Amazing Adventures

Back at home!

On our last night, we had an amazing dinner at White in Auckland. The chef insists he could have worked around Shanti's allergies, but the restaurant was too busy for it that night. So we ordered from the regular menu instead of the tasting menu. Perhaps in apology, they brought us some unusual interesting things to nibble on. The smoked poussin with peach and tamarillo salsa is one of my all time favorite dishes.

Now we're back in So Cal. There was no trouble whatsoever getting our two cases of wine through customs. We tried to declare it, but they didn't care. I guess New Zealand doesn't pose much of a threat to anyone.

The funny thing about coming back is the sun: the sun was setting at 8:45 pm where we left, and 4:30 where we arrived. No fair! I envy the arctic terns!

That's the end of this travelogue. Check marthaandshanti.com periodically to read about more adventures.

Hamilton may be sparse on tourist attractions, but the city gardens are worth the visit. From the center of the park, you walk to a circular piazza where one arch is labelled "Paradise Gardens." Following that door, you walk into a rectangular room with tall hedge walls, a tall rectangular pool, and five new passages. Like the between-world from the Chronicles of Narnia, each path takes you to a different world. There's a Japanese Contemplation garden, with a koi pond and a raked rock garden. The next door leads to the English country garden, where great care has been taken to make shrubs look as if they were planted by accident.

The fourth door is the tardis-like Chinese Scholar's garden. The first stage is a long walkway to a sculpture and a wall with a door. At the door, you look around and discover that the space is much larger than you previously thought. Through the door and a turn, and it's even larger. The terraced pond winds by a pond and under a covered walkway. Walking around the pond, you walk by a window opening onto a sculpture garden. Continuing to the walkway, another pond and a whole new section of the garden is revealed. At the end of the walkway, a bamboo-lined shady path leads up and into the sun, where you emerge at a pagoda overlooking the river! Now, we're allowed to see the entire garden and more.

The next door is the American Modernist, which looks like it could be a backyard pool in So. Cal., complete with a cactus garden, Adirondack chairs, and sculpture that works just a little too hard to be edgy.

The final door calls itself the Italian Renaissance garden. The upper garden is dark green -- a formal archway in a cross shape, covered with grape vines, with a statue in a fountain depicting Romulus and Remus. Opposite the fountain, a round pool and staircases descending into a grid of terraced gardens. At the lower terrace, you find that what you thought was a round pool is the top of an elaborate fountain! At one side of the terrace is an amphitheater. At the other end is a patio overlooking the river. This garden itself is over an acre -- a whole world accessed through a small door!

Ah, Rotorua, the major tourist hub on the North Island. People flock here from all over the world for the public showers in the downtown visitors' center and to experience the unusually accessible geologic activity. From miles away, your nose tells you that you're approaching a crack in the Earth's crust. Fluffy, sulfurous steam clouds emerge from the ground all around. Most motels advertise a natural mineral spa. You almost have to watch your step.

If you get tired of sitting in a mineral pool, you can go jet boating, sky diving, bungee jumping, and river rafting, all without the trouble of travelling to Queenstown. Having jet-boated through a canyon and a mild case of acrophobia, we decided to do the river rafting.

Leaving town at 9 am, we drove north about 20 minutes north of town to the headwaters of the Kaituna river. The rafting company's (Kaituna Cascades) headquarters are a block away from the bridge, in a corrugated metal shed. There, we were issued wetsuits, polar fleece shirts, helmets, and PFDs. We've never been rafting where we needed a helmet before. The fleeces are highly amusing. We being first got cartoon insects -- the others were in leopard or cow print tops. Still in the parking lot, our guide Scotty went over the important rafting skills. While their photographer took pictures, we drilled on the important command phrases, "FORWARD", "STOP", "LEFT", "RIGHT", "HOLD ON!". The "HOLD ON!" for going over waterfalls is the fun part. Martha, in the front, leapt into the bottom of the raft and grabbed onto the handle on the bottom while tucking her chin down. Shanti, having the entire third row to himself, jumped down sideways and braced himself against the far side with his feet.

Great! We've learned how to paddle. Next, we loaded the rafts onto the truck, drove the thirty seconds down the road, and headed down the river. After a few short warm-up rapids, we go over the first two waterfalls, two and three meters. At the top, all you do is grab on and scream. At the bottom, you close your mouth and stop screaming, because it's under water. Quite fun, really, but not too frightening, because the guides (Scotti and Alana) are still sitting up. They're at the ends of the raft because they know what they're doing. On the second waterfall, the raft folded in half at the bottom, and it got pretty cozy in the middle.

