The Beginning of the Australia Blog
So, here begins my blog about my journeys in the land of oz. Many of these are in far greater detail than I'm sure you'd like to read, as they are journal entries for me to look back on as well. I hope you enjoy and by no means feel obligated to read it... I will love you anyway!
Brisbane:
I arrived in Brisbane pretty sleepy after the plane ride despite having slept for 8 or 9 hours of it. A heap of us were on the flight from LAX and a bus met us at the airport to take us to the Benson Court Motel, where we stayed for the next week. Once we had moved our stuff into our rooms, many of us decided to go to the Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, where you can feed lorokeets, pet kangaroos, and even snuggle with koalas (if you want to dish out an extra $15, which I didn't want to do). The sanctuary was fun, and luckily I was not one of the people who stepped in emu poo...
So Brisbane is pretty much an amazing city... I think my favorite part of it is the fact that it is set along the Brisbane river and that you can use the city cat (a ferry) to get around the city. It's particularily pretty when it is lit up at night.
I unfortunately spent most of my time in Brisbane fairly sick. I got to go to the University of Queensland medical center, whose poor service is only rivalled by that of Vaden. As much as it doesn't seem like a big deal right now, it was quite an overwhelming experience being sick in a foreign country that didn't accept my medical coverage and where I knew very few people, and also where I had no calling card or cell phone with which to contact family and friends. I became pretty homesick for Stanford during that time. Luckily, that should be behind me now.
The Australia program seems to attract really awesome people. I'm really enjoying all of their company... My only complaint is that much of the program reminds me of freshman year, where everyone was friendly, but no one really knew each other and everyone one formed many many surface friendships. I find that being social all the time kind of puts a strain on me after a while and I just want to be by myself with a few close friends. That being said, I'm really enjoying all of the people in the program and it is very interesting starting off with a “clean slate” with people who don't really know me (and people who assume that I have never had hair ;)). It is yet to be determined how this will all turn out.
In terms of school, in Brisbane, we generally had lecture in the morning and afternoon. A couple of days of straight lecture was strenous, but the amazing Australian concept of morning and afternoon tea saved my ass. I only fell asleep once. After lecture, most people went out and partied, but being sick, I generally stayed in. Another thing that I've discovered about Australia is that alcohol is pretty expensive, which is yet another deterrent to partying every night....
On our weekend off in Brisbane, a group of people and I took a long train ride to the beach called Surfer's Paradise. While it was super touristy, the beach was still gorgeous and I love the ocean soooo much. The current was crazy strong and the lifeguards had their hands full with such a crowded beach. I have literally never seen so many lifeguards in such a small area of beach. There were a couple on paddle boards, there was a boat, and there was even a lifeguard on a jetski. Let's just say that Australian oceans are just a bit more treacherous than American ones.... The downer to the whole day though, was when the group of people I was with accidently left me when I went to the bathroom to change. Luckily, I met up with Tara on the beach who had also been left, and we were able to have dinner and catch a train back to Brisbane. Yet another one of the scary incidences that I've had while travelling in a foreign country with no cell phone... Really, I had no idea how much I relied on my phone prior to this.
North Stradbroke Island ie “Straddie”
From Brisbane, we took a short bus ride and caught a ferry to Stradbroke Island, which is one of the largest sand islands in the world. We spent our first day of “classes” travelling and swimming at the beach. Best first day of class ever, I must say! We moved into our new accomadations on in the Moreton Bay Research Station. Can I say cramped? I got super lucky and was in a room smaller than a Wilbur double with 3 other people. Some people though, were in a room not much bigger with 7 other people. And I thought the “doubles” in Lag were small....
A note on our teacher, John Hall. He basically rocks my socks off. He is a botanist with a sense of humor. His lecture style reminds me of my AP Euro teacher “Doc” from back in high school. In our first lecture, he showed us a wollemi pine tree (one of the oldest trees on the planet, which existed around the time of the dinosaurs) and then proceeded to take a plastic dinosaur head out of a bag and have it “eat” the wollemi pine. He's just an overall great teacher who really cares about making his classes interesting even if they run over the alloted amount of time quite frequently...
