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Avoca Beach, North Avoca Beach, and Terrigal

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I know I said the Blue Mountains were my new favorite place in Australia, but I think Avoca Beach is my new new favorite place in Australia. Sorry, Blue Mountains (probably only until I visit you again though).

Though we’ve moved into our own place, Viive and Ian were making a trip to their favorite beach last weekend, and they invited us along. Heck yes. And I’m so grateful to them for taking us. We’ve had a very busy couple of weeks full of adventure, yes, but also full of errands, errands, errands, and so much schlepping of furniture, lamps, heaters, fans, furniture, groceries, kitchen supplies, bathroom supplies, trashcans, side tables, and all of the little things that make a place home, all by hand, all on public transit and on foot.

Fortunately we were able to get the biggest things delivered, and our couch arrived the night before this beach trip! The door to our flat is a sliding door, like a barn door, so we were able to take the door off completely to try and get the couch in, but still. We got half the couch in two different times before figuring out the winning spatial solution involving a twist just so and a lift here and all of this with me having only one functional thumb to grip with. It was fun! But then we sat on it and watched a movie on the laptop and everything was lovely.

Anyway. The beach. The glorious wondrous peaceful relaxing idyllic silly beach.

I’m going to do a series of photos at some point called “me trying to lick things.”

Australia has a lot of sedimentary rock. If you remember, the Blue Mountains are old sandstone “mountains” which are actually high plateaus carved out by water.  Although the base of much of the continent is igneous and metamorphic, much of the continent is covered in a “thin veneer of mainly Phanerozoic sedimentary basins cover much of the Australian landmass (these are up to 7 km thick).” THIN VENEER?? Everything’s relative I guess. In any case, I’m definitely not a geological expert (though I may have aspired to such for a time in high school), so I’m not going to go into details, but the ancient sandstone (mainly set down in the permian and triassic ages) has been faulted, shifted, and lifted over time. Apparently, and I definitely didn’t know this, most of the harbors we have today are actually drowned river valleys, because the sea levels rose thousands of years ago.

The end result of all of these sedimentary deposits + shifting + erosion has been this:

and this:

Avoca Beach (and surrounding areas) are less highly trafficked than a lot of beaches closer to Sydney. But not just because it’s further away – because there’s less sand, and more rock! Beautiful interesting rock! I’m mostly going to let the images speak for themselves.

Check out the surge of the waves as the tide comes in. I guess there’s nothing for scale here, but that main boulder is probably about 10 feet tall:

Aside from us and the few other people wandering the rocks, most of the people off of the sandy area were fishing. I encountered one man who was busily scraping up little seaweeds attached in rocky pools. Upon asking, he said that as the water washed over the pools and retracted back out to sea, the little bits of plant matter would attract the kind of fish he was after, so he was priming the water for his fishing expedition.

What a way to spend a day, picnicking on rocks with family, maybe a couple of beers, waiting for your rod to bend, listening to the waves…

Much of the rocky areas were flat as above, but interspersed were also many beautiful deep pools carved out of the rock, almost supernaturally sunken into the flat surroundings.

Late in the day, at North Avoca Beach, before a tasty dinner of Thai, the early evening light drew out all of the soft deep colors of the sandstones with lovely reflections on the water. 

Ben took this shot. It’s perfect:

The little black blips are snails, holding on as water from high waves washes over them.

There was a trio of little girls playing on the rocks as we explored. They were shrieking and jumping and playing with the water, looking for critters in the shallow pools. Maybe examining these snails. So lovely. Must go back to Avoca.

Highly recommended: The Australian Museum

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Several days ago Ben and I set out to have a random adventure. We set off to catch a ferry that picks up near where we live. We arrived just in time to run down the dock and clamber on… and then it started raining.

We were planning on getting off at the Cockatoo Island stop, because… Cockatoo Island! Why the hell not? It’s not like you need to go to an island named after the bird to see them here – you get woken up by their raucous squawking early in the morning as it is – but as far as criteria to decide where to explore for a bit, good enough.

However, it looked like an industrial park and it was raining, so we decided to stay in the sheltered boat and ride all the way to the Circular Quay. What to do there on a rainy day? Museum!

