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Published: September 8th 2011
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Hello Class 5...or are you Class 6 now that you are back from your summer holidays? I hope that you have had fun the past six weeks away from school having lots of adventures? Have any of you been abroad anywhere special? I have been busy exploring some more of Australia and wanted to tell you all about it and show you some pictures of me discovering new and exciting places.
Sorry I haven't written to you from Australia for a while, Frankie had to stop and work in a small town called Carnarvon for a few months. Carnarvon is half way up the west coast of Australia. It is the same size as Sturminster Newton and about as exciting! They do have a couple of important sites to see though. First I visited the One Mile Jetty, which is the longest jetty in West Australia...can you guess how long it is?! We walked the whole way along the jetty out into the sea, although we could have caught the train that drives out there. At the end there were lots of people fishing and it was cold and windy.
Australia is meant to have a better climate than
England so their winters are still warm and sunny. This year has been a bad year for weather, Carnarvon has had more rain in 2011 than in the previous 3 years all added up! However, this just means we have been having the same type of weather as you have back home all summer, but it's our winter! Can you imagine walking around in shorts and a t-shirt in January?! All this rain and Australia is still a very dry country. When you drive around you see signs warning you there is no drinking water available for hundreds of kilometres. That's like driving from Stalbridge to Manchester, or even Scotland, with nowhere to get fresh water!
While Frankie was in Carnarvon she had 2 jobs. One was in a pub and I wasn't allowed in there as I'm not old enough to drink beer and gamble on the horses. Her other job was on a plantation and she took me there one day to look around. Plantations are the same as farms and in Carnarvon they grow lots of fruit and vegetables, including bananas which the town is famous for - so famous they built a big banana statue
on the way into town! The plantation I visited grows lots of different types of beans, cucumbers, zucchinis (in the UK we call them courgettes), squash (pumpkins), and chillis. It was interesting to see how all your food looks like when it is growing on the plants and how different it looks to the stuff you see wrapped in plastic in the supermarket or when it is cooked and on your plate.
In the middle of August I left Carnarvon on a road trip with Frankie and two new friends from Germany called Manuela and Maik. As we drove out of Carnarvon we stopped at The Dish, which is a massive satellite dish built by NASA for the first moon landing.
On the road trip we stayed a few days at a place called Exmouth and visited the Ningaloo Reef. This is a massive coral reef stretching along the coastline. It is very special because it is home to hundreds of different kinds of corals and fish and it is unusual because it is very close to the land and you can swim from the beach to look at the reef. I couldn't go snorkelling because I haven't
Me and a very big satellite dish
Frankie's had to learn some new acrobatic moves to take my photos! been laminated but my friends said it was amazing to see so many bright coloured fishes. They were very excited because they swam with a sea turtle and saw reef sharks, octopus and a stingray. They also took a special tour to see Whale Sharks which are the biggest fish in the ocean and they swam with Whale Sharks that were 7 metres long! Although I couldn't swim I had a lot of fun playing on the beach and looking at the beautiful bright blue sea, and I found a model Whale Shark to pose with which is better than me getting soggy.
Our destination was Darwin which is in the Northern Territory, at the top of Australia. Our journey took 4 days of driving for 10 hours a day because it is 3200km from Carnarvon to Darwin, the same as travelling from England to the other side of Europe! Australia is really, really huge and there is a lot of desert with small bushes and big eagles and not much else to look at. They also have some funny trees here called Baobab trees which look like they have been stuck in the ground upside down with their
branches looking like roots and they have big seeds hanging from their branches that look like christmas decorations. We saw lots and lots of kangaroos and emus that all like to sit by the side of the road and cross just as we are driving past. I think they need some Lollypop Men and Ladies to teach them the Green Cross Code!
On the journey we saw thousands of termite hills, which are mounds of dirt built up by ant-like creatures over a very long time - the oldest colonies are 100 years old. There are over 100 different kinds of termites, some eat trees, some eat grasses, others dirt etc. Each kind of termite colony builds a different kind of hill so we saw some small, round red hills, some grey hills that looked like tombstones and all pointed north-south, and some yellow hills that were three times the height of Frankie!
Near Darwin we visited Litchfield National Park which is famous for its waterfalls. At the moment it is the dry season in northern Australia but there was still lots of water falling down the waterfalls. I was left to look after the bags again while
everyone else went swimming in the pools at the bottom of the waterfalls. It was still nice to see the impressive waterfalls and the rainforest around them but I hope Frankie makes me and her camera waterproof soon so I can go on more adventures!
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