Kangaroo Island, Day 2 February 26

Day two of our visit to Kangaroo Island began with the Kelly Hill Caves, an extensive cave system with lovely caverns, and many stalagmites and stalactites.  We had a ranger-led tour deep into the complex:

At Hanson Bay I couldn’t resist another wild Koala photo:

We then went to a formation called “Remarkable Rocks” and learned of the geologic activity which led to its creation, following which we hiked down to and on to the rocks.  They are pretty amazing:

After lunch we went to a long and difficult predominately vertical walk (on a boardwalk and stairs) to a truly beautiful natural arch, out of which you could see a large colony of Australian Fur Seals cavorting in the waves and on the rocks.  They truly seemed to be having fun:

We then went to a lovely reserve where there is a path called “Koala Walk”.  Many eucalyptus have been planted in broad avenues to attract koalas, and it’s been successful:

 Finally we went to the local Kangaroo Island airport for the short flight on a regional scheduled airline back to the Adelaide airport.  No security.  None.  We got our boarding passes without showing any ID, just gave our names, and simply got on the 33-passenger jet-prop when the flight was called.  We arrived at the hotel in time for 8:00 PM dinner, and right to bed after.

A comment on the Australian marsupials, which are fascinating.  Most of their joeys (all marsupial newborns are called joeys) are born incredibly tiny, weighing on the order of 2 or 3 grams (one tenth of an ounce).  They must make their way from the birth canal to the pouch on their own, and find their teat in the pouch.  They then glom on to a teat and don’t let go for months until their development is far advanced and they can stick their heads out of the pouch.  The female kangaroo is fertile just a couple of weeks after giving birth, while she is lactating, and can have joeys of different ages in her pouch at the same time.  Even more remarkably, the milk she gives can be different from different teats depending on the age of the joey nursing, as the milk content required is different at different ages.  The echidnas (we saw a spiny anteater) are monotremes and have a cloaca from which all things exiting the body come.  These remarkable egg-laying mammals curl up into a ball to deliver the fertilized egg into the pouch where it is held until delivery of the baby which then nurses on the fur over the mammary glands, as they have no nipples.  This has been an amazing biology lesson!

Tomorrow Australian wines.

Kangaroo Island I February 25

Up at 6:00 to pack, check our large bags, and get to the ferry terminal at Cape Jervis for the ferry to Kangaroo Island.  The island is very large and has an abundance of things to see and do.  We’ll stay overnight tonight, have another full day on the island tomorrow and fly 20 minutes back to Adelaide tomorrow night on a small plane with a baggage limitation of 15 pounds.

The island is very beautiful, with a substantial portion of it dedicated to parkland and public beaches:

 We began touring at a eucalyptus oil plant where we had a fascinating tour of the production facility (which was quite basic):

This facility sells pure eucalyptus oil which actually has been distilled from the mixture of oil and water obtained from boiling the leaves in giant vats.  The oil is promoted to have many uses; the scientist in me is skeptical of most of the claims.

We next visited Seal Bay where, after lunch, we had a ranger-led visit to the sea lions on the beach.  Why this is Seal Bay is confusing, as Kangaroo Island has seals in another location which we will see tomorrow, but here at Seal Bay are sea lions.  The major difference is that sea lions have real rear legs and can walk on them, while seals have rear flippers and cannot raise their bodies off of the sand or rocks:

We then went to a sheep dairy and learned a considerable amount about the dairy farming of sheep.  We got to tour the milking barn and taste a number of varieties of sheep milk cheese:

Not done yet, we went to a honey farm! The beekeeper here has an enormous number of bees and produces honey from a number of different sources.  We got to taste five different honeys and indeed, they are quite different from one another:

Finally, after the honey farm, we went to a wharf where every day, precisely at 5:00 PM, a man feeds the pelicans.  This is a truly wonderful sight, as he has some patter which he presents as he first teases and then feeds the patiently waiting birds:

 Exhausted, we checked into our hotel, had dinner, and crashed!  More tomorrow.

