Random Idiocy

A few of you may be wondering why all these posts have suddenly appeared and why today. Well I have a good story for that. And for the rest of you I just have a silly story.

This week is my lecture recess. I spent the first half on Orpheus Island and I was suppose to spend the second half in Brisbane. Yesterday I arrived back and got already for a flight to Brisbane last night. I was going with Morgan and Scott but they were on their field trip still and wouldn't be back until like 2 hours before our flight. I was getting all heated up because I couldn't get a hold of them, I couldn't figure out if they had made reservations for a hostel and I didn't know if they were going to back on time. I was like really worked up. I had spent the day sorting out things with the housing department so I would get a meal rebate back for the week and I had spent half the day convincing my floormate to drive me and my friends to the airport. I even had one of my Aussie friends sitting in my room waiting with me to go to the airport. About 20 minutes before I was about to leave for the airport and still hadn't heard from them, something clicked in my head. I looked at my itinerary and guess what it said? THURSDAY APRIL 23rd. I was like noooooooooooooooo wayyyyyyyy ohhhhhhhhhhh myyyy goshhhhhhhhhh. I felt soooooooo stupid and it was hysterical. Here I was mad and confused at someone else and I had made the blooper. It was soooo funny. I don't think I have ever been so oblivious in my life!! It was really embarrassing to tell my floormate I had made the mistake about days because he had already been iffy about taking me. SO funny...WOW ..I still can't get over my stupidity.

Anyway I was really excited because that meant I got to sleep in my bed that night and also have all of Thursday to update my blog and relax. So to celebrate Dylan, Rhona and I went to the RA store and bought a TON of junk food haha. It was AWESOME, I love it here--there's always someone to laugh at you or with you and then go eat junk food : ) Yup so Rhona bought chips and soda, I bought popcorn and Dylan bought tim tams and gummy worms. Perfect!! We watched X-Men on my little computer in my room. Pretty good movie. It gets more random...then when we were done with the movie I opened my door and my other floormate is standing there. He wants to go to McDonalds. Rhona, Dylan and I are all exhausted (me especially--I woke up at 5AM that day and it was now 1230AM) anyway we agreed to go. So we went to one McDonalds--they didn't have an icecream sundays (which dylan really wanted) so we drove off to another one. We waited in their drive through line for a good half an hour. We get to the front of the line and Sameer (floormate) asks if they have icecream sundays-dude at the counter says no they close it off at quarter to one. Sameer tells him to go check, and luckily, very luckily they didnt turn it off yet. So-we all get icecream sundays. Delicious!!

If I'm not fat now I will be in a few hours...that must have been the most junk I've had since Easter (and that wasn't long ago). I'm definetly coming back to America ten pounds heavier and 10 pounds happier : )

Anyway, I am so glad the flight wasn't last night, what a fun night.

Alright well in a few hours I am really going to Brisbane. Morgan, Scott and I are going to do a surf adventure from friday through Saturday and then just tour Brisbane on Friday day and Monday. So expect to hear from me again Tuesday perhaps!

Hope you are all well.

Orpheus Island reef fishes field trip

Orpheus Island; my reef fishes class took a field trip to Orpheus Island Research Station from Sunday to Wednesday to do some fish censusing and learn how to do some research via snorkeling.

Sunday morning came way too fast. But somehow it was worth waking up that early. We had to meet the bus half way across campus at 530AM, yuck. It was a bit scary walking across the campus in complete darkness, but I felt a lot better with a flashlight (thanks Uncle Ray). It took us about an hour and a half to get to Ingham where we would take a boat to the island. It was a similar spot to where I had been to get to Pelorus Island, but not exactly. There were about 28 of us heading over so we had to go over in two shifts. When we go there they fed us breakfast, which was well needed. Then we settled in for a briefing of island rules and a low down on what we were going to be doing.

Then we basically suited up-wetsuits, hoods, gloves and all and headed for the boats! We were to perform some fish censuses via transects, point surveys and other means. I’m not sure how much detail I should give, just basically imagine a really nice snorkel with a bit more work put into it. We had to carry slates with us on all the snorkels to make note of the fish families and species that we were seeing. In some cases we had to record their behavior and in others we had to even catch them. To catch them we used clove oil which acts as an anesthetic and knocks them out for a few minutes. Surprisingly I caught the most!! This was definitely my favorite exercise.

You are probably wondering why there are no pictures. The worst thing ever happened, my camera case flooded! It was the first snorkel on the first day in the afternoon. It was drenched and I can tell you its never going to be okay again. I am so bummed but I guess I’ll just have to continue on without it. Hopefully my descriptions will get better.

