In Australia

I became a certified diver through Ithaca College’s SCUBA course last spring, and came to Cairns intent on diving as much as possible. Over spring break, I finally got underwater: I dove 13 times in Cairns, 11 of which were with Cairns-based Pro Dive. Every Aussie diver I talked to told me that if I was looking to dive the Great Barrier Reef, Pro Dive was the way to go. The Pro Dive crew has a reputation for being young, fun, and very helpful. Pro Dive has exclusive leases to several Reef dive sites, and uses smaller boats than the other Cairns diving companies. And, unlike other liveaboard companies, the Pro Dive boat you board in Cairns is the same boat you stay on for the duration of your trip. The other, larger (and by my definition more touristy) companies use small boats to ferry you from Cairns to immense, permanentaly moored diving boats on the Reef. They also use the smaller boats to take you from dive site to dive site, from one floating hotel to another. With Pro Dive, you stay with the same crew and group of passengers on the same, moderately-sized boat for the duration of your trip. It was easy for me to get to know the other 30 or so people on my Pro Dive cruise. My dive buddies were from Denmark, Italy, Germany, the UK, New Zealand — everywhere. (Everywhere except the US, actually. I liked that.)

Here are some pictures I took on the reef with an underwater camera I rented. The problem with underwater cameras is keeping everything from looking blue-green. You have to get really close to your subjects, with as little water as possible between them and your flash, to get a clear, colorful picture. Unfortunately, fish don’t stay still, and a lot of my pictures look like they were taken through a blue-green lens. Just try to imagine the colors.

The Walkabout students had an eight-day “spring break” this past week, where we could travel independently for awhile (I put “spring break” in quotes because it’s Fall here). A bunch of people went to New Zealand, some went to Thailand and a few went to Singapore. I went to Cairns, pronounced “cans,” in northeast Queensland to see the Great Barrier Reef. How could I not?

Cairns is a small city, and probably wouldn’t have developed beyond a small township if it weren’t for the reef. The entire city center (what Australians call their downtown areas) is a collection of tourist information centers, tour booking agencies, and cheap souvenir shops. Nearly everyone in Cairns is a backpacker, tourist, or someone working in the tourism industry. The staff in the hostel I stayed at were a mix of French, German, Japanese and UK expatriates, and I met people from Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Brazil. No one is actually from Cairns. You can’t get directions on the street, because there are no locals to give them. And there are no city suburbs because the majority of people live in apartment hotels and hostels; the nearest town is 8kms away. Yep, Cairns is Tourist Town, Aus. I usually avoid planned tours and prefer to explore new places on my own, but I signed up for a few touristy activities while in Cairns. It was a good decision. Without joining the tour groups I wouldn’t have seen half as much as I did, and I saw a lot.

My time on the Great Barrier Reef was undoubtedly the trip highlight. (Well, the three-day liveaboard diving cruise I took at the end of the vacation was the true highlight, and I’ll write about that in detail in my next post — just too much to say!) The first day I spent on the reef was also amazing, to say the least. I mean, how could it not be? It was certinaly, however, a “touristy” experience. The day was shared with 75-100 other tourists, the majority of which were 20-somethings touring Australia as flashpackers, a mix of vacationers and recent grads out to have a good time. At both reefs we visited, a good portion of the people on the boat spent only 15-20 minutes in the water, and then sat indoors for the next 45 or so munching complimentary fruit salad. I was hoping for a more adventuresome reef experience. Luckily I’m a certified diver, and spent my day with a dozen or so other divers, a good 10 meters below the surface-splashing masses. But even with the divers I felt a lack of an adventurous spirit, a character trait I pride myself on. I was frustrated to be the only diver who didn’t spend $10 on a wet suit rental — the trip was expensive enough, and the water was 26C, people!! One of the dive crew did comment on my manliness, which made me feel better.

In Australia, the name “Cairns” is synonymous with the Great Barrier Reef, but the city also serves as homebase for tourists interested in visiting the Daintree Rainforest. And as a guy who likes to think of himself as outdoorsy, I was certainly interested. Normally I’d prefer to hike a self-planned trip through a location as exotic and unique as the Daintree, but I learned a lot on the driving tour.

