Kangaroo hunting

By Friday, March 28th, Rob was most distressed that we had been in Australia for two weeks and had yet to see a kangaroo.

I quizzed all the swim moms and received a lot of advice on where to go. The four of us set out after swim practice, bound and determined to find some native wildlife...

The first place we hit was the Briars, an historic homestead that also has a beautiful bushwalk. The chatty lady at the information centre assured us that there were koala, kangaroos, wallabys and emus, just begging to be spotted. 

Not so.

We spent an hour prowling through the paths, our eyes on stalks, searching for any hint of movement. I saw a 2 inch ant and a flicker of a snake's tale, but no furry woodland creatures.

We gave up, and on our way out to the gate, a wallaby practically came up and tapped Rob on the shoulder. Seriously. He was 2 feet off the trail and didn't blink an eye when, after getting over the initial shock, Sophie jumped up and down to try and get him to hop away. Nope. He just sat and stared at us:

Rob declared that this animal sighting didn't count so we headed up to Arthur's Seat. We had been assured that there was no way that we could fail to see kangaroos here. This is the same place we had gone last weekend and saw some 'roo poo, but no trace of the animals who left it.

But finally, success.

They are about 4-6 feet when standing on their hind legs and cluster in groups of three or four. We saw about 15 all together but they didn't hang around long.

On Saturday, still on a buzz from our close animal encounter, we went to Cape Schank where, we had again be assured, kangaroos would practically be swarming the car.
Nope.
But we did see some awfully pretty coastline:

Rob gave up on marsupials and we set our sights on Portsea, because he had read that you can find seadragons along the pier.

Mighty Hunter, preparing to snorkel

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the seadragon hunt was unsuccessful.
Sophie threw some snags on the barbie (they have BBQs, fuel and all, in practically every park) for our picnic lunch.

Before heading home for the day, we drove out to Point Nepean, at the very tip of the Mornington Peninsula where we came across this:

No, not sharks. A pod of dolphins chasing fish about 10 feet off shore. Rob was a happy camper.

Off to the Big Smoke

Melbourne.
Wow.
Just...wow.
It's a 20 minute walk to the train station and then an hour long journey from Frankston to Flinders Street. All along the route into town are posters of "Dumb ways to die" characters, an extremely catchy ad campaign that Sophie has been singing for a very long time. We finally clued in that "Metro" is Melbourne Metro.
Here's the link - watch it if you dare:Dumb Ways to Die

Once we navigated the Flinders Street Station, we attempted to do a tour on the free tram that circles the downtown core but only lasted two stops before deciding it was too crowded and smelly. And I'm so glad we did because the tram doesn't go down all the incredibly cool laneways which are chock-a-block with street art (the rest of this post is going to be graphics heavy - be warned). Our first stop was the State Library of Victoria.

Yes, those people are lounging around in beanbag chairs. Want.

Reading Room Panopticon (thank you, Alice) with no-one at the controls in the middle

A display of campy book covers - if you can't embiggen, there are some fabulous titles like "Floozie out of Focus", "Widow is Willing" and "Stripper you're Stuck"

From there, we wandered searching for art.

Sophie, passive aggressively flouting the authority of the signage

We popped into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image which is just like Science World for for film buffs.

That's Sophie in front of a filter that changed your shadow into weird shapes - there's a Dreamworks exhibition opening at ACMI on April 10th so we will be back. Best of all - it's free!!

Finally, we did a brief tour of the lobby of the National Gallery of Victoria (again - FREE!) but only the lobby because we were all tired by this point. This is for all my crafty friends:

This bright and colourful sign greets you when you come in 

And you think What an odd thing to put on display. Old school afghan, desecrated Picasso and odd pouffs

Until you get closer and realize everything is made out of ICING!! Absolutely all of the decorations. And wallpaper. And the tea cup on the TV.

And for some reason, we were all craving something sweet so we walked back to one of the many many chocolate shops we had seen, stopped here and had one of these:

San Churro Ice Cream Sundae - Oh my lord-love-a-duck. Those are warm oozy dark chocolate brownies with 3 kinds of chocolate ice cream and chocolate drizzle that goes are hard and crispy when its cold. I gave myself a hematoma when my hand slipped trying to chip the chocolate off the side of the glass.

