Sean Colyer - PrometheusX

I realize that I haven’t been posting much lately (eek!); so I’ll give some quick life updates.

My semester here is quickly wrapping up and I head home very soon.  My dad is out here visiting me and we’re taking a mini whirlwind tour of Australia, at the moment we’re up in Queensland.

Several weeks ago, I decided I would go skiing.  After much investigation I decided the best place to ski (and heli-ski!) is New Zealand, I started to look at flights and how to get around.  Eventually I decided it would be difficult to manage and plan the trip without a definite, interested group.  I started looking around Victoria for the best local skiing and decided Mt. Buller provided a good compromise of skiing/convenience.  Unfortunately skiing in Australia is quite expensive (shared rooms are $60+, lift tickets are $96 or 77 for students, Rental is ~$40, food is at generally resort prices, and transportation is made more expensive by a resort “entrance fee” –  a way of collecting even more money).  That aside, I had my heart set on skiing and so I decided to pretty much just spur of the moment go for it.

With my reservations made a day before I left for my overnight trip, I packed my bags, grabbed some food and was ready for a fun trip.  I made it up to the mountain in the mid afternoon, I explored the resort for the afternoon and got ready for a good, full day of skiing the next.  I wake up early (read: 830AM) and get ready to go.  SNOW :)  It was great to be back on it, I took my series of chairlifts to the top and proceeded to ski as much of the mountain as I possibly could — it was only about half open.  The skiing wasn’t fantastic, I’ll be honest, but it was great to be skiing especially in late June.  A long day of skiing was a nice change, and I quickly found myself back on the way to Melbourne.

By now, many of my friends from the semester had started to leave, nearly every night was saying goodbye to one of my new friends.  It’s kind of a sad time, but at the same time we all know what a fantastic time we had this semester.

G and I had tentatively planned on visiting one of our friends Tim out in “the country” (a term in Australia meaning everything except one of the few major cities) — specifically a small town called Port Fairy. We hitched a ride with Tim and Flynn and were on our way.  It was a great feeling to be back in someones home — pets! home cooked meals! siblings! Living in student apartments often means some simple things in life are missed out on.  Port Fairy was a great little town, it’s known as a vacation town mostly, a summer-time retreat for Melbournians. Visiting in the winter, the town wasn’t overloaded, but was still a great time. We went fishing (yes, I caught a fish! It was enormous — ok, not at all), learned some new games, played beach cricket, and saw a different view of Australian life. It was a great way to spend a little time (though we might have stayed a bit longer without time constraints), I’m really glad I went.

Mt Buller-June 2009

Skiing Overnight trip to Mount Buller in Victoria, Australia

9 Photos

 

Ocean breeze.  You know the smell. The one that makes you feel like a little kid when you finally roll up to the beach.

That was last week.  I went with a group of friends (15 of us in all, wow!) to a tour of the East Coast of Australia.  We fly into Mackay (pronounced in Australian to finish with an I sound, we discover at the airport) and are instantly greeted by the smell of the ocean and warm weather.  The weather in Melbourne the past few weeks has slowly degraded and seems to rain all the time; I personally no longer believe there is a 12 year drought in Victoria. But I digress, we are instantly greeted by warm weather, sunshine, and that great smell.  We hop onto a Greyhound bus, first stop is Airlie Beach, our passageway to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.

Airlie Beach is a quintessential beach town, situated between beautiful beach and small mountain ridges and lined with palm trees its difficult to believe the warning signs of impending death via jellyfish and/or crocodile. Death by over-relaxation seems more likely. The plan is to get on a sail boat the following day, so we spend an afternoon relaxing, playing in the man-made lagoon (safe from the animals) and soaking the sun. Glorious. The next day we get up and work our way to our boat check-in. We gather last minute supplies and head off to the boat. Our ship is the Mandrake, our skipper, John, and our assistant Annie. We set off for a quick tour of the Whitsunday Islands.