Though they went easy on us for the first day of class, classes became far more intense over the next couple of days. We would have optional birdwatching at 6:30, and mandatory breakfast at 8:00. Then, we'd have lecture and/or field work till noon. We'd continue with more field work until about 5:00pm and return to the research station for dinner and then have more lecture until 9 or 10pm. Quite the rigorous schedule... The field assignments were quite fun for the first couple of days. We took data on the estimated burn dates of grass trees and counted the number of species in transects of increasing size. This was of particular amusement because John would not give us the actual names of the species, so we got to make them up. My group chose Disney characters ... the highlight: Bambi's mom was chosen for a particluarly dead, eaten looking specimen. Other field work included making profile diagrams of certain landscapes and measuring tree height.
During these days of field work, we also visited some pretty cool places, including Blue lake, Brown Lake, Point Lookout, a giant sand dune, and the beach. We were allowed to take a quick lunch break at Brown Lake and went in for a quick dip. The lake is pretty cool because it is all brown due to the tannins that have slowly leached into the water over time (the lake has no outlet and the only water that gets into it is from the rainfall). Blue lake was gorgeous, but we weren't allowed to swim out of respect to old Aboriginal tradition. Point lookout was one of the coolest hikes I've been on to date. We could see turtles from up on the rocks and beautiful blue ocean crashing all along the coast area. when we went to the beach, we saw some humpback whales. They were pretty close in and just a treat to watch. The sand dune, however, was the most fun. How could heaps of sand (this is how the Aussies would say it) be bad? We jumped off of dune ledges and just played around for an hour or so. After a long day in the bush, it was such a relief to just relax....
Lamington
Lamington is a subtropical rainforest that's a World Heritage site. The group stayed at O'Reilly's resort, which is totally a cushy expensive hotel thing. Most of the group lived in “Coot” which was a large house with a bunch of rooms and bunk beds, and a suspicious smell of mold. The whole situation resembled an extended ski trip. I, again, lucked out on rooms and me, Claire, Chris, and Cara were able to stay in a one of the hotel rooms in the resort :). The hotel rooms smelled normal ...
We were subject to the next onslaught of 9 pm lectures, this time about things like nothofagus (very old trees) and canopy cover. The lectures were okay because most of our days were spent in the field... aka on long hikes “observing nature” which could also been interpreted as singing Disney songs and jumping in waterfalls. I guess I can't believe that class can be so fun. I love being out and about every day even if counting leaves is sometimes boring. How will I ever go back to “normal” school?????
Day 1:
On the first day we had a bit of lecture in the morning and then the group split in two and we went on an orientation walk and did a bit of field work. On our way out to the rainforest we learned about the “most painful tree in the world” ... the Giant Stinging Tree. If you touch the tree, you get tiny little hollow spikes stuck in you, kind of like fiberglass. Oh I love studying abroad in a land where even the trees can hurt you. Nothing much more eventful than that, just happy hour and some more lecture at night. I don't really know how I feel about the night lectures. John was a really good lecturer, but being lectured to at 10pm, is still a bit taxing no matter how interesting the lecturer.
