docklands I also met and briefly chatted with an actress who had just moved to Melbourne from Adelaide. Her little dog didn’t much like me, though (which is actually how the conversation started), hehe. Who knows, maybe I’ll recognize her in a film someday too. That’d be pretty neat.
After grabbing lunch I got a seat in Southern Cross station from where I could see all the trains, and wrote quite a long summary of my three seminars to Sue. I knew that if I didn’t intentionally take time out to do that, it wouldn’t get done, and then I’d forget all the specific questions and issues that came up. It took longer than I thought to write it all down, too, so it was mid-afternoon before I met up with Ash & Tracy at Huntingdale railway station, as they’d been at Monash meeting with some people that day (because of my seminars it’d been basically two days since I’d seen Ash & Tracy).
We were on our way to James & Ali’s to have dinner, but our journey there was a bit… interesting. First, I was unaware that Huntingdale was a station that express trains coming from the city would skip, so it was quite awhile before a train going past Hallam stopped. And then once we got on the train, it was hardly moving. It took forever to make it two stations down the line, at which point the train was evacuated. Apparently there were “overhead” problems a bit further down the line (meaning the overhead power lines were malfunctioning), so they had everyone board buses that stopped all stations to Dandenong (one station from Hallam). Apparently train disruptions aren’t that uncommon, because they had a dedicated bus stop for such occurrences. That both was and was not reassuring. Anyway, James came to pick us up in Dandenong, but because of the train disruption and all the extra buses (and cars to pick up passengers), traffic was very slow. Oh well, we tried to get there at a reasonable time for dinner!
Dinner was well worth the wait though. James went all-out on the grill: kangaroo steaks (which are apparently quite difficult to cook right, but James grilled them to perfection), porterhouse beef steaks, and fresh green prawns (huge ones — head, legs, shells and all). And then Ali had some salads and other sides, plus a sumptuous chocolate mousse dessert with fresh fruit. I’d have to say that was easily our best meal of the whole trip! We were most definitely sated, and I ate as much steak and as many prawns as I possibly could, but there was still heaps left over. 🙂 I should’ve taken a picture of the spread, but oh well. As Alex challenged me once though, I shouldn’t need to document every memory for posterity with a photograph. (I also failed to take any pictures at James & Ali’s, perhaps because I usually put my camera away when inside other people’s houses.) Fri 13 Aug
I rode the train back into the city again to meet up with Ash & Tracy for one last day of ministry work at Uni Melb. We had been hoping to set up a table near the Union advertising that we had a postgrad (grad student) survey or something like that (basically using the survey Tracy & I brainstormed earlier in the week). We couldn’t get a table though, and so when I got there Ash said the new plan was to hang around in a little park on the edge of campus and ask passersby a) if they were postgrads, and b) if they had a few minutes to answer a few questions. Quite honestly, neither Tracy nor I were thrilled with this particular approach (both of us think random surveys like these aren’t usually used to collect data, but merely to start a spiritual conversation with a random person, which we think is deceptive), but we still decided to give it a shot — because we actually were interested in the data, and trying to find out information about many facets of postgrad life at Uni Melb.
Gathering data proved pretty difficult, as expected. We used Tracy’s two clicker counters to keep track of the number of people we asked if they happened to be a post-grad student (82) and how many said they were post-grads (8). Of those eight people, two agreed to take our survey. If we’d gotten a third data point, maybe we could’ve made some extrapolations. 🙂 Anyway, we think grad students are probably the toughest demographic to survey. Grad students don’t usually congregate in large groups anywhere on campus (unlike undergrads), and usually only emerge from their offices if they have to go to a class or a meeting somewhere, in which case they usually don’t have time to stop and take a 5-10-minute survey. Random surveys might work great for undergrads, but not grad students. Also, data from a survey would be most useful on a department-by-department basis, and it’d be tough to generalize the information gleaned to the whole campus. That’s what I think, anyway. This trip really reinforced, at least in my mind, that in order to reach grad students, there need to be people who are already in those departments (insiders).
