Making the Most of Melbourne

I had 2 days between when my bus trip ended and when I was meeting up with my family in Sydney, so flew to Melbourne for about 36 hours to make sure to see Australia's second biggest city during my time Down Under. Basically, I had very little time to see a very large city. And I got to see and experience a on of it! This was thanks to a family friend of mine that lives in Melbourne, she was kind enough to show me around some of her favorite parts of the city. I saw so much more than what I would have seen doing it on my own, and had a wonderful time with her and her fiancé during those two days.

The city has this amazing feel of old and new meeting each other. Many of the buildings are heritage listed, with older beautiful architecture (below right), but huge sky scrapers dominate the CBD (top). There are many small arcades with stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. And the city sets aside certain arcades and alleyways for graffiti artists, so people have a place to express themselves without defacing property. They say that Melbourne experiences all four seasons in a day, and this was definitely true of my time there! I experienced 20 C and sun, 5 C, and 10 C and rain, all in one day, it was so weird, but the drastic weather changes reminded me a little of St. Louis :P

                                     

It's also a city of neighborhoods. I got to explore the CBD and South Melbourne with my friend, the first day I was there, and then checked out the Queen Victoria Markets (below left), Fitzroy (below right), and Carlton my second day. Melbourne is a city of food and coffee and I got the chance to shop and sample some of these treats, for a more detailed account check out the links above!

I really, really liked this city. I was extremely sad that I had so little time there, because I would have definitely wanted to explore more areas of the city and also take a drive out to the Great Ocean Road. But, sometimes things don't work out, so now I have a reason to come back to Australia so I can do some of the things that I missed. Even living there for 6 months and traveling heaps, I still didn't get to everything I wanted to do. This is in part because Oz is enormous, and also because when you travel anywhere it really is impossible to do everything. You just have to make the most of the time that you have, and I definitely did that both in Melbourne and in Australia as a whole!

The Rock and the Red Centre

Besides the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Opera House, there is another iconic Australian wonder, and that is Ayers Rock, or Uluru. Now the second half of the bus trip was us traveling from the Top End to Alice Springs and then continuing on to the Red Centre and Uluru. First of all, it took us two days of straight driving to get from Kakadu to Alice Springs, and there is nothing in between besides roadhouses and a couple of very small, very sketchy towns. Australia is around the same size as the US (maybe a bit bigger), but unlike the states, 90% of the population lives within 100 mi of the coast. That means the middle of the country is largely empty. In fact, some of the cattle stations are bigger than european countries! Driving through the middle of the country is an excellent way to get this perspective. Another really cool thing about this type of travel is that I could really see how the landscape and ecosystem changed as we got further south. Slowly the trees became shorter and fewer and the soil became rockier and redder (below), as the landscape changed from savanna to desert.

There were a couple of really cool geologic features on the way, like the Devils Marbles, huge eroded granite boulders (see below for a sense of scale, I'm 5'2"). For such an empty part of the country the outback certainly has its own stark dessert beauty. Also it's a geologist's dream :) We had one day to recover in Alice Springs before heading back out into the Red Centre. Myself and the other people on my trip spent the day walking around the town and doing laundry. We also enjoyed the hot desert sun at our hotel's pool. I decided to go in the pool which was a horrible idea. You see, it's winter in Australia right now, and since the desert actually gets really cold, the only thing that causes it to heat up during the day is direct sunlight. As soon as the sun falls, it drops into the single digits Celsius. Well, this pool had an awning over it so never received any direct sunlight, and was not artificially heated. So when I jumped in, my heart stopped. Actually, I've never been in water this cold in my life (and remember I've been swimming in cold waterfall pools and diving 20m under the ocean) and I immediately had to get out. 

When we left Alice, we headed to the southwest. And finally we got to Uluru!!! The Rock is absolutely amazing because it is so isolated. There really is nothing but sand dunes surrounding it. You can see why the native people consider it a sacred site. In fact an entire side of the rock is considered sacred and you are not supposed to take pictures of it. That's way all the pictures you see of the rock are taken from only 3 angles. Also, while people are still technically allowed to climb the rock it is culturally disrespectful. I wouldn't have climbed it anyway, since I don't like heights, but it makes me sad that given this people still choose to climb it anyway :(

Another really interesting thing about Uluru is that it changes color depending on the sun's position in the sky. Sunrise, midday and sunset all have a different distinct color (see below). This is because the iron in the rock reflects the sun rays differently depending on it's angle. It's also incredibly beautiful to see, and sunset was one of my favorite parts of the trip! After Uluru we also went to the Olgas, or Kata Tjuta, which is a series of boulder like formations in the same national park as Uluru. We went on a wonderful hike there! Our last hike of the trip was the King's Canyon Rim Walk. It had some drop off parts, which made me a little nervous because of my fear of heights. But the views were amazing, and there were some really cool ripple marks in the stone so I'm so glad I did it!

