CYCLONE!

It's 5:05 pm - and I was just told we are being evacuated to Townsville, normally a 6 hour drive but it will probably take 12 with traffic. Gotta go pack! Whoooo, adventure! :)

Cairns?

The flight to Cairns was uneventful. A LOT of Asian people on the plane - it became apparent during boarding that they have no concept of personal space whatsoever! Amazing how quickly one can feel claustrophobic when everyone is right on top of you.
Cairns itself is really low-key. The whole Cairns region is about 150 000 people, so Cairns itself is not that big. The main industry is tourism, and this is their slow season (the hostel said they were at maybe 30% of capacity). I'm disappointed to say that beach bunnies are definitely not in season. However, I'm primarily here to chill and learn to dive. Probably be another week at least before I go diving. There is a big cyclone in the offing, expected to make landfall tomorrow night. More on that later, when there is more.
I'm currently in Port Douglas, mostly because there is a beach and they provide a shuttle transfer from Cairns to Port Douglas. The water is bathtub warm, almost too warm for serious swimming but great. The beach seems to go on forever but you can only go swimming at one spot, within the jellyfish nets. Apparently the box jellyfish migrate here this time of year and are very unpleasant to the touch... Today the beach is already closed due to the impending cyclone.
Probably no exciting adventures until another week or more, have to do some work and figure the diving thing out.

Lookout

Walked up to the "Lookout" yesterday, a high spot in the hills around Apollo Bay. Here are some views of the town...
Probably no posts for a few days - planning to fly to Cairns on the 28th, so I have to do some planning and work.

Rain and Fog

The last couple of days have been rainy and quite foggy. I went through 2 rather large books, also tried surfing again today with a bit of better luck. No other exciting adventures at the moment, but I am trying to decide where to go from here. Decisions, decisions...

Rainforest Walk

This morning I hitched a ride with some fellow travelers. A lovely couple from Vancouver whom I had already met at the Metro YHA during my last day in Melbourne. We drove about an hour inland to a little patch of rainforest. The area had been farmed/logged before but has regrown quite nicely. They have a nice long canopy walk set up - a series of towers connected by walkways going up into the canopy and back down again. The highest spot is 47 meters, which at this time is not quite as high as the tallest trees. The trees themselves are only about half as high as they will get - they grow to over 100 meters tall.
The walkway is set up on "towers" which are basically steel tubes (maybe 1 to 2 feet in diameter), which are held by guy wires. Design load is 400 kg per square meter - that made me feel safer, especially considering the thing moves a fair bit when you are on it. The tallest point is a bigger tower with a spiral staircase going up to a viewing platform. There is also a spot where they have a section of walkway which is just sticking out and hanging freely in the air (held by cables).
We did not see any animals on the walk itself, but we did catch a glimpse of a wallaby by the side of the road. Alive, too. The trees themselves are amazing. They are very tall and slim and quite straight. The outer bark tends to come of in long thin pieces, so the actual tree is smooth with these fronds hanging from it. One of them had an ant highway going up the side of it. Even though cars drive on the left and people walk on the left on sidewalks, ants walk on the right... I wonder how many ants were on that one tree - it was a steady line several ants wide up and down the whole tree - a track a good inch or so wide full of ants for the whole length of the thing, so 50 meters times maybe 2-3 centimeters. That's a lot of ants.
I spent the afternoon on the beach. It was nice and sunny today, not like the past few days which were cloudy and cooler. Also found a fish market so maybe tomorrow I will cook some fish for supper.
Time to go do some work!

Finally - Pictures! Note they are clickable if you want to see a bigger version.
A cool machine I saw in Apollo Bay - the company makes sea-do's

Here one can really see how incredibly tall and thin the trees are, with no branches except right near the top.

 The top of this spiral tower is about 47 meters up.

 A view of the intermediate levels of foliage:

 The little specks are ants... a whole ant trail on the right part of the tree (crappy camera wouldn't focus any better than that)

 The ferns way at the bottom are taller than me:

 A view of the walkway from the bottom, showing the "towers" the thing is standing on.

 This fellow was swimming in the harbour, right by the boats. Over half a meter across I'd guess.

Waves 1 - Me 0.00001

Had my first surfing lesson yesterday. I took a serious beating but did get up a couple of times. Also drank about a liter of seawater before I learned that I cannot, in fact, breath underwater. Today I rented a board again and went out for a bit, but there were hardly any waves. So I worked on my paddling and strained my triceps muscles a bit. Now I realize why surfers are always in such good shape - it takes serious upper body strength.