But that's nothing compared to the third waterfall, a 7-meter drop through a chasm slightly wider than the raft. That's the real exciting part. Alana was steering, and she took great pains to get the raft lined up just right. As the photo evidence showed, we shot through the gorge right down the middle. Then gravity took over and we all grabbed onto the raft. The folks in the front hit the pool first, with the raft submerging halfway (see the movie) before popping up. As it happened, the raft popped up underneath the waterfall! Martha was in front, hanging on and under water. The stern of the raft, with Alana upside down and her legs hanging out, was behind the waterfall. So where was the waterfall? On top of Shanti! Since he knew he would be rafting, he didn't bother to shower that morning. With a few tons per second of water pouring onto Shanti, we weren't going anywhere fast. By the way, if you tuck your head down, you can breathe in a waterfall. It took a while for us to pop out, but we eventually did, up to our armpits in water. The wetsuits were full of water. The booties were full of water. Our helmets were full of water!

Draining ourselves in the pool, we watched the other rafts drop through. One of the them (a different company, with more passengers and without floor handles) lost a passenger overboard. She had to swim back to her raft at the bottom. Don't worry -- we all knew what to do if we fell out. They haven't lost anyone yet. From there, we floated down the river and did a bit of surfing (backing into a small rapid, submerging the bow, and trying to get as wet as possible).

Back into our dry clothes, we drove to the Blue and Green lakes near Rotorua. The tree fern and pine forest by the Blue lake has a remarkable sweet smell!

Driving north, we settled for the night in the beach town of Raglan and watched the surfers and the sunset. The mauna beach is apparently known for having one of the best left-hand breaks anywhere.

The All Blacks beat France, but the country is still in a state of mourning. The lead story on all news outlets is, "will they sack the coach?"

Walking around more volcanos, see Huka falls, the Wai-O-Taupo volcanic park. Sulphur vents, bubbling mud pools, geyesers, and other smelly things. Tomorrow: river rafting in Rotorua.

A short hop (150 km) gets us to the Volcano region. At the southern end of the park is the first of three volcanos, Mt. Repheahu (sp). It is the largest of the three and the most active. last incident in 1995 killed 153 people in a lahar. However, its largest explosion occur in 186 AD. Enormous! No, it seems to go ever 5-8 years, which is pretty active on the global standard. There is a windy road that goes up to a ski lift (yah, I know, crazy, they actually ski the active volcanos). This road gives you first good look at the volcano. Its impressive, but does not have perfect shape since its lid has been blown off a few to many times. The wind is wild (Martha had a hard time opening her door, which was into the wind, however, she got "airlifted" back to the car from the lookout. The debris is very different from what we saw from the volcanos in Hawaii, much denser.

We headed off to Whakapapa Village (Wh = f) and National Park (city of that is.... since it was one of the worlds first national parks I guess it wasn't so ambiguous back then). Along the way we get our first peek at volcano number 2, Mt. N.. This is the picture perfect volcano. All it needs is stuff spewing from the top... okay maybe after we leave. In Whakapapa village we went to the visitor center, which had a nice display on volcanos. From here we poked around. THis means we did 2 shorter hikes. The first was a real quick jaunt that took you out into a alpine meadow with great views of Mt R. and Mt N. the second short hike was a 2 hour loop track to the Tan. waterfall. YOu follow sever picturesque streams through meadow with great views of the volcanos. The waterfall at the halfway mark has a nice 20 m drop off an old volcano flow. As you near the waterfall, the ground changes from meadow to lava flow, lots of pumice. The walk back takes you over the top of the falls and back to edge of lava flow and then through the meadow again. Arriving back at the car we took another ski road on the other north side of Mt. R up to the crater side of the volcano. Very different from the south side. Much more debris.... still denser than Hawaii, but the sheer volume of it is impressive.

We settled in for the night in the town of National Park at a backpacker joint. Pub next door had nice pub meals, a warm fire and friendly people. There we met a Canadian couple, who newly arriving from Canada informed us they had left in a snowstorm and power outage. I can only imagine this is warm to them here! Now I must go assert my dominance in gin rummy!

Well we are on the ferry to Wellington. The storm that was threatening yesterday arrived in the night; bringing torrential rain. This morning has had showers. The seas though are still quite rough as evidence from the fact this huge ferry we are on is being thrown around. The sound looks like a cross between Puget Sound and Some of the sounds of Scotland. In other words, it looks glacial with lots of inlets and islands and low peaks/hillsides coming out of the water. We should reach Wellington around 1 this afternoon where we will meet up with a new rental car.

Wellington didn't take long. We spent about an hour looking around the shops, then Shanti had a meeting while Martha checked out some more shops. Unfortunately, we had already seen all the shops, so Martha was left alone with the horizontal rain for two hours.

When we reconnected, we headed along the shore to the Te Papa Museum of New Zealand for a gander at some Maori artifacts. They have an insightful display on the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi -- the treaty between the Maori and the Queen. It seems that they wrote two versions, one in Maori, and one in English, and the two versions didn't say the same thing. For instance, Article II of the Maori version says that the chiefs shall rule over their lands, whilst the English version says they unconditionally relinquish their sovereignty, but retain their property. That seems to be one of the major sticking points. It should have been obvious at the time, since the Maori version didn't use nearly as many words as the English one.

