Time Travel

Sun setting at the Auckland
Airport

I'm back in the Auckland Airport after a comparatively short flight from Sydney today. Air New Zealand has changed their safety video - the Hobbit has been replaced by the guy from Man vs. Wild.

Piano? Computer!
Hopefully they piano was
already non-functional as
a musical instrument before
they put the computer inside...

I leave here at 8:30 pm on Sunday, April 7th... and I'll get home a few hours before that. That's right - they fly time machines! Joy to the International Date Line :p ... actually, I unwittingly booked all of my travel for the day Oceania stops daylight savings time, but even if I had forgotten to switch the clock, I just would have been an extra hour early (which is much better than late!) But I didn't. Forget to switch, that is. All has gone swimmingly. Speaking of swimming... the hostel I stayed at last night not only had a swimming pool on the top floor, but had also put computers inside hollowed out pianos - probably one of the cooler computer desks I've ever seen! :p

This post will have to be cut short, though, due to my free airport internet time running out! :)

Me and my "thick Canadian accent, eh!" head underground...

Hello, hello, hello!

The top portion of the
cylindrical building in
the rear rotates for
a 360 degree view!

Advance warning - this post might be a slightly more scatter-brained than usual, due in part to fending off a cold with a metaphorical stick, and in part to the fact that I am running off slightly less than five hours of sleep. :p The reason (for being sleep deprived, not sick haha) will be described shortly.

Wikipedia tells me
that there is actually
little evidence to
support the hoof-position
to the manner of
the riders' death...

But first, apparently I have quite a thick Canadian accent. This makes me chuckle.

Okay, sooooo... when did I last post? The zoo! Right. The weather in Sydney was supposed to be pretty gross for the whole of last week, but it wasn't... until about three days ago - and when it rains, it pours! So due in part to the weather and in part to my general dislike of cities (who am I kidding... if it had been sunny I still would have left :p), I got back on the train yesterday and headed back up to Katoomba. Why Katoomba, and not somewhere new? Firstly, there were still plenty of things here that I wanted to see (and after today, I realize that you could easily spend a good week or two exploring up here :p), and secondly, after the less than spectacular hostel I was staying at in Sydney, I wanted to go back someplace I knew was good. :)

The Blue Mountains look pretty cool in the rain and cloud and fog - though I would probably have been hugely disappointed if I hadn't seen them in the sunshine, already, because the fog was so dense that you couldn't see the length of a soccer field.

Anyhow, yesterday afternoon found me sitting sleepily on a sofa munching on a Timtam (delightfully tasty cookies ... that feel unhealthy as you eat them, they're that bad haha). I initially dismissed a faint roar in the distance, but it got closer... the roar of a sizable hoard of 8-9 year old school kids. Uh-oh. They came into the hostel... dun dun dun... such began my night of little sleep.

(You will see the pictures have nothing to do with me complaining about noisy children - this is a promise of a non-complaining part of the post to come!)

These kids were OFF THE WALL! For the evening they were sort of secluded in their own lounge area - you could hear them, but whatever - kids will be kids, and they'll go to bed and we will too and life will be lovely! :) Right? Ha. So wrong. Due to the whole fending off a cold thing, I went to bed around 9:30... So did the kids. Or that was the idea. In reality they were running around shrieking and screaming and pounding up and down the halls and laughing raucously and pounding on each others' doors then dashing off giggling; slamming the doors shut just so they can use they're magnetic card to swipe it open again. I'm pretty sure that was their first trip out not with family for most of them. But again, I was going to bed pretty early, so I didn't really care and figured that they would settle down in a half hour or so.

Not the case. The adults in charge clearly had no control over them, and combined with the screaming laughs etc, it actually sounded like they were doing canon-balls off the top bunk in the room next to ours - it was physically shaking our beds! How can such small people make such a big thump??? This went on until... 11:30 at night. Really???? Miss Bailey would not approve. (For those of you not from home, Miss Bailey was the school teacher at Fort Steele in the 1890s ... and did not put up with any nonsense. If they had been in the hallway instead of their rooms, Miss Bailey may have given them a piece of her mind...) Finally we went and found their teachers downstairs and got them to shut them up... sort of. :p If any of us had dared make half as much noise as they did when we were little, our whole class would have been banned from field trips for the rest of the year at least...