Another great thing about being in the Outback is that the stars were amazing!!! We could see the milky way and, of course, the Southern Cross! Our last night was spent in swag… which is traditional bush camping. Basically, it's a tent with enough room for a sleeping bag and that's it. I was really excited to camp in the Outback, but unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. You see, it gets outrageously cold at night, and anywhere the swag touches the sleeping bag all of your body heat is lost, so I spent a pretty miserable cold night in my swag :( The upside, the stars were beautiful, we got to hear dingoes howling in the distance which was crazy cool, and it was a great last night with the friends I had made on the trip!

Besides the fact that this is a totally unique and iconic part of the country, one of my favorite parts of this trip was meeting and traveling with so many different and fabulous people! Most of the bus was 20 somethings traveling on their own and it was so cool getting to know everyone and sharing these fantastic experiences together. At this point I have travelled on my own, with school groups, with friends, and now with tour groups. Each is incredibly different, but all have been fun and rewarding in their own way!

Traveling at the Top End

After an incredibly long hiatus, I figured it was time to start synthesizing my last month of travel down under! At the beginning of July I flew to Darwin in true backpacker fashion (see below left), to go on a 10 day bus trip through the Top End and the Outback. The First 6 days of the trip included traveling through the Litchfield and Kakadu National Parks, as well as driving on the Stewart Highway on our way to Alice Springs. 

The Top End of Australia is monsoonal, so there are two seasons: a wet and a dry. The winter (when I was there) is the dry season. This means that there is essentially no humidity and no rain, but temperatures are still in the 20s C. This makes in an ideal time to travel to this part of the country. In fact, in the wet many areas are completely inaccessible by road because they are flooded. Regardless of it being the dry, one of the highlights of Litchfield national park was all of the waterfalls. There are heaps of them that end in these gorgeous clear pools. Went spent a lot of the time the first couple of days swimming in these breathtaking waters. In the wet season many of these areas are inaccessible because crocs have access to them, but in the dry the crocs are cut off and they become safe to swim in. 

After spending a day in Litchfield we drove to Kakadu national park (top photo). This park is huge (larger than switzerland!!) and extremely beautiful. The landscape is mulga woodland dotted with billibongs (below top). I didn't realize it but, Billibongs are actually oxbow lakes, something I'm extremely familiar with. Oxbow lakes form when a bend in a river becomes cut off from the main river channel. There are a bunch very close to St. Louis, and the lake core samples I have been doing paleoenvrionmental research on are from one of these lakes! So I've unknowingly been working on billibong samples :) Not only was this a really cool discovery, but the lakes themselves are beautiful, hundreds of birds take refuge here and you can hear them all singing. This area of the country (like most of Australia) is interlinked with seasonal burning. It's natural here, and mosaic burning is used to keep fires from getting out of control, and to ensure the natural growth cycle of the native vegetation. The landscape is dotted with small smothering bush fires, its really otherworldly and incredibly cool (below bottom).

We hiked through several areas of the park, but one of the highlights of this part of the trip was going for a crocodile river cruise on the South Alligator River (there are no alligators in Oz this is a total misnomer) with a local aboriginal guide. Our guide was so great, he really helped us connect to the natural and cultural history of the land. And we saw at least 12 huge Salties, or Esturine crocodiles (below)!!! These are the man-eaters and it was amazing to see them in the wild, but obviously not be in the water with them. They are actually beautiful animals with amazing dappled scales. 

Our last stop on Top was Katherine Gorge, which we got to kayak through!!!! Now you may have noticed from previous posts, but I love kayaking, so I was so excited to be able to do this in the Top End. We kayaked through a magnificent gorge, on an extremely calm river. And we sawFreshwater Crocodiles while we were kayaking!!! These are much less aggressive and much smaller than the Salties, so it's safe to kayak in areas where they are. 

I had originally been on a different bus tour that wouldn't have included the top end, but due to not enough people signing up, I ended up on this one instead. I'm so glad that it worked out this way! The Top End is really unlike any other. It reminds me of the African Savanna, but is still incredibly unique. I loved spending the days hiking and swimming, and it was great to get a bit of summer in the winter before heading south for the rest of the trip!