Broken Hill & Sydney

Hello again! On the 23rd we flew to Broken Hill which is out at the edge of Outback country. It's mainly a mining town, but our goal was a sunset camel ride and to see a bit of different landscape.

We arrived in the afternoon and were picked up for the ride which was out in Silverton (an old silver mining town). The place where they had the camel rides was pretty entertaining. Definitely a change from the big city... :)

But we ended up with a private sunset camel ride since no one else had booked, so that was nice. We got on our camels, Cowgirl & Barley, and had a lovely ride.

They took any chance they got along the trail to grab a bite of their favorite salt bush.

We also saw a lot of kangaroo crossing the land as we rode along. They never got very close (since they are hunted on the mainland), but there were a lot of them and it was fun to watch them hopping off.
We also saw a flock (?) of emu. Our first wild emu sighting.
Some fun camel ride shadows.
And the flies, oh the flies... Apparently we were lucky, this was the low season for flies. :)

The long, flat road back to Broken Hill and an almost full moon.

That night we stayed at a motel in town. Didn't feel like splurging since we were there for only one night. They had a nicer, renovated wing and one that, let's just say, was waiting to be renovated... They also gave us a choice of a free bottle of wine or continental breakfast since we were on our honeymoon. We chose the breakfast, not realizing they seemed to have meant a single breakfast...
The next morning we wandered around the downtown and stopped in at a few sights including a railroad museum which had this fun sign (distance in kilometers). And then we were off to Sydney!

A few of the flies hitched a ride on the plane. And Matt had fun getting a pic of them.
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Now THIS is a honeymoon room! Looking for rooms in Syndey, we ended up getting a really good deal through a website that's like Hotwire in the US. We ended up with a Harbour Bridge view room just a few blocks from the main harbor. One of those buildings on the right is blocking the Opera House, alas.

So we had to take a short walk down to get a view of the Opera House. Here we are on our first night in Sydney.
And Matt getting fancy again looking back at the city from the Opera House.
The next day, another view of the Opera House.
All right, a break from the Opera House and a walk through their lovely Botanic Gardens. What you're looking at is their very large colony of flying foxes (or bats), that live in the middle of the park. When we saw something flying above the strongly lit Opera House at night we figured it was them, but it turned out to be seagulls. These guys apparently only feed on nectar.
We went for a tour of the Opera House, but they didn't have any shows that worked for us to go see. Oh well, another time. :)

We also took the ferry across to Manly, a nice, beachy suburb.
Timed it so we would be coming back at sunset. :) Can you see the people climbing the bridge? Lisa thought of doing it until she found out how much it cost and that you can't bring your own camera. Guess they want you holding on with both hands (you're already strapped into a harness). Safety schmafety. :(

We'll leave you with a lovely view of the harbour at sunset. We're off to Tonga for the next 10 days and don't expect to have reliable internet for awhile. Check back in with you after that with hopefully some great whale pics!

We are currently whiling away a few hours of layover time. The airport is kind enough to have free wireless internet. So, we'll update you on our last few days.

On the 18th, we flew to Adelaide from Cairns. Wandered the city a bit and checked out their main shopping street, Rundle. Seemed to have a lot of US brands, even a Target and a Hungry Jack's (this is the Australian version of Burger King, we found the wikipedia's entry for Hungry Jack's entertaining).

The next day we walked through their Botanic Gardens (too early in spring for most of the flowers to be blooming) and more of the downtown area. We also went to the South Australian museum which had a lot of natural history displays. There was a video of a "Shark Caller" on an island nation who went out in a small canoe, called a shark to his boat, got the shark to swim into a lasso (using a fish on a stick) then fought the shark into his boat. They had an example shark rattle on display, but we did not get a good picture. The light was better on the display of aboriginal shields.

We also got stuck in the rain for a bit. Different weather than up north.

You'll notice we don't have a lot of pics from the city. It was nice, just not the best for pics. Matt did find this cool fountain though and had some fun with the reflections.

The next morning we went to the Central Market which claims to be "the largest produce market in the southern hemisphere." Which sounds impressive until you think about what it's competing with. It was nice, but suffered a bit for us from the buildup. :) And it was the wrong season to find mangosteens for Matt. Here's a pic of Lisa looking at the map, trying to find more to the market.

That afternoon we went for a tour of Haigh's chocolates (famous in Adelaide like See's is in the Bay Area). We learned that they do a lot more work by hand than we expected! We also bought some to have at intermission for a showing of Into the Woods at a local theatre that we had decided to buy tickets for the day before. Lisa looks a bit grumpy because the chocolates ended up melting a bit and the play was only so-so and it was the end of a long day (we didn't trouble you with a description of all our transportation difficulties). :)

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On the 21st, we flew over to Kangaroo Island (so-named because there had been no aboriginal presence on the island for thousands of years, so when explorers came to it the kangaroos had no fear of them and actually waited curiously on the beach as they landed). Now its main business is tourism since it has a good collection of Australian wildlife in a small area.

Our first stop was at Seal Bay where you can see Australian Fur Seals (actually sea lions). There were a couple of cute cubs playing around and a few males trying to defend their territory. And just a whole bunch of sea lions lazing around.

Then our tour took us to Vivonne Bay for a lovely walk on the beach and lunch. The water there is like northern California, very cold, so no swimming. The shallow water was a beautiful shade of turquoise.

After lunch we walked around a bit more and explored a local jetty.

And Matt needed a funny picture with a good, rusty sign. :)

Then we were off to "Little Sahara" which is a bunch of dunes on the island, but about 5 miles inland...