In the "Cathedral" Cave
The electricians use these ladders
to change the lights... it is very high...
Fantastic acoustics - the Vienna Boy's
Choir has even sun here :)

oops...

Apparently kids don't need much sleep, because when 5:45 am rolled around... BAM! thumpthump giggle squeal screech pitter-patter-thunk shriek etc... earplugs did nothing to help this. :p Then an alarm clock from one of the other girls in the room started going off, and she wouldn't turn it off. It would turn itself off after a few minutes then go off again after 10 haha. Its funny though - I could ignore that, but not the thumping and laughing kids, and the girl next to me could ignore the kids but not the alarm.

Long story short, I ended up getting up rather earlier than intended.

None of you will probably believe me when I say that this entry was not actually meant as a complain-about-the-loud-kids session... I was just so appalled that after mentioning it I rambled on for a few paragraphs.

The real substance of this entry? Caves. Ancient, crystalline, fossil-filled caves across the Blue Mountains in an area known as Jenolan.

The entrance to the caves is near an enormous limestone arch - really more of a huge, winding tunnel, and technically a cave in its own right... just one you can drive a bus through. :p The caves were discovered in the early 1800s - the natives in the area knew about them but wouldn't go inside. One of the early convict settlers, though, found them and moved in. Then he started stealing cattle from the nearby farmers (Sydney was a growing city with limited farmland. As such, new sources of food were needed. Several expeditions tried, and failed, to cross the Blue Mountains (vertical cliffs can have that effect) but eventually a few people made it and found a huge valley on the other side perfect for farming. Thus came the farmers!) The farmers didn't really approve of this, so they got together, called the police, and tracked the thief back to his cave-lair. After hauling him back to the nearest town with a courthouse for sentencing, a few of the people who had tracked him down headed back to the caves to explore. And what they found was an immense cave system, mostly interconnected, and all filled with crystal (real crystal, not just the shiny, sparkly stuff. Lots of it is brown and opaque :p - but there was white and sparkly stuff, too haha).

18 metres down to the water, which is 5 metres
deep!

Just inside the entrance to one of the caves we saw a baby rock wallaby! Also, along the highway there were several larger wallabies and a good half-dozen kangaroos! I am fully aware that this is like someone being excited seeing deer back home, but hey, I am a tourist, after all... and now I have seen wild kangaroos/wallabies, not just caged ones. Also the pound near the caves is home to a family of platypuses! But all we could see were their bubbles. :p

This was the lighting-scheme in the 1970s
...
I never would have guessed :p

So the caves - all in all, pretty cool. Several had fossils of small marine creatures. Huge pillars, enormous caverns, cm or or thinner rippled curtains of crystal called "shawls" - all really quite pretty (with lights... pitch black otherwise). So when early tourists came to the area in the 1840s, all they would have to see by is candle-light. Which does actually produce a fair pit of light when you've got several together, but not enough to see some of the really awesome curtains etc high up / away from the ledges. Ladies would go on these tours, too, in their full length skirts - and one of the original methods of descent involved grabbing a potato sack, sitting on it, biting your candle holder in your teeth, and sliding down a 30 metre long chute of rock until you the big rock at the bottom... at which point you needed to turn right, because left led off a rather long drop. Then they'd have to climb back up. This is why I mentioned the skirts. :p There are stairs now! ;)

When this one lit up, it was like staring at the
mouth of a huge jack-o-lantern

To avoid climbing a ridge into the "Orient" cave, a very, very long tunnel was blasted through to the cave system. Except the people doing the blasting were not very careful and blew apart the crystal-filled cave the tunnel opens in to. Oops. Also, in an effort to not disturb the natural air flows through the cave, they fit the tunnel with two airlock doors... next to each door is a ~10cm hole for wiring to pass through, not with any sort of seal. I suppose the drafts from a small hole in the rock aren't as bad as those from a door-sized hole, but still... this seems to defeat the purpose of a double airlock door...

Platypus Pool! The colour comes
from crystal either
dissolved or suspended
in the water, I haven't
checked which...