We took the train to the “Museum” station and walked to the Australian Museum, which turned out to be a super awesome small museum with creative and in depth exhibits. I haven’t been to a museum with more of a sense of fun and with such interesting details.

I’m going to send you to Ben’s blog for the skeletal humor bits. They’re awesome  – go check them out.

Ben’s humorous skeleton and dinosaur pictures (and bird commentary) are great. I recommend enlarging those pictures. I love that the museum includes these exhibits.

The museum also had a nice way of assembling skeleton parts to make sense of the whole animals, like this armadillo. They did similar with an alligator and its bony plates and with turtles.

Ben told me he took this picture just for me. He had no idea what he was delving into, but…. Look at that ol’ elephant go!!!

After the skeletons, I spent most of my time there looking at the stuffed birds and the insects and spiders long after ben went off and looked at dinosaurs. whatever. Bugs, man! But then, I didn’t even get to the dinosaurs.

For a rather small natural history museum, this place had some serious depth and, as I’ve mentioned, a pretty great sense of humor. The little details included in the displays were pretty incredible.

Stages of bone regrowth:

Did you know that birds can make two sounds at once? I know it has always sounded like they can, but I had no idea that they actually are able to, and it’s because of this:

This is a fantastic bird! The walk to the train station from our places takes us under some large evergreens next to an expanse of grass. I’ve seen a pair of these guys several times now, and they are really pretty. I love that there are pigeons here with mohawks. They have bands on their wings that reflect a gorgeous green/blue/purple/black depending on the lighting.

I took pictures of many of the stuffed birds to use as my temporary identification book. I’ve since bought a pretty fantastic field book that I cart around with me, but it’s still nice to have these pictures to refer to. I need to get some sort of app so I can start learning the calls. Birds here make some WEIRD noises. Believe me, I’ll focus on that in a later post.

I think snakes are way more impressive than millipedes. Don’t get me wrong, I love millipedes. But sheesh!

The skeletons and the taxidermy were both quite nicely done, but what I’d really like, I think, is the skeleton exhibit and the taxidermy exhibits put together, side by side, so you can see how the flesh and muscles and feathers sit on the bones and take up space.

A cassowary’s crest is made of bone!

PS: even in skeleton form, emus are way more dopey looking than cassowaries. Though I think the curators may have been a bit biased when positioning the skulls.

However, what would actually be the coolest thing ever is if a zoo that took on that idea. I would LOVE it if zoos had reconstructed skeletons (they could be plastic!) at every enclosure, so you could make that connection to the animals in real life, not only getting a sense for its actual size up close, but seeing which parts of an animal are bone, which are flesh and cartilage and fur… how the feathers puff and fluff on the birds making them huge or small… how the head moves as the animal walks and how the skull is attached to the body… why different creatures have their legs underneath them and others  hold them to the side… I think I’d get a lot more out of observing an animal at the zoo, apart from its cuteness and interesting behaviors. The same the thing with aquariums. It’s fascinating to look at a fish skeleton and see which features are created by bony structures, and which are scales.

Plus, TEETH!

If I get rich and have the money to build my own zoo, I’m totally going to do that.

But onwards. The insect displays were also supremely well done.  Beautiful panels of families with well preserved specimens.

The display cases each have a button which you can press to get 2 or 3 minutes of light. I bet this helps preserve them, and cuts down on disrupting people looking at other exhibits nearby.

For the spider exhibits, display creators built small black boxes in which they got specimens to weave their webs, so that alongside the family information and spider specimens, you had an example of the types of webs they build at the same time. Brilliant!

I only managed to get through about 60% of the insect/spider exhibit before the museum closed. I’ll have to go back and start where I left off – dragonflies. I haven’t enjoyed a natural history museum so much in a long time. And admission is only $12!

Bonus Grouper: RAAAR. Or rather: BLORPBLORP

 

The Friendly Hippo

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And so, dear readers, they became friends for life.

Though they could never make their love known to the world, as he could never scrape together a large enough dowry to satisfy her father, they would always carry that unextinguishable passion in their hearts.

(note the sign. please do not sit on hippo.)