After the museum, we high-tailed it to the north. Two hundred fifty kilometers later, the sun finally set and we checked into the first motel we found. The motel keeper was informal and accommodating, because they had several movie channels and he wanted to get back to the story. So we watched the end of Lord of the Rings (part II) before bed.

Today we drove to Picton. This is the small village fro which the interislander ferry leaves. It is at the base of the Marlbourough Sound. We had decided at Abel Tasman that we would kayak here. Having tried to set up something in advance that fell through, we just found a booth on the beach
that rented kayaks. This was fine. However, it meant that instead of getting a two person sea kayak we got a two person sit-on kayak. This, in addition to a storm front moving in, which made the seas quite choppy, meant that we did not spend as much time on the water as we would have liked (We had rented for 8 hours and spent only four on the water). We did have a fun time of it, and proved several things. First, it is possible to have your sit-on kayak absolutely full of water and still float. And, Two, you can have a rousing rendition of rubber duck your the one while being thrown about by waves. We did meet a fun couple, who were attempting the same thing, and had a picnic lunch with them on a nice beach.

After making it back to shore, we set to meet up at a pub to celebrate our return to dry land after a brief interval where we tried to recover feeling in our limbs in nice hot showers. So, the evening was spent at a pub and nice restaurant with Martin (from Aberdeen Scotland) and Jewls, newlyweds from London. Had a wonderful time.

Watched the France vs. England semifinal, which was an abysmal game and tried to consolidate our belongings as we will have to check them onto the ferry.

That's right -- another day of booze. Cheers to us! No, seriously, we started the day with a small list of places to try.

The first was Te Whare Ra, known best for its fourteen rows of Gewurztraminer vines, grown right by the main road. The Te Whare Ra wines are characterized by a light fruity, floral flavor with low acidity. All of their white wines are well-rounded, at the expense of depth and finish. How do you do that? The flavor has no obvious holes, being well in the middle of most of the standard tasting variables, but it doesn't change as it sits in your mouth. Their red, a Franc-Malbec-Merlot blend, was dry and astringent, and could easily be mistaken for a white wine if you had your eyes closed. Since only four people work here, you get pot luck for who is running the tasting room. For us, it was the farmhand who can't really tell the difference from one wine to the other. Maybe you'll get lucky and get the wine maker.

Framingham, down the road, changed wine makers for 2003. Their 2003 Sauvignon Blanc hits you like a carefully crafted oak plank. It wasn't just me -- another lady in the lasting room practically spat it out as she did a double-take. Their 2001 and 2002 bottles I preferred, but they had the same mild rosy flavor as the Te Whare Ra, which I didn't particularly like. The surprise is the Montepulciano, which tastes like alder-smoked salmon.

Down by the airport, on what they claim is the best clay soil in the valley, is George Fromm's NZ (La Strada and Clayvin) yard, which also is hard to find in stores. Exports go mostly to Switzerland, we're told. All hand-picked, natural yeast, etc. Their chardonnay is malo-lactic, with mild oak depending on the batch. The Gewurztraminer is like a noble or a late harvest. But it's not. Their real successes are their three Pinot Noirs, consistent and mild and designed for cellaring. Mr. Fromm seems to like tannic acid, because both his signature Pinot and the Merlot-Malbec blend have the chewy-peanut-butter response.

We had lunch (but no wine) at the Allan Scott house, a heaping pile of New Zealand Green Shell Mussels thinly disguised as a salad. What else would you expect from the green-shell mussel capitol of the world? They're much better fresh than they are after they've been frozen and crossed the Pacific. After lunch, we walked around Blenheim. At a fashionable department store struggling to keep pace with its customers (except in the womens' clothing department, off it its own little world) we found a delightful selection of furnishings. All we bought was a box of dried kelp flakes, though. I think that we can make seaweed-flavor rice for sushi. The town center of Blenheim is a cute tourist trap of clothes boutiques and book stores, but the shops close early on Saturdays, so we couldn't get into much trouble. We drove around time three or four times looking for the visitors' info center, only to decide that the location indicated by the Footprint guide map in fact pointed to a bulldozer. We wanted the VIN to tell us where to find Sheffield road so we could find the Prenzel's distillery. Well, we found it eventually, thanks to Martha's brilliant navigating and the sign on the road that said "DISTILLERY TURN RIGHT."

When we walked into Prenzel's shop, we were assaulted with an immediate offer of, "Would you like a drink?" There's only one answer to that question. Martha tried their butterscotch schnapps and butterscotch brandy cream shooter, which she says tastes like ... butterscotch! These folks have distilled everything they can get their hands on, including a few they shouldn't. The Pear William brandy is fantastic, but the kirsch and grappa are revolting. Claiming New Zealanders aren't ready for distilled spirits, they have instead produced a dizzying array of flavored liqueurs like cassis, peach, chocolate, etc. Remember GQ's first rule of drinking, "There's no such thing as a chocolate martini."