Adelaide, Potoroos and a Joey February 24

Tuesday, February 24  Adelaide

Up very early and we departed the Indian-Pacific train at 7:00.  We went immediately to the enormous Adelaide Market which was just opening up:

We were pointed to a couple of different places which would be good for breakfast, both of which were very busy.  I ordered a “complete breakfast” and here’s what came:

Two scrambled eggs on two very thick slices of rye toast, a giant pile of bacon, two large sausages underneath the bacon, and a whole tomato which had been split and cooked.  It was breakfast for four.  I ate breakfast for one.

By now the market was open and busy, and we toured it.  The fruit and vegetable stands were lovely, but it was the meat markets which really caught our attention:

 And finally, Western New York

We then toured this lovely city of 2+ million people.  On the walking portion we passed the Migration Museum, and stopped to view a number of poignant plaques which were mounted on the museum walls while we heard some of the horrific stories they represented.  Here’s one:

 We then drove around the city; the entire city is surrounded by very large contiguous parks, a ring of green which is enormous and well-used.  It couldn’t be lovelier.  We then went to the extensive Botanic Gardens, had lunch there, and then had a docent-led tour emphasizing the use the Aboriginal people made of plant materials.  It was absolutely fascinating.  The core plant material they used came from the eucalyptus tree, and they used every part of it extensively:

We saw something I don’t think we have at home, a Tree-roosting Duck:

Finally we went to our hotel, checked in, and had a lecture on the city of Adelaide, its history and population, and an introduction to Kangaroo Island where we go on Wednesday.  At 6:00, still up and going, we went to the Cleland Wildlife Park, a game reserve located in a much larger national park about a half-hour out of town and up on a hillside.  We had a barbeque dinner there while the sun set, and then, at dusk, had a game walk to see nocturnal animals.  As it was quite dark, these photos are not as good as those I’ve taken in the day, but we had a wonderful walk.  The Potoroo is a small marsupial (sort of looks like a large rat).  Here’s one with a joey (baby) in the pouch.  The joey was the size of a fingernail when born:

 There are both resident and visiting kangaroos:

Tasmanian Devils:

And, of course, there are koalas.  There are resident ones and visitors who come and go.  Here’s an awake (!) visiting koala in a eucalyptus tree:

 Tomorrow off to Kangaroo Island.  Wake up will be at 5:00 AM.  We’re exhausted!

Indian-Pacific Train and the Big Pit February 22-23

Sunday, February 22-Monday, February 23

After Sunday breakfast we went to the waterfront where there is a large, but hard to see (because of amazing construction) bell tower:

This tower was built as Western Australia’s commemoration of the 200^th anniversary, in 1988,  of the settling of the country by the English.  Twelve of the eighteen bells came from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the parish church of Buckingham Palace.  The story is that these very old bells, dating from the early 18^th century, were damaging the bell tower at St. Martin’s , and the bell tower needed to be reconstructed.  When that was done these old bells were put into storage and newer, lighter bells were installed.  The bells subsequently were  brought to Perth for this newly constructed bell tower.

We learned a great deal about bell chiming vs. bell ringing vs. bell pealing (all of which are quite different) and we learned about how the bells are installed.  For true bell ringing the bells are pulled to their upside down position:

Ropes are then pulled which flip the bell all the way around; multiple bells are done in sequence and multiple bell ringers are used.  For bell chiming, the bells are stored with the clapper down, and the rope is pulled with a little jerk on it to get the clapper to hit the bell.  Bells are tolled this way:

 A carillon is different yet, with the person ringing the bells using a keyboard which moves the clapper which hits the bell as the bell is stationary.  There is a small carillon on the tower:

Finally we left the bell tower and went to the train station where we boarded the Indian-Pacific, a train which goes from the Indian Ocean at Perth to the Pacific Ocean at Sydney.  We took it two nights and got off at Adelaide, in the center south of Australia.  Our cabin had an upper and a lower bunk, the train had an excellent restaurant, and a lovely lounge car where we met people from all over the world.  Conversation was aided by the free alcoholic beverages which flowed freely.

