Australia

Collared Kingfisher (I think)

For someone who grew up reading flying doctor novels and stories about walkabouts and dreamtime and seeing adorable pictures of all manner of marsupials and fairy penguins, having the opportunity to visit Australia was really a dream come true. As those of you who know me well will already be aware, when I get a new job, I always look for PD opportunities ... usually for the PD, but also for the opportunity to travel by visiting a training program or conference. RMIT has wonderful support for lecturers who have presentations accepted for international conferences and it so happens I found a doozie ... the CDAA 2011 International Conference from April 25-29 in Cairns, Australia ... with Mark Savickas and Alvin Leung presenting. These are two luminaries I had heard a lot about and so the draw was there. And Australia!!! My colleagues, Linh and Phoenix, and I put in a proposal for a workshop, which was accepted, and then we were approved for funding ... with one small proviso ... that we write an article ... but we will think about that next week.

View from the Pool

View from Our Balcony

Well, we all know how risky it can be to have high hopes, as they can be so easily dashed, but I have to say that Australia was even better than I could have imagined. Now, granted, I did not see much of it, but every place we went was lovely and the people we met were just amazing. People did say that the prices would shock us and we were not disappointed there either ... they are shocking, but we were warned ...(^_^)...

It really is a bat ....

Linh and I went to Cairns a couple of days early, partly to see some of the countryside around Cairns, but also to have a chance to prepare properly for our workshop. Linh is the manager of the Career Centre and I have been swamped with work this semester and so we really needed the time to polish our presentation. We stayed in a lovely apartment for the time we were in Cairns. Our friend, Col McCowan had told us about it and it was great ... wonderful view and only a 5-minute walk from the Convention Centre. And a 10-minute walk from everything else. The most amazing thing was every evening at 6:20, the flying foxes would leave their roosts in some big trees in Cairns and head across the river to feast on the mango orchards. Those fruit bats are BIG! It became my futility to try and take a picture of them and my misfortune to have utterly failed ... but it was so amazing to sit on the balcony and see literally thousands of fruit bats fly by each night! The locals don't seem to appreciate them, however, as theyir guano eats the paint off cars and they cause a lot of damage to the fruit harvest.  We loved them, however!

Heading to Kuranda

View from the Train

View from the Train

We had a great day visiting the little village of Kuranda, high up in the tropical rainforest of Northern Queensland. The rainforest is a World Heritage Site and is absolutely stunning. We went up by a scenic train, and although the distance as the crow flies is not long, it took a couple of hours to get there. It was Good Friday, so the town was a bit quiet and we wandered around, window-shopped, had a meal and hiked along a rainforest path. There are some other things to see and do, and I was sad to have missed the Butterfly Conservatory ... and there were rumours of a park with koalas, but we didn’t get there, either. We did enjoy the village and found it to be quite charming ... We took the Skyrail back to Cairns.

Rainforest Hike

Barron Falls

Skyrail back to Cairns

The Skyrail is a loooong cable car system (I think one of the longest, if not the longest in the world). Apparently it took a long time to get approved and so it was built with a lot of attention to avoiding disturbing the environment. All of the towers were brought in by helicopter to avoid building roads and disturbing the rainforest.  It runs on solar power, I believe, and it just swoops you over the rainforest. Pretty amazing! There are two stops on the wat down to Cairns. One of them is Barron Falls, which we also saw from the train going up – but from the opposite side. We walked around the waterfall area for a while and then got off at the next stop, which was Red Peak, where there is an interpretation centre, a nature trail and a nature guide, the handsome Xavier.  He escaped a desk job in Espana in order to live in the tropics and tell tourists about the rainforest. It was all very interesting. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. The touristy things in Cairns are all so well-coordinated and choreographed and the bus drivers and ticket sellers and tour guides and servers are all so friendly. And everything is clean and charming ... even the train stations’ plantings were all very beautiful. We were very impressed!