What else? Tuesday night we all had to give seminars. I was really scared of this because the whole trip I really had a hard time IDing fish, mostly because I missed the trip the reef HQ aquarium where the class had practiced IDing fish earlier in the semester. But it turned out to be not as bad because my group (my partner and I) had only to talk about the clove oil exercise. Perfect! At least something turned out okay!

I tried to spend a lot of the days with new people, trying not to congregate with the Americans. This worked well as I didn’t have a snorkel buddy and the only other person without a buddy was German/Canadian and she socialized with the Australians. I was really glad of this—kind of why I hadn’t tried to find a partner till the last minute, but also I think no American wanted to be my buddy anyway. Oh well!! I also slept in a dorm with a bunch of Australians, a girl from Norway and one other American. I really enjoyed the company of these people. The girl from Norway was really entertaining and the other American is really motivated—she is doing an internship in Alaska when she gets home, it’s the NOAA Hollings Scholarship that I actually applied for last year and didn’t get. Though jealous, I felt like she deserves it—she’s really smart and down to earth. Who else? I also made friends with this girl from Melbourne, it turns out she lives in Uni Hall too and actually works in the dining hall. I hope that I can continue to talk to these people in class now too.

The snorkeling was really great. There are loads of coral booms at Orpheus and tons and tons of beautiful fish. On our last day we began the day by doing a mangrove snorkel. This was pretty cool—we swam among the mangroves on the surface of water at about one meter max. My buddy found a gigantic sting ray among some of the mangrove roots. It was huge, we didn’t get close because we didn’t want to scare it and get stabbed. The fish among the mangroves were quite different than out on the coral, though they did overlap, their abundances were quite opposite.

I really wish I had pictures to show you, but I will try to get some from my snorkel buddy. I will be there again at the end of May so hopefully by then I’ll have a camera of some sort.
What else? Island food was pretty good, though the cook took forever to cook. He would wait until we were like sitting at the table to start cooking, which sucked because one night we didn’t have dinner until 9PM! But really desert made up for it.

Wet suits smell bad and are horrible to put on in the morning when they are still half way wet.
This is the worst part however. Today one of my floormates came and was telling me about this incident that happened on Orpheus Island with an American girl and an Irukanji jellyfish (one of the most deadliest and smallest jellies in the world). At first I thought he was just trying to scare me and then he told me to check the Townsville Bulletin. I did and it turns out one of the people on the group that arrived as we left yesterday got stung by an Irukanji jellyfish. She had to be evacuated out on a helicopter lift and hospitalized. This happened at 1:30PM yesterday, I left the island at 8:30AM. I am so lucky that I wasn’t her. This girl—shes in my class—it totally could have happened on our trip. And the scary part was she had a full wetsuit on and somehow it still stung her. I have no idea if she will be okay and I don’t know who she is. But it really puts my camera problem into perspective….Please don’t worry about me though, I will protect myself as much as possible.

Busy week of school

This past week of class I had three papers, an exam and lab write up to hand in. It was by far the most hectic week so far, but I think I made it through just fine. I had a rough draft paper due for my coral class—it was on hermatypic and ahermatypic corals—corals with and without algal symbionts. I had a fishes paper due—on a fish family, Apogonidae, or cardinalfishes and their function in the ecosystem. I had to review someone else’s coral paper, I had a conservation practical to hand in and a midterm test for that class. Luckily I had no work for my rainforest class, though my teacher spent an entire lecture scaring us about our final exam. We got our exam dates this week—I have four exams spread out over a two week time period and I also have my final test on the final day of exams. Bummer!

The end of the week did come quickly enough and on Friday night my Aussie family was reunited, or most of us (no Miranda). We all went to Flinder’s street to go clubbing!! Morgan and I straightened each other’s hair and got all dolled up. It was a lot of fun. We first went to this club called Bully’s—they had sweet techno music but not much of a crowd which made everyone feel silly so we ended up going to this other place called Consortium. This was a lively place, but they took forever to open their dance floor. We decided to take pictures like crazy while we waited. One of the bartenders came over to us and put these sticker numbers on us. I guess the theme of the night was flirt like mad—basically you text this number if you see someone you like and the club puts the text up on this board for everyone to see. I guess I don’t live the single life very well because I took mine off before we hit the dance floor. It was a really fun night though dancing with all my friends and finally doing so in Townsville! At about 1:30, which is apparently early for a clubbing life we left and hit up McDonald’s. It was quite funny because I had promised my friend Miranda (who left early for lecture recess) that I would bring a blow up doll of her with us to the club. And when we were at McDonald’s this girl walks by with a blow up doll—I took a picture and have put it on facebook—tagging it as her. Haha.
Saturday night we all got together again for a movie night…well it actually started earlier that day when we all decided we wanted to go for a swim. When we got to the pool it was closed though for no apparent reason. After finding out it was closed for lecture recess we (Noor, Rhona, Dylan and I) took a nap under some trees. It was really peaceful—not having to worry about class work or running off somewhere. Then “The Americans” came along and we all decided we really needed icecream. So we all went back to Uni hall—they all loaded into the car to get icecream, but since there wasn’t enough room for all of us I went back to download movies for us to watch! It was awesome when they got back we loaded up on cookie dough and icecream and watched house bunny, a silly movie about an ex-playboy bunny who became a sorority mother. Then for the heck of it we went to dinner, though we were all stuffed from . Afterward we loaded up on more icecream and watched another movie. I love movie nights!!