At 11:00 PM on our first night the train stopped at the largest open pit mine in the world, in the middle of nowhere in the desert.  It’s a gold mine which is truly enormous, called the Super Pit.  It was hard to get a picture, but here’s the best I could do:

The trucks moving around looked like Tonka toys down below.  There was a sort of museum, open at that hour, where the most impressive thing was the machines which work the mine.  Each dump truck holds 250 metric tons of dirt, and out of each ton they get about 2.2 grams of gold.  Yet it’s worth doing!  Here is a front end loader and the dump truck (note there is a person in the photo of the truck):

Joyce didn’t go to the pit, and I returned at about 1 AM Perth time.  Now a word about time.  Australia has a mish-mosh of time.  Some states have daylight savings, some don’t.  Southern Australia has time which is ½ hour off of any other time.  It’s so confusing that the train announces that while we are on the train we will forget the outside world and use “train time”.  I felt a bit like I was in an Albert Einstein thought experiment.  So we changed time ahead one hour after coming back from the pit, and then the second night we changed ahead 1 ½ hours, making us right with the Adelaide time, but wrong with the outside world much of the time we traveled.

We went across an endless desert:

 This is on the longest piece of straight track in the world, variously told to us a between 400 and 600 km.  It was indeed endless!  Finally, on the morning of the third day, we got up at 5:30 AM train time, which was by then also 5:30 AM Adelaide time to have breakfast at 6:15 AM and exit the train at 7:00 AM to begin touring Adelaide!

Gold, Torah crowns and Fringe, February 21

Saturday, February 21, 2015

We started the day with a visit to the Perth mint, where to this day gold prospectors bring gold to be weighted and sold to the government.  In this wheelbarrow are reproductions of some of the largest nuggets found:

Of the 20 largest gold nuggets ever found, 19 of them were found in Australia!  To this day large nuggets are sometimes found in the gold fields.  Unfortunately, no photos were allowed in the mint, but we saw the largest gold coin ever minted, a 1000 kg. coin with a kangaroo on one side and an image of Queen Elizabeth II on the other.  It was quite a sight.  We also saw the making of a gold bar.  The raw gold was heated to melting in a crucible and poured into a mold, from which, after a few minutes, it was removed, already hardened, and cooled to room temperature in a water bath.  It was an impressive process.

From the mint we went to the Western Australia Museum where we had a guided tour of the Aboriginal section with an anthropologist.  She gave us a great introduction to the Aborigines of Western Australia and of the very spiritual world in which they live.  The word “Dreaming” is the best translation into English of the complex ideas which include much ancestor reverence and references, a code of behavior, a belief of a very profound integration of the land, the water, ancestors and dreaming into a way of being.  An attempt to explain all of this was in a sign in the museum:

The Law comes from the Dreaming.

The Law is a set of rules for behaviour.

Elders maintain the Law and ensure that it is passed on.  People say “It’s the Law” to explain the rules they follow.

Lore also comes from the Dreaming.  It is the stories that contain the Law.

There was a man with us from one of the aboriginal communities who also explained some of the differences between those communities.  These differences included language dialects and alternate ways of carving shields, spears, digging sticks and other everyday things.  It didn’t seem as if the differences were as great as those we had among the Native American tribes in North America, but the stories of the abuses of the native population by the Europeans are horrible and equally as bad as ours.

Here’s a shelter typical of those built by the native people out where the wind is ferocious.  The closed end of the shelter is into the wind, and the shape of the shelter creates a wind break for a fire to be built in front of the open part.  The wind carries the smoke away, and yet the heat of the fire warms the inside of the shelter:

There is so much more to learn, and we’ll continue to have instruction on the aborigines as we get into the southern part of the Northern Territory.

After lunch we were on our own for the afternoon.  Joyce had found a notice that there was an exhibit at the nearby art gallery of artifacts from the Jewish Ghetto of Venice.  The introduction to the exhibit explained that in September of 1943, as the Nazi armies invaded Italy, two elderly men who had been responsible for the religious service of the Spanish and Levantine Synagogues in the Venetian Ghetto, concealed a selection of liturgical objects.  The men who hid them died in the concentration camps, and the objects were forgotten until the recent restoration of the Scola Spagnola—the Spanish Synagogue.  We were excited to see this exhibit as we will be traveling to Rome, Florence and Venice with the Melton program out of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in October.  The items were spectacular.  Here is a pair of Torah crowns:

 And here a selection of rimmonim (Torah-top finials):

 The exhibit moves from here to Paris and then back to Venice some time in 2015, but the exact dates were not given and it’s not clear if these items will be in Venice when we’re there.

