Australia and America

I like America. I can tell everyone here that I'm Australian and they respond that I have "such a cute Australian accent". I've discovered that I can also describe the crocodiles that walk down the "side-walks" in Sydney and ... they believe me!

I've also made two other discoveries. (1) Don't drink a huge beer after going for approx. 15 hours without real food (otherwise you end up writing blog entries like this) and (2) "small" coffees in America are very similar to "extra-large" coffees in Australia.

I'm tired. I've now been on the move for 28 hours and I'm still not at my destination (in fact I'm in Dulles Airport in Washington - which (in L.A.) they pronounced as "Dallas" - which happens to be very confusing on boarding!) On the Qantas flight across the Pacific I was lucky enough to be upgraded to "Premium Economy". The chap sitting next to me read two books. One on French grammar and the other on Wagner's Ring Cycle. He was off to New York for a week to watch the entire opera. I felt a bit embarrassed watching the James Bond films and various cartoons. Oh well, we both got chatting with the guy in charge of our section of the plane. He was full of interesting stories about ... well I'd better not mention them in case someone from Qantas ever comes across this blog!

My bag was literally the last off the plane in L. A. The airport is appalling.

Washington Dulles airport is very dull.

Anyway, back to Australia. I haven't described our wonderful trip to Cervantes. "Our" = myself, Mike, David and a visitor Alberto (who's very Italian). We were in Perth for a conference, but then decided to spend an extra two days travelling around. Oh gosh, lots of good things happened, but I'm too tired to try and describe them all. We went to Fremantle (by boat), had some very good beers, watched some fire jugglers, went around the market, watched the most amazing sunset (Alberto's facebook page got updated to say "... was about to cry yesterday facing the best sunset he ever seen, lost on the other side of the world"), took a very interesting train ride back (particularly so for anyone that's watched "Last train to Freo" - it had some similarities!). Then for our main road trip. We went through a burnt out landscape, met a huge thunderstorm in the "gravity discovery centre" (where all the power went out), drove for ages, saw large eagles, ate a lobster for lunch, saw a crazy dolphin pushing fish (we assume) up to the shore, watched dolphins swim under us as we stood on a jetty, went to the Pinnacles national park (incredible), played pool, drove offroad, saw stromatolites, walked up to viewing towers, watched Alberto swim in the Indian Ocean (the rest of us were much too British) and ate in a sleazy road house.

What a holiday.

Hopefully the photos do a better job of describing the scene than I can!

I'm tired.

z v (an addition from a young kid that just decided to start typing on my computer - his mother has now removed him)

Oh ... and how could I forget. We all lay on the beach looking up at the phenomenal stars. The Milky Way was directly overhead, we could see the Magallanic Clouds and shooting stars. We lay for hours!

So much has happened ...

I've just realised that it has been almost a month since my last blog post. Wow! Since then I've had another wonderful trip to Melbourne. I have absolutely no idea why I didn't immediately write up that trip. Ms M. Mao and I drove (well she drove) down to the Southern Ocean on the Mornington Peninsula to the South of Melbourne. The views were spectacular. We first searched the rock pools formed from volcanic rock. Ms M. Mao decided to scare me completely by hanging off the edges of huge cliffs with just the ocean below.


She spotted a fish. I took photos of starfish. Anyway, we then got back into the car to drive to the start of a long walk that went along the cliff edges and finished at the Cape Shanks lighthouse.

I loved the walk. It was completely unexpected. I assumed that we'd have stunning vistas across the water and be able to watch whales frolicking in the ocean. Actually, most of the walk was far inland, where we strolled through shady woods, watched large eagles (I'm convinced that they were eagles) soar above the fields, walk across gullies, and ... every so often ... have a stunning view across the ocean.


Then the most exciting thing happened. We'd stopped for a rest and were chatting about all sorts of things when an echidna wobbled out onto the path. It looked at us, we slowly moved closer and then it simply came up to Ms M. Mao and rubbed her leg with his/her nose! It "snuffled" her, decided that she wasn't as good as an ant to eat and then set about trying to find some ants while we simply crouched down next to it!

It was wonderful.

In a rather happy frame of mind we then finished the walk (which did involve rescuing Ms Mao from the top of a tree) and drove back to Melbourne.

I had another fun flight back to Sydney (although my "window" seat didn't actually have a window next to it).

The next evening I went with Anna to the last night of Madam Butterfly being performed at the Opera House. That was wonderful as well!! The lead singer (Madam Butterfly) was phenomenal and we ended up giving her a standing ovation at the end. It's not a very happy opera. Unfortunately it seems that the opera season has finished this year in Sydney and so we'll have to wait for a while before going again.

What else? I played badmington. Dick's been away in China and so the work load has been ridiculous. I've been entered for a CSIRO award that meant that I had to write some embarrassing text about myself, the clocks changed, Ms Mao arrived in Sydney, the river flooded, Rick arrived in Sydney, I went tango dancing (with the two previously mentioned people), I've learnt how to say North, South, East and West in Chinese, I've booked a trip to China to see the Solar eclipse in July. The plan is to take a boat from Shanghai out to the islands off the coast and then go inland again! I'm rather excited.

I've also just discovered that my hotel booking for my USA trip (in a few weeks) didn't go through and so I'm frantically trying to find somewhere to stay. I head off for Perth in a few days (and plan to drive up and see the Pinnacles desert) and now ...

I'm going for a walk in the rain.