We spend the first afternoon motoring to a bay where we’ll be staying the night. We hang out all afternoon, swimming, listening to music, and chatting. The next day we wake up to a surprisingly rocky boat on our way to the famous Whitehaven Beach.  We arrive at the bay of the Whitehaven Beach and dingy to shore.  A short trek finds us on the lookout - wow.  This is absolutely gorgeous, the water is amazingly blue, the sand amazingly white.  Best of all it looks so natural, you know tourist after tourist has set foot on this beautiful beach, but somehow it still looks pristine. We spend the morning goofing around on the beach, playing football in the ocean (an activity we do with surprisingy frequency — and it certainly gives away our nationality…). (If you look at my pictures, it should be obvious which beach I’m referring to). On our way back to the dingy  we are meeted by a crarb army, there are thousands of these small crabs coming out of their burrowed holes and making a run for the new low-tide water line, it’s pretty wild.

We’re soon at our snorkelling location for the afternoon. I could only find one fin that tould fit on my foot, there seemed to be almost exclusively small fins which doesn’t work well for our group. It was fun to be snorkelling again, their was tons of corral and plenty of fish. Unfortunately the water was pretty hazy so pictures were so-so, and also the reef wasn’t the typical nearly artificially ridiculous colors, but it was still fun. We finally got to do some sailing that afternoon and the next morning before we were back on dry land.

We grabbed our rental cars and stuffed our faces (it’s hard work relaxing at sea..) before heading off North.  We hustled our way up to Cairns, an 8+ hour drive, where we showed up still in time to clean up and enjoy a bit of the night life before continuing on North again the next day.  We work our way up to Port Douglas, perhaps the most touristy town I have ever been in.  Port Douglas consists of exclusively hotels and overpriced restaurants. But, I won’t complain for a second because it’s got a beautiful beach and our hostel was roughly a stonethrow away. We relax on the beach for an afternoon and do the usual (see: eat, football…). A fantastic sand castle was made — I napped instead.  Our last full day and we were off to explore the rainforest to the north.

Our first stop of the day was a crocodile tour –  we can’t go to Australia and not see crocodiles! We leave from this small town, the Daintree Village. This town is absolutely stuck in time — the tourists come and go but the town apparently stays the same.  I asked a store clerk how big the town was.. “Let me put it to you like this; our local school has 9 kids in it.” .. Wow, life moves a little differently here.  We’re off on our tour and see several crocodiles, some cool birds, and plenty of trees.  We push on north to Cape Tribulation and the heart of the rainforest. We see the beach of cape tribulation and decide the best way to explore the rain forest is to push on and find our own hiking path. The road soon turns to dirt — now we’re getting somewhere, and we push on until we round a bend and a sign that says “4WD Only past this point”. I look around the corner to see a creek several feet deep — we decide not to push the luck of our small SUV. We park and walk back to a trail spotted on the way. Mike screeches as he sees a huge bird ahead — a cassowary — and sprints off after it.

A cassowary is like a wild turkey.  Only it’s HUGE, the thing was massive, it could have been as big as a person.  The bird took off running into the bush, clearly uncomfortable with what had just happened.  When Mike comes back someone takes the pleasure of informing the group that the bird is deadly, apparently it jumps up and will use its talons to claw ones chest — glad we know that now..  We find the desired trail and head off into the rainforest, it eventually lets us out at a beach. We wander down the beach until it ends at another stream inlet — we do however find some freshly fallen coconuts and bring them back to our hostel as prizes of the day. Our adventure wraps up here as the afternoon is getting late and we have a drive ahead of us back to Port Douglas.

The next day we round up the troops and head back to Cairns where we catch our flight to Melbourne.  The trip we agree, was definitely, definitely, a success.

East Coast Australia-June 2009

43 Photos

 

This past week, I rented a car with G and his friend, Alex, visiting from home. We were on a quest to see one of Victoria’s famous sites, the Great Ocean Road.  The road was originally built by returned service men of World War I using little more than picks and shovels. The road runs along the coast and shows famous sites, most notably is the Twelve Apostles, a rock pillar formation just off the coast.

We grabbed our car in the afternoon on Monday and went to to our final destination on Monday and decided to see the road on the way back the next morning/day.

The towns along the road seem suspended in time. The people move at a different pace, and fit admirably in the coast side towns we weave through. My favorite interaction though was in our final town, Peterborough. We arrive their just before 9 and throw up our tent.  We realize its just after 9 and we have some time, since we’re in a campsite we decide to go somewhere light, maybe a grab a bite to eat.  Leaving the campground fines us staring at a tavern with the lights on, perfect. I walk in the front door to see one man eating at the bar and no one else to be seen, he looks at me somewhat puzzled.