What I learned: The Daintree Rainforest is a lowland tropical rainforest over 135 million years old, making it one of the oldest rainforests in the world. Although the Daintree’s 1200 square kilometers covers only 0.2% of Australia’s landmass, protecting this World Heritage listed region is of immense ecological and cultural importance. According to the Daintree National Park webpage, the forest contains 30% of frog, marsupial and reptile species in Australia, 65% of Australia’s bat and butterfly species, and 20% of the country’s bird species. The Daintree Rainforest is home to the rare cassowary, Australia’s “other” iconic large bird species (although it’s also found in New Guinea), along with the emu. The cassowary can be identified by the large gray-brown casque on its head, and two red wattles hanging from a bright blue neck. But by far the largest tourist draw in the Daintree is Cape Tribulation, where the rainforest extends to the coast to meet the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Some nice imagery there.

A cassowary

My day at the Daintree started with a 6am hostel pickup from our driver, a Brazilian expatriate who, coming from the Amazon, knew a thing or two about rainforests. First stop on the driving tour was a nature preserve called Rainforestation. Sounds corny, but it was actually pretty cool. The entire park was divided into three large pens which you could walk through, with all of the animals walking around freely, at least the herbivores. I got up close and personal to emus, rare cockatoos, Australian marsupials of every size, and even a cassowary. The rest of the day was spent in the “wild.” On a hike through the forest, I saw a black orb spider — huge — and some brightly colored crabs and a mudskipper in the shallow waters of a mangrove forest. The tour group also went on a croc-spotting “ecocruise” on the Daintree River. The boat captain was a scruffy backcountry Australian who told us how a childhood friend was killed after being dragged off a dock by one of the region’s estuarian, or saltwater, crocodiles — “salties.” Saltwater crocs have a reputation for being the biggest, meanest crocs in the world; the largest recorded salty was 28.2 feet, 8.6 meters, long. Our river guide swears they grow larger in the remote regions of Australia’s largely unsettled Northern Territory. We saw three crocs on the cruise, the largest of which was a 6.5 meter male named Fat Albert. We also spotted a brown tree snake slithering through the trees at the water’s edge, and a rare species of kingfisher.

So I survived my tourist experience. At first the thought of being shuttled around by professional guides, whether in a van or on a cruise boat, with a bunch of strangers sounded like torture. But in the end I saw a lot, traveled a couple hundred kms by land and sea that I could never have covered on my own, and ate delicious complimentary lunches. It was fun playing the tourist, if only for a few days.

Oh, and I went parasailing in Cairns Harbor:

I came to Australia with more luggage than most of the other Walkabouters. The majority of my travel companions came to the country with two medium-sized suitcases and a backpack; I have an immense travel trunk from EMS, a 6ft. duffel bag, a large hiking backpack and a day pack. I needed the extra luggage to hold a pair of size 12 hiking boots, my Leatherman, a compass, a poncho, and most of the other necessary gear for the numerous hiking trips I planned to go on. Urban Australia is, after all, fairly Americanized, and I came to the continent prepared to venture into the countryside — the Outback — and experience remote Australia as much as possible.

I went horseback riding in the desert 30 kms or so outside of Perth, but in Tasmania, where 5,300 square kms of the island has World Heritage Area listing, I knew I’d have the chance to experience some real Australian wilderness. At least that’s what I told my self in Perth, where I spent a month living, reluctantly, as an urbanite. On our first day of uni at UTas, after only a few days in Hobart, we were told that we’d have the next week off for Easter break. My chance. Only a week after leaving Perth, and only a few days since my first excited glimpse of the green hills of Tasmania, a fellow Walkabouter and I set out on a quickly planned four-day backpacking trip to Frenchman’s Cap in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park.