We know, we've been in Australia for a few weeks and we have yet to show you pictures of kangaroos (wild ones anyhow) or koalas! Well, here our the 'roos. They're kind of like deer on the island. All over and eating people's gardens. :) And pretty tame because they haven't been exposed to hunting. We were walking and came upon a bachelor group of males and then later a solitary female, kindly posing for us in a field of daisies.


That night we went to see the Little Penguins returning to their colony. They go out fishing all during the day and only come back when it's dark. They are only about 12 inches tall and prefer temperate waters to the Antarctic.

The next morning we went to a New Zealand fur seal colony on a different part of the island. It's also the location of some cool rock formations including this Admiral Arch...

And the Remarkable Rocks which are a bunch of cool granite formations.

For the last stop of the day we went to the Hanson Sanctuary. We actually had been seeing koalas all over the island (you had to search for them and Lisa was pretty good at spotting them, even before the guide did), but this place is particularly favored by them and they have been growing new sugar gum (eucalyptus) trees, so it's easier to see the koalas in those because they're not as high. Enjoy the cute little koalas! :)

All right, now we're off to Broken Hill to ride some camels and then to Sydney. Take care, everyone.

Greetings from Adelaide! We came down here yesterday and are now in a hotel without a lovely view, but with a good internet connection, so we'll be catching up on the blog! Get ready for a long one... :)

These first few are from Friday the 15th. We decided to do the Mossman Sugar Mill tour that day and go on a "Croc Tour" further north at the Daintree River.

The northeastern area of Australia turns out to be great for sugarcane and it seems like you're always passing along great fields of it wherever you go.

They are currently harvesting (and will be for most of the spring and summer). It used to be all by hand, of course, but now they have big harvester machinery that chops it all down and cuts the cane into 12 inch pieces and loads it into the "canetainers" to be taken by rail to the mill.

The trains (and a few trucks) come in continuously during the day and night during harvest season. Here the cane is going through the first sorting and going by a large magnet that traps any metal stuff that's come in from the fields.

Here we're watching all the cane be taken for crushing and juice extraction.

Tubes of cane juice going to the purifier.

Mmm... mixed juices. :)

And Matt's favorite rusty bits photo.

After that we headed up north to the Daintree River for a crocodile sighting tour. However, the tours up here aren't like the ones further south that guarantee crocs by doing pole-feedings of chickens off the roof of the boat, so no action croc shots for you! And they did warn us that since the water was getting warmer, the crocs didn't come out of the water to sun themselves as often. However, we did see a nice tree snake.

And a cute, little baby croc (about 6 months old). Guess we could tell you it was a really big croc from far away... :)

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On Saturday we headed further north to the Daintree Rainforest area and Cape Tribulation. One of our first stops was a place that had a cool tower overlooking the rainforest canopy.

Next we stopped at an Insect Museum which we had heard had a large collection of live butterflies. Not so much. But it did have some cool live insects and a very large collection of mounted insects (who knew beetles came in such cool colors?).

And that's not a dead leaf she's holding in her hand...

They did have a few butterflies and one of them was very patient with Lisa.

The results of the modeling session:

We also drove up to an area that our b&b hosts had told us about and said it was far enough away from the usual tourist track that we would probably have the beach to ourselves. He was right.

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On Sunday we just relaxed and went up to Mossman Gorge for a nice, cooling dip in the river. No exciting photos to show you. :)

But on Monday we decided to head down to the Atherton Tablelands area for our last day in Far North Australia. It was only about an hour & a half drive south, but amazing how the scenery changed pretty quickly. We did drive through some more Cassowary country without a sighting. :P

Our first stop was at Granite Gorge where they have a rock wallaby colony that you could hand feed.
Even though they must get a lot of feeding from tourists, they were still pretty greedy. Watch out for those little claws!

We were fond of the momma wallaby and her joey.

All done, I swear!

Then we drove through some lovely, hilly country to the Mungala Falls Dairy which is a biodynamic dairy and had a very tasty lunch. Here are some cows along the way.

After lunch we hit the "Waterfall Circuit" which had 3 waterfalls in a 16km loop. At the first one we saw a few people swimming (Aussies love their swimming holes!) and decided we should go swimming at the next one (we'd learned to always bring our "bathers" along with us). So this is us swimming at the beautiful, but very chilly (too cold for crocs!) Millaa Millaa falls.

Then Matt went and swam in a nearby lake too! (That tiny dot in the middle is him.)

The lake also had turtles and lizards (but our photo of the turtles seems to have disappeared from the blog...).

Next we were off to visit the Curtain Fig, but we also stopped along the road where they had a platypus viewing area. Didn't see the platypus, but did make friends with some nearby cows.

This is the Curtain Fig. Kind of hard to capture in a picture. This type of fig tree grows by actually starting to germinate when it's dropping into a nice crook of another tree by a bird. It then sends roots from there down to the ground and start enveloping its support tree. It never directly harms the support tree, but does eventually block it from the sun and suck up all the water with its roots.

As we were leaving, we heard a rustling and some animal chatter and saw some tree kangaroos (a baby and 2 adults). It was at dusk, so the pics aren't that great, but apparently we were quite lucky to see them. When we told our host at breakfast the next day, she didn't believe us until we showed her pics! And then she actually called the Department of National Parks for us because you're supposed to report any sightings. Who knew?! All this time we thought the cassowary was the rarest sighting.

And the day ended with a lovely sunset and a good looking guy trying to get some cool sunset photos. :)