Update from the air (kind of)
Aug. 20th, 2009 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ria_oaksYes, I'm still alive... sorry for the lack of updates, guys - it's been a pretty busy past 3 weeks since Mom arrived! In fact, it's taken until I had 14 hours to kill on a plane to finally write an update which I won't be able to post until I get home anyway... it's 1:30pm Sydney time, I've been in the air about 3 hours... 11 to go. ^^ Will arrive back in Vancouver Wednesday morning at 7am, which is a bit trippy given that I left on Wednesday at 10:30am Australia time. :) Think that counts as time travel...?
Anyway, it's been an awesome 3 weeks. I'm going to do up a proper post with pics and whatnot for my travelblog (which has been even more sadly ignored than this journal), probably at least in part while sitting here trying to stave off boredom, but that'll take awhile - got a ton of pics to sort through, and don't have all of them with me. My camera, just days after I finally got it back, died. -_- Hopefully not permanently - I'm going to take it to get looked at soon as I get home. But in the meantime I've been counting on Mom to take the pictures. I've got a chunk of them on my computer, but not the most recent ones.
So, last few weeks... as I said, have been v. busy - trips with Mom tend to be like that. ^^ Though she's mellowed out over the years - this trip's itinerary (yes, she always has a detailed and often colour-coded itinerary) included "relaxation days". Shocking. ;) Good thing, too, because we definitely needed days to rest in between our tours. Which were, on the whole, fantastic. We went on a two-day tour of Fraser Island, which is a few hours north of Brisbane and is, I believe, the world's largest sand island. It's very beautiful - the entire island is sand, but somehow a ton of vegetation is able to grow there (something about the plants decomposing and creating nutrients to grow new ones, i think). It's got rainforest areas, sand dunes, beautiful beaches which stretch for miles and which we could drive along (they were like highways, seriously, it was pretty funny seeing how many cars were on them), and lakes with sandy bottoms... it wasn't quite warm enough to swim, though. Overall it was a great trip, though the truck we were in was pretty uncomfortable (it was quite small and just had 2 benches facing each other in the back, so there were 4 of us squished together on each side. And there were 4 big Spanish guys on the trip who took up a lot of room...).
After Fraser Island we went to Australia Zoo for a day, on our way to the airport to fly to Cairns. It's a pretty good zoo, though the amount of commercialization and branding of Steve Urwin's name gets tiring after awhile (how many things do they really need to plaster his face all over...?). I convinced Mom to get a picture taken with a python around our shoulders - I was going to do it while she watching, but as we got to the front of the line she got up the courage to be in the photo. ^^ It's a great picture, I'll scan and post it later... beautiful white python. After the zoo we flew up to Cairns, which for those that don't know is in north Queensland and is the main city along the Great Barrier Reef. We had a day trip up to a little village in the rainforest called Kuranda, which was lovely and is what Bowen really needs to get off its ass and become (we're supposed to be a tourist destination, but there's nothing to do on Bowen. Not really. Kuranda on the other hand had several little museums/wildlife parks, some great markets, and lots of nice shops and restaurants. And about the same population as Bowen. *sigh*).
We then took a shuttle about an hour north to Port Douglas, which is a nice little town along the beach and is one of the most northern towns in Queensland (above it there are only a few other small towns then a lot of rainforest). We stayed there for 3 days, and took 2 day trips - one to the Daintree National Park/Cape Tribulation (the aforementioned rainforest - incredibly beautiful!) and one out to the Great Barrier Reef. I got seasick on the way out, but knowing my tendency towards motion sickness we had gone on one of the more high-end tours (big boat which goes out to a big and fairly stable pontoon) which admittedly was pretty tacky and over-the-top but was worth it because once I got on the pontoon I felt better. Went snorkling for a bit, but I'm not that into it and to be honest there wasn't a ton to see. It was pretty nifty, though, and I saw a fair number of fish. It was quite beautiful, but not entirely what you would expect - all the pictures showing the bright bright colours of the reef are exaggerated, because without some special type of light that photographers use you don't normally see it like that (the colours are more muted and greyish when seen normally - still pretty, though). And now I can say I've snorkled on the Great Barrierr Reef. :) (and Mom and I, being complete dorks, proceeded to go to the video store that evening and rent Finding Nemo... which I own and have seen numerous times, but it was neat to see it having been out where it takes place. I commented to the girl at the video store that tourists must rent it all the time and she said that yeah, they do. ^^