Anyway, following the survey deal, Mike, Ash, Tracy & I went to Trinity College at Uni Melb (kind of like an exclusive fraternity, it has its own dorms, dining hall (think Hogwarts style), and church/chapel). Anyway, the new events coordinator at Trinity is friendly toward Student Life and Christian Union (unlike the previous events coordinator, who was rather hostile), so he hosted us for lunch, along with Malcolm, Sandy, and a few other grad students affiliated with CU. That was a good time to meet some other Christian grad students on the campus who are eager to see something happen there, and it also opened some previously-closed doors for Student Life and CU to get more involved at Trinity with their undergrad ministries.
After lunch we went down to the Melbourne Aquarium, where my friend Emily works (from Monash CU). She couldn’t get us in for free or a discount (though our Penn State student IDs got Tracy & I a very nice discount anyway), but she was able to give us a personal guided tour after she finished her normal shift, telling us all about the various fish and marine creatures in the tanks. The Melbourne Aquarium is really quite nice, and has been rated as the best tourist destination in Melbourne. They’re also home to the world’s largest species of stingray, and croikey were those massive! The penguins were also really fun to see and watch, but really, just about everything at the aquarium was neat to see. It was great to see her again and hang out a bit (she wasn’t able to make the Friday night reunion thing at Joel & Rosey’s, but was at the Wednesday night dinner at Jillian & Susannah’s).
That night Ash, Tracy & I had dinner at Mike & Bec’s house, sort of a “team dinner.” I forget how we even got onto the topic, but Mike, being a PSU alum, wound up recounting a funny story of how he saw Penn State President Graham Spanier scooting around campus one day on a Segway, and other stories basically poking fun at Spanier (and to join in, I found a photo of his ridiculous washboard instrument that he plays with the Deacons of Dixieland band, so that Bec could gain a better picture of why so many people make fun of him). It’s always fun to meet other Penn Staters on the other side of the world. 🙂 Sat 14 Aug
James got us a deal with Hertz for a rental car for a day, so we rented a car and took a day trip down the Great Ocean Road. Apparently we were lucky to get a car; the Hertz in Dandenong was sold out, and the one in Clayton was very nearly sold out, with lots of people renting cars to go up to the snow in the Australian Alps east of the city, to places like Lake Mountain and Mt Buller. I guess Aussies don’t trust their snow driving enough to take their own car to the snow, but they’ll sure take a rental car!
First up: Bells Beach, which is just past Torquay, the town where the Great Ocean Road starts. Bells Beach is world-famous for surfing.
And then of course some obligatory road sign photos:
Next stop: Anglesea. We stopped for lunch at a fish and chips shop, where I got a burger with “the lot.” What’s on a lot burger, you ask? Bacon, tomato, lettuce, beetroot (as beets are known in Aus), fried egg, and pineapple. DELICIOUS. We got our lunch takeaway (to-go) and went to the city beach to enjoy it (it was still a nice day at this point). I don’t think we each needed to get an order of chips though, they give you heaps!
Split Point Lighthouse at Aireys Inlet, and a Wicked Camper that we saw parked there (each Wicked van has a very unique paint job and pithy saying on the back):
Coalmine Creek:
It was fantastic to get a chance to drive along the Great Ocean Road again. I think I can safely say that’s a place I’d like to visit every time I come to Melbourne. Here’s a short video that Tracy took with my camera while I was driving, for just a little sample of what the road is like:
And then it started raining, so our photo-taking dropped off precipitously. That, and we needed to MOVE if we were to make it to the Twelve Apostles before sundown. Unfortunately that meant we didn’t have enough time to drive down to Cape Otway Lighthouse. With the murky, grey, rainy weather we wouldn’t have seen a lot anyway. There are so many cool vistas and other things to see along and near the Great Ocean Road, you could easily take a few days poking along in order to soak it all in. But when you only have a winter’s afternoon, you do the best you can!
