Category Archive for ‘Down Under’ at marinegirl

Archive for the 'Down Under' Category

The goat party

27 October

Last weekend we went to the last of the infamous Mundingburra goat parties. A couple of years ago these guys had a load of friends round for a party and roasted a goat. Next time round it was a pig, then a cow… you get the picture. This time round there were 300 people (not roasted, obviously) a goat, a pig, a couple of roos and rumours of a crocodile, although I never saw one. There was a DJ and people spinning fire pois in the garden, a band playing upstairs, some curiously alcoholic punch and lots of beer. These guys know how to throw a party!

S woke up in the morning to see a half-roasted roo floating around the pool on an inflatable lilo. That’s when you know it’s time to go home.

Sunday was mostly spent sleeping, eating and floating in the sea.

in Down Under. Closed

More flights booked

23 October

Booked some more flights today. I’m going to be flying back to Manila on November 8th. Which isn’t very long away at all! Apart from a couple of weeks in the UK over Christmas and New Years, I’m going to be living in Dumaguete for the next six months or so. Exciting!

in Down Under. Comment?

An abridged, coffee-break update on me

18 October

Ol’ bloggy has been abandoned of late, but I thought a resurrection was due, given that I’m going to be off travelling to exciting climes again soon. I shall make a concerted effort to post something at least as often as I redesign the thing! I might try and fill in some of the gaps (there are many) between June and now… so don’t think you’re going crazy if posts start appearing in wierd places!

So here, as promised, is a quick, coffee-break update on me:

After a brief period of being ~~homeless~~ nomadic, I’m now living in a ‘half-way house for marine biologists’ (not my words!). Actually, it’s fab. The house is big and lovely and right on the Strand (by the sea) so I can go swimming after work. After a while living in ‘quiet’ houses I’m really enjoying living somewhere busy again - there’s anywhere between three and seven people (depending on fieldwork), an eclectic mix of aussies, poms, french and sometime peruvian! Oh, and a couple of possums.

Last month I flew down to Melbourne for a few days to meet up with Rich, who was doing some silly diving stuff in a cave somewhere. I loved Melbourne. Lots of good food, nice and easy to get around, an interesting mix of old and new architecture, and well, just fab. Melbourne has a much more European vibe than Sydney, I think I miss that. We hired a Toyota Prius (hybrid-eco-fun-new-favourite-car) and went on a brief road trip along the Great Ocean Road, which is just stunning. All dramatic and windswept and lighthouses!

I’m making the most of having housemates with 4WDs. Have had a great time the last couple of weekends neglecting my work to go on jolly jaunts fishing (unsuccessfully), driving along beaches, swimming in creeks and spotting ‘roos in the bush. I’m kicking myself for not taking some photos.

Finally, a bit of news - I’ve just booked flights to come home over Christmas! I’ll be in the UK from 23rd December to 3rd January. I am very excited about finding come culture in London, diving in Scotland over New Year, good clothes shops, meeting up with friends in London and Sheffield and Waitrose. I am less excited about how horrifically cold it is going to be, flying in from the Philippines! Donations of jumpers, hats and shoes will be gratefully received.

in Down Under. Comment?

Cape du Couedic

29 April

I’ve always thought it would be really cool to live in a lighthouse, and although I’ve yet to find anywhere that will let me stay in the actual lighthouse itself, this came a pretty amazing second! I booked one of the lighthouse keepers cottages at Cape du Couedic through the Department of Environment and Heritage for South Australia. Although still operational, the lighthouse is now automated, and the three keepers cottages have been restored as heritage accommodation.The location was absolutely stunning. Set in the middle of the largest national park on Kangaroo Island, we were miles from anywhere, probably more than an hours drive from the nearest shop! No internet, no phones, no televison… but wallabies and a lighthouse outside our window and a pile of wood left for us to light the stove!