After a third day in Port Douglas to (gasp) relax on the beach, we flew to Darwin (and for those that know nothing about the geography of Austalia, that's at the very north in approximately the middle of the country, in the Northern Territory. It's quite close to Southeast Asia, you can get cheap flights to Bali and whatnot from there (thought about that too, a few monthes back, but it didn't pan out). From Darwin we went on a 3 day tour of the Kakadu National Park, which is amazing. We saw a bunch of waterfalls that we were able to swim in, which I've always wanted to do... only ever done it one other time, in Hawaii years ago. I'll talk more about it in my proper post (and I know, this is already getting long... I fail at short updates!), but it was a great trip. Not the best tour company (compared to the next one), but pretty good and the area was beautiful. We went on a crocodile cruise, which was cool and also pretty creepy - there were evidently 2500 crocodiles in the river we were cruising on; after about 10 minutes the guide said that we had just passed over 50-100 crocodiles and that if we fell in we would die pretty much right away. Yikes! It was spectacular, though - it was only about 8:30am and the river was all misty and empty except for us... and 2500 crocodiles and a lot of birds. :)
After Darwin we flew to Alice Springs for our 3-day Uluru tour, which is pretty much in the middle of the country. Finally out in the outback proper! Though it's not as red and empty as I'd though - there's a surprising amount of vegetation and trees. It's very pretty in a rather dry way. :) This was by far our best tour, just in terms of the tour company itself - great guide, very friendly and informative and helpful. Nice pace (our Kakadu guide walked very fast...), and unlike our Kakadu guide he fed us lots of snacks during the day. :) First day was Uluru itself, which really is pretty amazing. We went for a guided walk at the base led by an Aboriginal woman, who told us some of the stories/myths about Uluru in her own language which was then translated by another guide. We then drove to a lookout point to watch the sun set over Uluru, which was beautiful but also pretty funny because it was jam-packed - there was tour bus after tour bus lined up with all the people sitting around having champagne and snacks as the sun set... as were we. ^^ Next day was a 2-3 hour walk of Kata-Tjuta/The Olgas, which were spectacular. Better than Uluru in some ways - Uluru's the big sight, but it's not necessarily the best... just the one you hear about the most and see plastered on postcards and souvenirs the most (though it is remarkable, don't get me wrong). Last day was perhaps the best, actually - a 3-4 hour walk of King's Canyon. Again not as well known as Uluru, but according to the guide many people on the tours consider it the best of the three (he was right). Pictures to come, of course, but they won't really do it justice... beautiful walk, and not too difficult. Weather was fantastic on all 3 days - warm, but not too hot, and not cold as night like we had worried. And happily enough there was a girl on the tour who was alone and just a few years younger than me, and we shared quite a few interests, so it was really nice having someone to talk to (no offence to my mother, lol - but it can be hard to meet someone who one can talk to easily and for a long time, you know? ^^ And nearly everyone else on all the tours we'd gone on had been European, and while most of them spoke at least some English, they were often in pairs/small groups and naturally tended to talk in their own language more). I really liked her, but sadly she lives in the UK. We traded emails, anyway, and I've got some pictures to send to her, so maybe we'll be able to keep in touch a bit.
And that's about it... flew to Sydney the other day, and spent one full day wandering around the city. It's a nice city in a lot of ways, but I still much prefer Melbourne and even Brisbane. Sydney's too damned big... and the CBD isn't nearly as compact as in the other two cities. It feels very spread out and it takes awhile to get around. It's also not as easy to navigate as the other two, which both have CBDs arranged in a nice grid fashion. :) The Harbour and the adjacent Botanical Gardens are very nice, though.
*looks at watch* Well that killed almost an hour and a half, go me! It's now almost 3pm, which means about 9.5 hours to go. Bleeeh, bored now. And tired of using the computer, I think I'll give it a rest and maybe work on my travelblog post later. I don't want to give myself a headache. I'm also getting a bit hungry, which is always one of the worst parts of long flights for me - I hate the food, though I try to eat a bit of it. Got a bunch of snacks with me, too.
Anyway, suppose it's a bit pointless to say what time it is given that by the time I post this I'll be home. ;) Just pretend, okay?
(hours later... home now! just slept for 4 hours because I was exhausted, now going to try to force myself to stay awake until tonight. Tis nice to be home... nothing like that view of the West Coast mountains and islands as you fly into Vancouver, it always chokes me up a bit when I've been away from home for awhile. :) Also had a gorgous sunrise above the clouds when we were about 45min-1 hour out. Rest of the flight from when I wrote this was fine; watched a bunch of TDS/TCR on my iPod and a couple of episodes of The Office. Watched The Soloist and Wolverine on the in-flight entertainment (former was v. good, can't beat RDJ and Jaime Foxx, and the latter was pretty entertaining overall... though I don't know the comic version of Wolverine's origin story and I gather the movie butchered it. ^^; I enjoyed it well enough, anyway).)