We arrived at the Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell NP just before sunset. Not that we could see the sun, of course. It was rainy, windy, and cold. I think Tracy lasted about 5 minutes before going back to the car, Ash about 20 minutes, and I was out there for maybe 45 minutes or an hour, because I at least had a rain jacket along. I wound up chatting with a family on holiday from Melbourne for a bit. They were there with binoculars to try to spot some of the colony of penguins that come ashore every evening in twilight on the beach far below. Anyway, I was out there until it was almost pitch black, which got Ash & Tracy worried that I fell off a cliff or something, hehe (our mobile phones were as good as paperweights out there too). Anyway, we had driven all that way, and I was determined to see what of the Twelve Apostles I could, even if the rain, wind and fading light made it extremely difficult to take pictures of even half-decent quality. The last time I was at the Twelve Apostles, there was one more standing (note the rubble from one of the Apostles that collapsed in 2006). I wonder if any more will collapse before I see them next.
By that point night had fallen and we were very ready for dinner in nearby Port Campbell. After dinner Tracy decided to try her hand at left-side-of-the-road driving, at least until we got close to Melbourne, at which point she yielded the wheel to me to navigate the city. I honestly had some white knuckles for the first few k’s while sitting in the passenger seat as she got used to everything, hehe. 🙂
It still wasn’t quite like my mom’s reaction from the passenger seat while I drove my parents down the Great Ocean Road in 2004 — suddenly gripping my arm and yelling “JARED!!” as a car rounded a bend on the other side of the road (cliffs on one side, ocean on the other). I had to tell her, “Mom, you HAVE to stop doing that, or else you WILL cause an accident.” 🙂
Anyway, when I dropped off Ash & Tracy at their respective hosts, I said my farewells to them until I was back on U.S. soil. We still had another full day in Melbourne, but were planning just to chill and not meet up or anything. I was tired from spending so many hours in a car that day, but still had a little energy to play with James & Ali’s sugar glider. When he leapt at me it definitely woke me up a bit, lol. Sun 15 Aug
My last full day in Melbourne was a very relaxing one. I went to church with James in the morning (Ali wasn’t feeling well that morning), and then for lunch afterward, Ali had prepared a nice meal, and invited their friend Hernon and Hernon’s dad over (Hernon’s dad is also named Hernon). I had met Hernon a few times back in 2004 when spending time with James & Ali (Phillip Island, surf fishing, etc.), so it was good to see him again. We just spent most of the afternoon and even evening chatting with them. Like I said, it was quite a relaxing day, and a good way to wrap up my stay in Melbourne, and get ready for a lot of traveling in Western Australia.
Stay tuned for Part 4 in a few days, about my travels in a place I’d never been to before: Western Australia!
Picking up where I left off in Part 1 a few days ago, here’s Part 2 of 4 of my Australia trip recap. Sun 8 Aug
I was exhausted from our very full Saturday so I just slept in at Joel & Rosey’s. So I just chatted with Rosey until it was time to go into the city to meet Ash & Tracy. We planned to go to the RMIT University “Open Day,” because someone had told us that a bunch of grad students and faculty would attend, showing off research posters. So we had high hopes that we’d get to meet quite a few grad students. That’s not at all what Open Day was, however. Instead, it was purely an undergrad recruitment day, with one representative from each department there with some basic facts about the department. So we quickly decided it wasn’t going to be useful for us, and instead decided to relax for the afternoon — I wasn’t the only one who was really tired. So we went down to a café on Southbank to have a coffee and write some postcards. I’ll tell you what, I really needed a day of pretty much doing nothing.