It was fascinating to read an account from someone who grew up living in Parndana Lodge (our cottage) in the 1930’s… trapping wallabies for stew, arguments between the lighthouse keeper and his assistants that meant they were forbidden from talking to the other families for weeks on end, supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables arriving only three times a year by boat, sending school work off in the post… if it felt remote for us, it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like back then!While we were cooking dinner on our first night in the cottage, we both heard some odd banging noises. The other cottages were both empty, so it was a bit spooky. Rich ran around looking under all the beds and in the wardrobes for an intruder (who must have walked 20km to get there!!!). We later read lots of accounts of the “ghost” that rattles the kitchen window in the visitors books… although I blame the wallabies!The strong winds earlier in the week meant that while we were staying at Cape du Couedic we had to drive up to the North coast each day to go diving, so we didn’t have as much time as we’d have liked to explore Flinders Chase National Park. We did manage to get around our little corner of it though. Our lighthouse was just a few minutes walk from Admirals Arch - an archway carved out of the rock by the waves, under which lives a New Zealand Fur Seal colony. We watched the seal pups playing in the rockpools and their parents getting crashed against the rocks in the big surf as they came home for the night. We also made it to the Remarkable Rocks, which were…. well, pretty remarkable! These huge, totally bizarre rock formations sit up high on a cliff and look completely out of place with the surrounding geology. We got there quite late, after all the tourists had left, and stayed until we could see the lighthouse beam calling us home for dinner!

I only wish we could have stayed there a bit longer, to really soak up the remoteness.

More photos from Cape du Couedic

in Down Under and Wanderlust. Comment?

Diving Kangaroo Island

27 April

Crikey, it seems like a long time ago now, but here’s the rest of my holiday reports!After being blown out on the first couple of days, we finally managed to get underwater. Everyone else had their drysuits, and I was super-shivery in my 5mm wetsuit in the 17C water, but it was totally worth it!

Jim (Thistleton, of KI Diving Safaris) explained that the North coast of Kangaroo Island is the confluence of two major current systems, which leads to a bizarre combination of tropical and temperate species. The diversity of seagrass is just amazing, and everywhere is teeming with fish life. Jim guarentees that he’ll find you a leafy seadragon within two days, or he’ll give you another two days diving for free. That sounds pretty cocky, until you meet the guy, and you realise that he just knows the underwater environment here so well. True to his word, we found our leafy on the second dive.

By the end of the first day we were all experts at spotting the weedy seadragons, which stand out as being much bluer than the surrounding seagrass, but we had no chance at all with the leafys! Jim had to practically pick the thing up before I realised what he was trying to point out to me, and if you blinked for just a second they would disappear before your eyes! They really are masters of camouflage. But the undewater attractions don’t end with the seadragons. We had huge groupers and wrasse (bigger than me!) which followed us around, and pufferfish, and lobsters, and best of all - seals! It’s amazing how just looking at a seal can make you feel warmer! Just as we were ending our first dive we caught a glimpse of two playing below us… a teaser for what was to come.

On our final dive, we went for a ’seal dive’ - over to the rocky gullies where Jim knows they like to hang out. We quickly found three seals, who were happy to play with us and hung around for the whole dive! Before we went in, Jim taught us how to speak basic seal - we had to look fun to play with, or they would get bored quickly and move on. So there we were, akwardly somersaulting and spinning around desperately tring to entertain some very bemused looking seals! I’ve never felt so clumsy underwtaer before, they just move so quickly and elegantly through the water, it’s breathtaking. With all that underwtaer excersise I wasn’t cold for a second, and I had to keep checking my air, which was disappearing quick! It’s difficult to imagine how you could have more fun than that on a dive!

Check out some more of Rich’s underwater photos from Kangaroo Island here.

in Down Under and Underwater. Comment?

Kangaroo Island

25 April

I loved, loved, loved Kangaroo Island! It’s like a tiny chunk of the outback has been torn off and thrown out to sea… big expanses of remote nothingness, red dirt roads and heaps of wildlife. The island has a pretty impressive history too!

The first non-Aboriginal people to live on Kangaroo Island were sealers, escaped convicts and runaway sailors, who sought refuge here in the early 1800s. Why the Aboriginal people abandoned Kangaroo Island, or when they last lived here, remains a mystery.