“Are you open?” I ask

“No, we’re closed.”

“Is there anywhere else in town that would be open?”

He looks at me and can’t tell if I’m serious. “Not at this hour of the night” He chuckles, still surprised I could even think something like that. We walk away, I’m puzzled, I look down at my watch and find it glaring 9:20 back at me. Different pace. At least we were provided a few laughs at our lifestyle clashes…

The next day we start off relatively early, and work our way from the Bay of Martyrs back East. The coastline was generally stunning. The blue-ness of the water was quite impressive, perhaps growing up with the north Atlantic ocean makes other oceans seem that much more impressive. The Twelve Apostles are the most famous site along the road, and are certainly an epic view. They’re created because the pillars are of a harder rock than its surroundings which erode more quickly. We take a few hikes at the various locations, the “blow hole” was pretty interesting — water rushes into this hollowed out section several hundred feet from the rest of the coast, and the waves seem stuck inside.

We hiked to a waterfall later in the trip. The waterfall was in the middle of a rain forest, it felt like quite a jungle, it was an impressive site of natural beauty. The path to this particular waterfall was incredibly man made; a man-made metal pathway with high side railings seemed to be some sort of blend between science fiction and video games. In fact the path oddly reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder , where they had to stay on the path or risk changing the past.. (and future..)

We continue to cruise the coast line and observe the beauty, it is easy to see why the journey is one of Victoria’s famed tourist activities.  We were late returning the car which provided a nice life lesson: don’t be late returning car rental. They wanted to charge us for an extra day which we were able to talk down a bit, but it was relatively frustrating…  The trip was a lot of fun though, and I think it was best experienced by just renting a car and going for it.

Great Ocean Road

30 Photos

 

Recently, my friend asked me to participate in a rogain. What is a rogain you may be asking yourself — it’s essentially extreme orienteering; they give you points on a map with varying score values, a limited time, and tell you to get to as many as possible and have the highest point score at the end.

This rogain in particular was with the Victorian Rogaining Association, a group of varying age and tatlent weekend warriors who rogain. We were given a 15-hour or 24-hour option, it being our first rogaining experience we opted for the 15 hour competition. This meant that we can use any of the 15 hours between 12 noon on saturday and 12 noon on sunday that we desire. We laid out our course, agreed that we were going to get lost frequently, and took off at a jog for a whirlwind 15/24 hour period.

Our first point is supposed to come after we have passed all the buildings, we pass them and look for our turnoff — we don’t find it, instead we hit the next intersection. Uh oh, we already missed a point, but we decide to cut down to the stream on the map and make our way to our next point. We cut east and find our “waterflow” (we dubbed them “rivers”). There was no water in it.  In fact, it didn’t look like water had run their for some time. There was however large trees, fallen branches, ferns, and a steep hill on either side. We stick with the plan and make our way down the river to the river intersection where our first point will be located.  Several minutes into this plan, we have all fallen, got mad across most of what we were wearing and progressing slow.  It becomes clear this is going to be an interesting exercise.  We finally make it down to the point looking quite disheveled and somewhat annoyed at the amount of unnecessary time spent trailblazing without the apparently necessary machete. Some other groups eye us, their faces say they think our trip is going to be most interesting…

We make our way back out to the road and proceed as planned for several points, we make pretty good time. Aside from one minor detour where we misread the map, we’re doing pretty well. After our aforementioned adventure we revise some of our plans to travel by river and instead decide we might be better suited on trails or roads. This decision highlights one of the biggest tradeoffs in rogaining — when is it advantageous to shoot a bearing with a compass versus stick to established paths? Good question.

As we’re trudging through the forest we have some fantastic views, the path at some points is carved into the side of major ridges and provide beautiful glimpses of canyons and trees. Many trees in Australia shed their bark, which is very hard to adjust to; the trees get so smooth and bark is scattered across the whole forest, it’s definitely something that takes getting used to. There are several flipped cars throughout the forest, it provides an interesting contrast to the otherwise very natural feeling — it also begs the question as to how they got there? It might be tough to drive through sections of this forest..