The glorious blue mountains

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First, a question: my photos seem far less vibrant on wordpress than they do when I view them on my computer. Does anyone know why this might be? Does wordpress publish in CMYK? If so, arg. I know I could look this up, but then I’d have to go back and re-edit all my photos from RGB to CMYK, and that would make me sad. So, deliberate ignorance for now. Anyway, onwards.

….

This is my new favorite place in Australia. I’m not sure what my old favorite place was – maybe our flat? that one thai restaurant? – but this tops it.

I haven’t been able to identify this flower. It grew on the sides of sandstone cliffs which had water dripping down them.

We only have two weeks of our fantastic multipasses left, so we’re trying to take advantage of them while we have them by traveling to wonderful places at the ends of some of the rail lines.

The Blue Mountains National Park is a large reserve about 2.5 hours by train to the West of Sydney, and it’s home to a whole bunch of really old, really worn down, sandstone mountains. I think they call them mountains because there are big cliffs and the altitude is slightly higher than the rest of Australia, but to me, they feel more like awe inspiring canyons.

First things first: yes mom, I hurt myself, but I’m fine! I’m writing this a week after the fact and postdating it, so I can say with certainty that healing is progressing quite nicely. The deeply cut flesh of the thumb is all sealed up, and only the epidermal layers are left to heal! My curiosity in combination with a stupid multitool are to blame. I call it a stupid multitool because the blade doesn’t lock. That doesn’t mean I’m not also stupid for not checking whether the blade locked. The curiosity came in when I really wanted to see what was inside an odd looking growth on some bushes. The end result was the blade closing on my thumb and a rather lightheaded walk back to town with my thumb in my mouth wherein I drank a lot of my own blood and grew more familiar than I ever wanted with the interior depths of that digit. Ben was quite nice about it, and after finding medical supplies and a very nice cafe to let us use their bathroom, I was able to patch myself up.

Cool Australian product of the day: Dettol.

It’s an antiseptic that’s sold in a very concentrated form, so you dilute it 1:20 for use. Not only do I now have a strong belief in its powers (no infection! win!), but I think it’s totally awesome that it’s sold the way it is. I may be misguided, but I feel like an antiseptic for sale in the US would be sold dilute and ready to use, to either satisfy the public’s laziness or to simply make more money.

Anyway, after an impromptu lunch at the cafe that let us bloody their bathroom, we set out back down the “Charles Darwin Trail” that we had been on when I unfortunately delayed us. The trail begins a half mile from the train station at Wentworth Falls, and goes all the way to the national park itself, all through lovely bush and along a lovely creek that has eroded its way through the sandstone to form little undercliffs and waterfalls. We got routes from Wild Walks.

Turns out, if I’d only walked a little further down the path (we were only 20 minutes in) I would’ve seen another bush with the “growths” opened, and found out that they are actually quite oddly located seed pods. They seem to be rather randomly placed along the main branches of the bush. I thought they were going to be some kind of burl with a bug inside. When we walked back down the same trail at the end of the day, I picked up my original slightly dented unopened seed pod, still lying by the side of the path, and threw it into the creek.

I kept cursing myself as we walked for at least another half hour, until I became too distracted by the beautiful scenery and all of the fascinating plants that I’d never seen before.

The creek began as a little thing at the beginning of the trail, maybe three feet wide, but as we walked we kept crossing more and more feeder streams, and eventually the creek grew large enough to harbor lovely little rapids and waterfalls. I thought, oh! Wentworth Falls! How nice! Spoiler: no. not Wentworth Falls. Wentworth Falls is much more epic.

But that was part of what was so nice about the day. We had no idea what to expect. We knew we wanted to go to the national park, so we did. Only on the train did I start looking for trails to walk on my future device, I mean phone. We picked one that had a medium hard rating, was estimated to take 5 hours, and had “undercliff” in the name, because hey that sounds neat. So as we walked, the creek started getting more interesting, the terrain started getting more varied, and really, the point is, the walk kept getting more and more interesting the further we went. It was a perfect slow introduction to the beauty, and allowed us to appreciate each new aspect with equal enthusiasm. I loved it.

Sandstone can make incredible rock formations. I need to learn about the geology of this area, and about how some of these structures were formed.