That night, we had fish and chips and watched Australia crush New Zealand at the rugby world cup. Sunday would be a national day of mourning.

It's a beautiful morning in Sun City, so we skedaddle over to Marlborough for our wine country tour. On the way, we are drawn into the World of Wearable Art. Why? Shanti read about it somewhere. Did you see the costumes they were wearing at the race in Canterbury last weekend? We were in Wanaka, but that didn't matter, because the pictures were on the front page of the newspaper. So the kiwis must take their fashion seriously. That dress made from licorice looked astounding, but the best dressed winners looked super-swank. "I'll just put down media," the lady at the museum said.

The World of Wearable Art, to save money, shares its space with the classic car museum. The juxtaposition of a gleaming machine and a mannequin decked out as a a glow-in-the-dark coral reef is surreal. The tiger fish and toast (yes, toast) dresses are astonishing. And a red dress will never be the same again. Sadly, they don't sell catalogs, so you'll have to travel to Nelson to see it. We're told there'll be a new web site with lots of pictures in December.

The road to Marlborough is nearly as deserted as the West Coast highway. Strange, that. You know you're there when the sheep are replaced by grape vines. This time, it's Shanti's turn to sip, and Martha's turn to drive. Following a ploughman's lunch at the Keg and Cork, we hit four wineries in two hours. Wow, that's fast. There's only the one major road, and you can drive from one end of it to the other in ten minutes. Which is exactly what we did. With four stops on the way.

The standard six flavors are sparkling, Riesling, gewurztraminer, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, and pinot noir.

Huia is a boutique shop, with small batches and hard to find in stores. We think their wine maker has similar tastes to ours. We liked the riesling and chardonnay (malo-lactic) in particular. Down the road is the slightly larger major exporter Cloudy Bay, with a nice nutty chardonnay. The pinot we found too sharp, but the botrytis riesling (18 bottles left) was quite tasty (17 bottles left). The mid-sized Saint Clair has so many trophies on their bar, they have trouble finding room for anything else. There seem to be medal awards for all their wines, even the ones in screw caps. Their merlot has a cork because it's intended to age well. Their chardonnay uses American oak, but isn't oppressively tannic. Seems like they know what they're doing.

If you can make only one stop in Marlborough, the most efficient one is Savour, the representative for six producers ranging from the giant Kim Crawford to the diminutive Maia (only has one wine, and only a few barrels of it). The Maia Pleiades is a merlot-malbec blend, one of the better red blends we've tried. Not as full-bodied as the GST, it has the spicy merlot flavor without the bitter aftertaste. Astrolabe is another micro-label (Simon Waghorn) that everyone seems to like.

Back at our motel, the television tells us that despite the bloom of the NZ wine industry, kiwis prefer their wine to come from a box. So what happens to all this stuff? It gets shipped overseas. Which explains why the wineries here do better at getting their product to California than do those we visited in Australia. The other surprise is that many of the premium wines are simply not available in stores. They're either sold directly to restaurants (so that you won't know what the markup is) or only to tourists at the door. They're very cheeky, and will happily discuss their conniving marketing plans with anyone who walks through the door.

Today's big adventure was walking in Abel Tasman Nat'l Park. I write walking, and not hiking, because the trail is so well maintained, you could do it in sandals (and several people did). The pilot of the water taxi that dropped us off jokes that the coastline is boring: golden-sand beaches, rock outcroppings, golden-sand beaches, rock outcroppings, etc. Every one of these is worthy of a postcard, and the pattern repeats for miles. This coast line also has dramatic tide differences. The average tidal difference is 4.8 meters. So in order to get the water taxi in the water, there are disel tractors that sit in the water and pull. They winch the boat in and out of the water. This was an amusing procedure to watch. The boat ride was fun in-and-of-itself. While is primary objective is to get you to the tramp you want, the drivers stop in some of the bays and stop to take you out to see the seals on seal island. Since part of the park became a marine reserve the seals have increased in number from a couple hundred to roughly 2,000. Thats alota seals folks! We didn't see that many maybe 20 or so. Another interesting bit of info about this park is that it is not all park land. There are private houses (even a little village) dotted along the shore. This makes the tramp seem less remote than you might like.

The jungle is dominated by fern trees, some just now erupting with fiddle-heads that could anchor a string bass. Around these are a few black beech trees, but mostly ferns of all shapes and sizes. Our favorite is a single-bladed cliff-dweller with a variegation mutation.

The part of the track we hiked was in the middle. From a beach called Tonga Bay to Torrent Bay. If the tides had been more cooroperative, we might have walked right back to town. As it was, the section we hiked was about 15 km. We could not cross the estuary because low tide was not until 6:30 this evening. There are several spectacular views of the golden beachs from on top the cliffs. The beaches themselves are as lovely as they look (okay, minus the sand fleas :)). The walk reminded Martha much of her walk from Manely to the Split bridge in Sydney. In fact, given the option of the two, I think the Sydney walk would win.