About 5pm we took the tram to Christ Church in Hawthorn to see my friend Rob of The Backyard Bard with a storytelling of “Revelation.” It was a dramatic performance of “Revelation” — Rob memorized the entire book! Very impressive. Here’s a segment of the performance, from Revelation 4:
The storytelling that Simon and Rob both do for The Backyard Bard really helps to bring the Scriptures alive. It aids and enhances my mind’s eye without overwhelming it the way that a film would. Joel & Rosey were kind enough to bring my luggage to the show too, so I was able to say my farewells to them there.
After the show I rode with Rob back to his house in Brunswick, a northern suburb. Rob & Simone have a 1 1/2-year old daughter named Hannah, and again, I know them both from Monash CU; we had a Sunday night Bible study in their house, and they’ve since both been on staff with CU part-time a bit, though neither are currently. They’re both taking courses at Ridley (a seminary), and Rob’s also working full-time with The Backyard Bard.
Rob & Simone are planning to move to the Middle East to work with a deaf ministry in about a year and a half, and they hope to move to the region permanently eventually. They have a heart for Middle Eastern culture (perhaps partly because Rob’s mum is Lebanese), and as such much of their cuisine and even the furniture in their house has a Middle Eastern feel. For instance, instead of having a couch in the living room, they have a muffraj (sp.?), which is basically some cushions or pads laid on the floor and against the wall. I’d even drag the muffraj into the study at night to sleep on it, so it’s quite portable. Mon 9 Aug Read Tracy’s perspective here
After discussing Australian and American politics with Rob for a good chunk of the morning, I caught the tram down to Melbourne Uni to meet up with Ash & Tracy. I was a bit late, however, because I got mixed up which way was north and south. I knew I wanted to go south toward the city, so I started walking toward the sun and wanted to catch a tram heading that way. After I waved off one tram, I realized that was actually the one I wanted when I looked down that way and saw the Melbourne skyline — south is away from the sun in the Southern Hemisphere. Doh! So yeah, in addition to cars being on the left side of the road, the sun was in the opposite direction, so I was all screwed up!
After getting some additional meetings set up, Ash went back to Mike & Bec’s house to work on some things, while Tracy & I took advantage of the third beautiful day in a row (60 and sunny, and what would turn out to be the last day of gorgeous weather in Melbourne during our stay), and walked around the Botanical Gardens some, hung out at the Shrine of Rememberance for a bit (a gigantic WWI memorial that is viewable from the CBD down Swanston Street/Saint Kilda Road), and then took some time to write up a survey we could give to grad students, to find out more accurately what their needs are as grad students in Australia, and how they view spirituality. We knocked that out while having dinner at a sidewalk Italian restaurant on Swanston St. Unfortunately I didn’t find out until we got the check that my two bottles of beer were $7 each. Yikes! Glad I didn’t have more!
Tue 10 Aug
This was the rainiest day we had in Melbourne. Fortunately the Queen Victoria Markets are covered! Queen Vic Market is a huge mostly open-air market that has lots of just about everything: delicatessens, bakeries, butchers, fresh fish/seafood markets, produce markets, jewelers, souvenir shops, clothing shops, sports apparel shops (even selling American sports jerseys), leather shops… Yeah, pretty much anything you can think of, the Queen Vic Market probably has. I almost bought an akubra hat, but then realized I just wouldn’t wear it that much. That, and knowing that I’m soon moving to Colorado and already have too much stuff helped prevent me from buying anything there (I’d already purchased an Australia t-shirt and zipper sweatshirt a couple days earlier).
After eating lunch at the Market that we each bought piecemeal there (an orange here, a banana there, a roll here, some meat and cheese there), Mike picked up the three of us and drove us to La Trobe University, where we met with the Christian Union staff there, led by a man named Peter. He initially seemed skeptical of a partnership with us or Student Life/Campus Crusade (lots of raised eyebrows while questioning us), but by the end of the meeting he’d warmed up to us and seemed keen on the idea of a partnership (lots of raised eyebrows while joking around). Needless to say we were quite pleased and relieved with how that meeting went! Peter and his team were already poised to launch some sort of grad student ministry, and it seems like they’d welcome our input and energy. They also provided some helpful ideas for what would make future visits from us or other American students useful.
