From before our ten days of wonderment: played pick-up ultimate frisbee Monday night (a weekly event), lots of fun...went to a huge potluck dinner at Keith's Tuesday night, run by Malte - full of wonderful food, I ate way too much...Wednesday night played volleyball again; this time we had a training session beforehand, and WHOA did that help. We actually sustained a pretty decent game. Woohoo. Keith played another gig at Moondyne Joe's Thursday night, then it was home to finish packing and get some sleep before our early start Friday morning.
7:45am Friday: meet in the carpark AT THIS TIME AND NO LATER or you will be left behind. Cool, except the buses were about an hour late. No surprise there. There were about thirty students on the trip, along with two tour guides and a Murdoch rep to make sure we didn't disgrace the university. We got a riveting speech from the president of Murdoch (or some other position at the uni that requires him to wear a suit) about how he could kick us out of Murdoch AND out of our home unis if we behave inappropriately during our trip...his speech was so uncharacteristic of Australian authority figures, it kind of weirded me out. But no matter. We piled onto two buses, led by our fearless leaders - Terry and Fi (short for Fiona but don't call her that), and we were off. I was on Fi's bus, accompanied by pretty much everyone else I knew going into the trip, and a bunch of new faces. Day one was all driving. We saw a lot of sheep, a lot of kangaroos (Fi was kind enough to stop the bus so we could take pictures), stopped for lunch at a really windy but beautiful seaside picnic area - my feet were so happy to be out of their shoes. Our stop for the evening was in Lynton, where we stayed in a sheep barn on a big ranch. The barn happened to be located at the bottom of a HUGE, GINORMOUS hill, which a bunch of us climbed up. Keith and I kept climbing (we couldn't see the other side of the hill yet, and we wanted to find a good place to watch the sunset) and came upon a whole other world up there. Lots of really cool vegetation, the grass was higher than my knees, there were these weird melons growing on vines along the ground...anyway we found the sunset, got a lot of pretty pictures of the Indian Ocean (I think?), then spent a good amount of time wandering back through the tall grass to the barn. Terry made us dinner (as he did every night) with the help of some of us, we ate off of tin plates around a big long table; it was a scene out of the Waltons or something. And I forget what we ate, but it was tasty. That man knows how to cook. After dinner we moved the furniture around and put our sleeping bags on the floor and crashed pretty early - we had 6am starts every day.
6am means 6am. Terry bangs on the door, yells "everybody get up" four or five times, and we are outta there. Every morning was cereal or toast for breakfast (sometimes we had a toaster, sometimes we did not), and we were on the bus by 7am. Day two was spent mostly at Kalbarri national park - we climbed a gorge, hiked over a lot of really beautiful cliffs looking down on the Murchison River, took a ton of pictures...this is when I realized how good this trip was going to be. The gorge we were in had clear paths, but if you weren't paying attention or wanted to be an idiot, it's definitely possible to hurt yourself by, oh, say, falling off the edge. And our tour guides basically let us roam wherever we wanted. There's so much more trust in Australia than in America. For that I am thankful. One of the very cool structures on these particular cliffs was nature's window - a naturally made hole in rock looking over the river - photo op! We went a little shutter happy. That night we stayed at a place called Hamelin Pool, where we found, brace yourselves, STROMATOLITES!!! Here's the deal with these babies. They are the oldest life form on earth, and because they actually PRODUCE oxygen, they are responsible for the atmosphere we all know and love. They're pretty badass. And Hamelin Pool is the only place on earth where they are easily accessible by humans, although they are found in the Bahamas and in one other place in Australia. Basically, they look like funny-shaped rocks. They sit along the shore of a beach, there's a boardwalk that goes out to them so you don't step on any, and there they are: behold the beginning of life as we know it. A few of us already knew about the stromatolites before we got to Hamelin Pool, so needless to say, we were ecstatic. This is also evident given the number of pictures I took of these guys. But it's hard to get other people to be excited about rocks if they have never heard of them before, no matter how heroic the rocks are. We were the only people out there; I'm amazed anyone else finds this place, to be honest. It's out in the middle of nowhere, when you get to the boardwalk there are a lot of placards with information about the stromatolites, but other than that you're on your own. You don't have to pay to see them, they trust you to stay on the boardwalk (again, kudos Australia); seems to me, if we had this kind of scientific goldmine in America we'd have totally commercialized it by now. Think of all the scam attractions we have in the US - this is real, live old rock, and the Australians just let it be. This country has got its head screwed on right.
Hamelin Pool became "the place of sunsets" - for the two nights we stayed there we spent at least 45 min each night watching the sun go down. Oh to do this every night. We tented while we were there - I was in a tent with Lucy, Lauren and Julie - THAT was fun to set up. The first night it looked a bit dilapidated (we were missing some parts), but we got it together by night two. Both nights we had a big fire before and after dinner. To quote Keith: who needs technology when you've got fire? Seriously - we were entertained for hours. Now here comes Aussie animal encounter number one: the first night we were at Hamelin Pool, I had to pee very early in the morning. I did not want to walk all the way to the bathroom, so I decided to pee behind a tree. It was still dark. When I went to leave, I looked to my right and OH HELLO KANGAROO - there's a big red kanga about 2oo feet away. Now, kangaroos are actually pretty dangerous - if I haven't said it already, they can attack you WITH ALL FOUR LIMBS AT ONCE. But this guy was far enough away that I just watched him (or her) for awhile, then went back to my tent. Oh yeah - the stars were perfect.
Oh these entries are going to be long. I've gotta go to class so I'll stop here. Hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend! Love you guys.
Sounds fabulous so far. Who needs the travel channel when we have Kelsey's blogs!! Can't wait to see the pictures and read more.
ReplyDeleteLove, Mom