The Frenchman’s Cap hiking trail, or track, as the Aussies call ‘em, started on the side of a highway somewhere in the middle of the Franklin-Gordon park, at the heart of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (the WHA is comprised of several parks and protected areas). The track is locally infamous, thanks to a stretch of muddy, buggy trail that winds through the soggy buttongrass of the frequently flooded Lodden Plains — the “Sodden Loddens.” The sodden portion of the hike ended up taking longer than I anticipated. We spent most of the first day picking our way through the narrow, but surprisingly deep crevices of the heavily eroded footpath. Track erosion is a major problem in the Tasmanian Wilderness Area, especially in wet buttongrass plains; when an overused track becomes, essentially, a mud pit, it is too easy for hikers to tramp a new path into the low brush. When that path is followed by other hikers, the process starts again. Robyn and I spent almost four hours in the Sodden Loddens the first day, following a maze of muddy, unofficial tracks, all the while trying to keep our boots dry since we’d neglected to purchase gaiters. Gaiters are more or less large shin guards that cover your boots and allow you to tromp through a foot or so of water while staying dry; they also protect you against snake bites. Apparently they’re requisite hiking gear in Tasmania. Who knew?

Speaking of snakes: All snakes in Tasmania are venomous. Albeit there are only three species. Death by snake bite is uncommon, and there is a single anti-venom to treat all three kinds, but the average snake bite can make you quite ill and a bite in the remote Tasmanian bush is especially dangerous. We’d been told that, if bitten, the best thing to do is sit down and stay still, since snake venom travels through the lymphatic system. That made me a bit nervous. Robyn hadn’t done much backpacking before, and we both agreed that if someone had to be bit it should be her — neither of us was confident in her abilities, should I be bitten, to make her way back to the highway for a heroic rescue. In the end I only saw one small black snake in the Loddens as it slithered under a clump of buttongrass a few feet ahead of me. The only other sign of wildlife in the Loddens was scat — roo scat, wallaby scat, wombat scat.

After the plains came the gray ruins of a 2007 landslide (”landslip,” to the Aussies), although the terrain was only slightly more sloped than that of the Loddens and I couldn’t figure out from what incline, exactly, the mud had flowed down from. There was no discernible trail within the large swath of mud, and you had to follow pink ribbons tied to thin saplings, the first regrowth after the landslide and the first trees we’d come across on the hike. Further along a dense forest stood on either side of the mud flow, and in the landslide’s path immense mud-covered trees lay in neat rows beside one another.

There are two huts along the Frenchman’s Cap walking track, which takes most people between 3 and 5 days to complete.  We stayed one night in each of the huts, and a third in a tent.  The huts were much cozier than I expected — four large bunks, each bunk with enough room for five or so people, a wood stove, and a drum of freshwater outside.  If we hadn’t slept indoors after the long hot and wet of the Loddens, we wouldn’t have had the energy to summit the Cap on the second day, which we did.

On the second day, the trail took us along Lake Vera, a small mountain lake with thick vegetation growing on its steep banks. I had to duck under fallen limbs and scramble along mossy log boardwalks and up creeking split-log ladders put in by the Tasmanian parks service. From the lake the trail began to climb; literally each step was vertical for at least 45 minutes of hiking. I felt like I was in a different country than the day before. Day one: the plains of Africa, only wetter. Day two: the jungles of Brazil. The trail took us through a dark, wet rainforest and followed babbling streams of ice-cold water as their waters tumbled away from us down the hillside. After two hours of slow climbing we emerged at the top of Sharlands Peak. The view was incredible. Behind me I could see the sun reflecting off a distant Lake Vera, ahead there were three more small lakes, tucked in a valley amongst several gray dolorite peaks. I wasn’t sure which one was Frenchman’s (as it turned out, none of them were).

Up next came my favorite part of the trail — the two hour hike from Sharlands to the Lake Tahune Hut. This section of track is difficult to describe. The majority of the walk was on a ridge that twisted its way through the mountaints below several peaks. On the right the ground dropped off abruptly to a deep green valley below. You could see the valley extend for miles, until it emerged from the surrounding peaks and met with an oranger, flatter area of land, which I presumed was the Loddens. On the left, the flat ridge extended for a few hundred meters, and then ended suddenly in a rock wall of dolorite, the base of whatever peak we happened to be skirting. The top of some of the smaller peaks were visible, but most rose beyond sight.