Travels to Apollo Bay

So my last post was on the 11th and it's now the 18th! I arrived in Apollo Bay yesterday, from Melbourne. The first hour of the trip was by train, then 2 hours by bus along the "Great Ocean Road". This is a very twisty road built right hard along the shore, into the cliffs. So picture the bus, with a driver who is not exactly taking it slow. Me (still somewhat afraid of heights) in this said bus. About 1-2 feet beside the bus (the side I'm sitting on) is a guardrail which is about a foot or so high. IMMEDIATELY after said guardrail - nothing but air. And the bus is leaning out a bit as the driver is hoofing it through the turns. I was looking down some 40-50 meters in places. In 3-4 spots there was one way traffic only (with temp. stop signs) and a second temporary guardrail, because the permanent guardrail didn't have enough dirt to hold it. Washouts... Here one could see that the metal posts holding the guardrail are long, really really long pieces of metal going straight into the ground, somehow trying to find some rock/soil to hold on to. People actually pay for tours to take them along this road, although at least the tour buses drive more slowly. We finally got stuck behind a tour bus which made the rest of the drive a lot easier. That being said, the scenery was nice, what with the cliffs and being able to look out quite far over the ocean.
The hostel in Apollo Bay is the nicest yet. They have two good sized rooms with couches, and even put a fire on in the evening. I played a good game of Scrabble and a couple of games of asshole with some fellow travelers. I'm booked in here for another 9 days, and may extend that to catch up on business.

Melbourne

Melbourne was somehow not so exciting - perhaps not the best idea to go directly from one city to another. But I did entertain myself somewhat in the time I was there. The coolest thing was probably the "Human Bodies" exhibit, which shows bodies (human and animal) preserved by plastination. It was not as extensive as the one I saw in Toronto a few years ago, but I've been waiting to see this again so that was sweet. The best exhibit was a person where they removed everything but the blood vessels. They put the material they use (not sure what it is) into the blood vessels, then use acid to remove everything else. So you're left with this red network of veins and arteries, in exactly the same places in space as they were in when the person was alive. No pictures allowed though. :(
The visit to the Melbourne Aquarium was kinda cool, but the place was chock full of loud kids! Made me really look forward to diving and seeing some of these animals in nature. That being said, they had baby hammerhead sharks, stingrays, a sword shark,and many many other fish. One of the most fascinating things was the octopus. It "breathed" by opening a pouch by it's head to gather water, they closing it with a sort of sliding flap and pushing the water out through a nozzle. Kept doing this the whole time, nice and slowly. Deep breaths...
Down by the waterfront I found this strange really tall structure that seemed to serve no purpose. Turns out it's a huge Ferris Wheel, but without the wheel. Built in 2008, but they found cracks in parts of the wheel in 2009 and took the wheel down to repair it. Repairs are expected to take a year or so, under warranty! I guess each of these machines is unique, so you can't just go to the parts warehouse.
Probably the best thing in Melbourne was the market. I would say some 20 counters with meat along, another 10 or so with seafood, masses of vegetables and fruit. I bought some Kangaroo meat which made a great stir fry. Unlike beef, this stuff was so lean that it totally soaked up the soy sauce and olive oil I marinated it in. I also found some "Bio-dynamic free range eggs" for $10.90 a dozen. Note that Australian and Canadian dollars are about par... What the hell is "bio-dynamic"???
While in Melbourne I also went to see Lindsay. The similarity to Chris when it comes to posture, the overall physical appearance, and general way of moving and such is striking. But of course once I talked to him the personality was quite different. Same thing with Adam (an Aspergers/autistic fellow of about 18 who is staying there as well) - he sits in chairs and moves very much like Simon. Fascinating how mental and physical traits are so related.
Spent a bit of time hanging out with Katharina, whom I originally wanted to tour the Melbourne area a bit. (email mishaps prevented this). Really sweet girl, she's back in Germany now. Homesick and probably missing her boyfriend, she actually changed her flight to leave 5 days earlier (out of a 3 week trip). She had suggested taking the train to Melbourne, which is pretty sweet because otherwise I wouldn't be in Apollo Bay today.
Last night I actually had a guy called Malte staying in the same room. And I've heard my name a bunch of times when someone else was meant. So many Germans here, I can't go a day without meeting at least one and most times it seems like over half of the people in the hostel are German.
That's all on Melbourne - time to go to the Sea!
Penguins!:

 There's a fish right in the middle of the picture:

 Sea dragons?:

 Swordfish:

 Octopus - the sack fills with water on each breath, which is then squeezed out through a tube:

 A cool building - part of the Melbourne University:

 Bangers and mash - looked better than it tasted, but still:

 This whole corridor is meat, all the way to the end:

 Ground beef...:

 The old central station, still used as a train station:

 Long way down (taken from the bus):