Sunday morning I had to wake up at 4:30AM to go on my class field trip to Orpheus Island.

SYDNEY!! HOP TO IT

Day 1 Sydney continued…
So after we settled into our new residence for the next two days I called BridgeClimb—if it isn’t obvious this is the company that allows you to climb up onto the Sydney Harbor Bridge, which stands at 134 meters at its maximum. Just a bit of background, the bridge was finished in 1932, having been started in 1923. And it was designed by John Bradfield and cost over 10 million dollars. Luckily, though still sad, only 16 of the 1500 workers on the bridge were killed in construction.
After I made reservations for the night climb, we made our way in the general direction of the bridge—not really knowing where exactly we were supposed to climb from. We passed a beautiful church, the infamous Hyde Park, the botanical gardens and finally the Opera House! This was beautiful but loaded with people. We turned our heads to the left and saw the bridge! We made our way along the harbor side, passing delicious looking cafes and restaurants, weaving in and out of the historical “Rocks” (an old convict prison area) finally finding the BridgeClimb building. Excitedly we took loads of pictures finally making it in to get our tickets and suit up. We ended up going on an earlier trip (by 15 minutes) because apparently we were the only 3 in the later time—would have been cool to have a personal tour! Inside there were several stations to prepare us how to climb, ending with a simulator of the bridge’s height and how we would be connected as we climbed the stairs. At this point I told Scott and Morgan that I was going to count every stair—but I never actually remembered when we made it out to the climb.
All ready to go in our sweet bridge climb jumpers, gadgets and accessories we made our way to where the adventure began. At first it was a bit scary—the bottom was close enough that it was scary –I could feel my legs shake. I wanted to stop and look around but I couldn’t stop looking at my feet. I should note that I was at the front of the line because the guide said anyone scared of heights should be at the front. I am scared of heights but I also thought the best spot would be at the front so you don’t have to stare at everybody’s butts. In retrospect this was a very good decision because throughout the climb I was able to ask the guide questions and hear his stories. Oh oh we also all had these like ear pieces so we could hear our guide—it was a good thing to because even a meter behind him I couldn’t hear him half the time without it.
Anyway you are probably wondering about the spectacular view, and of course I have only one picture to show you because we weren’t allowed to bring cameras (or anything dangling for that matter). But it was spectacular. We could see endless lights, bustling cars, the glowing Opera House and even people still busy at work in their offices. It was a city, but it was a lot different than any other. Life was calm and relaxed and it was beautiful. The climb itself wasn’t too strenuous and it certainly wasn’t humid as they told us it would be. They had provided us with beenies and a zip up hoodie (of course attached to our bodies) that we could use if we got cold. So of course I used those. So the walk went like this…walk across the planks to where the arch forms—walk inside the hard sturdy concrete slabs holding the arch up-walk under the arch-stare at the Opera House—walk underneath the road with cars speeding overhead—walk up the steepest stairs ever becoming even with the road/smushed in between the road and train tracks (way cool when the train went by!)-walk up more steep stairs and finally on the arch! Climb the towering arch—take a break and stand on the platform directly above the road—feel the bridge shake a bit as cars zoomed below—climb the arch to its peak and scream at the top of your lungs!—smile for the solitary picture you would get at the end—stand in awe while listening to the stories of John the tour guide/ask a million questions if your name is Hilary—head back down in similar fashion. In all the climb took 3.5 hours, and not surprisingly my legs didn’t stop shaking until about an hour after my feet were firmly planted on the ground. It was amazing, to climb the bridge, see the view and hear the stories of its existence.
One story in particular was most impressive. An Irish worker who had been working on the bridge since they started one day fell off the bridge from 40meters. For anyone this is sure death, but this managed to make his body so ridge and pencil like that he penetrated the water only to surface a few seconds later. Miraculously alive he had only loads of bruises and probably a really bad headache. He was taken to the hospital, so lucky to be alive. 5 days later he was back to work on the bridge. Why you ask? He was one of 1500 men working while thousands more waited outside hoping for a job. If he didn’t go back to work he would have been easily replaced, but this was the time of depression even in Australia. He had to go back to work, either that or his family would have no means of getting food and protection. Crazy huh?
I would definitely recommend climbing the bridge to anyone who goes to Sydney. It was awesome.
We were all starving afterward because we hadn’t actually eaten properly since breakfast that morning. We searched the alley ways which I had heard were cheaper than the busy streets (not true) finally making our way back to the harbor. We found this delicious restaurant—City Extra—where we enjoyed the most needed meal ever. It was quite good but in the end it took our waiter 1 hour and a stare down before we got our bill and this was after Morgan stacked our cups and plates in disgust haha. Luckily the whole meal we were serenaded by a man playing accordion so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
