From: "Sarah James" To: Subject: Trip Report #6 - Darwin, Australia Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 17:52:07 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Unsent: 1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4807.1700 February 17, 2002 Darwin, Australia "Cause I'm just a teenage dirt bag, baby Yeah I'm just a teenage dirt bag, baby Listen to Iron Maiden, baby With me" "Turn it down." "No this is a great song." "Oh come on Mark, that's way too loud". . and so the Carlson family continues to ramble along on their year long adventure. Life is passing by all too quickly. After a superb two week stay with the NZ Jamieson's in Tauranga we flew to Australia shortly after New Years. We are left with fond memories of a warm Christmas. We picked up a few Kiwi tips to add to our annual Xmas celebrations - Santa gets left beer with cookies rather than milk, and the kids have adopted Santa Sacks (decorated pillow cases) and can't wait to ditch their smaller stockings. My beautifully decorated Xmas stockings, that I slaved away making for each of my dear children, obviously holds no sentimental value to them. Bigger is better. This was the year that Chloe deduced, or was told, that Santa is Mum and Dad. Imagine that, no more Carlson children believing in the magic of Christmas. Response from all three children: "Oh yes we do Mum, Santa has to come as long as we still live at home". Well at least I don't have to buy separate wrapping paper and go to great lengths to hide it so that the kids don't notice that Santa has the same wrapping paper as Mum and Dad. Chloe continues to grill us on why we lied to her about Santa all these years. It doesn't matter how many different ways both David and I respond to her, as far as she's concerned she's been lied to! We've taken in a number of Australia's sights: Melbourne, Great Ocean Road, Phillip Island, Benalla and Kancoona, Glen Rowan & Beechworth (Ned Kelly territory), Canberra, Sydney, Byron Bay, Brisbane, Gold and Sunshine Coasts, Cairns and points north and lots of other places in between. We are now enroute to Darwin. We'll leave Tasmania, Adelaide, Ayers Rock and Perth for another trip. We haven't been killed by any of the dangerous Australians i.e. the estuarine crocodile, any one of 10 of the world's most venomous snakes, box jellyfish, red-backed and funnel web spiders, scorpion, paper wasp, stone fish, sea snakes just to name a few. We held on tight to the kids as we were getting in to the Electric boat on Barratt Creek (a tributary of the Daintree River), as it was right here that Beryl Wruck lost her life to a crocodile while standing beside the water's edge. We didn't spot any Crocs during our riverboat cruise but apparently there are still plenty living in these waters. We've learnt a little bit of the Australian language: G'day mate, Oz, Aus, Aussie Land (all names for Australia), chook (chicken), cozzie (swimsuit in NSW), togs (swimsuit in Queensland), bathers (swimsuit in Victoria), barbie (BBQ), billabong (water hole), bloke (guy), bitumen (paved road), blowies (large flies), bottle shop (liquor store), bugs (small edible crustaceans), esky (a cooler), tomato sauce, (ketchup), ute (flat bed pickup truck), Mackers (McDonald's), mozzies (mosquitoes), icy-pole (popsicle), lollies (candies), yabbie (crayfish) and Mark's favourite word at the moment is "bugger" (darn) - but he is trying to stop saying it after we explained what it may be taken to mean in North America. We've started calling some of the dangerous animals by their less scary names - salties (man eating crocodiles), stingers, bluies and snotties (very poisonous jellyfish). We've enjoyed the Australian flora and fauna. Finding animals in the wild rather than zoos was all the more rewarding. We've seen kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, possums and many birds in the wild. The rainbow lorikeets, cockatoos, red rosella's, king parrots and laughing kookaburras were much enjoyed by everybody. We still get a chuckle when we hear those laughing kookaburras. They sound just like the cackle from the witch that goes up on our door at Hallowe'en. At the moment we're in the Northern part of Australia. We've had a car for most of our time in Aussie Land. I figured out how to disconnect the radio/cd player by pulling on a wire in the trunk. It would magically work when it got reconnected but the kids didn't know this and thought we had a faulty radio/cd player. Mark did a 4 day open water dive course in Cairns and did very well. His dives were out on the Great Barrier Reef. David joined Mark, while the girls and I snorkeled. Heather has been chomping at the bit wanting to dive too, but they won't let her until she's 12. She's been trying to get us to promise that we'll bring her back to the Great Barrier Reef so she can do the course here when she turns 12. Not sure it will be the Great Barrier Reef, but we can probably be convinced to take her somewhere other than the murky waters of Tobermory where David taught me! We enjoyed snorkeling on the Reef. Heather has been an avid snorkeler for sometime but Chloe has always been afraid of venturing in the Ocean, for fear that sharks would get her. We all attended "Reef Teach" which was a 3 hour education session on the Great Barrier Reef the night before we headed out there. Chloe was gripped and the next day she needed little persuasion to join Heather and I snorkeling. She seems to have overcome the fear she had and she's as fascinated with what's under the water as the rest of us. She hummed away quite loudly through her snorkel, which at the time just made me think she was really enjoying herself, but upon reflection perhaps this was a defensive reaction to scare the sharks! None of us saw any sharks, although the ones that frequent the area are the harmless black tipped and white tipped reef sharks. The girls and I saw a honeycomb moray eel and a blue spotted lagoon ray both of which gave the girls a bit of a scare. I had two girls on top of my back for a bit like little suckers attached to a big fish! The kids are indifferent to Australian Rainforests. Been there done that in Malaysia where it was better. Rainforests here have been logged or have in the past been decimated by cyclones so they aren't as immense and they lack the primates that we found in Malaysian Borneo. We haven't been able to swim at any of the beautiful beaches in Queensland as it's stinger and box jellyfish season. However, we enjoyed some of the beaches near Sydney, and had a marvelous time body surfing, boogie boarding and surfing (the boys) in the hippy mecca of Byron Bay. If you want to know more about Australia or you're contemplating visiting, read Bill Bryson's book "Down Under". I think it goes by the title "In a Sunburnt Country" in other parts of the world. It's a wonderful read and we concur wholeheartedly about his observations of Australia. We're out of tooth paste and there's no Crest tooth paste for sale in Australia! Plenty of Colgate, Sensodyne, MacLean's, Oral B and Close Up, but no Crest, yuk we really are on an adventure, imagine ...we'll have to try new toothpaste. Found Johnson's dental floss for the costly amount of $10.00 for 200M. G'day from Down Under! Sarah