Following that meeting we had a Skype conversation at Mike’s house in Brunswick West with a guy named Lewis, a transplanted American who’s on staff with CU in Sydney at the University of New South Wales. Lewis is pretty much the main person in the Christian Union national organization who’s really been pushing forward grad ministry in Australia, so it was helpful to talk to him. He was really excited that we were there and interested in giving energy to grad student ministry in Australia. Back-to-back great meetings!
Another cool thing about that meeting was that Rob came by Mike’s house to pick us up for dinner, but sat in on the last part of the meeting while we finished up. Mike had previously seen Rob in a Backyard Bard production and wanted to meet him anyway, and Lewis had heard a lot about Rob and was planning to see a show later this year. And then I forget if I mentioned this, but Mike is a Penn State alum, who studied abroad for a semester in Sydney at UNSW, which is where he met Lewis. Add on all my connections with folks on staff with Christian Union as well, and we think there are too many connections to be purely happenstance! We really feel like God was paving the way on this trip, and opening quite a few doors.
For dinner Rob took Ash, Tracy & I to a Yemeni restaurant in the suburb of Ascot Vale. Coincidentally enough, the restaurant is called Yemeni Restaurant. Clever, huh? Rob & Simone visited Yemen (and other countries) last year, so Rob was showing the restaurant owner some photos on his iPad — and the owner even spotted his former house in one of Rob’s photos of a city in Yemen (Sa’na?). Anyway, eating at the Yemeni restaurant was quite a neat cultural and culinary experience. First off, the food was excellent. We sat on the floor, and the dishes were all laid out for us on the floor as well. For the various bean, meat and rice dishes, we’d scoop it all up with pieces of Yemeni bread (much like naan bread in Indian cuisine). We were all dipping and scooping the bread on the same plates, so we really were sharing a meal together, not just eating our own separate dishes while happening to be at the same restaurant or table. We all felt like it gave us a much better insight into what it means in Middle Eastern cultures (and meant, in Biblical times) to sit down and share a meal with other people. It really is more of an experience, and one in which you have to trust the people you’re eating with, because they’re dipping bread into the same bowls or dishes as you.
Following the game we all retired to Rob & Simone’s place, where Ash, Rob & I enjoyed a riveting game of Power Grid (Rob won). And because it was Power Grid, Tracy knitted instead. All in all, it was a really fun way to spend my final evening at Rob & Simone’s.
Stay tuned for Part 3, coming up in a few days probably, which will cover my last few days in Melbourne. Part 4 after that will be about my whirlwind visit to Western Australia!
I was working on Part 2 of my Australian trip recap, when I decided that this was worth a post all on its own…
When I was staying at his house, my friend Rob gave me a lesson in Australian politics. It’s interesting but also kind of bizarre and complicated. For instance, did you know that the prime minister, who is a member of parliament, can be deposed and replaced by his/her own party in parliament at any time? Did you know that this does not trigger an election, either? Did you know that the prime minister can dissolve parliament and call for a new election if either house of parliament fails to pass a given piece of legislation twice? Or that in what is called a double dissolution, after dissolving parliament and winning the resulting election, the prime minister could then require parliament to meet as a single house to vote on the failed legislation that triggered the election in the first place?