We had no trouble finishing the track we had set out to tramp in less than the alotted time. So, we got to sit on Torrent beach and watch the oyster catchers and the tide going out (at quite a clip). We caught our water taxi back to town in a 15 minute fly across the water in this direction. Was like an amusment park ride! The weather had started out in drizzle, but by mid morning and for the rest of the day had good sun with some clouds. Great walking weather.

Back on land, we took the scenic route via Ketariteri beach back to our town and got some fish and chips at a place recommended to us. Dory fish and chips were excellent at KT's takeway. Its still really light here and will be til close to 10, but as we are tired, I think we will relax with some books.

Poked around Nelson, set up adventuring in Abel Tasman tomorrow

Hokitika Gorge, Pancake Rocks. Rain. Getting tired of travelling, need a rest.

Happy Birthday, Sanjay!

Franz Josef - Hokitika

Franz Josef: Glacier walk. Caves, cravasses, arches. The half-day trip was great. FJ is a very wet glacier: lots of waterfalls and caves.

Hokitika. glow worm dell, nice beach.Glow worms here almost as good as the caves at Te Anu (and cheaper).

Wanaka - Franz Josef

Walk the Rob Roy glacier trail. As the guide book says, getting there is half the fun. There are only three roads out of Wanaka, and one of them goes into Mt Aspiring National Park. This road, running through cow and sheep pastures, follows a river valley lined with steep mountains. The fun part is the 8 or 9 creeks you ford ("No, you don't really need a 4wd. I do it all the time in my car."), but the livestock present another challenge. More than once we brought the car to a halt, stared down by a cow.

Picture, if you will, a large, brown cow standing in the middle of a single lane gravel road. Past a green pasture on its right, a cold, glacier-fed river flows into Lake Wanaka. The roadside is lined with poplar trees, evenly spaced in a neat row. On its left, a sheer rock face rises thousands of feet into the air. The cow is chewing its cud, watching as, ten feet before it, a black Nissan Pulsar hatchback grinds to a halt. The driver looks at the cow. The cow chews. The driver stares meaningfully. The cow chews. The sheep scurry for cover in the saloon. A tumbleweed blows across the road. Finally, the driver draws, inching forward toward the cow. The cow takes a final chew, then turns her massive head toward the river and ambles off the road. Today, she chooses not to fight.

Note the position of the trees. New Zealanders are big on planting things in orderly rows. So much so that you can see Moire patterns in the forests. Yipes!

Queenstown - Wanaka

A gondola trip saves you 300 vertical meters' hike to the top of the hill above town. From there, it's about three hours to the top of Ben Lomond at 1780-ish meters. The trail up is well marked, and our spirits are buoyed by a small gaggle of schoolkids and teachers travelling with us. A third of the way from the saddle to the peak, Mr. D. (who is making his 159th climb of this peak) gives us a geography lesson. On the Queenstown side of the mountain are the Remarkables, a jagged and snowy ridge. On the far side of the saddle are the Southern Alps, stretching from far north to far south. If you stand at the top and turn around, there's a staggeringly tall crag at every angle.

Queenstown

Drive Glendorchy. Raining. Watch a movie. Downtime.

It's raining in Queenstown, and, while we're sure there are mountains somewhere, we can't see them. We tried to drive to Paradise (and the start of the Roteburn Track) but the road was washed out 2 km before the end. So we backtracked and instead headed toward Invincible. Same problem, also 2 km short of the Invincible Mine (Au). So we're doing some low-lying adventures. Yesterday we went jet boating. Twice.

Recall that the laws of physics for fluids are slightly different than they are for you and I. A river wants to meander (curl is conserved, sayeth the Navier-Stokes equations), whereas you and I and the jetboat want to move in a straight line. So if you want to travel quickly down a fast-flowing meandering river, you need to point your thrusters to the side. Then to the other side. Repeat. From the point of view of the water, it looks like you're careening off the canyon walls, but you're really just working hard to stay in the same place. Loads of fun!

We took a tramp to Lake Marian in Milford two days ago. Martha asks, "Why do we only go hiking when it rains?" See the pictures of the beech forest for and idea of the creepy trees there. I think the three tall ones look like Ents. Go figure. We're going to watch The Fellowship tonight on our laptop and watch the lightning from the comfort and safety of our motel room.

Driving the southern scenic route in NZ. The road starts from Dunedin, but it starts to get interesting at Balclutha. We stopped there for lunch in a cute, trendy cafe and to buy warm clothes at the store the locals use. Two observations:

1. Forget wool. Sure, they grow lots of it, but the preferred fabric for warm clothing is polar fleece.

2. Someone made way too much All Blcks licensed clothing for the Rugby World Cup. In fact, the logo-emblazoned warm fuzzies sell at a discount to similar quality generic sweaters! Probably the same is tru of all those Wallaby-brand plush toys they're trying to dump at the airports. If either team is eliminated from the RWC, that'll be your chance to pick up a lot of clothing on the cheap.