Apart from one main road that loops around the island, all of the roads are unsealed, which makes for some entertaining driving! We were pretty careful though, and only had a couple of sliding sideways moments. You have to keep a keen eye out for animals too… we frequently had to stop for wallabies, roos and possums, less often for echidnas and goannas, and once for a huge black snake, which we thought was dead… until we went over for a closer look and it moved! Sadly we didn’t see a wild koala, apart from a couple of squashed ones. One of the cafes had a “Roadkill Recipes” book for sale! For a while we didn’t realise that the tracks we’d been driving past were actually the main roads marked on our map, and we drove right through Parndana, which is the largest settlement in the heartland of KI without realising it! Following the directions I’d been given, we eventually made it out to our accommodation - Gum Valley Retreat. It’s a lovely farmhouse-type building with a few motel rooms, being run by a couple of ladies from Canberra and Adelaide who come over to KI for the holiday season. We were spoilt with fantastic home-cooked three course meals and an open fire, and at night we had wallabies playing right outside the window.Unfortunately the wind was blowing too strong for us to get out diving, which was a bit of a disappointment, and meant we had to change our plans around a bit and go exploring first. Kangaroo Island has some fantastic local produce, and we made it our mission to sample all of it. We bought wild cranberry jam and olive oil made from wild olives, ate honey ice cream at Cliffords Honey Farm, did a tour of Emu Ridge eucalyptus distillery, shared a seafood platter with KI marron and bought an esky full of cheeses (halloumi to die for!) from the amazing Island Pure Sheep Dairy - where the sheep line up all on their own and file in to their favourite spot for milking twice a day! Oh, and we sampled plenty of the local wine!On the second day we drove along the south coast, taking windswept beaches complete with seals, underground cave systems and the amazing ‘little sahara’ - huge white sand dunes that spring up out of nowhere! Whilst the seals were very cool, they were completely outclassed by the pelicans, which arrive at the jetty in Kingscote at 5pm prompt every evening, when they know that an eccentric guy called John arrives with a bucket full of fish. We got up really close and were right in the thick of feathers and beaks fighting over their tea! Great fun.More Kangaroo Island photos

in Down Under, Edible and Wanderlust. Comment?

Bondi Beach

23 April

On our second day in Sydney we got up bright and early and headed over to the infamous Bondi Beach. All the locals go on about how it’s just full of tourists, and how the Northern beaches are much nicer, but I think it deserves it’s iconic status. Just look - it’s fantastic! Continue reading ‘Bondi Beach’

in Down Under and Wanderlust. Comment?

Sydney

22 April

Sydney was really cool… freezing in fact! I can’t believe how much I’ve acclimatised to living in North Queensland. We must have looked very funny, as Rich was sweating in shorts and a t-shirt and I was shivering in my jeans and a jumper!So, we could hardly go to Sydney without doing the tourist thing. We decided not to climb the bridge… it costs a fortune, and they don’t let you take your camera! For about $15 you can climb the ‘South East pylon’ and get great views of the harbour from there, so we did that instead, which I think was a good choice. We then went for a closer look at the Opera House, which really is an impressive building. Up close it’s all tiled, which I don’t think was what I was expecting! We also took a ferry across the harbour to Taronga Zoo, which was lots of fun. We liked the fishing cat and platypus best. We did stop short of having photos taken cuddling koalas though. Continue reading ‘Sydney’

in Down Under, Edible and Wanderlust. Comment?

Cheaper than Qantas

19 March

I bought new shoes! Apparently the whole ‘laid back aussie’ thing is a myth, and I won’t be allowed into Sydney’s finer establishments in my flipflops, sorry thongs. So I found the least shoelike shoes I could. And of course, being in Oz, they had to be red.I’m all excited because in less than a week I leave for my whistle-stop tour of a a few more corners of Oz… Sydney and Kangaroo Island (yes it’s really called that) here I come! Expect LOTS of photos.In other news, life in TSV is good. The torrential downpours are becoming less frequent, and the mythical winter is apparently just around the corner; I’ve almost survived my first full summer in the tropics! The new house is working out well, and when the wind blows in the right direction I can smell salt-air from the sea on the verandah. I’m slowly starting to make a bit of progress with my PhD work, but am distracted by cheap diving days on maggie and cheap beer drinking days by the river far too easily.Right, I had better get on with finishing a lit review and all the other things on my list of things to do before I’m allowed a holiday!

in Down Under. 2 Comments

37 Clayton Street

23 February

I’m all moved in! It rained of course. Fortunately I haven’t managed to accumulate too much stuff yet, and there was no fish tank to contend with. A queen size bed was a bit of a challenge, but a friend of a friend had a Ute I could borrow.The house is fab. It’s a proper old wooden ‘queenslander’ house, much more eco-friendly in the tropics than these new-fangled brick houses which need the air-con running all day. It has loads of character, wooden floorboards (and walls!) throughout and a little verandah at the front which is kept cool and shady by the trees. It’s been recently done up too, brand new bathroom, new roof and re-painted inside and out, so isn’t quite as ‘quirky’ as some of the other old houses I’ve lived in! Only downside so far is that the mozzies get in and I’m being munched. Buying a mosquito net for my bed is on the list of Things To Do tomorrow.The address to send cards, letters, bourbon biscuits etc to is:37 Clayton StreetHermit ParkQLD 4812AUSTRALIAYou can look it up on Google Earth now Dad!

in Down Under. 1 Comment

marinegirl