Anyway, it's been an awesome 3 weeks. I'm going to do up a proper post with pics and whatnot for my travelblog (which has been even more sadly ignored than this journal), probably at least in part while sitting here trying to stave off boredom, but that'll take awhile - got a ton of pics to sort through, and don't have all of them with me. My camera, just days after I finally got it back, died. -_- Hopefully not permanently - I'm going to take it to get looked at soon as I get home. But in the meantime I've been counting on Mom to take the pictures. I've got a chunk of them on my computer, but not the most recent ones.
So, last few weeks... as I said, have been v. busy - trips with Mom tend to be like that. ^^ Though she's mellowed out over the years - this trip's itinerary (yes, she always has a detailed and often colour-coded itinerary) included "relaxation days". Shocking. ;) Good thing, too, because we definitely needed days to rest in between our tours. Which were, on the whole, fantastic. We went on a two-day tour of Fraser Island, which is a few hours north of Brisbane and is, I believe, the world's largest sand island. It's very beautiful - the entire island is sand, but somehow a ton of vegetation is able to grow there (something about the plants decomposing and creating nutrients to grow new ones, i think). It's got rainforest areas, sand dunes, beautiful beaches which stretch for miles and which we could drive along (they were like highways, seriously, it was pretty funny seeing how many cars were on them), and lakes with sandy bottoms... it wasn't quite warm enough to swim, though. Overall it was a great trip, though the truck we were in was pretty uncomfortable (it was quite small and just had 2 benches facing each other in the back, so there were 4 of us squished together on each side. And there were 4 big Spanish guys on the trip who took up a lot of room...).
After Fraser Island we went to Australia Zoo for a day, on our way to the airport to fly to Cairns. It's a pretty good zoo, though the amount of commercialization and branding of Steve Urwin's name gets tiring after awhile (how many things do they really need to plaster his face all over...?). I convinced Mom to get a picture taken with a python around our shoulders - I was going to do it while she watching, but as we got to the front of the line she got up the courage to be in the photo. ^^ It's a great picture, I'll scan and post it later... beautiful white python. After the zoo we flew up to Cairns, which for those that don't know is in north Queensland and is the main city along the Great Barrier Reef. We had a day trip up to a little village in the rainforest called Kuranda, which was lovely and is what Bowen really needs to get off its ass and become (we're supposed to be a tourist destination, but there's nothing to do on Bowen. Not really. Kuranda on the other hand had several little museums/wildlife parks, some great markets, and lots of nice shops and restaurants. And about the same population as Bowen. *sigh*).
We then took a shuttle about an hour north to Port Douglas, which is a nice little town along the beach and is one of the most northern towns in Queensland (above it there are only a few other small towns then a lot of rainforest). We stayed there for 3 days, and took 2 day trips - one to the Daintree National Park/Cape Tribulation (the aforementioned rainforest - incredibly beautiful!) and one out to the Great Barrier Reef. I got seasick on the way out, but knowing my tendency towards motion sickness we had gone on one of the more high-end tours (big boat which goes out to a big and fairly stable pontoon) which admittedly was pretty tacky and over-the-top but was worth it because once I got on the pontoon I felt better. Went snorkling for a bit, but I'm not that into it and to be honest there wasn't a ton to see. It was pretty nifty, though, and I saw a fair number of fish. It was quite beautiful, but not entirely what you would expect - all the pictures showing the bright bright colours of the reef are exaggerated, because without some special type of light that photographers use you don't normally see it like that (the colours are more muted and greyish when seen normally - still pretty, though). And now I can say I've snorkled on the Great Barrierr Reef. :) (and Mom and I, being complete dorks, proceeded to go to the video store that evening and rent Finding Nemo... which I own and have seen numerous times, but it was neat to see it having been out where it takes place. I commented to the girl at the video store that tourists must rent it all the time and she said that yeah, they do. ^^