Day 2:
We went on an 18 km hike this day. It was quite a hike with so many beautiful views. We followed a creek up through a valley and finally to the top of one of the hills of Lamington. We stopped for a couple of group pictures, on of which was in front of a giant strangler fig (which is one of the coolest trees ever; its seeds sprout on the top of another tree and it slowly grows roots down to the ground and literally over time strangles the host tree for its space on the forest floor). During one of the pictures, we made our TA (Rob Price) crowd surf...it was a quality time. On our way, the group stopped at a waterfall where we were able to swim and stand underneath the waterfall. The water was freezing, but I've never swum in a waterfall before, so it was quite a novel experience. We then continued our hike all the way up to the top, where the vegetation type changed from rainforest to a forest of old nothofagus trees aptly called the “Hobbit Forest.” These ancient trees look like they came out of Lord of the Rings and are sort of relics as they no longer really reproduce, but rather they just sprout new, genetically identical trees off of the base tree. Sadly, these trees will probably die off fairly soon because global warming will make the top of the mountain in Lamington too warm to support them. We then ran most of the way back to the our rooms, so that we could hit the hot tubs before dinner.
Rest of the week:
I woke up early one morning to go bird watching and take the “tree top walk.” On this walk you walk across a bunch of draw bridges and then climb up this really tall series of ladders to the top of one of the tallest canopy trees in the forest. It was gorgeous looking out at a sea of green trees in the golden light of the morning. I cannot even begin to describe how breathtaking the view from the top was.
Another amazing walk that I went on was the glow worm walk... Glow worms are these little worms that bioluminesce from their butts, very similar to fire flies. These little guys were featured in the “Caves” episode of Planet Earth (a reference for any other nature nerds like me). Anyway, they love the wet walls of rocks near creeks and inside of caves. They all line up at night and glow, making amazing little constellations of light on the ground. While the display of lights was fantastic, our walk down there was a little less than stellar, in that Rob lost half of us on the way down...in the dark forest. Apparently (Rob found this little bit of information to be quite obvious), we were supposed to walk through a narrow tree instead of taking a left at the sign that read “gloworm gully.” Needless to say, none of us found this quite so obvious. In the end after about 10 minutes of panic in the dark Rob came and found us...
The rest of my week consisted of a bit more field work and a LOT of work on my field notebook, which consisted of all of our “homework” and lab assignments, none of which were very hard, but artistic skill was required for much of it, and thus I got to spend a lot of time with colored pencils. I hope that my drawing skills paid off ;). At the end of the week, we also had our first exam. I studied for it like I would have for a bio core exam....which was WAY too much studying. Alas, hopefully I did well.
Brisbane:
I arrived in Brisbane pretty sleepy after the plane ride despite having slept for 8 or 9 hours of it. A heap of us were on the flight from LAX and a bus met us at the airport to take us to the Benson Court Motel, where we stayed for the next week. Once we had moved our stuff into our rooms, many of us decided to go to the Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, where you can feed lorokeets, pet kangaroos, and even snuggle with koalas (if you want to dish out an extra $15, which I didn't want to do). The sanctuary was fun, and luckily I was not one of the people who stepped in emu poo...
So Brisbane is pretty much an amazing city... I think my favorite part of it is the fact that it is set along the Brisbane river and that you can use the city cat (a ferry) to get around the city. It's particularily pretty when it is lit up at night.
I unfortunately spent most of my time in Brisbane fairly sick. I got to go to the University of Queensland medical center, whose poor service is only rivalled by that of Vaden. As much as it doesn't seem like a big deal right now, it was quite an overwhelming experience being sick in a foreign country that didn't accept my medical coverage and where I knew very few people, and also where I had no calling card or cell phone with which to contact family and friends. I became pretty homesick for Stanford during that time. Luckily, that should be behind me now.
The Australia program seems to attract really awesome people. I'm really enjoying all of their company... My only complaint is that much of the program reminds me of freshman year, where everyone was friendly, but no one really knew each other and everyone one formed many many surface friendships. I find that being social all the time kind of puts a strain on me after a while and I just want to be by myself with a few close friends. That being said, I'm really enjoying all of the people in the program and it is very interesting starting off with a “clean slate” with people who don't really know me (and people who assume that I have never had hair ;)). It is yet to be determined how this will all turn out.