We found a mine as we were walking along a ridge carved path as night fell. An open hallway in the side of a ridge is pretty spooky, we explored it only very briefly, as the clock was ticking and we wanted to push on. We decided we would try to one more point, 72, and take a shorter path nearby to bring us to the road and home.  This is where we learned how hard night navigating is, we wandered around the area where we thought it should be, finding a path that wasn’t on the map, rivers of course with no water, and the flow it was supposed to be on was quite hidden.  We stumbled upon the path on our last ditch effort before heading back.  We decided we’d skip as much of the night navigation as possible.  Our walk back had few points on it and was very long — by the time we made it back to the camp it was just shy of 10, leaving us 5 hours to work in the morning. We devour food and sleep for a few hours.

6:30. Time to get moving to be out by 7. We have varying paths for the day depending how ambitious we decide to be. We start off at a jog — we’re going big. By now we’ve gotten much better at reading the map and determining which paths are feasible, we still manage to overshoot one turn by a couple hundred meters, but we’re doing pretty well. After grabbing the points on our ambitious plan, we make it back to the hash house (base, food) a bit after 11, leaving us a bit less than an hour (late fee is 10 points/min, read: bad). We decide to finish with a bang, we drop our packs and run to grab the 46 point we missed yesterday (hah! take that!) and add on a 58 point a bit further down the road. We see people heading back as we’re going to grab our last point, we overshoot it mildly but keep our jog up and make it back with 9 minutes to spare.

We won the novice field, but it wasn’t exactly competitive. There was one other team doing the 15 hour competition, and 3 doing the 24 hour (but we think they required as part of a PE requirement or something, so they might not have been giving it their all…). It was a great time: a fun challenge with some friends and nice to be outside in this beautiful country. Using the extremely precise measurement of string based on the path I believe we took (highlighted in maps below, blue is first day, green is second) we did approximately 34km the first day and 27km the second, totally 61km or about 39 miles.

Rogaining

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I’m open to opinions, this is the conclusion I have wandered to – I’m thinking through writing more than declaring infallible truth.

The United States has received criticism both internally and internationally about its environmental protocol and consumption-waste lifestyle. This has led me to wonder how I would solve the issues. I think a number of “green” solutions have been taking the wrong approach, and the “green” movement needs realignment.

Celebrities endorsing things that are “green” is ridiculous, it does little more than try to make people feel good about themselves without any serious change.  The near celebrity status of the Toyota Prius and hybrid movement is really quite similar; I am not the first to seriously question the environmental benefit of Priuses.  Weighing a car down with the use of heavy, expensive and difficult to dispose chemical batteries seems to be backwards thinking.  There are other options that consume similar levels of fuel, a Volkswagen Golf TDI is a 4-door car that offers 50 miles per gallon and costs less than the Prius.

The Lotus Elise weighs in just less than 2,000 pounds, goes 0-60 in less than 5 seconds, and offers super car like handling for a price tag in the $40,000 range. It has highway mileage of nearly 30 miles per gallon to boot.

An original Mini weighed between 1400 and 1500 pounds, a new one weighs at least 2,500 pounds. The original Beetle was tipped the scales at just fewer than 1900 pounds, a new one: 2,700 pounds. While cars have certainly gotten heavier, these increases are still less than 3,000 pounds, almost all family cars now are weigh over that. A new Chevrolet Suburban has a curb weight between 5,600 and 6,300 pounds. A Honda Accord now weighs between 3,300 and 3,600 pounds.

Cars have gotten heavier because of added features, particularly advancements like air conditioning and certain safety features.  However, materials have also gotten a lot better, manufacturers have gotten much better at using steel and aluminum which enables them to do better quality construction with less material.  The main problem has been an arms race amongst consumer, who can have the biggest car with the most room to bring around as much stuff as will possibly fit.

I propose a tax at the time of sale of new cars based on weight.  Cars that weigh over 3,000 pounds will be charged $1/pound tax.  Current taxes like this such as the gas-guzzler tax are fixed prices (such as $1500), and have done relatively little in the long term to change car design.  Car manufacturers can engineer cars to weigh in this category, but they will be slow to do so and the nation should push consumers to lighter cars and stop this trend of the heavy car arms race. The funds from this tax could either help pay off the unbelievable amount of US debt or go to funding public transportation. There should be exceptions for large work-related vehicles; in the grand scheme of things dump trucks for construction are not the vehicles that need re-engineering.