From Balclutha, we drove due south to nugget point, home to colonies of seals and sea lions. Elephant seals, that is. The outlook at the Nugget Point lighthouse is a bleak, windswept promontory over ta dozen or so rock islands. The islands are obviously made from sedimentary rock, because the stripes point straight up!

The elephant seals (or so we think, based on their size. It's hard to get a closer look.) must be remarkable climbers to lift their corpulent selves high up on the rocks. One smost of them were flopped down in the patchy sun, while one had figured out to use a tuft of grass as a pillow.

The sea lions were in the water, not sunning themselves. The easiest way to find one is to watch the birds, which hover over the sea lions, presumably hoping for them to drop a snack.

West of Nugget Point, through gprhs (green pastures, rolling hills, sheep) is Purakaunuis. A short walk through a fuscia forest, and you get too the falls (see pictures). Fuscia forest? Yup. Fuscia trees grow to about 20 feet tall, but some of them grow more sideways than up. Further to the west, the fuscias have finished blooming, but here, they're still going. This is also a good spot to look at ferns. A small patch by the side of the trail has seven different observable specie (out of the two hundred-oo found in nz). Some are single leaf, some staghorn like, and some the good old-fashioned fern-shaped ferns. My favorite is the single-leaf fern, where the leaf looks like a maidenhair leaf, oval with a subtle point.

The purpose of the scenic drive is to take side trips from the main road to the coast to look at the rugged coastline. So we'll skip specific descriptions and refer you to the pictures.

Form the road, what you see is GPRHS punctuated by yellow-flowered shrubs. Looks like Scotch Broom, but I'm not sneezing, so it must not be.

Wednesday morning, we drive from Invercargill (The only attraction is the tuatara lizards in the museum, some of which are very old and bigger than the ones you'll find in the Taronga Zoo in Sydney.) Amusingly we are behind the Tour de Southland bicycle race, through unrelenting hills and gale force winds. Upwind all the way for those poor folks!

The race finished (for today) at Tuatapere, where we turned north to head towardthe

Fly to Christchurch on Saturday and drive to Dunedin on Sunday.

Christchurch's main attractions are the stunning botanic gardens (see pictures) near the city center and the restaurant Canterbury Tales. The scallop and mango salad with cumin-infused olive oil, sea salt, and cracked pepper alone explains why it's ranked as one of New Zealand's top restaurants. Unfortunately, the bacteria liked it too, and Martha was sick all night. We complained to the hotel in the morning, and they suggested that we go to a doctor and get lab tests to prove that it was food poisoning, and we can't prove it was their fault anyway. Hrrmph. We're not recommending the Crowne Plaza in Christchurch.

Bailing out of Ch.Ch around noon, we drove to Dunedin, where the scenic parts of the South Island starts. Actually, it starts outside Dunedin, so we've nothing to report but a day of driving in another gutless Japanese edition Nissan Pulsar.

Today's mission is to explore the Poor Knight's Islands, an archipelago reserve full of ancient creatures that never had to compete with mammals. Of course, it's a reserve, so you can't go onto the islands, but you can swim around them. The rock cliffs are steep, dropping immediately up to 70 meters deep not a stone's throw away from the waterline. We joined a dive boat (Dive!Tutukaka is the only operator from Tutukaka. There are others from other cities. D!T is geared toward experienced divers -- "We won't be going very deep today. Only 40 or so meters.") to go snorkeling and see what we could see. It's possible that Jacques Cousteau was right, that the Poor Knight's Islands are "the best sub-tropical diving in the world," but we found that we prefer tropical diving. More on that later.

The boat arrives through a narrow passage to the only sheltered point available, in the harbor between the North and South islands. Our first swim is above the narrow shelf of kelp where, looking down, you can barely see the bottom. The dominant form of macrofauna is clearly sea urchins, of many sizes and colors. The bluefish and the snapper know that you won't eat them, so they come very close. Trigger fish hang out in deeper water, along with a few other big lurkers. Near the surface, there are large schools of 5-ish cm fish that will swarm around you, and a few miniscule solitary iridescent blue ones that don't know that you are big enough to eat them. One wall was carpeted with blood-red anemones waving in the surf. Oddly, the splash zone was barren -- no barnacles, no shells, and hardly any green algae.