The caves themselves were super neat! From tiny, bizarre shapes growing sideways out of the walls, to tangled webs made of stone - the longer you looked, the more you saw! There were even huge waterfalls, except formed over millions of years and solid rock! Which must weigh a huge amount, but since the water drained out of the caves, none have broken under their own weight. If you could somehow speed up and control the deposition process in the formation of the crystal, it would be cool to see if you could grow/build structures that way - because that would be ridiculously awesome looking and apparently relatively strong.

An old bolt-ladder

Sadly, the guides themselves were not so enthusiastic... (to be fair, I was warned haha - last time I was in Katoomba, the person who took us canyoning said that the cave tours were exceptionally boring - but also the only way to see the caves). Also, they (the guides) seemed personally offended that early explorers had left candle soot on the crystal, yet they've come in and built huge cement stairs and steel railings through the whole thing (and accidentally blew up one of the caves...) Plus they steam wash one of the caves a few times a year - they tell us this after a lecture on how they're all believers in maintaining the cave as it naturally occurs... their actions and words seem to contradict one another hahaha. I wonder what the people running the caves in 50-100 years will have to say about the people running it now.



Apparently these caves are one of the safest places to be during an earthquake. The limestone they're eroded out of absorbs all the movement - there is no evidence of anything having ever broken due to shaking inside the caves; all the broken stalactites on the cave floors have grown into the floor, i.e. are millions of years old and left over from when water was still pulling out clumps of sandstone.

a bit of scale... it is wider than
I am tall, and its hanging from
the ceiling...

If anybody hasn't seen the episode of BBC Earth on caves, they should look into fixing that. They show a segment on an underwater cave in the Yucatan, I believe, filled both with sea water and fresh water - but there is virtually no current, and they two waters (different densities) have separated into two layers, so that as you pass from the lower to the upper it looks like you're breaking the surface into air, but you're not! Its just the next layer of water!

On a completely different note, the term for a resident of Seattle is a Seattlite, which sounds amusingly similar to a satellite.

More cave pictures up on Flickr!

Tomorrow, back on the train to Sydney for my last (???) night! (On the ground, at least haha - I guess technically there will be a night on the plane. Though I think I skip night and go from day to day over the international date line. But that is a minor detail. I will almost inevitably be sleeping on the plane, so in my brain, its night :p ).

This trip has flown by... I'll do at least one more post before I get home, though.

For now, I'm going to give going to bed early another shot, since the horde of children departed this morning (after disposing of their sheets and an alarming series of non-linen materials barely short of classmates down the laundry shoot).

- Marysa

Today, I went to the zoo :)

I stand corrected. Each of our provinces does have a Queen's representative - the Lieutenant Governor. After this was pointed out to me, the faintest tingling in the back of my memory tells me that maybe, maybe this was mentioned briefly some time in social studies. But it obviously didn't stick. :p

Here is an assortment of fun facts for your reading pleasure:

- The elephant at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney understands English instructions to lift his feet, turn, move over, back up, etc while being hosed down.

- A very amusing zoo keeper showed us a bunch of large and venomous spiders... - Funnel-web spiders are the most dangerous spiders in Australia (land of the dangerous spiders ... also snakes...) - and the most dangerous of the funnel-webs? The Sydney Funnel-web. What is more - they're very common. As in, you're usually only a few metres, tops, away from one. Awesome :p
-Including the tax in the price on tags is a fantastic idea, and I will miss that upon my return to the land of home...
- Not only are the trains double-decker (two story trains), but some of the stations are also double, even triple (okay, one of them was just people, no trains) stations ... rails running bunk-bed style!

I've never seen a bird sit like this before

- Central station has no fewer than 25 active platforms.

there's something about that corner...

- The Sydney Harbour Bridge was painted grey because that was the only colour of paint they could get in the quantities they needed.

That is a bear. In a hammock. A
non-cartoon bear, in a hammock.
I didn't realize such things actually happened...

- The Dodo was a type of (really big) pigeon.
- A grocery cart / buggy from home is a trolley here and occasionally was a trundler in New Zealand. (Trundler! Still makes me chuckle, don't know why :p )
- We've all heard of a murder of crows, but what about a mob of kangaroos?
- Wollemi Pine trees were thought to have gone extinct before the age of the dinosaurs... until 1994, when someone found 8 in an isolated area of the Blue Mountains.
- Kangaroos can hop up to 9 metres in one jump (not from a standing start, but still!)

