Kookaburra sits in an old gum tree

It’s been a little over two weeks since I first arrived at the Bay View Hotel in Sydney, and after a whirlwind tour of the South East Coast and Southern Australia, I’m back for the weekend-long UC EAP orientation. Since I didn’t spend my squeezed-in wi-fi hours (Do all McDonald’s in the US have free wi-fi, too? I never thought I’d be on the hunt for Maccays, as they’re called in an Aussie accent, but it’s the best way to get online while traveling here!) giving daily blog reports, I figured I’d do a nutshell/highlights version. Let’s start with this little guy:


Unfortunately he’s not sitting in an old eucalyptus tree as the title claims but on a fence at Featherdale Wildlife Preserve, which was one of our main stops on the way back down from Newcastle area and where we saw all quintessentially Australian critters-- echidna, Tasmanian devils, dingo, kangaroos, koalas, snakes one doesn’t want to run into, and countless slightly bizarre feathered creatures, including kookaburras who made throaty sounds, if not full throated laughter. The little guys have recently been stirring up some trouble, as the Australian News ran somewhat frequent headlines about the authors of the original children’s song who waged a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Men At Work for using the melody in the short intro to "Down Under" thirty years after the song was released… and won. Oh, copyright law.

So how are the beaches?

I have seen many, many beaches, and they are all beautiful, whiter than any in California sometimes to the extent that makes them painful to look at without sunglasses. (Conveniently, one is rarely caught without sunglasses around here.) We drove down the South Eastern Coast, eventually making it to the very Southern tip of Australia, where Corner Inlet Marin and Coastal Park hides some of what were our favorite beaches a short walk through eucalypt forest.


With all the choices, my absolute favorite comes down to a pretty close tie between Tea Garden’s Ocean Beach and a small bay found on Kangaroo Island. Tea Gardens is a sleepy town off the beaten path, and its beauty, semi-remoteness, and coziness coupled with memories my dad’s family had of frequent visits while they lived in Newcastle combined to make it a warm and lovely place. The bay on Kangaroo Island was even more remote, the drive to get there a bumpy ride on the gravelly dirt roads with reward of sharing a still, clear bay with two other living souls.

Takes my breath away


Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges, pictured above. The hike to get this picture was a bit of a straight-upwards rock scramble, enjoyable and totally worth rising at a pre-sunrise hour to do before the heat. The Outback was the best part of the last couple weeks. Wildlife was everywhere (nothing poisonous, mainly ‘roos, emu, and a few rabbits), and the stars so far from any city life were almost as amazing as what I could see during the day. Seeing green eucalyptus trees thriving where only srub brush seemed to come out of the reddish dirt increased my already developing fondness for them.
The Blue Mountains also fall under this category. We were stuck in the clouds the first morning we were there and were afraid we wouldn’t be able to see the massive rain forests, cliffs, and renowned rock formations at all, but we stuck it out and were rewarded with the Three Sisters, pristine cascades, and eucalyptus trees whose size spoke to their hundreds of years in existence. We hiked down into one of the rain forests (is it bad that I was surprised to learn that Australia has rain forests?) and forwent the walk back up to experience a ride on the steepest-tracked passenger train around; it traveled a 50 degree grade at some points. Yes, that’s steeper than Marin Ave. in Berkeley.

You go downtown

Though cities aren’t my favorite place to be, I have to concede that the ones I’ve wandered around have been pretty enjoyable places. Sydney feels a bit overpowering because of its size, but the novelty of the opera house and its many beaches boosts its score a bit. Melbourne has a funky downtown square, an mix of artsy modern structures and old brick buildings, that reflects what I saw of the culture there-- a lot of fashionable younger people (multiple universities) and entertainment or shopping meccas with beautiful parks housing war memorials and other historic monuments running along the edge of downtown. The night I spent there happened to be a Wednesday, the one night of the week the Queen Victoria Market is held at night so I enjoyed some live music and food on at the very crowded, lively QV Marketplace.
I've heard it called "an overgrown town" and "a city of churches," but my favorite city was definitely Adelaide. The central district is bordered on all sides by parks, and the central Victoria Square (it's more of an oval, really) highlights old-style buildings and a pretty, quaint, brick church.


Both Melbourne and Adelaide were very promotional of cycling as transport and recreation through their bike paths, lanes, and signage, more so than any city I've seen in the US (and much more than Sydney).

In a word

Expansive. An obvious choice, considering Australia is the same size as the continental US, but I'm not referring to a quality shared by various parts rather than the country as a whole. When one is traveling through rain forest, one travels through lush, eucalyptus covered hills for a long, long time. When one in the mountains, it seems apparent that landscape of cliffs and massive rock formations extends indefinitely. Driving down the coast, it's easy to start taking the white sand beaches for granted because there are just so many. When there's nothing but dirt, scrub brush and some tough trees, there's nothing but dirt, scrub brush, and some tough trees for hours driving. Since the population is so condensed in the coastal cities, a place like Sydney isn't just a city, it's an expanse of city. I'm still working on a rational explanation for why the sky seems bigger, too.