We made it to the second hut by 2pm. After six hours of hiking we wanted to rest, but we had to make it to the top of the Cap before nightfall — at about 5pm — if we were going to have two full days to walk leisurely back to the highway. A ranger staying at the hut told us the hike to the top should take about 90 minutes, so I only brought my water bottle. But I had to ditch it before I made it to the top — this last section of trail wasn’t a hike, it was a climb, and that fact caught me by surprise. The trail was immensely steep, even though it included several switchbacks, and after half an hour or so the plantlife disappeared and we were walking and scrambling over bare rock. Every once in the while there’d be a straight drop to one side of the trail, nothign but air all the way down to Lake Tahune. Vertigo, baby. I needed all four limbs and all 6′1″ of length to climb the uppermost reaches of the Cap, so unfortunately my much shorter hiking partner Robyn didn’t make it all the way to the top. For the last 30 minutes of hiking, there wasn’t a trail at all, only a series of bright white dolorite cairns to follow. I felt bad for Robyn, but I liked going on alone. I felt badass, like Indiana Jones or Bear Grylls, especially when i drank some runoff meltwater dripping off a cliff from the snows at the peak above. The view from the top was a surreal 360-degree panorama at the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Too many peaks to count, an immense lake int he distance, and two of Tasmania’s iconic wedgetailed eagles floating and diving nearby.

Frenchman’s Cap. I climbed that.

The second stop on the Walkabout (I can’t believe it’s been a month already!) is the city of Hobart on the island of Tasmania.  Hobart is a small, picturesque city of 200,000 that has been ranked by Lonely Planet as one of the world’s “most beautiful” places to live.  Nearby Mt. Wellington is the most imposing landmark at 1300 meters.  It is only a few kms from the city center and makes a beautiful backdrop for Hobart and its suburbs, especially in the morning when its highest reaches are shrouded by blue fog.

Tasmania is Australia’s smallest state, with a reputation for easy-going, ecologically-minded citizens.  Travelling Ithacans would fit in nicely here.  Tasmania’s mascot, so to speak, is the Tasmanian tiger.  Odd, considering the Tasmanian tiger, or Thylacine, has been extinct since the 1930s.  The Thylacine appears on all Tasmanian tourist pamphlets and brochures, along with the slogan “Discover Your Natural State.”  I really don’t know why you’d use an extinct animal to promote the environmentally-friendly image of Tasmania, which advertises itself as Australia’s hiking, biking, and outdoor adventure Mecca.

Tasmania’s extinct Thylacine

Coming off the plane to Hobart, the first thing I noticed was the heat.  Tassie is south of Australia and I’d been told to expect cool weather not unlike that of upstate New York in autumn, especially since we’re now moving into the Australian winter.  But for the past few days the temps have been hovering somewhere around 25C — Perth weather. 

Next I noticed the trees.  There are numerous hills and small mountains surrounding Hobart, and suburban homes have been built less than halfway up their slopes — the rest of the land is forested.  At first I thought this was evidence of Tasmanians’ love for all things green, but I later learned that building homes on the tops of the local hills would be a fire hazard.  In the 1960s a massive bushfire erupted and nearly consumed the majority of Tasmania’s forests; Tasmanians have been wary of developing suburbs too close to fire-sensitive tree cover since then.

Hobart is Australia’s second-oldest city behind Sydney and has a rich maritime history.  Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hobart was the home port of the ships of Tasmania’s highly profitable whaling industry.  Today, sub-Antarctic ice-cutting ships make port at Hobart to restock after scientific voyages in the Southern Ocean, as Tasmania is the southernmost landmass before Antarctica in the eastern hemisphere.  (Before coming to Tasmania, I thought it was close to the Antarctic, relatively speaking.  But I learned it takes 8 days by boat to reach the ice continent; it takes only 2 from the southern tip of South America).  There is no more whaling in Australia, but Japanese vessels venture into Australia’s sub-Antarctic waters and illegally kill whales in the name of science.  The whale meat, gathered for “research,” is sold at high prices to Japanese consumers; apparently there’s really nothing the Australian federal government can do to stop this.

Perthian – of or relating to Perth

The first person the Ithaca College Walkabout Down Under students met upon our arrival to Australia was a charter bus driver who took us from the airport to our apartments. He gave us some advice that if we followed, he said, would help us survive in Perth, Western Australia.

“Most people think that WA stands for Western Australia,” he said. “But WA stands for Wait Awhile.”

After living in Perth for a month, I’d have to agree: Life moves at a slower pace in Western Australia. Our media class at Murdoch hasn’t started on time yet, and every 45 minutes or so we’re given a 10-minute break.