To repeat myself, it was as if, maybe, rather than driving to the edge of the grand canyon and looking down and thinking “whoa, that’s neat, and big!” you got to watch the evolution of the land from tiny stream to awe-sucking-whoa up close and personal in a whole day of mind-blowing beauty.

It’s a stream! With a bridge over it! How cute! And look at those plants! I’ve never seen anything like that before. The flowers are so weird! Magpie! Hi magpie! Ooooh it’s a little waterfall! How pretty! MAN that’s a big Norfolk Island Pine. Cockatoos! In the trees! Wow they’re pretty but they sound like they’re dying. Oh my gosh, that’s a gorgeous waterfall. Look at how the water has sculpted the sandstone into ripples! Oooooh! Now the path is like a cathedral of trees! Another feeder-stream! Oh jeez, that’s a lot of stairs. Wooow, running water has the loveliest sound. Look at these eucalyptus – the bark is soooo pretty. Holy crap, that’s a big waterfall!…. Holy crap! Cliffs!…. Look at how tiny those trees are down there!… Holy crap! WHOA how do we get over there?… Oh my gosh, this is so pretty…. Oh my… wow…

It’s all part and parcel, the whole “ancient waterway” gig. HUGE COSMIC GORGES! Itty bitty tiny trees.

That’s not really a nutshell. Maybe an emu shell! But that’s what the day was like.

Things I am jealous of: Ben saw a snake! The last half of a snake, anyway. We didn’t know what it was until we went to the Taronga Zoo (later post) and Ben identified it as a Red-bellied Black Snake which is venomous, but is not one of the most deadly snakes in Australia. They tend to live in the bush by waterways, and are quite timid.

And now, a series of photos with commentary. Pretty pictures… lots of them.

Our walk began in the flat lands around Wentworth Falls.

And as we walked the creek grew bigger, and interesting sandstone rock formations began popping up. This is near where Ben saw his snake. Damnit, I was ahead of him, and I missed it!

One of the few places where we bumped into other people, the popular spot on the very top of Wentworth Falls. I love the pathways they’ve built. Giant stepping stones through the waterways.

And one of the warning signs on the railing: um, yeah. Not crossing that barrier.

This is what lay on the other side of that sign and fence. There are a couple hundred feet more cliff under the bottom of this picture.

There are incredible paths

And overlooks

And more paths…

We came across a pair of Crimson Rosellas who appeared to be nesting in a knot in a tree. One of them flew off, but this one here stuck around.

Another wildlife sighting was this here ant. The closest I can come to identifying it sticks it somewhere in the bulldog ant family, Myrmecia. They are alll over the place! I was surprised when I identified it, because I imagined it would be harder to find a bulldog ant (they’re interesting because their sting is awful. Dangerous things are interesting!). In addition to this type, we encountered several with the same body structure, but with opposite color markings – red body and black head.

The coolest thing, though, was a pair of these birds:

We didn’t know at the time, but it turns out that these are female Superb Lyrebirds, Menura novaehollandiae. If you’re not familiar with these guys, you should be, because the males put on incredible mating displays that can turn quite surreal because of their mimicking abilities. Click on that link to check out some videos. These two females were scratching for food in the undergrowth with their formidable claws.

I wanna go back!

 

Spider sighting

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I’ve seen a few jumping spiders that are new to me, but this one was particularly beautiful.

I think it’s a Mopsus norman, the “Northern green jumping spider.” It looked yellow to me, and also looks yellow in my picture, but apparently they can vary a lot depending on their environment, and the eye markings look correct. Oh man I want a nice macro lens! This was taken with my phone.

Tidbits

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In Australian supermarkets, the only garlic available is beautiful purple hard stemmed garlic. #YUM

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Oz money has windows in it!

It’s also made of plastic, not cloth. We had a bank teller tell us that US money is hard to count, because it all sticks together.

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In Australian parks, signs limit hours of alcohol consumption to between 8am and 7pm. Hah! That’s a change. Ben and I spent a recent evening before going to look at a couch on top of a play structure, eating pizza and sharing a pair of beers. It was dark out already (our days are starting to get longer, not shorter), and we had to stay safe from pirates!