These guys were ridiculously agile!

- Some lizards, like the (this is actually the name :p ) Scheltopusik, don't have legs and look like snakes, but they're actually lizards. I'm not entirely clear on how you tell them apart :p ... Lizards have ear openings, snakes do not... Lizards can move their eye lids, snakes can't... lizards have short bodies and long tails, snakes long bodies and short tails... snakes have forked tongues...
- Tasmanian Devils can chew through cow hooves. Also kangaroo skulls. And their entire species is threatened by a type of contagious cancer because their dna is all so similar (not a very big gene pool to draw from).
- The spider keeper at the zoo brought the spiders out to show us in a Spiderman cooler.
- There is such a thing as opalized fossils... and dinosaur bones which are actually opals! Opals are formed by silicate under pressure, so if a silicate solution seeps into either an impression left by a bone/shell, or into the bone itself before it decomposes, and then goes through the regular opal-forming process, bam! (Now draw that "bam" out over tens of thousands of years...) Opal dino bones. Huh. Also these are apparently scattered throughout veins in the Australian Outback (which has red dirt) and people will dig big shafts down into the earth in search of opals (regular or fossilized). Then leave the holes behind when they're done. Don't fall in! ;)
- Australia has 11 of the world's 15 most venomous snakes, 4 of which are common throughout the blue mountains.
- Chocolate is "choc-ies" and candy "lollies"
- Most of the trains have the seat backs attached to little hinged arms at the sides, so you can switch which way the seat faces (since they don't turn the train around, just keep a driving car at either end). Also the trains are electric. The ferries (which are also part of the transit system - that's how I got to the zoo!) are also double-fronted - no need to turn around!
- The book I'm reading used the word "restive." Which does not mean restful - rather, it means restless/uneasy. But thanks to the GRE prep-book I was using last spring, I knew this. :p
- Razor scooters never lost popularity here.
- Sunscreen is awesome. Apparently at least 2 in 3 Australians are expected to develop some form of skin cancer by the time they're 70. Not good. 

New South Wales (not whales)

The Harbour Bridge

How ya goin'?

little parrot in the botanical gardens

um... on the train? Oh! How am I doing!? Good thanks :p
That seems to be the go-to greeting, here, and it took me a few times to actually understand what they were saying.

The past few days I've been exploring Sydney! Surrounding one of the harbours is a huge botanical garden complex, with all sorts of (absolutely enormous) trees and other plants from around the world - and some pretty cool birds, too!

giant tree

Also fountains, statues, ponds, etc - and the Governor's residence. Interesting - in Canada we've just got the Governor General, but here they've got a Governor General as well as a Governor for each State - so the Queen has her own representative just for New South Wales. That was (is) a pretty cool building. It was built to match what is now the Conservatory of Music... which one of the governors had built as (very elaborate) stables before running out of money. :p Then a few governors down the line, they built the house haha. The guide was from Philadelphia, of all places, but he's Australian now - but in my head it seemed like an American was singing praises to the Queen which made me chuckle a bit. :p

Opera House

The iconic Sydney Opera House sits on one side of the botanical gardens - I've got to admit, its smaller than I had pictured haha. On my first visit to the gardens I saw this bizarre bird with a long curved beak and tall spindly legs... turns out it is called and ibis, and after a few days I've realized that they're everywhere. :p 

Forget the opera house,
they've got Carmen set up
right on the water!

Usually every Saturday night the city puts on a fireworks display over Darling Harbour (seriously? What is this, Disneyland?), but they were cancelled this week due to the "Hoopla Festival" ... that is to say, the city hired a circus for Easter! So that was super cool! Street performers and stages set up all around the harbour, a trapeze suspended beneath the bridge with acrobats swinging and doing crazy how-are-they-not-dropping-each-other routines! Little "trains" driving people around, music everywhere, people dressed in ridiculous costumes (I think my favourite was three individuals in costumes shaped like an eye, a nose, and a mouth... the mouth would go up to people and lick them, haha!) The harbour is lovely at night-time - all the trees all lit up with white lights, people everywhere - very alive.

