Early Days in Oz

Darwin

Day 1.
7 am. Sun's up. The first walk out of our rental apartment. A deep breath of clean air, vista of brilliant blue sky and turquoise sparkling ocean bordered by a reddish hued sand. It is so beautiful and welcoming.

I cross the road and immediately find an inviting walking/cycling path into a coastal nature reserve--pure exotic expansiveness. It is my favorite beach on our trip thus far.... and there is miles and miles and miles of it. I say to myself that even if is is humid and buggy in the wet, even if the town is uninspiring, that beach stretch is beguiling; I would live here.

Most of Darwin's foreshore is park, path or wild. No side by side megaresorts with guards stopping outsiders from walking on their prime oceanfront land (as in Jimbaran, Bali). It feels freeing.

Birds are everywhere...Within an hour I saw common flocks of black and white ibis, sulphur crested cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, galahs (like big pink and grey budgies), various sandpipers, kites. Everyday we see two or three "new to us" birds. We're delighted.

We'd read our Darwin nature books and were well armed for all kinds of nasty critters like venomous spiders, python snakes and crocs (salties and freshies) "that than jump the length of their body!!!" So when we heard that a crocodile was spotted a few days ago around the beach area, we felt guarded about swimming. Teens, however, seem to disregard the warnings to not swim and were back in the ocean as soon as the partrol guy left the area. We chose to swim at the protected lake (with schools and schools of fish at our feet) and waited another day before ocean swimming-- after talking to reassuring locals -- and then, very close to shore!

Our biggest Darwin adventure was a daytrip to Litchfield National Park.
http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/parks/find/litchfield.html
http://en.travelnt.com/explore/darwin/litchfield-national-park.aspx
After driving through an hour-and-a-half of nondescript eucalytus shrub land (I am sure the ecosystem has a more exalted name) we got a look at 8 foot high magnetic termite mounds. They create these massive east west structures through their saliva, the purpose being to create the exact temperature needed to survive -- internal warmth at night, and cooling in the day. Primordial aircon. From there we found our way to Florence Falls. We swam under the falls and back--exhilerating! We then tromped along a parched trail in "Savannah woodland," delightfully ending at a series of cascading deep blue-green plunge pools. Alongside the pools were monitor lizards and in the pools, very big fish.

Off to Coff's Harbour... !
We spent the first couple of days finding our bearings and checking out the local area. Yesterday we unsuccessfully went Koala Bear spotting, but we enjoyed Muttonbird Lookout and saw some very big pelicans.

- Catherine


Sierra's Post
HHHHHHHHHHHeyyyyyy everyone!
We've decided that we will each write a paragraph or two for a family blog entry! Australia is beautiful! Since my mom wrote about Darwin I'll write about Coffs Harbour. It's a small little city with the basic things like Target (American Zellers) , food stores, movie theaters, excetera....And it is surrounded by a Beach/Harbour with ginormous waves! (today we might go boogie boarding).
My parents insist on at least one hour of walking in a park each day, so we did that, went shopping, saw a movie, and most exciting of all- in my opinion -saw wild kangaroos in local's back and front yards with either tails or heads sticking out of their pouches! They were sooooooo cute and we got very close with at least 50 pictures to prove it! BOING, BOING, BOING!.....ha, ha, ha

Love, Sierra

-- Savannah's Post --

Darwin Australia was full of long, sandy beaches where you could walk for hours and hours, national parks studded with aboriginal-significant outcrops and artifacts, and lit by gorgeous sunny weather every day. Also, we had the beaches almost to ourselves during our morning walks -- well, speedwalks, because Mom came -- considering Australia only has 18 million people and Darwin has less than usual. Darwin is full of the "real outback" Aussie's -- not the cityfolk down south -- and full of all 300 of them, it seemed. But I didn't mind, because it meant for clean, beautiful parks.

The weirdest thing about Australia so far is a particular species of Australian male -- about 35-50, grizzled, looks like he's seen a lot of things in life, girlfriendless or wifeless or companionless, tatooed, and possibly drunken mid-flight, on 100 ml plastic bottles obtained from the exasperated but polite stewardess. (She: "Can I get you anything to drink?" He: "Sure, I'll have anything with whiskey in it.") We have had a few run-ins with this kind: the first was flying to Australia from Bali -- the man who sat in front of me, told the stewardess he'd been flying on this airline "For 7 years!" and proffered her a gift for another stewardess he knew well. This smacked intuitively of prosititution and drugs to me (the 7 years flying to Bali alone, that is). He then proceeded to get really drunk and show the defining characteristic of this species of Australian male -- a unexplainable and shocking hatred of children. He made several extremely rude comments into the air in front of him about Sierra, in the jist of "Shut up little girl! Why didn't you leave her at home if she can't sit there like a mummy and be perfectly silent and allow me to pretend children don't exist in this world?". (This was accompanied by his holding his hands over his ears, and quietly intoning "shut up! shut up! shut up!") My impression was later reinforced by a grizzled taxi driver who told us that when asked by children the question "How long until we get there?" he liked to respond in a menacing tone with "Get out of the car!"

To be perfectly fair however, this type of human composed 1% of the Australians we have encountered, and the other 99% have been perfectly humorous, kind, welcoming, chatty, hospitable, and helpful, showing a sense of strange but funny humour and a stranger taste for food. In the market in Darwin we passed a stall in the food row -- "Roadkill cafe: You kill 'em, we grill 'em". Proud providers of 'roo meat, crocodile meat, wallabee (sp?), etc etc so on and so forth. I suppose if you are a Darwinian "true" outbacker yet living in the city like one of those soft city folk, you must make up appearances by eating the tough, wild, burnt meat of the predators and prey you are so nicely protected from while inhabiting the city environs. Perhaps nastiness to children is another way of convincing yourself you are still a tough, indomitable Crocodile Dundee man.

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Hersh says:

Love the lingo! Too right!

Day One in Oz:

We needed to do a bit of grocery shopping, so we pulled in to a strip mall where they had several stores including a Woolworth's. Thinking it was like the Canadian version (a Zeller's variant) we asked a bloke in the carpark if he knew where there was a grocery store. He looked at us in a rather gape-jawed manner, and said "Wot?!?!" Repeating our plea, he said "wellllll..... there's a Woolies right there," and of course being the rather thick-heading Canucks that we are, we asked (Again!) "but does it sell groceries? Cuz that what we need!" And he said "yaaahhhhh... it's what we call a 'grocery store'." Of course, we explained that we were clueless Canadian's being used to Woolworth's as a drygoods. He came to, and we got our tucker. (not bad lingo, huh?!?)Anyways, we were all quite amused.

Driving:

Fortunately Singapore and Bali exposed me to right-hand driving... I must be getting a bit used to driving on the left, no glaring headlights coming at me, and -- it requires a high degree of focus.

Winter:

It's winter here. Solstice in 2 days. The sun sets at 5pm. Weird.

Kangaroos: Very very cute...

for pix to accompany this post, click here:

http://s122.photobucket.com/albums/o274/hersh_album/Australia%20Pics/

cheers

Hersh