Any car enthusiast could talk your ear off about the advantages of lighter cars, ranging from performance to better gas mileage. Lighter cars also obviously use substantially less material and are thus easier to dispose of.
I think this would be a good first step to changing the American mindset in regards to cars. If we as a nation decide that we want to consume less or go “green”, we need decisive action that will encourage the citizens to follow this initiative. Perhaps it is time to start to move from the “bigger is better” mindset.

Kangaroo, or Roo as it is affectionately called here, has grown in the Australian diet. The government encourages Australians to eat it, it is a lean meat, has a low CO2 output (they digest food differently?), and uses less water.

I cooked up my first Kangaroo steak the other day, it’s actually really good. At around ~$17AUD/kg it’s a reasonably priced meat. I prepared in my wok on a reasonably high heat for several minutes, with pepper and onion worked into the steak.

Also, my sunglasses broke in New Zealand, the screw fell off of one side — bummer.

Over Easter Break I went to New Zealand with a group of 13 students. Most of us live together and we were all Americans or Canadians who wanted to see New Zealand.

New Zealand is divided into two islands, the North and South. The South island is where most of the tourist action is, extreme sports and beautiful scenery mostly.  New Zealand, now famous for the stunning filming location of the Lord of the Rings movies is a beautiful country. We ended up driving most of the island tallying up roughly 3200km (~2000 miles) over the course of a week.

Driving on the “wrong” side of the road is certainly interesting as first but you quickly get used to it, the weirdest part is that some cars have windshield wipers/turn signals reversed (ours did) and that was definitely interesting getting used to. I wish I had a motorcycle or high end sports car, as these would be the vehicles needed to do the roads justice.

Our week was a fun filled road trip, we split our nights between camping and hosteling. The stars are amazing, the Southern Cross (the stars on the Aussie flag) are so easily spotted amongst a sky absolutely busting with stars.

Milford Sound is one of the most beautiful places (the album image below is from there) I’ve ever been. Mt. Cook, one of the famous mountains was beautiful as the backdrop to lakes. Even shooting with a DSLR, the pictures can’t do the beauty justice. Driving through the mountains and gazing on the sites with your own eyes is … undescribable.

Queenstown is the extreme sports center of the island.  We had Mario Kart style luge races (ski lift-esque picture) with 13 of us bashing into each other barreling down a mountain. Flips, blood, sweat, and tears were left out there. Well, maybe not tears. It was a great way to spend an afternoon with friends. I got to go horseback riding for the first time in awhile which was really great essentially cantering through the fields of Rohan. Our guide realized that two of us knew how to ride and gave us decent free reign. Our group ended up fording a river that was probably ~4 feet deep, it was quite an adventure and a great time.

We then headed to Franz Josef glacier where we had quite a journey determined to touch the glacier. Despite a rainy day, and countless warning signs, a small group of us decided to stop at no less than touching the glacier. Our trek involved hiking up a waterfall, around ridges, and countless slips. We scared several tour groups by our motley crew appearance… Perhaps it’s a story better told in person…

We eventually made it to the north side of the island where most of us went skydiving. Wow. It’s quite an experience, it’s a pretty interesting feeling knowing you’re about to jump out of a functional plane. It was a pretty wild experience, and not actually as terrifying as I had thought it might be.

It was a great trip, it was wrapped up in appropriate fashion when I had a plane that landed at 8:00AM Melbourne time (NZ is +2 from Melbourne) and an exam at 9, I flew through customs grabbed my bag hailed a cab and cruised into the lecture hall just as my one exam of the semester was starting.

New Zealand

33 Photos

 

I just got an email in my gmail account from Grand Central about upgrading to Google Voice.  I just performed the upgrade and I’m pretty excited about the new features offered by Google Voice.

Grand Central for those who don’t know was a service (bought by google) that provides a single phone number for you, ideally for your whole life. As you move houses or trade cell phones, you can just keep giving people one number to call.  The service had more functionality, such as the ability to ring multiple phones (home and cell), and lots of filtering. They’ve also updated the theme to closely match other Google applications.

Google Voice increases the functionality even further, you can now make outbound calls, send and receive SMS messages, voicemail transcripts, and conference calling among others.  I’m glad to see they are finally working on this service again as I have had limited use of my account for some of the reasons just mentioned.