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Rain in sunny Sydney:

And a lovely sunset to follow:

The environment here is like nowhere I’ve been in the US. Mostly bright beautiful sun, cool rainy days, palm trees, lush foliage. But even when it rains, the air feels dry and I get thirsty quickly. It’s like a drier, sunnier San Francisco, I suppose. With way cooler bugs.

Second Sydney Foray

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Today was an adventure inspired by a couch. Our lack of a couch. Our really really sad uncomfortable lack of a couch. Let’s just say that a week spent sitting on a deflating air mattress writing blog posts and editing pictures and replying to emails will make you determined to acquire a couch. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem I’ve ever had, or that you should actually be sympathetic, but a couch is the last item we need to really make this place our home, and thus this story revolves around a couch.

I found Ben a standing desk on Gumtree (Oz’s rather nice equivalent to craigslist). We scored a tv/media cabinet from the side of the road. We found a real fridge (with freezer!) on Gumtree. We bought a legitimate real-person bed. Our landlords are loaning us a tiny old 13-inch tv with bunny ears. We hauled some $10 Gumtree bedside tables on the bus to put in our bathroom. IKEA kitchen stand and tall desk chair have both been situated in the kitchen and office. All that’s left? Couch!

The couch we found on Gumtree, the couch of our dreams ($100, comfy looking), is located in Mosman, a tiny little community on the top of some very tall hills on the other side of some very large rivers.

When one is traveling over an hour on trains, buses, and boats to see a couch, why not make a day of it? And so we did.

The opera house stands across the river from our old friend Luna Park. Still creepy in daylight! In a good way.

First observation? The opera house is WAY cooler in person than in giant zoomed out landscape photos. Sure, it’s a neat shape in tourist pictures, but a far off shot gives you no sense of scale or how it’s constructed.

The roofing is a mix of different types of ceramic tiles, which gives the roof its characteristic shimmer.

The way the building looks, sprouting out of the ground into massively tall sweeping points is the coolest bit, though.

YAWN

I guess I prefer perspective.

 In the Circular Quay (pronounced “key”, I did not know that) area where the opera house is located, someone owns this:

I wanted to take a picture with Ben posing all gangsta next to it, but he said whomever owned it was obviously actually gangsta, and would shoot us. I said, anyone who owns a mini can’t be gangsta. He said, IT’S A BLING CAR. I said, it has a handicap sticker. He said, all the more evidence! He’s been in a shoot-out! I rest my case with, “It’s a mini.”

In other news, ferry rides are pretty.

I can’t wait to more fully explore this coast line.

When we eventually did find our way to the residence of the perfect-couch, it was indeed perfect, and the people selling it were perfectly nice. We’ve looked into hiring a guy and a truck to help us move it sometime this week. However, they are moving on Saturday, themselves, so we told them what we were planning, but that we’d rather they have the money rather than a truck-guy, if they were interested. So! We’re giving them $100 to deliver it, which is more than we were planning on paying for a truck-guy, but brings our total investment to about what we were assuming we’d pay to /buy/ a couch in the first place. Win-win. I am anxiously awaiting Friday. I think we’ll watch a movie on the computer with some wine on our new couch.

We rushed to catch the ferry back to Circular Quay, and man, we were both tired and ready to be home, but Sydney at night is gorgeous. Taking long exposures from a moving boat isn’t the best way to get beautiful shots, but I don’t care. Look anyway!

Impressionist:

Realism:

It was a good day.

BED: Check!

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IKEA beds suck. Costco beds suck. Ben gets weird when he thinks about buying someone else’s bed. So we went to a real furniture warehouse and spent a ton of money to buy ourselves the perfect bed! It’s not the best bed. It’s not the fanciest bed. It’s definitely not the most expensive bed. But it’s perfect for us – firm, doesn’t need a box spring, and Aussie-made.

How cool is that? One of the things I’ve noticed here is that there’s a large drive for nationally-made goods. Which makes sense. It’s just one of the many things about living in a different country that hadn’t occurred to me. Also interesting: most of the items at the Costco here are Aussie-made! We have Aussie Cancer Council sunscreen (a whole liter of it), Australian olive oil, Australia-grown sugar…

Bed + fancy sheets + Aussie-comforter + duvet cover + costco pillows + 2 wool blankets loaned to us by Viive = BED! It’s perfect.