We made the long walk back to our hostel via Hyde Park and the beautiful church. Sleep did not come so easily—there was definitely major partying going on somewhere nearby and our solo roommate came back at like 3AM drunk and loud.
Needless to say I was more than happy to get up when Scott’s alarm went off the next morning.
Day 2: 6:50AM rise
We made our way to the opera house for some pictures without any people in the background and then back to the City Extra for pancake breakfast with icecream! Yumm and our check came quite quickly today. The reason we were up so early today was we were taking the 8AM ferry across the harbor to the Toronga Zoo!
This was really exciting, the zoo was huge! There was an entire exhibit for water animals that was probably larger than most aquariums—it has leopard seals, sea lions, seals, penguins, pelicans and other cute fuzzies. There was numerous exhibits on birds, an entire section for reptiles-poisonous snakes and frilled lizards, komodo dragons and more traditional animals like lions, tigers, zebras, giraffes and a pigmy hippo (my absolute favorite!) And of course a Tasmanian devil! It was animal lovers’ heaven. We spent four hours there and easily could have spent more time but we wanted to make it to the aquarium. We took the ferry back to the Sydney harbor and grabbed a cheap lunch at McDonald’s—this wasn’t so popular with Morgan and Scott—Morgan was deprived of French fries and Scott and his sandwhich were attached by a kamakazi (spelling) sea gull. Luckily starbucks was not far and it saved the day—yummmm.
We hit up some really awesome tourist shop and then jumped on another ferry headed for Darling Harbor—home to the infamous Nemo movie and of course the Sydney Aquarium. This was a pretty kick butt aquarium. I met some animals I have never seen before including a lung fish--human’s ancient ancestor, dugongs—Australian equivalent to a manatee, the blue-ringed octopus, a mermaid (just kidding) and FINALLY our first platypus (actually 2!). The aquarium also took us about 4 hours to get through especially because the platypus doing his wild zipping turning dance caught our attention for ages. Ultimately I had to buy a sweet t-shirt to remember this trip from the aquarium.
For dinner we were planning on going to a restaurant called Wagamama’s that Casie (a friend from Cornell) recommended. But it turned out to be less vego friendly than we thought, thanks anyway Cas! Instead we resorted to an expensive but delicious looking restaurant in “The Rocks”. AmoRoma, as it was called, served us a delicious candle light pesto flavored dinner, but unfortunately the servings were only expensive and meager. Fortunately however we had waffle Sundays on the mind and knew the perfect place to satisfy that hunger. We enjoyed them on the harborside while listening to this man sing and watched a whole bunch of gay drunk Australians walk by after their cruised ended. It was super entertaining, until this creepy creepy creepy guy came over and started asking us for money. He was not part of the cruise ps. He threatened to throw Scott in the river, it was odd and scary and none of us knew what to do because we didn’t want to make him any more mad for fear of what he would do. Finally he went away –stood infront of the poor singer probably harassing him too because we could hear his voice quiver. But we found that the perfect chance to get the heck out of there –and we headed back to our hostel.
Day 3:
Again we had an early start because we were headed for Bondi beach! We planned on taking the bus there but actually had no real clue were to get the bus or what time it left. We finally found a bus stop and found out we had just missed the soonest bus, but found this the perfect opportunity to go find breakfast. After being treated so wonderfully by the City Extra for the last two days, this mornings breakfast was a large disappointment. We found this little café on one of the side streets, saw that it wasn’t crowded so we sat down. $6.50 for a fruit salad the size of my palm—so not worth it. Basically I am going to have to disagree with the Lonely Planet Guide Book—alley food is definitely not better than main streets.
We ended up getting on a bus that took the long way to Bondi—but it didn’t actually go all the way to the Beach. There was an older woman on the first bus we got on that offered help to us in getting on the right one. She was very sweet—she even offered her home to us, well sort of. But it was nice to take the long way because we got basically a free tour of the non-commercialized part of the city—loads of beautiful homes and great views. When we finally got to the beach front we were awed by the atmosphere—what a great place to be Easter eve! We made our way toward a street that the woman form the bus had recommended—deciding not to follow the Lonely Planet book—and it was a good thing too because we found a cute little hostel not in the book, Surfside hostel.
It was nicely decorated inside—kind of a mermaid superhero scene and the guy at the desk was a lot friendlier than the guy at City Resort Hostel from the nights before. We were told we could even borrow water equipment like boogie boards. We were all excited about this so we slip, slop and slathered our way to the beach. Super surprisingly, the water was COLD but the waves were great. We were out there most of the early afternoon and by the time we were done I was so cold and managed to get some rashes on my legs and belly from the board and salt water that can still be seen today (eek!) Tired, but content we made our way back to the hostel for a nice hot shower (well needed because we dared not shower at the other hostel). It felt so good.