Privacy could be a concern, their privacy policy swears they’re not evil. Who knows, maybe they’ll sell add space based on my voicemail transcripts? For now at least the trade off seems worth it, the governments always listening anyway right? Might as well benefit

I think the service is still invite only, so if you’re looking for an invite you can leave a comment, if I ever get any, I’ll pass them along. I have no idea if I will.

I went to the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne this weekend. It was quite an experience.

The sound. The noise is pretty incredible and probably the most indescribable experience of the race. It’s loud, but powerful and actually pretty entertaining to hear. With redlines of ~18k RPM, they rev a lot higher (~3x) than your average car, which means their exhaust is more of a song than virtually any car. This high revving passes almost every other vehicle, my motorcycle redlines at ~13.5k, and the Trans Am at 5.5k, as mentioned the pitch is quite exhilarating.

The actual F1 race is around an hour and a half, but the festivities are a day long event (really, 4 days if you go to the other races and practices and timing sessions). This means that there are several races throughout the day and lots of other cars to see in the meantime. The other cars to see were as much a lesson in history as the current F1, there were cars from throughout racing history which was certainly impressive.

The Grand Prix takes place on roads that are shut down around Albert Park lake. I hadn’t visited here before, but it’s a quick tram ride and a pretty nice area. The panorama below captures it nicely, think I’m a sucker for palm trees.

The GT race was exciting because it was road cars racing, this means high end Ferrari’s and Lambo’s fighting Porsche 911’s, a stray Corvette or two, and several others. It’s refreshing to see high end exotics doing what they were made to be doing. There was also a Mini Challenge where Mini Coopers, which appeared to be mostly stock, were raced. Unfortunately, I think this race was one of the other days or before I arrived, but certainly would have been interesting. There was also a V8 race of cars that I didn’t get a great chance to identify, but was also exciting.

Unfortunately, the race ended under safety car, after 3rd place went for a pass with just several laps left resulting in 2nd and 3rd wiping out. Jenson Button racing in a Brawn car had been wiping up the field all day though and coasted to a relatively easily victory. Somehow, Lewis Hamilton, reigning world champion, after starting in the rear managed his way to 4th place by the time all was said and done. Richard Branson who just endorsed the Brawn team has had incredibly good fortune as they landed him a 1-2 finish. I believe he was quoted as saying something to the effect of “I’m the luckiest man alive.”

It was a great experience. I don’t think it would become my new favorite hobby, but I’m really glad that I went. Now if I got to drive, it might be a different story…

Sydney. The eternal rival of Melbourne. This led my visit last weekend to involve a number of comparisons as to which was actually better. At the end of the day, or weekend really, I prefer to live in Melbourne. I tried to take an unbiased opinion but it’s quite difficult and I’m sure compelling arguments could be made for either side.

The beaches and coastline are fantastic. Coogee and Bondi beach are both half hour bus rides from the city center. The ~6.5km walk between these two reveals some of Sydney’s most impressive scenery. Beaches flow into cliffs, the clear blue water shimmering below, and the clear blue sky above collide into a setting that’s truly spectacular.

Manly Beach is a half hour ferry ride from the city and a great way to spend a day. Manly is a small beach town that knows its audience, there are cheap beach shops and lots of restaurants. The beach itself is full of life: surfers, or surfers to be, volleyball, boogie boarding, swimming, and generally heaps of people soaking in the sun. The only real complaint would perhaps be a slight overcrowding, who can resist the perfect weather on the weekend?

The city is a bit larger than Melbourne. I believe Sydney is between 4 and 4.5 million while Melbourne is between 3.5 and 4. However, Sydney is much more of a hassle to get around. Melbourne has great public transportation with a relatively cheap train and widely covering tram system. Sydney relies heavily on buses which seem perpetually stuck in traffic.

The social life is surprisingly different, Sydney has a feel much more of a major metropolis. Sydney tends to be dressed up when Melbourne seems casual. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of the city (well, the brief feeling that I got) in a phrase, but it seemed more of a generic large city but definitely had some cool and unique features.

The Sydney Opera House, the most well known building in Australia, definitely sets the waterfront apart. It’s swooping sails are enchanting, and the building alone gives the sense that you’re in a different world.