The relaxed lifestyle was hard to adjust to at first, especially since the level of customer service we’re used to in the U.S. doesn’t exist in W.A. Waitresses don’t hover over your table at restaurants; there are less cash registers and longer, slower lines at grocery stores; several times I’ve awkwardly stood at the front desk at the City Stay apartments, you can awkwardly stand by the front desk at our hotel and the receptionist won’t ask if she can help you with anything until you ask. It all seems highly unusual (and a bit rude) at first, but eventually you learn to appreciate the “no worries” approach to life.’

All Perthians reserve some space in their schedules for rest and leisure. Around 3 p.m. on weekdays the beaches fill with young kids still in their school uniforms, swimsuits and beach towels in their backpacks. The adult form of relaxation takes place at the “local” (pub) or campus “tav” (most unis have a tavern on campus). Australian’s drink to unwind, and tend to nurse a few pints over the course of a night. The majority of American youth, on the other hand, associate drinking with the excitement of partying, and are much more likely to drink to get drunk.

The only time I’ve seen an active Perthian is at the beach. The majority of Australians live along the coast, where they’re relatively safe from the heat and dust of Australia’s Red Center. As a result, Australians have a passion for water sport – kite boarding, boogie boarding, skim boarding, water skiing, swimming, sailing, and of course, surfing. In laid-back Perth, the beach lifestyle extends beyond the coast and is evident throughout the city. Every other store is a surf shop, and it’s not uncommon that the guy in front of you at the grocery store is a barefoot surfer dude in board shorts.

Indeed, “surfer dude” would be an accurate description of at least half of young Australian men. The typical young male Perthian can be seen wearing a neon tank top, Billabong shorts, flip-flops and large, colorful “sunnies” (sunglasses). Most of them have long, grungy hair or a faux hawk.

Perth’s ladies, on the other hand, aren’t the surfer girls I was anticipating. Teenage and 20-something females dress like they’re on their way to work, even at the clubs. Hardly any of them wear jeans, and I’ve never seen one in a t-shirt. They wear long skirts or high-waist dress pants with collared shirts, and the only colors you seem them in are white, black and gray. They’re probably trying to look classy and older, but I find their style intimidating. I’m used to my American girl friends and their Rocket Dogs, Hollister hoodies, and Old Navy jeans.

Relaxing along the Indian Ocean

I’m 19 years old and of legal drinking age in the great country of Australia. Being legal has its advantages: I can go into a bar (they’re called “pubs” here) or liquor store (called “bottleshops”) without getting any dirty looks; I can sit at the bar and cheer on my favorite Australian Rules Football team (the Freemantle Dockers look pretty good); I can order a nice merlot with my steak (haven’t done that yet). Yep, easy access to alcohol is pretty nice.

That said, the drinking life isn’t all that I expected. In my last post I talked about how much more expensive everything is in Australia, but I didn’t mention the most surprisingly expensive item of all: the humble six pack. The cheapest one I’ve found so far in Perth costs a whopping $14. And that’s for Toohey’s, a commonly found Australian beer, not an import. It gets worse. A bottle of vodka goes for almost $60 at the bottleshops. The price for a case of beer hovers somewhere around $40. I miss you, Keystone.

The alcohol situation wouldn’t be so bad if us Walkabout-ers were living closer to campus and could hang out with other students in Murdoch’s student village or at an off-campus house party. Instead, we’re forced to hang out in the center of Perth, where the only night life options are overpriced bars and clubs. Drinking out is expensive in any country, but in Australia the prices at the bar are sometimes unbelievable. A pint of decent beer (I recommend Moo Brew) costs $8, if you’re lucky. Mixed drinks cost more.

The only way to drink cheaply is to drink boxed wine, but they don’t have Franzia in Oz. The drink of choice is Fruity Lexia, a sweet white wine with a gnarly aftertaste that’s almost palatable if you mix it with lemonade. Classy. The sugary concotion is cheap, but it has its disadvantages. You can almost feel the highly acidic mixture eating away at your esophagus and stomach lining, and you tend to suffer from acid reflux for at least two days after a night drinking the Lexia.

So your only choices are to drink bad wine, overpay for a good drink, or stay sober. We drink a lot of wine.