Next we decided to be tourists and did a bit of shopping! I managed to find a cute new purse/wallet and an Aussie hoodie! Next up, meal time, as you can only imagine from the pathetic breakfast we had that morning. We found this awesome looking place, with decent prices—the Bondi Bistro—and what a good move! I ate an entire large pizza by myself—Margarita style—SO good!
That evening we were going to take a walk to Coogee along this scenic route from Bondi-but it got dark too fast! What is this America? We ended up playing on the beach all night –burying ourselves and making funny shapes and even attempting to make a Easter picture for you all. To continue with tradition we went to Hungry Jacks (the equivalent of burger king) to get an icecream cone. It must be something about icecream and creepers because we found another creepy pissed off man asking for money, luckily we weren’t his victims that night.
Sleep that night did not come so well—we were sharing a room with 4 kids from the UK and two mystery people. The mystery people came in late that night and some of the UK people pounded on the door at all hours of the night.
Day 4: Easter!!!
Early rise 6AM because we were headed to Coogee!! It was definetly the perfect time to go on the walk because the sun was just rising and the view was terrific. I am so glad we waited until the morning. We were greeted by the Sydney runners and many cute little dogs along the way. It was about an hour and a half walk—though probably a bit longer because we stopped ever second to take a picture. We decided that we are all moving to Sydney and are going to leave there. You should have seen the water, it was picture perfect and the sky colors behind it –awestriking. It was cool to see Sydney life at its norm-there were even surfers out hiting the morning waves. How wonderful would it be to wake up to that kind of life? We passed two beaches in between—McKeay and Bronte—Bronte had a sea pool that was basically filled by the ocean but you could do laps in it. Way cool!! In the Easter spirit Scott had bought us all cadburry eggs, which we happily enjoyed on our wonderful walk. Our walk bypassed us through a cemetery overlooking the ocean. This is the picture at the top of my blog—fyi –I want to be buried there. We finally made it to Coogee and sat and enjoyed the peacefulness before heading back.
When we got back we had just enough time to take a quick shower, pack up and get out before we had to check out. We then had planned to have breakfast at this place called the Gelati Bar that had mouth watering pastries in its window. Everyone, and I mean everyone, stopped by the window when they passed. Morgan and I split some French toast with strawberries and an omelet with tomatoes and cheese. Scott couldn’t resist having more icecream and got crepes with icecream. We then all split a delicious piece of rum cake and a chocolate eclaire.
After snapping a final picture we jumped on a bus back to the city. Here is where trouble finally hit. It was Easter day and we had no booking for a hostel. We called a million places not expecting everything to be booked, but it was. Finally we called a YWCA that had a triple for $120. Settling on this we made our way there. Our room was amazing, we were so excited not to be in a hostel, so excited to have real sheets and a towel and even the free soap! Needless to say we crashed on our beds for a well needed afternoon nap. Finally waking up happily we decided we had to go into the city one last time. On our way we passed through the Anzac Memorial and the Botanical Gardens. The gardens were gorgeous—there were amazing flowers, trees and the mixture of garden and city was spectacular. Inside the garden was the government building—basically a castle—we could have had a tour but we came too late. Oh well we will just have to go back! We then made our way to the Opera House because we still hadn’t touched it. This was fun, lots of people were crowded around, there was even a wedding going on. It did not appear that there was an opera going on though, bummer. Our mission for the night was to make it to Darling Harbour to the Lindt café, yes an entire café for Lindt chocolates! First we stopped at this bar/night club for a ten dollar dinner, It was pretty good, though after we saw a cockroach on the floor. Haha. Finally making it to the Lindt shop we were all in ecstatic bliss. What a great way to spend Easter! We each had a chocolate shake and purchased a few Lindt balls. We devoured our milkshakes on the Darling Harbor pier watching the lights dance on the water. Sadly at about 9 we decided we should probably head back as we had to catch a ride to the airport the next morning at 520AM. When we got back we turned our TV on, just to enjoy all aspects of our 120 dollar room. We watched Mr and Mrs Smith and enjoyed nice hot showers. It was the perfect way to end our trip to Sydney!
Day 5
We headed back to Sydney on a 7:10 flight and my friends Noor and Rhona were there to pick us up! It was nice to see them, but sad to be back in reality. What a nice trip!
We pretty much had done everything we wanted, we didn’t do much as far as nightlife stuff but I think we definitely did the worth stuff in Sydney. The only thing I am bummed we didn’t get to was Manly beach—but hey they just means I’ll have to get back someday!

