Hello from Narrabri

I'm back at Narrabri again and finding some time to update this blog as the computer system in Sydney seems to be down. I'm starting to relax again after a crazy few weeks. Last week I spent Monday night out, had a late-night rehearsal on Tuesday, gave a lecture at Sydney uni on Wednesday evening (that had to last two hours!), played music on Thursday, my honours student finished his thesis on Friday (I hope he does okay), bought lots of music from the city on Saturday, played in the chamber concert on Sunday (which was really exciting - a proper chamber concert!), went to see La Boheme at the Opera House on Monday, had a meeting all day on Tuesday, flew to Narrabri and now I'm here!!

Wow, that was a long sentence!!

The opera was wonderful. The singing was amazing and we had seats on the second-to-front row! I'm now trying to finish everything off before going to the UK next week. Apparently it will be cold.

An update - finally

Sorry that I haven't posted a blog entry for ages. I spent last week ill in Parkes (not fun on the 4pm to 4am shift!) and now am trying to catch up on everything. The exciting news is that I've now basically finished off everything relating to my permanent residency. I now have a NSW driving licence (which has a picture of a waratah on it) and got the final visa stuck into my passport! I managed to play through the Brahms clarinet trio yesterday in rehearsal without embarrassing myself too much - I have a lot of practice to do before the concert on Sunday - and am giving a two hour lecture this evening. I've only just finished writing the talk.

The Loch Ness platypus!

I've always wanted to see a platypus in the wild, but had resigned myself to the thought that they are much too rare and, to see one, I'd have to be very patient and spend days sitting near a likely river. On the third day of our trip we saw one! I'm still rather excited!

For the entire road trip we'd been passing signs saying "Cradle Mountain 50km" with Alice enthusiastically trying to convince us to turn off and head up to the mountain. Anna and I had ignored her. However, on our last day we had to decide between seeing the wild North-West coast of Tasmania, or heading inland back to the mountains. Alice won! We first went off to "Boat Harbour" to get some breakfast. The views of the perfectly clear ocean were beautiful. We ambled around a deserted beach, got very wet when a wave came from nowhere while I was looking at the brightly coloured sea anemones in the rock pools and then decided to continue our hunt for breakfast elsewhere. We drove through Scarborough to Burnie where we had an enormous breakfast before continuing to the Burnie cheese factory. It was good! We spent a happy half-hour tasting all the different cheeses and honey before setting off again towards the Cradle Mountain national park.

We were soon back in the "Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area". The wikipedia article on this area doesn't seem very good (maybe we should update it?), but does give the interesting piece of information that "The Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park is a significant location of Tasmania's endemic species - 40-55% of the park's documented alpine flora is endemic." I'm sure that you'll also be extremely excited to learn that the Cradle Mountain area also has "Australia's only deciduous tree" which has the exciting name of Nothofagus gunni. Now you know!!

Anyway, Anna skillfully drove the car down a very narrow road with a few tour buses coming in the opposite direction (I must admit that I shut my eyes a few times as our car seemed to be about to plunge over the edge) until we reached Dove Lake. It was raining and misty! We went to register that we were going on a walk, tried to find some dry clothes (and failed) and headed off to hike around the lake. Wow! The photo on the link that I provided above shows a beautiful, calm lake with some gorges mountains around (the mountain at the back is Cradle Mountain). We had wind, freezing rain, mist amongst the snow capped mountains and huge, thundering waterfalls that were pouring off the mountain sides. It was exciting. We kept imagining huge monsters that lived in the lake and had a huge shock when we stopped for a very wet picnic to spot a shape in the water moving towards us. It was a platypus! It didn't stay on the surface for long, but it was swimming less than 10m away from us!

We also walked through wonderful forests where the trees were completely covered in fungi and mosses. It was stunning and the walk has really made me want to get back to this area in Tasmania to have a go at the Overland Track. Anybody want to come with me? I recommend packing something waterproof!

After completing our walk we had assumed that it would only take us an hour or two to get to Launceston where we could find some wineries in the local area. However, our time estimation didn't take into account my extremely slow driving. There was one stretch of road where I think that I averaged about 30km/hr due to the number of 180 degree bends in the road. I enjoyed myself. Alice felt sick. We went to see a huge dam, drove through a beautiful farming area and ended up in "Paradise". I'm glad to be able to report that Paradise is very green, very wet and doesn't have a tea shop. Unfortunately, all the wineries were closing by the time we reached the Launceston area and so we simply went to the airport and chatted about what a great holiday we had just had.

(P.S. the flight back was quite funny as the guy in the seat behind us took a fancy to Alice and Anna and got quite excited showing them photographs of his house - "This is my sink", "This is where I keep my tractor" ... I've decided that I like Tasmania!!)