In terms of school, in Brisbane, we generally had lecture in the morning and afternoon. A couple of days of straight lecture was strenous, but the amazing Australian concept of morning and afternoon tea saved my ass. I only fell asleep once. After lecture, most people went out and partied, but being sick, I generally stayed in. Another thing that I've discovered about Australia is that alcohol is pretty expensive, which is yet another deterrent to partying every night....
On our weekend off in Brisbane, a group of people and I took a long train ride to the beach called Surfer's Paradise. While it was super touristy, the beach was still gorgeous and I love the ocean soooo much. The current was crazy strong and the lifeguards had their hands full with such a crowded beach. I have literally never seen so many lifeguards in such a small area of beach. There were a couple on paddle boards, there was a boat, and there was even a lifeguard on a jetski. Let's just say that Australian oceans are just a bit more treacherous than American ones.... The downer to the whole day though, was when the group of people I was with accidently left me when I went to the bathroom to change. Luckily, I met up with Tara on the beach who had also been left, and we were able to have dinner and catch a train back to Brisbane. Yet another one of the scary incidences that I've had while travelling in a foreign country with no cell phone... Really, I had no idea how much I relied on my phone prior to this.
North Stradbroke Island ie “Straddie”
From Brisbane, we took a short bus ride and caught a ferry to Stradbroke Island, which is one of the largest sand islands in the world. We spent our first day of “classes” travelling and swimming at the beach. Best first day of class ever, I must say! We moved into our new accomadations on in the Moreton Bay Research Station. Can I say cramped? I got super lucky and was in a room smaller than a Wilbur double with 3 other people. Some people though, were in a room not much bigger with 7 other people. And I thought the “doubles” in Lag were small....
A note on our teacher, John Hall. He basically rocks my socks off. He is a botanist with a sense of humor. His lecture style reminds me of my AP Euro teacher “Doc” from back in high school. In our first lecture, he showed us a wollemi pine tree (one of the oldest trees on the planet, which existed around the time of the dinosaurs) and then proceeded to take a plastic dinosaur head out of a bag and have it “eat” the wollemi pine. He's just an overall great teacher who really cares about making his classes interesting even if they run over the alloted amount of time quite frequently...
Though they went easy on us for the first day of class, classes became far more intense over the next couple of days. We would have optional birdwatching at 6:30, and mandatory breakfast at 8:00. Then, we'd have lecture and/or field work till noon. We'd continue with more field work until about 5:00pm and return to the research station for dinner and then have more lecture until 9 or 10pm. Quite the rigorous schedule... The field assignments were quite fun for the first couple of days. We took data on the estimated burn dates of grass trees and counted the number of species in transects of increasing size. This was of particular amusement because John would not give us the actual names of the species, so we got to make them up. My group chose Disney characters ... the highlight: Bambi's mom was chosen for a particluarly dead, eaten looking specimen. Other field work included making profile diagrams of certain landscapes and measuring tree height.
During these days of field work, we also visited some pretty cool places, including Blue lake, Brown Lake, Point Lookout, a giant sand dune, and the beach. We were allowed to take a quick lunch break at Brown Lake and went in for a quick dip. The lake is pretty cool because it is all brown due to the tannins that have slowly leached into the water over time (the lake has no outlet and the only water that gets into it is from the rainfall). Blue lake was gorgeous, but we weren't allowed to swim out of respect to old Aboriginal tradition. Point lookout was one of the coolest hikes I've been on to date. We could see turtles from up on the rocks and beautiful blue ocean crashing all along the coast area. when we went to the beach, we saw some humpback whales. They were pretty close in and just a treat to watch. The sand dune, however, was the most fun. How could heaps of sand (this is how the Aussies would say it) be bad? We jumped off of dune ledges and just played around for an hour or so. After a long day in the bush, it was such a relief to just relax....