And now I must clean the drool off the keyboard.

Our Introduction to Australian Camping

Before we left Canada, one of Rob's new workmates got in touch with us and invited us camping the weekend we arrived in Australia. We figured, why not?

Blue Gums Caravan Park is about a two hour drive away from Frankston and part of the route takes you up and over the Great Dividing Range along a beautiful winding road called the Black Spur. Unfortunately, the afternoon we tried to drive it, the Black Spur was closed because of an accident: Melbourne's version of the Malahat. Instead, we went the long way 'round and saw a spectacular number of animals "sleeping" along the side of the road. Kangaroos, wallabies, wombats - the size of the roadkill here is astonishing. Poor Sophie - as we pulled into the campsite, she plaintively asked "Are we ever going to see living animals here?"

The campsite was swarming with a mob of tanned Aussie kids in bathingsuits and Blundstones and the adults were gathered around the firepit (made from an old washing machine drum) cooking paella.

The rain that had been threatening while we drove in unleashed its fury shortly after dinner was served. The amount of rain coming out of the sky was truly amazing. About half an hour after the deluge started, we heard the girls yelling for us from the tent (they had to time it correctly because the thunder was impressive too). They were still recovering from jet lag and had gone to bed before the rain started.  We stuck our heads in the tent and the entire floor of the tent was jiggling - dry, but undulating like a waterbed straight out of the 70's.

 By this time, the fire had gone out, but one resourceful fellow got it going again with a soldering torch that one of them just happened to have in his truck.

The Aussies alternated between apologizing for the weather, and blaming us for bringing it. Eventually though, the rain stopped and within 30 minutes, the water soaked into the ground and by the morning, it was as if it had never happened. As I made the trek to the washrooms before anyone else was up (because my internal clock was still 3 hours ahead of everyone else's), I saw a kookaburra sitting in an old gum tree. That made the already memorable introduction to Australian camping perfect.

Merry, merry king of the bush is he.

Our house...is a very, very, very fine house

Now that I've left you with that earworm, I'll tell you about where we're living.

Frankston is a fairly large (think: Western Communities in both population and geographical area) and it has an Uplands style area in the south and East End Vancouver-like area in the north. We live in the south.

The front of the house and the cute little echo I get to drive for the year.

Our street, Plummer Ave., has only one way in and involves making either a hard left up a hill from a major highway, or a death defying right hand u-ey at the bottom of the hill. Which can be a bit daunting when you're driving on the wrong side of the road and have just learned to drive stick with your left hand.

Plummer Ave is where the white car is pulling out. The grey car is about to pull a u-ey

Once you're actually on the street, it's nice and quiet and there are some beautiful old homes here.
Many of you have already seen a picture of the east facing kitchen. There are a kazillion windows and they all open up so I can enjoy the beautiful morning sun and the laughing of the kookaburras.

The back garden is jungle-like and I have yet to figure out what kind of trees and bushes are there. I was cutting back some shrubs and tried to brush a spider web out of the way -  it was as strong as fishing line, no exaggeration. Behind the back gate, there's an extremely precipitous hill that leads to the Sweetwater Creek Nature Reserve and a lovely ambling trail along the creek.

The view from the upper deck. Yes, upper. We also have a mid and a lower deck.

There are a few differences between Canadian and Australian houses. All electrical plugs have switches on them so you don't have to worry about sucking phantom power. However, more than once, I assumed something wasn't working when, in fact, I hadn't turned it on.

You can imagine the conversation: "Rob, the &$%# washer isn't working!" DH: "Have you flipped the switch?"

The other major difference is that Australians don't do dryers - everything is line dried. I'm ok with this because I LOVE crunchy towels, but laundry requires more foresight than I'm used to. On the plus side, I've already relegated all laundry duties to the child labour. After all, it is a year of learning life skills. I think I'll assign toilet scrubbing and oven cleaning next.