The Montezuma Falls and the "Place you come to die"

We had parked our car at the top of a steep hill because I was too cowardly to drive our little 2-wheel drive car over wet boulders to the car park at the bottom and had set off walking along an old tram line with deep gorges on one side and steep mountain sides on the other. The tram line was apparently opened in 1896 to carry ore from the mines to Zeehan. It was stunning. The main purpose was to see the Montezuma Falls. Depending upon which website you find, the Montezuma Falls are either Tasmania's highest waterfall or "one of the highest". Anyway, the falls are spectacular - over 100m from the top the bottom. To get the best view you have to walk across a swing bridge that spans the gorge.

On return we all got covered in mud and soaked (it wasn't actually raining, but, in places, it felt as if we were walking through a river). The conversation was slightly unusual as the ladies had refused to use a perfectly respectable dunny when setting out - although apparently it was okay on return :)

I was relieved to discover that the car hadn't disappeared down the mountain side, we tried (and failed) to dry our socks and then continued our drive North. Anna and Alice continued perfecting their two part renditions of the Samuel Webbe's "Ave Verum" and Franck's "Panis Angelicus" whilst we drove through some beautiful mountainous scenery.

We decided to spend the night in a pub/hotel in "Wynyard' - a town on the North coast. We arrived, checked in and then went down to the pub restaurant for dinner. We shared our section of the restaurant with a large number of Harley-Davidson bikers and enjoyed some good ales (and, of course, cider, for Alice) and food. Later the ladies decided that they were really going to embarrass me and ask the "live music" guitarist and singer whether they could sing Panis Angelicus (or something similar) to the bikers and miners.

In the end, Alice decided that she'd try and teach me how to dance (she really wanted to dance with a guy with a HUGE beard, but although he did keep smiling at her they didn't get a dance). Anna was more "fortunate"! Whilst Alice was trying not to laugh at my dancing, "Neil" came up to tell Anna how beautiful she was, asked whether she took drugs and was explaining about his time in gaol. He seemed rather shocked that we'd come to Wynyard on holiday. We'd asked him what there was to do in the area and he told us that this was where "people came to die".

Day 2 in Tasmania

I finished my last blog post with us just getting into Queenstown. People don't seem to like Queenstown. We were warned multiple times about what a terrible place it was. My guide book states "In certain lights, multicoloured boulders - on the hillsides, denuded through a combination of felling, wildfire, erosion and poisonous fumes from the smelter - reflect the Sun's rays and turn to amazing shades of pink and gold ... many Tasmanians view the place as a haunting reminder of the devastating impact humans can have on their environment". However, it was great. It had a wonderful old-town charm with many "historic" buildings. Unfortunately, we didn't see any shades of pink and gold because it was dark when we arrived and raining when we left. Instead, I had the best steak of my life in an old hotel restaurant while Alice tried out the various Tasmanian ciders (she was getting homesick for Devon). We had the option of "home-maid pie [sic]", but turned that down. In the evening we played scrabble until we were too tired to think.

I woke early in the morning to go for a walk and have a large breakfast. During breakfast I chatted to a copper miner who increased my knowledge of copper mining from "nothing" to "not a lot". I now know that there is something that you can't do in the rain which is a bit of a problem in Tasmania. However, I never did work out what it was. He recommended that we spent the rest of our holiday seeing a wind farm on the North Coast. He said that it was the most interesting thing in Tasmania.

Finally :) the ladies woke up and came in for breakfast. We then drove across some amazing scenery (with clouds in the valleys below us) towards Strahan (pronounced something like Strawn). We had high hopes for Strahan. Everyone had told us that this was a wonderful place to visit. Strahan is a lovely port on the Macquarie Harbour, "on Tasmania's forbidding west coast". It is "the last stop before a long stretch of ocean to Patagonia. Sometimes considered the loneliest place on earth ..." We parked the car and found the visitor centre which had a sign saying "Wherever you've been, whatever you've seen - this is a totally new experience. Hailed as the world's first magical realist building, the Strahan Wharf Centre is described as an ark with a novel inside. Telling the stories of southwest Tasmania, it has met with an enthusiastic response from visitors. Miss this Centre and you will miss the best Strahan has to offer." I'm sad to report that we did decide to miss the best that Strahan had to offer. However, we did find a rock! It was an exciting rock! The rock also had a sign on it which told us that the rock was discovered by Jonathon Withers who found that "after a three hour study of the rock's surface, a trance like state would evolve". Anna and I left Alice staring at the rock, but she seemed to get into a strange state after only a few minutes (see photo) and therefore we thought that Strahan was a bit too exciting for us and we'd better move on.