Ballroom in the Governor's House

Also, there is this ENORMOUS market near Darling Harbour called the Paddy's Market... WOW sensory overload! SO much stuff!!!!! Clothes, cds, jewlery, nuts, souvenirs, knock-off handbags, vegetables, towels... stuff! A LOT of STUFF!!!

Today I hopped on the train (these trains are fantastic. If Europe's train system is like this, no wonder it is so easy to get around...) for the 2.5 hour ride up to... New Castle! There's no castle, apparently. Actually, I went to Cardiff, just south of New Castle. Why? To see Kate! Who is not only from "Cranbrook", but from Wycliffe, no less!!! She's been living down here for a few years and gets to feed reptiles at a nature sanctuary. So she and Evan (her boyfriend) took me all around the vicinity of New Castle to see lots of cool stuff, like fantastic rocks eroded into bizarre shapes slashed through with fractures and covered in snails (and one section of rock where the water would go ripping up this thin crevice to explode out the end when it hit the rock face - that was cool!) Apparently there was a storm last night and there were a few dead puffer fish washed up on the beach.

tiny finch!

Also, they took me to this little nature park type thing where I got to pet a koala. I know, I know, koala's are wild animals and it only lets people pet it because its a tourist thing and the koala was raised to be handled etc, but still, it was so cute! And it had really soft, thick fur - like sticking your hand into a basket of un-carded alpaca wool or something. It was also very placid, and intent on eating the leaves on the branch it was holding, which is good, because it had pretty long claws... There were lots of other animals at the park, too - my favourite I think were the tiny, rainbow coloured finches, but there was a pretty awesome owl, as well.

I'm sure this means
something other than
an actual Zebra Crossing...
maybe its a special
kind of cross walk ... ?

Oh, and kangaroos and emus! The emus make very bizarre noises, a bit like a deep drum, and they growl... they were growling a lot... I've never seen a velociraptor (obviously), but the emus are remarkably similar to my mental image of one. Sharp, predatory eyes (which is funny because I'm pretty sure they're herbivores...) and almost scaly clawed feet... the kangaroos had tiny little t-rex arms and walked around using their tail (forelegs + tail to lift back legs forwards, back legs to move forelegs + tail... THICK tails). Some delightfully tasty fish and chips (also deep fried slice of pineapple sprinkled with cinnamon sugar... the beavertails of Australia? I  think so... it was weird, like the fish part of fish and chips, except pineapple inside instead of fish, but surprisingly good!) and ice cream all the way from the distant land of New Zealand (that country is serious about their dairy!) aaaaaaaaaaaand ... 10 pin bowling. First time I have done that. I knocked all of ONE pin over on my first turn. But I got better, haha. :p

They also introduced me to a band that sings exclusively about beards, appropriately named "The Beards," as well as an Adventure Time-like show called Gravity Falls... which taught me a good joke! Actually, its a pretty bad joke, but I laughed, so I'll share it anyhow. Its a PELICAN joke! Why did the pelican get kicked out of the bar? ... Because its bill was too big! hehe. he

'allo!

So I haven't updated this in a few days and as such there is much more about today in this post than the last couple, because today is rather fresher in my mind. :p

Tomorrow - the zoo!

Abseiling, Climbing, Canyoning - BEST day yet!

Today was SO MUCH FUN!

First off, we had a really small group - just myself, a guy from Seattle of all places (we had a good chat about things to do there, decent neighbourhoods, nearby mountains, etc), and our fantastic guide, which was awesome because it meant virtually no standing around waiting!. A few short abseils followed by a few longer (abseiling is fun. Funfun. :D ) It was super windy though, so to avoided twisted ropes and tangling in trees we ended up doing some rock climbing instead of some of the originally intended abseils. Which is fine by me, I like climbing. ;)

From our perch on the side of one of the Blue Mountains (tangent: why are the Blue Mountains called "blue"? The trees are green, the rocks are orange... BUT when it gets really hot, the oil in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees evaporates creating a blue haze over the mountains. That's kind of cool :p ) we could see the smoke coming off the remainder of the big fire which we could smell last night. It was a controlled burn (like our forests, fire helps these ones regenerate), but it got really windy and ended up being rather larger than intended...