Finally we went back to the hotel, washed up, and went out into a combination of Saturday night, Chinese New Year, and Fringe Festival.  The city is hopping.  Loud, boisterous but good-natured crowds, music, alcohol, people dressed in an amazing variety of looks, with the young women, especially, in very revealing and provocative outfits along with shoes impossible to walk in.  We had dinner at an Outback themed steak place—delicious---and sat at a table on the sidewalk enjoying the parade in front of us.

Tomorrow, Sunday, we board the Indian-Pacific train and will spend two nights on it, arriving in Adelaide on Tuesday.  No internet on the train, so more in a couple of days.

Rottnest Island February 20

Friday, February 20

We began early this morning with a ferry to Rottnest Island, off the coast of Fremantle.  We boarded the ferry in Perth and cruised down the river to the mouth of the Swan River where we stopped for more passengers at Fremantle and then crossed to the island.  Here’s a photo of Perth from the ferry:

The island got its name from a Dutch explorer who came ashore, saw a large number of a local marsupial, the quokka, which looked to him like large rats, and declared the island uninhabitable because of them.  Rottnest means “rat’s nest” in Dutch.  The island is wild and lovely with a dramatic coastline:

Many people come to Rottnest for the day to bike and hike and enjoy its beauty.  It now is a resort island, but it has an interesting military past.  We spent considerable time learning about the WW II submarine base which was at Fremantle and the amazing 9.2 inch long guns which were mounted on Rottnest Island to protect the harbor.  We visited the Oliver Hill Battery and saw one of the guns which actually had been built in 1901 in England, but were installed here to protect the coast during WW II.:

We toured the underground control systems which were quite extensive, and learned about how the ammunition was made and stored as well as how the gun was loaded and fired.  Here’s the loading platform with the breech opened:

We drove around the whole island, stopping for walks at overlooks and at the beautiful lighthouse.  Here’s a spot where there was an imperious pelican:

And here’s the lighthouse:

At the end of the day we took the ferry back to Fremantle and went to a local hotel restaurant for a wonderful buffet dinner, after which we came back to Perth and to our hotel.  

Perth February 19

Thursday, February 19

Off to the airport this morning for the 4 ½ hour flight to Perth, the capitol of Western Australia and about as far from Rochester, NY on land as you can be.  Perth is 20 miles upstream on the Swan River from Fremantle, on the Indian Ocean coast and the site of the America’s Cup race in the 1980s.  Another three-hour time change!

In the afternoon we toured Kings Park and the enormous and quite wonderful botanical gardens.  Here’s a view of Perth from the gardens:

We had a great docent take us on a walk through the gardens for well over an hour, where she showed us many varieties of trees and plants which we do not have at home.   Here’s one, the grass tree:

There are also birds we don’t have.  I got this photo of one I haven’t yet had identified.  Anyone know what it is?

Perth has a wonderful feel about it and extraordinarily friendly and upbeat people.  Despite being a city of over 2 million people, it is still, in many ways, a frontier town, isolated and with its own style.  The downtown is lovely with four free bus routes around the city, the busses running every 10 or 15 minutes!  It is impeccably clean with no litter anywhere.  The weather is gorgeous, sunny all the time (they average 8 hours of sunshine/day 365 days/year), and temperatures are in the 80’s with a great breeze.  They did have a heat wave last week, just before we arrived, with temperatures of 100!

We checked into our hotel and at 5:00 began a lecture on the history of Western Australia, which was fascinating.  The state is, by far, the largest state in Australia and accounts for about 1/3 of the land mass of Australia.  There’s been a gold rush, and currently export of minerals, especially iron ore, make up the large bulk of the economy.  There’s been a boom and bust economy which fluctuates far too frequently for comfort, and the Perth area has the highest proportion of millionaires of any city in the country.  

Of course it was now well after 8 PM Sydney time, and I’m afraid much information didn’t stick in my memory.  We had dinner after the lecture and off to bed!