Hobbiton by guest blogger, Sophie

Hobbiton, The Shire, Middle Earth

Last week in New Zealand, the four of us went on an adventure down in Middle Earth. Yes, we went to HOBBITON!!! Well... the movie set at least. It was a blast. When we got there we were asked to board a bus that would take us to Hobbiton. Now, on the bus there were many people from ALL OVER the World. There were some from Germany, Czech Republic, America, Australia, New Zealand, and us, from Canada. The bus driver, Deandalf, not to be confused with Gandalf, was a very friendly fellow. He was talking the whole five minutes we were on the bus (but I guess that’s his job). Once we got off the bus, Sam, our tour guide (which is ironic that his name is Sam and we are at Hobbiton), lead us to a sign that said, ‘Welcome to Hobbiton’. First he took us to the Gandalf’s Cutting and the Garden.

Pickle, the cat, is paid extra to sit in front of the hobbit hole and look pretty, but doesn't like getting her picture taken.

There, we were allowed to take pictures of some of the hobbit holes. The hobbit holes weren't actual hobbit holes, they didn't even open. The only ones that did were the bakery, which only was just the doorway. And Bilbo Baggin's house which was only a little hallway so they could show enough when filming.

Bilbo Baggin's hole

 Anyways, we finished taking pictures and we went to the frog pond, which was a small pond surrounded by “hobbit holes”. Again, they weren't really hobbit holes. They were really just hobbit doors. Everyone went around taking pictures of EVERYTHING.

Yes, they took pictures of EVERYTHING!!

 After that, we went to Bag End. When we were there, we asked Sam if he had ever been asked any weird questions. He told us that someone once asked if the lake was full of real water and so he said, “No, it is full of de-hydrated water so when people fall in, they will stay completely dry.” Because if you ask a silly question you will get a silly answer.

 We went down the hill to the party tree. The party tree was one of the reasons why Peter Jackson chose that sight. The other reasons were because the lake was there and there were no power lines or other modern things visible. After we took pictures we all went to the Green Dragon for free drinks.

The Green Dragon bar

At the bottom of my glass of ginger beer, there was a small golden ring. I put it on and vanished. My parents were looking for me for hours. When I finally took off the ring, my parents were happy to see me, but the bus had already left so we had to run all the way back out of Middle Earth and into the real world.

And so it starts...

Instead of trying to get everything perfect, it's better to just dive right in, right? Well, here we go.

The title picture was taken at the top of Mt. Maunganui on the east coast of New Zealand. It was the last time for the next twelve months that we could point across the ocean and say "Look! Victoria is right over there!"

We got into Auckland at 5:30 in the morning, picked up the rental car and drove south out of Auckland after deciding not to test Rob’s newfound driving-on-the-wrong-side skills in the downtown core. Instead, we headed straight to the Waitomo glow worm caves. Our cameras aren't good enough to give you any idea of how spectacular the glowworms are but here are some pics of the astounding stalactites:

Stalactites reflected in the water as we were being paddled around in a tin boat by a Maori girl who demanded absolute silence while we viewed the glowworms. Interesting fact: the glow is caused by a chemical reaction between what the worm has digested and oxygen. Voila - bioluminescent poo.

This is for you, Jane. With your fabric draping superpower, you would really appreciate the beauty of these shawl formations. They're over 6 feet long and as thin as a piece of velvet.

After the caves, we headed to Cambridge. Our motel room was right over a major highway (no wonder he was so willing to give us two rooms for the price of one!) but we hadn't been to bed in two days and slept like logs.

I'm going to skip over Hobbiton because guest blogger Sophie will be covering that soon...

On towards the coast. We visited the Hanurama Redwood Forest only to discover that the trees there had been imported and are native to the Pacific West Coast. No wonder it smelled like home. There were two springs, one of which was called “Dancing sands” because the sand bubbles up as the gushing water pushes it. 

We also went to Okere falls where there used to be a hydro energy plant and now is just a rusted couple of turbines and a raging river.

The entire time we were in New Zealand, we didn't eat a single kiwi. But we did visit a kiwi farm:

And that's it for now. We'll try and post something every day or two - let us know what you think!