We then headed off to the Empress Canyon for my very first canyoning adventure. Verdict? funfunfunfun. VERY much enjoyed it! And finished off with abseiling 30 metres straight down through Empress Falls (slippery! :p ). The cool water was delightful (in a wet suit... far to chilly without haha). All in all, this was hands down one of the funnest activities I have ever done! Ridiculously good fun. :)

Went for a walk to the Three Sisters while
waiting for the film to be developed

The only sad bit is that I haven't got a lot of photos - my camera isn't waterproof and the disposable one we split resulted in very few discenable photos - pity, but it was super super fun so its barely raining on my parade :p ... though it DID rain this evening. Real rain, too, not just drizzle! Which means its actually relatively cool out, which is delightful.

When I got back, I bumped into a guy from Wales we played board games with back in Kaikoura - neither of us knew the other was coming to Oz haha. Also, if anybody missed this back in January, it is rather fantastic and worth watching the full 30 seconds... seafoam storm in Queensland (google it if you have no idea what I'm talking about...)

Alright, back to my book and milo :)

To find mountains, look down!

Katoomba.

Pretty cool name for a pretty cool town in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales near Sydney, Australia.

Except, well, where are the mountains? As I think I commented in my last post (or maybe I didn't, I don't remember and I'm not going back to check :p ), you can't see any mountains from here. Now, I'll admit that I've been a bit snobby in the past in my definition of a mountain, but there isn't even a sturdy hill to be seen! The landscape stretches into the distance in a mostly flat, slightly rolling tangle of forest. So, mountains? Yes actually. We're on top of them! Well, kind of yes. They're not pointy mountains, and they are sort of short, but depending where you stand there are some pretty massive elevation changes.

Witches Leap
(apparently "leap" is a Scottish
term for a kind of waterfall)

Katoomba sits on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park. This whole area is built on a 1000m high limestone plateau (hence the flatness). Towards the East (and the ocean), the limestone has been eroded over thousands of years to create huge canyons and valleys - most with near-vertical (or actually vertical, or even overhanging) cliff walls, exposing the vastly varying shades of orange/white/brown in the sedimentary layers of the plateau.

This also makes for some... different... hiking. You start at the top, go down to the bottom, then have to hike back up again! I've got to admit, I think I like the start-at-the-bottom way better, since going down is usually easier. :p

Katoomba Falls

Today I followed a trail down to see Katoomba Falls, where the Katoomba river goes tumbling hundreds of feet off the side of a cliff to the valley below. The trail starts off down a steep-sided valley, passing some smaller falls, before turning into a bunch of stairs cut into the limestone cliff (this isn't one of the straight up and down cliffs, don't worry. Also, they had railings :p ).

Lizard!

At the bottom I saw a lizard! Well, some little kids saw the lizard and pointed it out to me. :p

Large flocks of the bright white cockatoos were swooping around the cliff faces and the waterfalls, settling in the big leafy branches sticking out from trees which either found purchase in cracks in the rock or grew out of scattered ledges. The cliffs also support a number of "hanging swamps."

Three Sisters

The opposite side of the cleft formed by the Katoomba river is a vertical cliff - a very, very high one. At the end, there is a point where the smaller valley hits a bigger one, where three limestone spires have evaded erosion - their name? The Three Sisters. How many mountains carry that name? A fair handful...

There was a pair of rock climbers barely visible about a quarter of the way down from the top. On my way back up the endless staircase, I passed a group of about 60 school kids coming down... who made full use of the echo potential of the valley to shout at the climbers. :p However, passing a huge, strung out group of people as high as my hip meant a mix of running up stairs and stopping for prolonged periods of time - at least half of them were exclaiming that "this is SO scary!!!!" as they went down.

A nearby fire has filled the air with smoke but caused a pretty spectacularly orange sunset.

While wandering around the shops along the main street here, I came across an old sign saying "Drink coffee. Do stupid things faster." Also they have cowbelle cheese! That makes me happy.

I noticed this in New Zealand, too (and also around UBC, for that matter, but that isn't kids) - razor scooters are making a big comeback. Also yo-yos.

OOO funny thing I heard on the radio in NZ before I left - something about the "marmageddon" ... a massive marmite shortage!

Pictures to follow, I'm having trouble with the internet.

Cheers,

Marysa

Fancy going climbing?

They did.

If Pluto had landed somewhere else, it might have still been considered a planet.