Vaucluse

On our trip to Sydney over Christmas we went on a couple of really good walks.  One of them, on Boxing Day when we happened to see the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, was through a suburb called Vaucluse.

Vaucluse is about 8km from the Sydney CBD.  It is on the southern end of the headlands that form the entrance to Sydney Harbour.  It is a beautiful area of Sydney, with views on the western side towards the Harbour Bridge with the eastern side looking out over the Tasman Sea.  The houses here are VERY posh, with lots of little beaches and places to swim. 

Maquarie Lighthouse, Vaucluse



The path we followed started at the lovely and historic Maquarie Lighthouse, built in the 1880s.  There has been a lighthouse in this place almost since Sydney was founded.  This lighthouse, replacing the original, was erected in the 1880s and is still functioning today!

The walk took us all along the coast line which, while breath-taking, is extremely treacherous and it is in this area that the worst non-wartime accident in Australia occured.  The ship Dunbar crashed against the rocks here in a storm in 1857 and only one person out of 122 people survived.

Vaucluse Coastline

Vaucluse Coastline

This is an older part of Sydney and there are lots of beautiful parks and viewpoints throughout the entire walk.  We were even lucky enough to walk past a nudist beach with one extremely un-shy man, more than happy to look up at everyone on the pathway above him.  He was clearly not concerned about sun exposure!

The coastline had beautiful views but the wind was constantly howling (as one would expect at this time of year and right on the water) so we were pretty happy that the last part of our walk took us to a little inlet called Parlsey Bay.  It was a lovely little beach (although there was a rather disconcerting shark net), surrounded by beautiful houses, with beautiful clear water and not a breath of wind.  It was a wonderful way to spend Boxing Day and it is a walk that we will definitely do again.

Parsley Bay

 

Aussie News

The blogger page won't allow us to upload any photos at the moment, so we will give you an update on the news out of Australia.  You'll just have to use your imagination until we get our photo problems sorted out!

The big news right now in Australia is the weather.  This week was the second anniversary of the devastating floods that cut across Queensland.  Those flooding events followed intensive rainfall throughout the spring and summer.  Now, two years later, rainfall has been less than normal, and there are fires burning throughout the counrty.  Many of these fires are caused by lightning strikes, some are caused by sparks from vehicles and a few are deliberately lit.  Any arsonists that are caught are in serious trouble with the law and are lucky to be in police protection!  In addition to the fires, they are expecting a massive tropical storm to wreak havoc in Western Australia. 

Right in Brisbane we are free of fires, but we have had two weeks of highs over 30, with humidity over 50%.  Some days it feels like trying to move around in a sauna!  We have finally had to join a gym so that we can walk on a treadmill for some exercise.  It has been weeks since we have walked to or from work, and the forecast is for more of the same this week ("cooling" is considered anything below 30, so we might have a cold day of 29C this week, but we will have higher humidity, so it is not really any better!)

In 10 days we head to Melbourne, where in one week they will have a temperature range of 20 - 40C...and that is sometimes all in the same day.  We will be watching tennis, so hopefully the roof is closed and the air conditioning is on!

Happy 2013!

We had a great trip to Sydney for Christmas and returned to Brisbane to celebrate the New Year.  Sydney was a great place to spend the holidays, but it really doesn't have the weather that Brisbane does.  Something has gone wrong with us that we now find 20C cold!

Christmas is really lovely in Sydney.  The city is decked out in Chrtismas trees and lights everywhere and the David Jones department store in the CBD had a fantastic series of automated Christmas themed scenes in the windows.  Even without snow it was very Christmas-y.

Decorated Tree in a square near Circular Quay

Some of the David Jones window displays

We tried to see a couple of new areas in Sydney and we were lucky enough to be walking around Watson's Bay on Boxing Day, which is one of the premiere viewing points for the start of the Sydney to Hobart race.  We had no idea that we were in such a great vantage point, it was just dumb luck!

Looking out over Watson's Bay towards the CBD

The start of the race (all the boats with sails are racing)

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race was started in 1945.  Yachts of different sizes leave the Sydney Harbour at 1pm on Boxing Day and race to the Hobart Harbour, 1170 km to the south.  It gets kind of confusing, becuase the speeds are given in knots and distances are sometimes said in nautical miles and sometimes in kilometres.  Landlubbers like us can't quite follow exactly how fast the boats are going or how far away they are, but we do know they go really fast.  The winner of this year's race, Wild Oats XI, took only one day, 18 hours and 23 minutes.  There are different categories of boats and there are hadicaps for the different categories.  Wild Oats XI ended up winning the entire race, both outright and with the handicap.

This is our last day off before we head back to work tomorrow.  It doesn't matter what you are doing, where you are or how much time you have off, the break is never long enough.  Luckily we are off to Melbourne in just 3 weeks, so we won't be waiting too long until we get our next break.  Happy New Year!

