When I was in Melbourne we spent a day on a wine tour of the Yarra Valley. To be honest, I was expecting some kind of civilised, wine-tasting affair with spittoons and meaningful discussions about freshly mown grass, blackcurrants and beeswax. Apparently that’s not how they do things Down Under… I have never drunk so much, so quickly before 10am! We visited five cellar doors (thankfully, eating a big carb-filled meat pie for lunch at one of them) including Chandon, where we tasted red champagne, which was surprisingly yummy.
Contrary to popular belief, Moët is not pronounced “mo-ay”, but actually “mow-et”. Whilst Chandon is of French descent, Moët is Dutch, hence the t !
in Photography and Wanderlust.
Don’t you just hate it when someone travels to the same places as you, and their photos are a million times better than yours?
Essaouira is definately one of my favourite places in Morocco. The blue and white medina crammed full of spices and pigments and souks, not to mention the infamous blue fishing boats, are a photographers dream come true. Lomokev is a long standing Flickr Fave of mine, and his recent shots from Essaouira are stunning. The medina is quite small, and having spent a couple of weeks there, I know my way around pretty well. I love trying to pick out exactly where each shot was taken. *sigh* Oh well, seems like an excellent excuse for another trip!
You can find more of Lomokev’s Essaouira photographs here. (fez) has a fantastic Essaouira set too, in fact all of his Morocco sets are well worth checking out.
in Photography and Wanderlust.
Last week I came across some old National Geographics at the Salvation Army for the bargain price of 50 cents each. National Geographic is the only magazine I subscribe to; I’ve got more than four years of issues at home, and one day I hope to have a whole bookshelf full of yellow! I continually look back through old issues… the writing is timeless, and the photos are amazing inspiration. In a more perfect world, I would be a National Geographic staff photographer… or maybe an ‘Explorer in Residence’ - I’ve always throught that’s an amazing job title!The feature story from June 1984 issue is ‘By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent‘, written by Paul Theroux, and photographed by Steve McCurry (one of my all-time photography heroes). I made a beeline for this issue because India is top of my wanderlust list of places to travel to at the moment (as reflected my recent reading list no doubt!). Continue reading ‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’
in Photography and Wanderlust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to Carl Svendsen’s Souvenir Chart of Great Keppel Island, ‘Great Keppel is a big, dry, rugged and mostly uninhabited island with dangerous cliffs and foreshores’.The whole island is rather run down and scruffy, as though nothing has been done to it in years. Paint is flaking, signs fading in the sun and the jukebox has hits from the mid-nineties. In it’s most recent incarnation the resort attempts to attract families, but signs of its ‘party island’ past remain in the Wreck Bar on a Saturday night. From Friday to Sunday the island is busy with day trippers and weekenders, but for the rest of the week the place is empty, almost as though abandoned, and it feels quite odd. The exception is Island Pizza (a slice of paradise), which serves surprisingly good pizzas on a tastefully decorated deck populated by palm trees. This makes a welcome break from the mediocre staff meals at Keppel Haven, with classic rock DVDs (Bon Jovi appear to be a particular favourite) projected, slightly out-of-focus, onto a big screen.It’s odd that the resort is so neglected, given that the island is stunning. The beaches have fine white sand, which your feet sink right into, and all around there are amazing views out to other rugged, uninhabited islands. Hiking tracks (which sadly I didn’t have time to follow) lead up to a peak in the centre of the island and to remote beaches around its shores.
The purpose of the trip (at least the bit I was there for) was to try and locate spawning aggregations of coral trout and stripey sea perch, and to collect DNA and otolith samples from these species to determine when they spawn, and how populations in the island group are connected. We didn’t have much luck finding any spawning aggregations; they’re going to try again next month. To get the DNA and otoliths (which are essentially fish ears, inside their heads), we had a permit to spearfish on scuba. This is usually illegal, apparently because it would make it too easy to catch them…. Yeah right! I failed to spear a single fish the whole time! Which I think makes me the worst spearfisher ever. But at least my karma is intact I suppose. Once we’d (ok, the others) had caught them, we had to take fin clippings, remove their otoliths (gruesome photo warning)… fillet and barbeque them! It would be a shame to waste anything! We also did an ‘underwater fishing’ trial, which was basically fishing with a baited line like normal, but underwater. It was hilariously unsuccessful, all the fish we wanted to catch simply nibbled the bait off and left the hook behind, and one dumb other fish got itself hooked (and released) three times! All the bait in the water attracted a rather pesky remora and a tawny nurse shark, which just complicated matters further! I laughed lots.The days were pretty long, and it was super hot being out on the boat all day, but it was good fun and I learnt quite a bit from chatting to the guys. I flew back up to Townsville this morning, and am knackered. Back to the office tomorrow!
in Down Under, Underwater and Wanderlust.
Becks is a marine ecology PhD student, living in Queensland (Australia), Dumaguete (Philippines) and London (UK). Marinegirl is her online alter-ego. She dreamt her up as as super-gorgeous superhero saving the underwater world (if you've seen Captain Planet, you get the idea). She is not, and never will be, in the marines.