As we continued to swim around the number of toes we could feel declined from twenty to zero, and it was time to scamper back to the boat. Several hot cups of tomato soup later, Shanti took the ship's kayak around to poke into nooks and crannies. He tried to kayak into the archway, but the head wind meant he had to work very hard to stay in the same place. Marthasicle meanwhile had changed into warm clothes and gotten a hot chocolate IV drip, so Shanti caught a lift on the ship's tender over to the South Island to look at the wall there. The back flip off the tender into the cold water was fine, but turning around to discover a fifteen foot long jellyfish not a foot in front of his face. Ack! It turns out that these little fist-sized transparent animals (with yellow and red digestive bits at one end) polymerize! In a helix, no less! The archway was also pretty cool under water. A school of bluefish, a flipping big striped thing lurking below, and a wall covered with kelp home to more critters.

For the experienced tropical snorkler, there are a few drawbacks to sub-tropical PKI. For one thing, clouds of thimble-sized jellyfish can float by, making the water as thick as pea soup, not to mention getting tangled in your hair. And the visibility isn't so good in the summer. Oh, and the water is colder, so you can't spend as much time in the water.

It was a fun trip back to port as a storm had blown in with winds up to 40 knots. As Shanti replied to the skipper when asked 'How did you like the ride back', 'It's the largest surf board I've ever been on'. We arrived back in once piece to port around 4 PM, and our teeth did finally stop chattering. We hopped in the car and head down the Cape to Wapio, where the Wapio caves are located. It's a bit of a drive down a gravel road, however the cave offered us our first glimpse of the famous glow worms. The cave, which is 200 m long, unfortunately had a small river running through it because of all the rain NZ has been having, so we could not get too far in. We did get far enough to look up and see tiny galaxies of glowing bluish/green dots. One worm larvae was on the floor, and on closer inspection we discovered it is about an inch long, with a light source at one end. If you just look at the light, it appears to be only 3-4 mm long!

Back in Auckland for shopping and sight seeing. The sight is Kelly Tartnlan's Antarctic Experience, with a penguin enclosure and an a submerged aquarium built in Auckland's old sewage treatment plant. Would like to spend more time looking at the penguins, but they don't have a good window for you to watch them. You have to take a tram through and see what you can as you zip by.

The undersea dome has some nice big rays, but Sydney's aquarium was better.

Today's mission is to explore the Poor Knight's Islands, an archipelago reserve full of ancient creatures that never had to compete with mammals. Of course, it's a reserve, so you can't go onto the islands, but you can swim around them. The rock cliffs are steep, dropping immediately up to 70 meters deep not a stone's throw away from the waterline. We joined a dive boat (Dive!Tutukaka is the only operator from Tutukaka. There are others from other cities. D!T is geared toward experienced divers -- "We won't be going very deep today. Only 40 or so meters.") to go snorkeling and see what we could see. It's possible that Jacques Cousteau was right, that the Poor Knight's Islands are "the best sub-tropical diving in the world," but we found that we prefer tropical diving. More on that later.

The boat arrives through a narrow passage to the only sheltered point available, in the harbor between the North and South islands. Our first swim is above the narrow shelf of kelp where, looking down, you can barely see the bottom. The dominant form of macrofauna is clearly sea urchins, of many sizes and colors. The bluefish and the snapper know that you won't eat them, so they come very close. Trigger fish hang out in deeper water, along with a few other big lurkers. Near the surface, there are large schools of 5-ish cm fish that will swarm around you, and a few miniscule solitary iridescent blue ones that don't know that you are big enough to eat them. One wall was carpeted with blood-red anemones waving in the surf. Oddly, the splash zone was barren -- no barnacles, no shells, and hardly any green algae.

As we continued to swim around the number of toes we could feel declined from twenty to zero, and it was time to scamper back to the boat. Several hot cups of tomato soup later, Shanti took the ship's kayak around to poke into nooks and crannies. He tried to kayak into the archway, but the head wind meant he had to work very hard to stay in the same place. Marthasicle meanwhile had changed into warm clothes and gotten a hot chocolate IV drip, so Shanti caught a lift on the ship's tender over to the South Island to look at the wall there. The back flip off the tender into the cold water was fine, but turning around to discover a fifteen foot long jellyfish not a foot in front of his face. Ack! It turns out that these little fist-sized transparent animals (with yellow and red digestive bits at one end) polymerize! In a helix, no less! The archway was also pretty cool under water. A school of bluefish, a flipping big striped thing lurking below, and a wall covered with kelp home to more critters.

For the experienced tropical snorkler, there are a few drawbacks to sub-tropical PKI. For one thing, clouds of thimble-sized jellyfish can float by, making the water as thick as pea soup, not to mention getting tangled in your hair. And the visibility isn't so good in the summer. Oh, and the water is colder, so you can't spend as much time in the water.

It was a fun trip back to port as a storm had blown in with winds up to 40 knots. As Shanti replied to the skipper when asked 'How did you like the ride back', 'It's the largest surf board I've ever been on'. We arrived back in once piece to port around 4 PM, and our teeth did finally stop chattering. We hopped in the car and head down the Cape to Wapio, where the Wapio caves are located. It's a bit of a drive down a gravel road, however the cave offered us our first glimpse of the famous glow worms. The cave, which is 200 m long, unfortunately had a small river running through it because of all the rain NZ has been having, so we could not get too far in. We did get far enough to look up and see tiny galaxies of glowing bluish/green dots. One worm larvae was on the floor, and on closer inspection we discovered it is about 3-4mm long, with a light source at one end.