This all came up because Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party (left-wing), who was elected PM in 2007, was extremely popular (70+%) even earlier this year. His main issue was climate change/cap and trade, which he called “the great moral issue of our time.” The legislation was set to pass shortly before the Copenhagen summit, with the opposition Liberal Party/National Party (right-wing) coalition being led by a moderate named Malcolm Turnbull (Turnbull once held negotiations with both Labor and Liberal to determine which party he’d join). The legislation had already failed once in the Senate (which the coalition controlled), and Turnbull thought if they defeated it again, then Rudd would call an election and the Liberals would get trounced at the ballot box. Two days before the cap and trade vote, however, Turnbull’s leadership of the party was challenged and he was replaced by Tony Abbott as opposition leader. Abbott galvanized the opposition and defeated the cap and trade legislation in the Senate. Everyone expected Prime Minister Rudd to respond by calling for a double dissolution, but instead, noting that public support for cap and trade was slipping a bit, Rudd trotted out a junior aide to announce to the press that Labor was shelving climate legislation for four years. The press and the public immediately turned on Rudd, wondering how something he had been calling “the great moral issue of our time” for three years could simply be given up on so suddenly and quietly, and put on the shelf for several more years. Nobody knew what he believed anymore, and his popularity started sinking quickly.
A few months later Rudd instituted a super-profits tax on the mining companies. Rudd’s Treasury Department estimated the tax would cost the mining companies $12 billion, but the mining companies knew Treasury had made an accounting error, and that the real price tag of the tax was $30 billion. So the mining companies were hammering Rudd and Labor with TV commercials, and the public realized that mining is the reason for Australia’s economy doing so well, so they soured on Rudd even more, sinking his approval rating to under 30%. Labor realized they couldn’t sustain the withering attack ads by mining from then until the likely October election, so the Labor MPs voted to oust Kevin Rudd as their party leader and replace him with a member of his inner “kitchen” cabinet named Julia Gillard. Gillard, even though she was in on all Rudd’s decisions, because she was a new prime minister she was able to negotiate with the mining companies to knock the super-profits tax down to $10 billion (and then she claimed it was a win for the government, based on the faulty $12 billion original tax claim, but it was really a win for mining).
Anyway, the Australian election was held on 21 August and resulted in a hung parliament (neither Labor nor the Liberal/National coalition held an outright majority in the lower house). Last week Labor reached an agreement with the few independent MPs to form a minority government. Who knows how long it’ll hold together though.
Back to the Australian electoral system. The method for electing MPs and Senators is rather byzantine, to say the least. Australia uses preference voting, meaning you either rank all the parties from 1-8 or whatever, or you rank all the candidates from 1-however many there are (in Senate races, that can be more than 60!). By voting for parties, you are in essence voting for whatever candidate preference rankings that the party placed with the election commission. In preference voting, all the 1st-preference votes are tallied. If no candidate has reached the vote threshold for election, then the last-place candidate is eliminated from the race, and the 2nd-preference votes from those ballots are added to everyone else’s totals. If a candidate still doesn’t reach the vote threshold, then the second-to-last candidate is eliminated (I believe), and the preference votes on those ballots are re-allotted accordingly. At this point I honestly have no idea what happens if candidates still haven’t reached the vote threshold. And why do I keep saying “vote threshold”? Well, because in the lower house of parliament, the vote threshold is simply majority of total ballots cast (50% + 1). In the Senate, however, the threshold is generally 14.3%. What?!? Here’s why. Senate elections are state-wide, with six of the twelve Senate seats from each state up for election every three years. So with six seats available, the vote threshold is one-seventh of the total votes plus one (if only two seats were open, for example, then the threshold would be one-third of the votes plus one). Each party gives all its votes to its 1st-preference candidate. Once that candidate reaches the vote threshold, then all the party’s votes go to their 2nd-preference candidate. And on it goes. According to Rob, this lower vote threshold means that minor parties have a far better chance of getting elected to the Senate, rather than the House. In Rob’s opinion, preference voting makes it even harder for minor parties to win seats in the House than would a straight-up winner-takes-all election like is done here in the States. The complicated vote-counting system is also why it can take days or weeks to count all the votes correctly!
Now that I have you all thoroughly confused after my description of the Australian electoral system, I figure you all will have a little more appreciation for the overall simplicity of the American electoral system!