After a third day in Port Douglas to (gasp) relax on the beach, we flew to Darwin (and for those that know nothing about the geography of Austalia, that's at the very north in approximately the middle of the country, in the Northern Territory. It's quite close to Southeast Asia, you can get cheap flights to Bali and whatnot from there (thought about that too, a few monthes back, but it didn't pan out). From Darwin we went on a 3 day tour of the Kakadu National Park, which is amazing. We saw a bunch of waterfalls that we were able to swim in, which I've always wanted to do... only ever done it one other time, in Hawaii years ago. I'll talk more about it in my proper post (and I know, this is already getting long... I fail at short updates!), but it was a great trip. Not the best tour company (compared to the next one), but pretty good and the area was beautiful. We went on a crocodile cruise, which was cool and also pretty creepy - there were evidently 2500 crocodiles in the river we were cruising on; after about 10 minutes the guide said that we had just passed over 50-100 crocodiles and that if we fell in we would die pretty much right away. Yikes! It was spectacular, though - it was only about 8:30am and the river was all misty and empty except for us... and 2500 crocodiles and a lot of birds. :)
After Darwin we flew to Alice Springs for our 3-day Uluru tour, which is pretty much in the middle of the country. Finally out in the outback proper! Though it's not as red and empty as I'd though - there's a surprising amount of vegetation and trees. It's very pretty in a rather dry way. :) This was by far our best tour, just in terms of the tour company itself - great guide, very friendly and informative and helpful. Nice pace (our Kakadu guide walked very fast...), and unlike our Kakadu guide he fed us lots of snacks during the day. :) First day was Uluru itself, which really is pretty amazing. We went for a guided walk at the base led by an Aboriginal woman, who told us some of the stories/myths about Uluru in her own language which was then translated by another guide. We then drove to a lookout point to watch the sun set over Uluru, which was beautiful but also pretty funny because it was jam-packed - there was tour bus after tour bus lined up with all the people sitting around having champagne and snacks as the sun set... as were we. ^^ Next day was a 2-3 hour walk of Kata-Tjuta/The Olgas, which were spectacular. Better than Uluru in some ways - Uluru's the big sight, but it's not necessarily the best... just the one you hear about the most and see plastered on postcards and souvenirs the most (though it is remarkable, don't get me wrong). Last day was perhaps the best, actually - a 3-4 hour walk of King's Canyon. Again not as well known as Uluru, but according to the guide many people on the tours consider it the best of the three (he was right). Pictures to come, of course, but they won't really do it justice... beautiful walk, and not too difficult. Weather was fantastic on all 3 days - warm, but not too hot, and not cold as night like we had worried. And happily enough there was a girl on the tour who was alone and just a few years younger than me, and we shared quite a few interests, so it was really nice having someone to talk to (no offence to my mother, lol - but it can be hard to meet someone who one can talk to easily and for a long time, you know? ^^ And nearly everyone else on all the tours we'd gone on had been European, and while most of them spoke at least some English, they were often in pairs/small groups and naturally tended to talk in their own language more). I really liked her, but sadly she lives in the UK. We traded emails, anyway, and I've got some pictures to send to her, so maybe we'll be able to keep in touch a bit.
And that's about it... flew to Sydney the other day, and spent one full day wandering around the city. It's a nice city in a lot of ways, but I still much prefer Melbourne and even Brisbane. Sydney's too damned big... and the CBD isn't nearly as compact as in the other two cities. It feels very spread out and it takes awhile to get around. It's also not as easy to navigate as the other two, which both have CBDs arranged in a nice grid fashion. :) The Harbour and the adjacent Botanical Gardens are very nice, though.
*looks at watch* Well that killed almost an hour and a half, go me! It's now almost 3pm, which means about 9.5 hours to go. Bleeeh, bored now. And tired of using the computer, I think I'll give it a rest and maybe work on my travelblog post later. I don't want to give myself a headache. I'm also getting a bit hungry, which is always one of the worst parts of long flights for me - I hate the food, though I try to eat a bit of it. Got a bunch of snacks with me, too.
Anyway, suppose it's a bit pointless to say what time it is given that by the time I post this I'll be home. ;) Just pretend, okay?
(hours later... home now! just slept for 4 hours because I was exhausted, now going to try to force myself to stay awake until tonight. Tis nice to be home... nothing like that view of the West Coast mountains and islands as you fly into Vancouver, it always chokes me up a bit when I've been away from home for awhile. :) Also had a gorgous sunrise above the clouds when we were about 45min-1 hour out. Rest of the flight from when I wrote this was fine; watched a bunch of TDS/TCR on my iPod and a couple of episodes of The Office. Watched The Soloist and Wolverine on the in-flight entertainment (former was v. good, can't beat RDJ and Jaime Foxx, and the latter was pretty entertaining overall... though I don't know the comic version of Wolverine's origin story and I gather the movie butchered it. ^^; I enjoyed it well enough, anyway).)
