Adventures in Queensland and Wollongong

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March 4th 2009

Published: March 4th 2009

I know that it has been a while since I updated this blog and for that I apologize. I have been having too much fun running around and starting up with uni. I also would like to apologize for my spelling mistakes and grammar from my last entry, I was very excited and wanted to convey my adventure to you all and in doing so I made several errors some of you were kind enough to point out.

Since my last post I have done a whirlwind tour of Australia. We met up with some friends from Canada and travelled down the Great Ocean road just West of Melbourne on an adventure to see the landscape that so many tourists before us have been on. We went and saw the 12 Apocels (7 now because many have fallen due to erosion), London Bridge (which has an amusing story about a couple having an affair and then part of the bridge collapsed stranding them so that they had to be rescued by news crews), and the beautiful beaches along the coast. We ended up camping 2 nights and drove for three days to see all the sights and stopped along the way to go surfing and see a few small towns. It truly is a beautiful drive and I am thinking about camping it again and taking some more time in the places that I enjoyed. Highlights of the trip were seeing an echidna, several koalas, some fossils in sandstone (mostly crinoids and a few brachiopods), swimming at some beautiful beaches, visiting Bell's Beach (famous surf beach), and having some lovely spiders camping with us in the tent.

The day after we arrived back in Melbourne for our trip we left to go to central Queensland to Rockhampton where we picked up our friends car to take it to Cairns to his brother who was on a ski trip to Japan and couldn't take it up because of the floods. We arrived the day after the floods and you could see that it had been quite high even around the houses within a reasonably large city. We drove several hours to a cattle station of about 30 000 acres where we spent about a week exploring Queensland and visiting with Mark's parents. We chased kangaroos on motorbikes and explored the paddocks with them, rode quads through huge flood puddles, rode horses a few times (this is a great deal harder than it looks) and flew in a bush plane (basically a small Cessna). I think this was my favorite place primarily because everything was exceptionally green and was complimented by the vibrant red soil which managed to sneak its way through the lush grass. Just seeing the bright green and the bright red together was an amazing sight. Driving down the red dirt road with grass and trees everywhere and quite possibly some of the most beautiful clouds I have ever seen made it truly a unique experience. I wasn't planning on heading to Queensland in the wet season but I am very glad I did.

In order to round up the cattle on these stations, dogs are used to do most of the difficult work. We went to watch a guy train some dogs, play with his puppies and enjoy a few beers in the sun. These dogs are amazing and actually hitch rides on the motorbikes by hopping on the back which was truly a sight to see. They are quite effective at herding and are very eager to do what they do.

While we were at Mark's parent’s cattle station we were lucky enough to witness a thunder and lightning storm there. Without a doubt it was the best that I'd ever seen. The lightning was off the tail end of a cyclone and we instantly heard the noise when we saw the lightning and could hear every little crackle of the thunder booming in our ears. We even saw the lightening strike several hundred meters away shooting sparks and fire up around where it had struck the paddock.

We saw plenty of roos, cows, horse, spiders, large beetles, huge moths, a dead dingo, some of the poisonous spiders like a red back and lots of eagles and parrots floating around the farm (the parrots are even here in Wollongong and I can see them everyday on my walk to class). Some of the best scenery though was the multitude of butterflies that were lazily flying around the flower gardens just outside the house on the patio.

We left the outskirts of Rockhampton to head to Charters Towers several hours north and closer to our destination of Cairns. We stayed here with Mark's older brother Pos (named so because when he was small he had large eyes like a possum and the name happened to stick) where we aided him in fixing broken flood fences and exploring some geology with them. We travelled all over the farm on land similar to that at Mark's parents, riding on the back of a pick up truck and off-roading to cross rivers and paddocks and racing emu's.

I never did this but I will next time I see emu's, apparently if you lay on your back and stick your feet up in the air, they will wander right next to you in order to investigate and are rather friendly because they don't know any better. I guess they have a rather small head and an even smaller brain.

Pos lives on about 100 000 acres with several thousand head of cattle so we had plenty of land to cover in fence fixing and exploration. We stopped by an old gold mine from the area to look at some rocks and acquire some samples, panned for gold (rather unsuccessfully) in a river and went to a few rather unique geological formations. There are lots of intrusions in the area and we went to a massive quarts intrusion that stuck out of the middle of the ground and took several pictures there. While on the farm we also had the pleasure of heading to one of the new gold mines in the area.

Pos knew a mine supervisor and arranged a trip for all of us. We ended up about 400m underground in the mine, observing the machinery that was so advanced the guys in it were merely watching movies while the machines did there work. We saw numerous gold veins, giant machinery, huge caverns that had been blasted or drilled out and the giant ladders of the escape shafts that I would hate to climb.

We stayed one night in Cairns after long drives, numerous hand stand competitions and driving which is quite interesting because the stick shift is set up the same but you use the other hand, the steering wheel is on the wrong side and of course you’re on the other side of the road. We left the following day to Sydney where we were met by the uni pick up service, they had our names written down like you see in the movies so I felt very important walking up to the sign that said "Coulson." We arrived in Wollongong (pronounced whool-ung-gong for those of you back home) only to find out that they had moved their orientation week activity back 1 week so we ended up missing the excitement but as it turns out a great number of the people had missed it too =(. I have contented myself with exploring the city, going to the beach, exploring campus, catching up with some aussie friends and meeting heaps of new people here in residence. I also managed to swing my class schedule to include Thursday and Friday into my weekend so I only have classes Mon/Tues/Wednesdays.

I am not posting pictures just yet because there are quotas on internet usage here and I don't want to go over my quota since I need to do plenty of research for my classes. I am not down here just for fun so you can't feel too envious... well maybe you can. Hope everything is going well for you all back home. Please write me emails about what’s going on in your lives so I can stay in the loop!

Adventures in Queensland and Wollongong

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