The Royal Botanical gardens are a stone throw away from the opera house and create an impressively tranquil environment. While the city noise lies just a few blocks away, strolling through the gardens is quite relaxing. The craziest thing about the gardens however is the large number of bats that live in them. I tried to capture this in the picture below with the tree, there are bats that hang from trees across the park in the middle of the day. While famous, they are the noisiest things in the park and something of an eyesore, if you ask me.

The aquarium was impressive. Yes, I found Nemo. The best part was having the exhibits where you walked through tubes in the shark tank and the corral reef tank. Be sure to check out the warning sign below. Australia is famous for its wildlife and perhaps there is no better exhibit of that than the aquarium, though the zoo would be a good balance. It’s a great time to walk among the sea creatures, it’s absolutely amazing to think about the amount of variation under the sea. Underwater life is often grouped into several small groups, such as fish, sharks, sting rays, but it is much more complex, comparable, I imagine, to life on land.

I went camping recently in the Grampians National Park. The park is roughly a 3.5 hour drive from Melbourne and is located in a hilly part of Victoria. We got in pretty late on a Friday night. My tent mate and I decided that because the weather was so nice and we wanted the nice summer air floating through that we wouldn’t put the fly on the tent. Unfortunately, the weather knew our plan and started raining in the early morning — we raced to put on the fly and cover our stuff. My bag wasn’t completely covered however and most of my clothes would be wet for the rest of the trip. A mistake I really should have avoided, oh well.

The camping trip was with the mountaineering club through uni, and the activites for the weekend were bushwalking (read: hiking) and mountain climbing.  The views were amazing. The bushwalking was fantastic because I ended up going with a small group who wanted to go on a difficult, long path and keep a quick pace while doing it. I think our walk was just under 20km for the day.

We proceeded to go climbing on the Sunday. Rock Climbing is an interesting activity for me.. I enjoy the challenge, but am not very good at it. Rock climbing is something of a skilled art in balance — not brute force as I consistently try to do.

Overall, it was really nice to get outside again, it’s something I haven’t done enough of. I hope that when I return home again I remember to make time for the wilderness.

The Moomba Festival is a huge festival kind-of carnival in Melbourne every year. It’s dubbed a “Water Festival”, and surrounds the Yarra River which runs through the middle of the city. Melbourne has been in a drought for 12 years (though it’s rained the past few days…), and they take their water conservation quite seriously. Most of the would-be grass is dead and not allowed water. The festival had plenty of stands for education on water usage and water paths. Water is something I can take relatively for granted at home, it’s amazing how different that is here.

The festival was a good time, there were guys wake boarding from riding a winch, and all sorts of rides. The highlight for me however was the “Birdman Rally” — a fundraising event where the participants attempt to make a flying contraption and test it off of a platform in the middle of the river. Often times this contraption involved little more than a cape, and was very entertaining. We saw fireworks one night too, they were pretty awesome because they were shot off from the middle of the river.

One of my favorite places I’ve found in Melbourne is the Carlton Gardens. Luckily, they’re also very close to where I live. Within the gardens is the Melbourne Museum. The museum is something of a science museum, which aren’t my favorite, but it’s still informative and a good museum. I love the architecture of building, it’s got a very unique and new feel to it. In the picture below you can see the part that towers out into the sky, within this section is an actual mini forest representative of local forests.

Around the gardens are nice paths for running and relaxing. It’s nice to have a little green grass — most of Melbourne, and Victoria (the state) are very brown and dry from the drought of the past 12 years.

I decided to swing by St. Patrick’s Cathedral the other day while I was near the museum. It’s nice, not the largest cathedral I’ve ever seen — not exactly La Sagrada Familia — but it’s tastefully done and quite peaceful.

During the summer in Melbourne, every Wednesday there is the Queen Victoria Night Market. Located at the intersection of Elizabeth and Queen St on the edge of the CBD (downtown), the masses really show up for a good time. Food vendors representing a broad range of taste sell food, craft style merchants hawk all sorts of stuff, and a pair of live bands complete the fun, summer atmosphere.

The event was a good time, I saw some friends I hadn’t seen since soon after arrival, and enjoyed a relaxing summer night.

So I’ve done a minimal amount of coding while I’m here. But I have posted updates to both the Facebook Imaging Spider and GAMVL