Christmas 2012

Finally, after 11 weeks or 55 work days, we have made it to the Christmas break.  Now we have a week off to relax and get some much needed rest.  We will be in Sydney from Christmas Eve until 29 December and will spend New Year's Eve in Brisbane.  One year we would love to be in Sydney to see the big New Year's Eve fireworks show but we need to decide more than a couple of weeks in advance that we want do it.  Hotels are completely booked and probably have been since the middle of spring.

The storm blows in...

but it doesn't last long

We have had some crazy weather here ove rthe last few weeks: highs in the high 30s and lots of wind.  When it isn't windy it's humid so no matter what, it will be unpleasant.  Our spring had some crazy storms, with thunder storms moving quickly through the city and leaving behind flooded areas and blown down trees.  We are hoping to get some respite from the heat in Sydney, but they are certainly not immune to crazy weather.

Going to Sydney is one of our favourite things to do and we haven't gone there as much as we wanted to in 2012, so it is a great way to end off the year.

Tropical Christmas

This is our third Christmas in Australia and it still is a strange thing for us, to hear all the same Christmas carols and see all the same decorations that we would in Canada, but it is outrageously hot and just getting into summer!  (How hot is it?  We hit 38ºC on Tuesday, the hottest December day in 10 years in Brisbane!)

Six white boomers (the other two wouldn't fit in the picture)

The kids are getting out of school now, so our offices are a little less busy as parents take time off to spend with their kids, or to get ready for Christmas.  There are still quite a few kids group activities going on, and almost every day at lunch there is a group of kids from either a school or a club, singing carols on the Queen St Mall.  It is quite nice to hear the familiar music, but now our problem is sunburn, not frost bite.

Children's choir on Queen St Mall

We have seen some really amazing Christmas displays, including a sandcastle of Santa and his reindeer, along with an emu, a wombat and a fairly angry looking kangaroo.  The sculpture isn't finsihed yet, but it is most impressive and we hope they treated the sand so that the artwork doesn't all disolve into a puddle in the next rainstorm.

Amazing sand sculpture

Not all the decorations are man-made, this is also the time of year when many of the trees are in full bloom.  The frangipani trees are very pretty but the most impressive are the poinciana trees, with their brilliant red flowers.  The trees have a beautiful canopy shape and provide lots of shade over a wide area.  One of the most beautiful poinciana trees in our neighbourhood was recently blown over in a summer storm and they had to close two lanes of traffic just for the clean-up!

Poinciana Tree...this photo was taken just two days before it was blown over

Lovely and colourful frangipani trees

This has been one of the longest vacation-free stretches for us (12 weeks!) and we can't wait for the next two weeks of work to end.  We will have 10 days off, including spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Sydney!

So many crocs!

We have saved the best for last in relating our trip to the top end: the crocs!  Last year when we were in Far North Queensland (FNQ) we took a Daintree River cruise.  The pilot on that boat was very respectful of the laws when it came to approaching crocodiles in the Daintree River.  He would only get within about 5 metres of a crocodile and only stay in one place for a short period of time, in order to not stress the crocs.  He told us that the laws in FNQ are unique and that in Darwin they have trained the crocs to actually jump out of the water for meat.  We thought he was joking...he wasn't.

The top end of Australia is crocodile heaven!  When we were in Broome we were told that they occasionally have to close the beach because a croc or two moves in.  We didn't see any crocs, but we were well aware that there could, at certain times, be crocs in the area.  Scary stuff, but not fully appreciated until we arrived in Darwin.

Years ago, when crocodiles were hunted, people actually used to swim in the Darwin Harbour and Adelaide River (the Adelaide River is a major river that concludes in the Darwin Harbour).  No one swims there now!  Since they have started protecting crocodiles in the early 70's, the crocs have had an exponential increase in numbers and no one would risk swimming in these areas (tragically, a couple of weeks ago a young girl near Darwin was eaten by a crocodile while swimming in a "safe" place...crocodiles really get around.)  Now the crocs and citizens are in a transitional time.  The crocs can't be hunted, but some of the captured ones are destined to become lovely purses, boots and shoes, sold both overseas and in Darwin.

Our first exposure to the wild crocodiles in the Northern Territory was on the morning of our trip to Litchfield National Park.  We started the day by heading to the Adelaide River and getting in a very low profile tinny (sort of like a beat up floating caravan).  We really didn't see any crocodiles at the very beginning of the boat trip, but we could see the signs of them on the riverbank.  The guide told us that it was only legal to feed once we got past a certain point in the river.  We envisioned it would be like one of those Koi ponds, where the fish gather near the food and then swim away.  Not so for these prehistoric beasts!