Wine tasting in WA’s Swan Valley

My first meal in Perth was a $17 pizza split amongst myself and another Walkabout-er. The pizza, which the menu advertised as “large,” was barely enough food for two people and had no toppings besides cheese — hardly a good deal, I thought. Unfortunately, I’d get used to those kinds of prices.

Food, clothing, home products, public transport — anything and everything costs just a little bit more in Australia (and sometimes a lot more). The Walkabout tuition does not include a meal plan, so the majority of my funds here go toward feeding myself. It’s hard to do that on a budget; pasta is a Walkabout staple. The average candy bar is $2, a 20oz. drink usually runs you $3, and movies cost $16 at the theater. Potatos, lettuce, and ham cost about the same in Oz as they do in America, but the average box of cereal can cost upwards of $6 (and that’s just for corn flakes), strawberries are more than $5 a punnet, and turkey costs $26 a kilo. Australians don’t have a dollar store, but a two-dollar store.

Getting myself from the City Stay Apartment Hotel, our accomadation in Perth, to the Murdoch University campus, a 20-minute train ride away, is a huge drain on the wallet. An adult all-day rail pass costs $8.50! None of the Walkabout-ers actually pay that, though. We buy the student all-day pass for $3.20, which still isn’t too cheap if you ask me (keep in mind that we have to use the train to get just about everywhere, so we use it every day). Sadly, the IC students technically aren’t supposed to buy a student pass, which is for full-time students only; we’re not recognized as full-time students in Perth, since we’re only studying at Murdoch for one month. I’m pretty sure all of the IC students will keep risking the $50 fine for illegally purchasing the cheaper train ticket, though. I’ve been hassled several times by the train guards for buying the wrong pass, and they always let me go once they hear my accent.

This is the last year of Ithaca College’s Walkabout Down Under program, which started in 2004. Students on the Walkabout travel to three different Australian universities — or “unis,” as they call them in Oz — and take four month-long classes. In Perth, Western Australia I’m studying Australian media at Murdoch Univeristy; from there I’ll travel to Hobart, Tasmania to study wilderness and sustainable development at the Univeristy of Tasmania; last stop’ll be Melbourne’s La Trobe University, where I’ll stay for two months to study Australian history and Australian literature. At the end of the four months there is an optional two-week photography course held in the Australian Outback, which I’ll be participating in.

My travel companions over the next four and a half months will be 30 other Ithaca College sophomore and juniors (I’m a sophomore). We’ll take every class together, just the 31 of us, and live in the same off-campus housing together. In Perth there’s three to five students sharing an apartment. I live with two girls, and am one of the only people lucky enough to have a single room.

Perhaps the best feature of the trip is the ample amount of built-in free time my fellow travellers and I will have while abroad. In Perth we have Fridays off, a few Thursdays off, and a handful of half-days. We’ll also have an Easter break while in Tasmania, a spring break before the first Melbourne course starts, a five-day break between the two Melbourne courses, and another short break before the photography course. That leaves plenty of time for exploring, relaxing, and travelling. I’m hoping to go to the Great Barrier Reef over spring break, and several of the other students on the trip have already booked flights to Asia for that time.

First Stop: Perth, WA

When flying from the east coast of the United States to Perth, Western Australia, don’t do what I did:

Don’t fly from Buffalo to Atlanta, Atlanta to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Sydney, and Sydney to Perth one after another. I had a six hour layover in Los Angeles, but other than that, I spent almost 36 straight hours sitting on planes (and not sleeping) and running between terminals to catch connecting flights.

Don’t stay up all night before the morning of your first flight so that you can sleep through the plane ride. It just doesn’t work that way.

When you’re on the plane, don’t order the Cobb sandwich — specially not for $8. It doesn’t look anything like its picture in the menu.

Don’t exchange currency at the airport. You’ll get ripped off big time.

And finally, don’t put the first aid kit your mom made you bring in your carry-on, even if you don’t have any other place for it. There was a small pair of scissors in mine, which I wasn’t aware of and which somehow made it all the way to Sydney before an airport metal detector picked up on ‘em. Airport security wasn’t happy, especially when I continued to deny knowing anything about the scissors. The contents of my backpack were strewn about the checkpoint, and I was pretty sure I’d be put next in line for a random cavity search.