Easter Weekend

To infinity and beyond!!!!!!!!!! er-- to Sydney!!

Day 1:
Morgan, Scott and I set out for the airport at 8AM from campus. It was nice not to have to get up super early. Our plane left around 10:30--there were loads of people in the airport and pretty much all of them were headed to Sydney. It must be the Easter destination! We arrived in Sydney clueless as to where we were going to stay. We had decided to "wing-it" on accomodation as we weren't sure where our days' travels would bring us. We ended up calling a hostel that advertised free pick up from the airport--in the end it cost us each 12 dollars, but it turned out to be one of the cheapest (for obvious reason) hostels in the city--a total of $37 for two nights. Our first site of the city was quite interesting. We loaded into a 10 passenger van with some Germans, perhaps Canadian?, French, Russian..who knows what else. And our driver was some sort of Spanish who spoke crazily to someone on his radio while he drove recklessly and carelessly in odd directions--bolting around. But it was a good way to see the city and do some good people watching. We were the last people to get dropped off and we were partly out of the busy area. The hostel looked a little uninviting from the outside and the guy at the reception was pretty dead. Anyway it was cheap, the bathrooms were drenched in water and other questionable substances. We got in a room with only one other person--a guy traveling from New Zealand who we met at like 3AM our first night there. We believe he had wanted to have the room to himself because he brought in two girls....
Anyway we decided to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge but more to come on that...I'm off to Brisbane till Monday..hopefully I'll finish the story of Sydney later!

Rainforest Ecosystems Field Trip

April 3-5th

This weekend was our course field trip to the Paluma Rainforest. Honestly I wasn't excited about it but it turned out to be a lot better than I thought. Though still nothing compared to a weekend on the ocean : )

Friday we drove to the top of Mt. Spec about an hour and a half away from Townsville, in which direction I still don't know. The teacher who drove us was a terrible driver. We were all pretty much scared out of our minds. It was manual drive, and I'm pretty sure this woman had never driven that way before. As you can only imagine, driving up a mountain over 1,000 meters in elevation around crazy twists and turns with other cars coming at you on a street only wide enough for a single (small) car--was an accident waiting to happen. Luckily the accident did wait to happen and we made it up alive. The night didn't get much more eventful than that. We arrived too late to do any rainforest exploring, as the canopy of the rainforest blocks out a lot of light so even though it was 4 PM it was as dark as 7PM (in winter). Basically we IDed plants all night, which turned out to be pretty successful after our teacher showed us how to use this computer key rather than our textbooks (which was utter failure).

Saturday we began the day with 730AM breakfast. By the way, we all had to take turns helping the solitary cook clean up after each meal. It is also important to note, here in Australia you have five meals a day. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. Its wonderful really : ) After breakfast the group of us who had arrived late afternoon the day before went out with our teacher to learn about open tall forests (I think?). It was cool because it wasn't the rainforest, so it was something new than what we had seen the last field trip we took to the rainforest. Highlights were: morning tea (water and 3 delicious brownies (probably only I had 3 of them)), the "fart" plant -which smelled surprisingly like a fart, the ecotone-where rainforest meets tall open forests, and a tree that had gotten struck by lightening.

It has escaped me as to what went on Saturday afternoon, but I'm sure it was more plant IDing and project planning. Oh yeah, we did go out into the rainforest and began our project work, managing to get through one quadrat in an hour. Saturday night I drank a lot of tea, discovering that milk+tea+sugar=very good. We also had to give mini group presentations on our projects, even though we really didn't know much to say.

So my group project is about these things called lenticels, which are basically part of tree "skin" that help the tree "breathe" when its in water logged areas. It is our hypothesis that buttresses (you know those groovy exposed roots on those huge trees) also serve as a breathing mechanism for the tree. We basically wanted to set up a survey to try and figure out if our assumptions were true or not, hence we set up transects near a stream and those atop a slope to see if lenticel distribution changed between quadrat types.

Anyway, Sunday we got up early again and spent the majority of the day (3-4 hours) finishing our quadrats, eating scones and swinging from vine epiphytes in the trees.

I should also tell you the toilets were pretty sweet. They don't flush..simply everything drops to the ground. But they have a fan system that like blows up delicious smelling smell (honestly delicious-like flowery) to keep things from stinking up. (I know you wanted to know all that)

On our way home Sunday we stopped at this infamous place called the Fruity Mango or something like that (I guess it wasn't that famous I can't even remember the name). They have all sorts of yummy non-dairy icecream, slushy-type things. Yummm yumm. In the back of this place they have their own orchard where they grow the fruits that they put into their icecreams. I went back there to check it out, there were these really big ugly fruits called...Jack something, and the coolest part was--these ants had made a nest in the plant's leaves! My teacher wripped it open and all these ants started pooring out! SO cool, until you get too close, then its disgusting. The odd part about these ants is that you can eat their butts, I guess it tastes pretty good, but being a vego (Australian for vegetarian) I'll never find out!