Phoenix in snorkelling gear

Linh and the Great Barrier Reef

Phoenix joined us on Easter Sunday and the next day we went on a cruise to the Great Barrier Reef. The wind was up (20-30 knots) and so there was a lot of sea-sickness. The boat staff were used to it and dealt with the barf bags with aplomb and good humour. Poor Phoenix went below to lie down. Personally, having the wind on my face was what kept me from feeling queasy ... but with all that wind, I did stay a bit dizzy for a couple of days. Strange! Well, the outer reef was absolutely stunning and luckily Phoenix recovered enough to try snorkelling. What a great day! The water was not exactly crystal clear due to the rough seas, but we saw plenty. I think the fish stay around because they get fed, but it was still wonderful to see them. And we saw a medium-sized sea turtle. The coral was actually the most amazing part, however. There are hundreds of kinds of both hard and soft corals and they are really stunning. It seemed as though there were a couple of quite dead areas, but that is to be expected, with all the traffic that the area bears, I guess. In addition, I heard that the corals are really being affected by global warming and the reef is moving a bit further south, as the Coral Sea is too hot for corals to thrive. We all went snorkelling a few times ... I got out when I saw the turtle and some fish with jellyfish in their mouths. One young Japanese snorkeller had nasty welts all over her leg ... OUCH!  I hope there are areas that are not roped off and where tourists cannot go where the natural environment is healthier, No clownfish, but we saw so many kinds of beautiful fish, I would never complain! Again, the touristy part was done well. We also got to meet some of our fellow conference participants, as the cruise had been offered as a pre-session attraction. We had time for a shower and got ready for a gathering, where we met Col and some others, whose names we had heard of. Nice to put faces to names!

QUT Friends

Col and Phoenix

The next day we had a Master Class with Mark Savickas and it was great. He is an icon and I was not very impressed by his session. The following days offered lots of informative (mostly) presentations and keynotes and research sessions. We ate out with our friends from QUT, who adopted us (thanks to our former colleague, Alison Thomson) and had a big gala dinner/dance at which time Lydia and I were serenaded for our birthdays. What a lot of fun! We three introverts stayed until the very last song, which was a verrry Scottish rendition of “I Will Walk 500 Miles”, which our friend Alan assisted on. Good times! We learned a lot, met many wonderful people, survived our presentation (which was actually well-received, although our audience was small) and I think Linh and Phoenix have started to develop a wonderful network ... Did I already mention that we will think about the article another day?

Phoenix, Sheila, Linh



Alison

After the conference, Linh and I went to Melbourne. Phoenix stayed another day in Cairns before coming back to Saigon. Boy, did she miss out! Well, Linh sort of missed out as well because she had to work. We were met at the airport by Luke, the friend of our former colleague Sarah, who was playing field hockey. We went out to a Greek restaurant and enjoyed it immensely ... mmm tzatziki! Melbourne is so multicultural and what a bunch of foodies live there! Linh and Sarah shopped all day Sunday. I shopped some, but also took in the Queen Victoria Market and rode the City Circle tram around the loop and walked around Federation Square and visited the Ian Potter Gallery of the Victoria National Gallery and the State Library. What a great city. I just loved it. So much public art!  And of course, since RMIT seems to be a major property owner in Melbourne, I saw lots of evidence of RMIT ...they have 40 or so buildings just in the city centre area!

Near Queen Victoria Market

 




Vu and Sheila

The next day I met up with Vu, a student I had taught in Level 6 English. He is a lecturer at Nong Lam University and is doing part of his Master’s degree in Melbourne. Nong Lam specializes in agricultural, forestry, agronomy, and plant science programs and Vu has a scholarship to study. I think he is doing experiements related to reducing toxicity and salinity in soil. We spent much of the day together and walked along the Yarra River and then went to the Royal Botanic Gardens. As it was such a gorgeous day, we stayed out of doors the entire time. I had thought to go to the museum or the main building of the VNG at the Arts Centre, but it was just too beautiful. The gardens are gorgeous. Shortly after I bid farewell to Vu, I met up with Linh and Sarah and we went to an Italian bistro (alley cuisine, I think it is called) and we had a wonderful meal. I had pumpkin risotto and it really was luscious. Almsot as good as my amiga, Rita's risotto. The next morning, I had breakfast at the Queen Victoria Market and got back in time to catch my shuttle to the airport. Sweet Vu came to see me off. It was a very lovely gesture on the part of a very lovely guy.

Royal Botanic Gardens

Black Swan

So, while I didn’t see any flying doctors, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, wallabees, quolls, bilbys, and not even one platypus (do you see how I avoided the plural there?), we did see flying foxes, bell mynahs, some black swans and a collared kingfisher and met some of the friendliest, most hospitable and gracious people that we could ever hope to come across. Dreams come true. Beauty!

Hey, hey, hey, it's a beautiful day ...

If you want to see many more pictures of Australia, please check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/raven_chick.  Next stop - Chiang Mai!