Lamington
Lamington is a subtropical rainforest that's a World Heritage site. The group stayed at O'Reilly's resort, which is totally a cushy expensive hotel thing. Most of the group lived in “Coot” which was a large house with a bunch of rooms and bunk beds, and a suspicious smell of mold. The whole situation resembled an extended ski trip. I, again, lucked out on rooms and me, Claire, Chris, and Cara were able to stay in a one of the hotel rooms in the resort :). The hotel rooms smelled normal ...
We were subject to the next onslaught of 9 pm lectures, this time about things like nothofagus (very old trees) and canopy cover. The lectures were okay because most of our days were spent in the field... aka on long hikes “observing nature” which could also been interpreted as singing Disney songs and jumping in waterfalls. I guess I can't believe that class can be so fun. I love being out and about every day even if counting leaves is sometimes boring. How will I ever go back to “normal” school?????
Day 1:
On the first day we had a bit of lecture in the morning and then the group split in two and we went on an orientation walk and did a bit of field work. On our way out to the rainforest we learned about the “most painful tree in the world” ... the Giant Stinging Tree. If you touch the tree, you get tiny little hollow spikes stuck in you, kind of like fiberglass. Oh I love studying abroad in a land where even the trees can hurt you. Nothing much more eventful than that, just happy hour and some more lecture at night. I don't really know how I feel about the night lectures. John was a really good lecturer, but being lectured to at 10pm, is still a bit taxing no matter how interesting the lecturer.
Day 2:
We went on an 18 km hike this day. It was quite a hike with so many beautiful views. We followed a creek up through a valley and finally to the top of one of the hills of Lamington. We stopped for a couple of group pictures, on of which was in front of a giant strangler fig (which is one of the coolest trees ever; its seeds sprout on the top of another tree and it slowly grows roots down to the ground and literally over time strangles the host tree for its space on the forest floor). During one of the pictures, we made our TA (Rob Price) crowd surf...it was a quality time. On our way, the group stopped at a waterfall where we were able to swim and stand underneath the waterfall. The water was freezing, but I've never swum in a waterfall before, so it was quite a novel experience. We then continued our hike all the way up to the top, where the vegetation type changed from rainforest to a forest of old nothofagus trees aptly called the “Hobbit Forest.” These ancient trees look like they came out of Lord of the Rings and are sort of relics as they no longer really reproduce, but rather they just sprout new, genetically identical trees off of the base tree. Sadly, these trees will probably die off fairly soon because global warming will make the top of the mountain in Lamington too warm to support them. We then ran most of the way back to the our rooms, so that we could hit the hot tubs before dinner.
Rest of the week:
I woke up early one morning to go bird watching and take the “tree top walk.” On this walk you walk across a bunch of draw bridges and then climb up this really tall series of ladders to the top of one of the tallest canopy trees in the forest. It was gorgeous looking out at a sea of green trees in the golden light of the morning. I cannot even begin to describe how breathtaking the view from the top was.
Another amazing walk that I went on was the glow worm walk... Glow worms are these little worms that bioluminesce from their butts, very similar to fire flies. These little guys were featured in the “Caves” episode of Planet Earth (a reference for any other nature nerds like me). Anyway, they love the wet walls of rocks near creeks and inside of caves. They all line up at night and glow, making amazing little constellations of light on the ground. While the display of lights was fantastic, our walk down there was a little less than stellar, in that Rob lost half of us on the way down...in the dark forest. Apparently (Rob found this little bit of information to be quite obvious), we were supposed to walk through a narrow tree instead of taking a left at the sign that read “gloworm gully.” Needless to say, none of us found this quite so obvious. In the end after about 10 minutes of panic in the dark Rob came and found us...
The rest of my week consisted of a bit more field work and a LOT of work on my field notebook, which consisted of all of our “homework” and lab assignments, none of which were very hard, but artistic skill was required for much of it, and thus I got to spend a lot of time with colored pencils. I hope that my drawing skills paid off ;). At the end of the week, we also had our first exam. I studied for it like I would have for a bio core exam....which was WAY too much studying. Alas, hopefully I did well.