RAD adventure day 2

If you haven't read about day one of my dive weekend, check that out first(see post below.) If you are in the right place...well here we go : )

Day two I woke up at 6 AM--if there's one thing I love about camping its that you wake up so early and aren't even tired. Its like its just the way of the world wake with the sun and go to bed when it goes down. I love that. Anyway, dive 4 took place before breakfast. This morning we were heading out to do our deep dive. No pics from this dive because they said we wouldn't see much this deep. True, not much was going on that deep. We worked our ways down to 82 feet. BUT I did see a barracuda swim by! They are like really long fish, maybe 3.5 feet and pretty thick beasts. While we were down there we were suppose to check to see if we got narked-basically when you go to depths like this the nitrogen level in your blood stream becomes so high that you almost act drunk. You become a lot slower at simple tasks and do stupid things. One time (not this dive) I took my regulator out of my mouth --for no apparent reason. I think I was narked then. Anyway, we were told (above water) we would be counting forward and backward to 10 underwater. Honestly I think I did it better underwater than above. After this our instructor cracked some eggs underwater (using my head to crack it actually) It was really cool. Because the pressure is so strong at this depth the egg yolk actually stayed together. It looked like a little planet underwater. We passed it around -squeezed it, whatever it didn't break apart. Pretty cool, hey?

Oh random aside--I know Maggie(my twin!) will appreciate this. I couldn't find my one piece bathing suit when I was packing for the trip so I had to wear a bikini. For any of you that know me well enough this was a big deal because I'm pretty insecure about the way I look. But as I'm sure Maggie will point out--Australia is helping me grow and change, *sarcastic wohoo...*

After a delicious breakfast (managed to spill on my wetsuit) and a 2 hour interval we set sail for the opposite end of the island. WHAT A VIEW. I was dumbfounded by the view. (Sorry to say I don't think the pictures do it justice-see the picture at the top of the blog webpage) We were out to do a drift dive. Basically jump in the water and let the current take you for a ride! This was a great dive, didn't have to put much effort into kicking and saw a lot of great reef fish. We also covered a lot of the island, almost making it back to where we started.

Here we took a little rest, sunbathing on the top of the boat. Wow that feels good : ) and we had a bit of carrot cake that the skippers wife prepared (never met her though). After a good few jumps off the top we made our last dive, which was simply a fun dive. Scott and I went out went one direction on the reef and came back a bit deeper then navigated our way back to the boat (or pretty closely!)

Sadly after this we had to head back to reality--I mean the mainland. It was sad to see the weekend fly by so fast. But it was SO much fun. Definetly competing for the best weekend yet with my Cairns trip.

When we got back to shore we traveled a ways and had a good little barbeque, finally heading back to the dive shop. I had to wait for my gear to get cleaned and fill out our dive logs. But the dive crew were all there and basically begged us to come back again. I think they really had a lot of fun with us. They gave us (the americans and I) shirts to keep and continued to ask me to come back and do my rescue diver course with them. We'll see!

WHAT A GREAT WEEKEND!! : )

blast to the past-Pelorus Island adventure day 1

Last weekend was a weekend from heaven. I went with a local dive shop, Remote Area Dive, consisting of 8 divers including my friends Morgan and Scott("the americans") and 5 dive crew people.

We had to be up at 530am to be picked up by the dive shop. Of course the night before was our townhouse party so it was the worst night ever to want to get to bed early. I set my alarm for 430 so that I could wake up, maybe have a shower, and be ready. Naturally, my alarm never went off, but somehow my body woke up at 5am anyway so I was OK. I opened my balcony door to see how dark/cold it was that morning. To my surprise a delightful smell of beer and strange noise of drunken voices greeted me, the party I guess wasn't over. Crazy Australians.

We had to drive about an hour and a half to Ingham, a town North of Townsville, where we would catch a boat out to the island we would be staying on. To my happiness, breakfast was provided and a good hour nap awaited me. When we finally got to Ingham we had to take a small PWC to the bigger boat (maybe 40 ft. long). It was a very bumpy 30 minute ride across the ocean to the island, fortunately so bumpy that I didn't get sea sick. That proved to be consistent for the whole trip. The view was stunning--open ocean for as far as your eyes could see-except forward where the islands were. The island we were staying on is called Pelorus Island, one island of a chain of islands that make up the Palm Islands.