We went to the coast. It was stunning (the first time that I've been in the Roaring Forties - it was windy!). The rain had stopped for a while, the beach was deserted (except for a big dog that suddenly turned up and took a fancy to Anna). We ambled down the beach, walking up the sand dunes looking for rare mutton birds that nest in the area (we didn't see any) and trying to understand why the sea (for a small stretch) was completely black (our current theory is a strange type of sea-weed).

Back into the car and we now drove North through "buttongrass moorland" keeping an eye out for wombats (which, we learnt, have cube-shaped droppings). We didn't see any wombats, but did see heaps of wallabies and pademelons (and dead Tasmanian devils). We stopped in small towns and villages before ending up in Roseberry where the "Creative Anachronism" festival was going on! Unfortunately, we didn't have time to stop and take part in the festival. Instead we stocked up on food and then set off on a four hour hike through the rainforest. It was beautiful (and eerie when Alice and Anna decided to sing chromatic scales a semitone out from each other). I'm running out of energy at the moment to continue this posting so I'll leave us in the rainforest and continue the adventure tomorrow ...

Tasmania!

Wow! Another wonderful holiday. I think that the word which summarises the whole holiday must be "water". I woke at about 5:30am on Friday to discover that my kitchen was flooded. This is a complete mystery. The top kitchen drawer was completely flooded, the floor was soaking, but no water was in the sink, coming through the ceiling or from the walls. I was terribly annoyed! Anyway, I drained as much as possible, turned off the water (to discover a pipe about to explode in the garden - which it did a few days later) and sent a work colleague a panicky email before running off to meet Alice and catch the train to the airport (meeting Anna en-route at Central).

I like my travel companions. We all decided that we'd prefer a window seat on the flight instead of sitting together and so were rather spread out through the plane. Alice, getting the short straw and sitting over the wing! We had a great flight over the bays South of Sydney before the clouds arrived and we had a fun bumpy flight into Hobart. (By the way, the photos on this page are a bit of a mix. I've rudely stolen quite a few of Anna's and Alice's photos - simply because they are better than mine. I can't find out on "blogger" how to give credits, but the good ones are probably not mine.) It was raining in Hobart. Apparently, it is almost always raining in Hobart! Anyway, after Anna had managed to extract herself from the quarantine dog that had caught her trying to smuggle in an apple, we went off to find our car. Anna was terribly embarrassing (actually, I decided by the end of the holiday that Alice was even more embarrassing) and asked the car rental agent -- whilst trying to convince the agent to let her drive the car -- whether they could recommend some good wineries that we'd be driving past (this is a question that I don't believe you should ask car rental personnel). Oh well, she did get signed on and drove us into the town/city of Hobart. It's gorgeous. We walked around the boats in the harbour, had a terrific fish-and-chips, bought an old map of Hobart in an Antique shop and then started on our long drive across into the wilderness.

What a drive! I must admit that I expected that the main road across Tasmania would be quite fast and well made. In fact, it was small, windy, full of holes and great fun to drive on. We started off following the Derwent river inland through little towns like New Norfork, Gretna, Hamilton and Ouse. We stopped at Ouse, on the river Ouse, to buy some sweets, to be told that we were still many hours from our destination and to look around a little church. It really did feel as if we were driving through England! I haven't seen any countryside look so green for ages. Also, buildings were old! It was beautiful. We kept driving .... Alice and Anna would pass the time singing in two part harmony before we'd screech to a halt because we'd seen a great view that needed photographing, or a dead Tasmanian devil, or a live echidna!!! As we got into the wilderness the scenery became stunning! As a sign said: "If you're travelling West, you're venturing deeper into the wet, wild, west coast wilderness, which receives an astonishing 2.5-3metres of rainfall a year. Its foundations are billion year old quartzite rock, formed in primeval seas. It's a land of ancient rainforests, swift dark rivers and rugged mountains."

Wow!

I decided during the drive that there was no way that I'd be able to describe the scenery (and now, after cooking and eating half a kilogram of kangaroo, I'm feeling to fat even to try). The views were stunning. We were driving amongst mountains about 1.5km high that were covered in rainforest and with huge waterfalls pouring over their sides. My book describes the region as "one of the planet's great wildernesses, an almost uninhabited landscape of fretted mountains, glacial lakes, majestic rivers, waterfalls, gorges, virgin temperate rainforest and 1000-year old trees". We stopped driving to have a short walk through the rainforest to see a waterfall. I don't think that any of us was ready for the shock of actually seeing the waterfall. Alice was bounding on ahead. She turned a corner and came face-to-face with a wall of thunderous water. She squealed! It was all very exciting, dramatic and wet.














As we'd totally miscalculated the time it would take to get to Queenstown, it was getting dark by the end of our hike and so we put a Sibelius symphony on the CD player and had great fun driving down a ridiculously windy road (with a huge drop on one side) in the dark and rain into Queenstown.