Leaping for food

The guide had a 2 - 3m long bamboo pole with a heavy gauge string on the end, to which he tied a raw piece of meat (mostly the leftovers from beef processing plants).  Far faster than you can imagine, a very large (3+m) crocodile swam up to the boat, leapt out of the water to waist height, and clamped onto the bait.  The sound of those jaws clamping shut was positively deafening!  (We can't imagine what it would have been like for early settlers, maybe thinking that they could outsmart or outswim these creatures...they have been around for millions of years and are more or less the perfect killing machine.)  This baiting of crocodiles was repeated more than 20 times and we saw far more crocodiles in the water, watching the action and hoping to be the next one to have a go.  The smaller crocodiles must move away from the food when a bigger croc comes into the picture, otherwise the little guy becomes the food.  We certainly saw enough crocs missing arms to know how much they like to bite.  (Fun fact from Wikipedia: a crocodile's closing jaw pressure is up tp 5000 pounds per square inch (psi) or 30 MPa for us metric folks.  Compare this to a great white shark, with just 400 psi (pfft!) or a human with a mere 120 psi (why bother?).  On the flip side, the muscles that open the jaws are so weak that the jaws can be held just by human hands...not that we'd be willing to experiment with that!)

Lurking Croc

Sometimes they don't bite right away...the other guy at the top is playing it cool

Note his missing right arm!

The little tinny that kept us safe

After seeing this display we were intrigued by a tourist attraction called "Crocosaurus Cove", right in the centre of Darwin.  We were a bit dubious because we thought that it was a place to catch a bus that would take you to a crocodile sanctuary somewhere out of town, but no, the crocodile park is a two level enclosure right in the middle of the Darwin CBD (central business district).  The backpacker's bar and several apartments look right into the park and we can only imagine how many backpackers have had drunken thoughts about climbing the walls to wrestle a crocodile...not a good plan!

All that keeps this croc at bay is the aluminum pole...we'd rather have a gun!

They had the biggest and oldest crocodiles here.  They had some that were more than 5m long and 80 years old, including the one that was in the Crocodile Dundee movie.  He was an angry croc who was missing his front leg and had killed every potential mate that he had ever met.  Needless to say, he was in isolation.  There is also a tank here where about 3 large adults and people can pay to get in the "cage of death" which is a plexiglass cylinder that is lowered into the tank.  We saw some people in the cage and it did not look pleasant.

Leaping little guys! 

We really liked seeing the tank ponds with more than a hundred juvenile crocs, all swimming around and jumping for food.  They get their entire bodies out the water and it is really something to see!  We took the opportunity to hold a baby crocodile, who was strangely cute but still ready and willing to attack, if only they would remove the elastics from around his snout.

Sort of graceful and kind of cute...from behind plexiglass

Overall seeing the crocs was the true highlight of our trip.  They are fantastic ancient creatures and they will be there, with cockroaches, for the next million years.  They have lived for millions of years before man and will likely live for many millions of years after man.  For all the amazing sights that we saw, the crocs are what we remember and have come to almost love.  But beware...these things are killing machines!!!

Litchfield National Park

While we were in Darwin we took a day trip to Litchfield National Park.   Litchfield was established as a national park back in 1986, on land that was previously part of a cattle station.  The geography isn't ideal for cattle, a lot of it is quite steep and there didn't seem to be too many natural paddock areas.  It is a beautiful park, however, so hopefully the original owners were paid a good price by the government!

After visiting the Adelaide River and seeing gigantic jumping crocs (a topic that deserves its own blog entry!) we started the hour and a half drive south to Litchfield National Park.  This is pretty rugged country and very different from the subtropics that we are used to.  Litchfield Park is known for waterfalls, swimming holes and really striking natural features.  One of the first things we saw were termite mounds...gigantic "cathedral" termite mounds, easily 4 - 5 metres high and fields of "magnetic" termite mounds, which look like tombstones in some kind of outback cemetary.  The magnetic mounds are oriented north-south and are very thin, potentially to have minimal sun exposure for the colony.

Gigantic Cathedral Termite Mound

Magnetic Termite Mounds

Each type of mound is built by a specific species of termite, which in turn has a very specific diet.  Mostly we saw individual cathedrals in one area and the magnetic mounds in another. 

Wangi Falls

After seeing the termite mounds we visited a mountain water fall and lake, called Wangi Falls.  Being Canadians and having visited the Rockies many times, when we see a mountain lake, we think "glacier" and "cold"...not in this case!  The water in beautifully warm and a joy to swim in.  The only draw back is that in years of big floods, the crocs can get in but they struggle to get out! 

Buley Rockholes

We ended the day by relaxing in the Buley Rockholes, and cooling down in the 39ºC heat!  Then it was another 90 minutes back to Darwin, where we drank champagne and watched the sunset over the Darwin Harbour.  Such a rough life we lead!

Sunset over Darwin Harbour