We had to take the dingy boat into the island because as you can imagine around the island was rather shallow. This was fairly entertaining as we had to anchor the big boat, which came out of the sediment several times. After choosing our tents (got one to myself!) and throwing in our swags (the most comfortable sleeping bag in the world!) we suited up for our first dive!! WOHOO!

I didn't mention that for Scott and I this was also an advanced certification dive course, Morgan wasn't interested in this quite yet though. So our first dive we practiced normal open water skills--clearing our masks, sharing air, neutral buoyancy etc. Then we did an underwater naturalist tour--basically swim around and enjoy nature (but DO NOT touch). As you can see from the pictures it was beautiful, loaded with corals and fish! On our surface interval the boat skipper let us jump off of the roof into the ocean. This was totally cool. Then we got back in the water for a second dive which was our underwater navigation dive. We each had to practice kick cycles and then apply it to navigating our way in a square. we all did well and even got a fist pump from the instructor (I assume this to be a good thing). Then we just used up our tanks on some more underwater exploring. Saw some cool fish, nudibranchs and even a sea sponge! This was cool because the instructor picked it up and we got to hold it. It was kind of soft and slimy like Willy (the Wrasse in Cairns). I LOVED THIS, its so cool to be able to interact with the underwater creatures!

At this point we were starving divers and went back to the island for lunch. Let me tell you, some days it really pays to be a vegetarian. The food was delicious! I got a whole quiche pie to myself, an entire avacado(delicious!) and some random veggies. YUM! We sat around and chatted each other up for a while, I guess my funny side came out and people started to realize what a joker I am (more to come on that later). The Americans and I decided to explore the island--we were told there was a "goat trail" up the mountain that we could go on. Oh ya, there were goats on the island! Little and wicked cute! Anyway the goat trail turned out to be a real mess, omg. I was in my Jesus sandals and the Americans were in their watershoes, but we definetly should have been in proper hiking boots. The path was really nonexistent, we kind of played a guessing game as to where the path actually was, avoiding spots with huge spider webs and even larger actual spiders. We finally made it to one huge bolder, a good look out point. But i made the executive decision that a better lookout point was instore for us a bit higher. I should mention at this point that there are crazy ants all over the place here that get on you and bite you. They were all over me and my Jesus sandals. Ouch ouch ouch!! We climbed higher and finally found a satisfying look out point--we could see the boat and the beautiful vast ocean. We thought the hike up was miserable, but the hike down was worse. Thinking we could just wing it on the whole path thing we ended up in a thicket full of palm size spiders,it was an absolute nightmare. To top it off as I was running away from two ginormous spiders I ran into a plant infested by the nasty ants and they were soooooooooooo mad at me. Morgan would swear I had 10 on my back and they were ALL biting me. She smacked my back as hard as she could--it was probably the most horrible experience I've had in a while.

We all rushed into the water upon making it back to camp. Utterly refreshing, perfect! While we were just relaxing in the water out in the distance Morgan and I saw a huge splash in the water and a huge tail flick out. WOOOOOOOOAHHH. We think it was a whale or something. Then a few minutes later we saw bubbles out of the water and fish jumping out repeatedly. This occured in several other places in the next half hour. Somebody, and somebody big was out there feeding. How sweet is that??

After a nice stroll down the beach to try to get a better look at the point where we first saw the huge tail, it was time to go on our night dive!!! Wicked. This was an awesome dive. We saw a squid darting around in the glow of our lights--it even ran into our instructor. Then we swam around a few reefs and a shark swam between my legs!!! Don't get your panties in a bunch, it was just a reef shark, maybe 3 feet long. But it still spooked me a bit! Cool, hey? We ID'ed it later as a white tip reef shark (though I've actually only heard of black tipped reef sharks, oh well). What else? Lots of cool fish obviously, overall a REALLY cool and non-stressful night dive. I wish you were there dad!

Dinner awaited us after the night dive, some yummy veggie curry for me. Then we played around with marshmallows. The Australians have two flavors --white and red (raspberry perhaps?) and they are really small. Americans are definetly better but oh well. This is where my goofiness came in. People weren't really talking so I took it upon myself to lighten up the mood. I made a contest to see who could get the most golden brown 'shmellow. It was only two of the dive crew that actually participated but it was quite fun and entertaining. After they failed miserably for a while I decided to enter my own contest. Then one of the dive crew found a stick with tons of branches and decided to stick a marshmallow on each one of them, it didn't work so well but everyone got a marshmallow off of it. Of course this led into a fluffy bunny contest, where you put as many marshmallows into your mouth and each time say fluffy bunny. One kid bet I could get 22. Pathetically and drool covered I made it to 5. Fail. It was a fun night.

For those of you that think I'm long winded I'll stop here with this adventure. For those who are entertained still --day two awaits you in my next post. cya there : )