We were picked up by the bus at 9 am to head off to the Cape. The first stop was the Kauri Kingdom. Really just a jazzed up gift shop, where there are some enormous kauri logs drying out in the parking lot and on display.

We stopped at the gum park, a major site of gum digging up to the 1930's, where the proprietor of the family farm is the great grandson of the original stakeholder. Gum? Preserved kauri tree gum was a major source of industrial resin before plastic became available. Learned all sorts of interesting tidbits. Got to see a mock-up of a gum digging camp. The holes from the digging are still there. The individual diggers dug holes of different shapes to 'claim' a digging site. Fighting in WWI, four of the family had learned to use dynamite, and exploited this as a vastly more efficient method for extracting gum. We learned that there were once kauri forests covering the Cape, however, they have been wiped out not once, at least twice and most likely by current accounts a third time. The first, scientists attribute to the rising of the seas after the ice age, about 100,000 years ago. The second layer of destruction is attributed to tsunami resulting from a piece of comet/asteroid that fell into the Tasman Sea about 40,000 years ago. The Tsunami, it is estimated was a 2 km high wall of water moving at 1000 kph that struck the forest, throwing trees up into the air, inverting them, and driving trees into the ground. That's why there are trees and branches buried upside down.

The whole Cape has trees buried beneath it, preserved still as wood. We saw the remnants of the 50,000+ layer -- it's still wood! They can't actually date it using carbon dating because it is too old. However, it is thought to be the oldest intact wood in the world. They have a team of scientists coming this March to use ground penetrating radar to map the Cape and look at the possible third layer. Meanwhile, there are all these trees in the ground, technically once in the ground the trees are called Swamp Kauri. Minerals in the ground 'soak' into the trees wood and changes the hue. So, there can be many types of Kauri colorings. The trees are extremely expensive to dig out of the ground so most just remain, and as the soil erodes in the farm fields there are logs peaking out. The gum diggers of old, much like gold and apparently almost as profitable, used these spears to get a core sample and see if the resin, or sap of the tree, was present and then dig it up on the small scale, so the wood left own in the pits. Unlike Redwoods, Kauri reach almost the same height, but instead of tapering off as they get higher, the Kauri stays a consistent diameter.

we also learned about Tea trees. The Manuka is one of two types of tea tree, and produces honey because the European honeybee can pollinate the flowers. The other tea tree has flowers that are to small for European bees and the native bees are solitary animals and bury themselves in the ground for 8 months of the year. The tea trees also produce potent antibacterial oil. Apparently, it is even in trial for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.

Overall a very interesting and informative stop.

We then continued up the Cape through little Maori towns. Our Maori tour guide song to us some traditional Maori songs throughout the day. The Cape has been changed for decades by DOC (Dept of Conservation) activities and those of the inhabitants. The Cape is really nothing more then giant sand dunes gradually consuming a chain of rocky islands. In order to stay this flow of sand, massive efforts to plant grasses and trees (including one of the largest man made forests) continues. Even with these efforts, there is very little topsoil and when any erosion takes place on a hillside farm you see patches of sand underneath. It is amusing to see forests planted on top of obviously shaped dunes. We made it to the lighthouse at the tip of the Cape, where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific. There were some decent waves and quite obviously two currents intermingling. However, our guide says on a 'good' day those waves slam into each other, creating a 5 meter spray. Impressive. There's not much to see except ocean as far as you look. The old lighthouse beacon has of course been replaced by a modern flasher, but they kept the old building, which we found amusing. We had lunch on a nearby beach close to the Bay of Spirts. The Cape is the place the Mauri believe the recently dead visit before traveling down the roots of the Giant Kauri to the sacred grounds. On this beach that we had lunch on there was a tidal lagoon, that was impressive both for its clarity and for the speed with which the water moved. We have video, but it really was like watching a tub drain as the tide reversed swept out to sea! If you stand in the sand near the water for too long your foot will get sucked below the sand.

After lunch, we headed to 90 Mile Beach. Actually, it's only 90 km, but it's long and flat, though curved. It is classified as a highway, with traffic rules. Amusing. You're insane if you take your car out as it takes a good long way to get down and there is only one road at each end. Thus, over the years many a car, some still have remnants visible, have been claimed by the beach. Did I mention that at high tide there is no beach? just sand dunes. Did I also mention that the way to get to the beach, the 'road', is actually a tidal stream, passable only at low tide and you drive along it downstream to its outlet to the sea? Crazy, huh? Even more crazy, we stopped along the way and the tour guide broke out snow toboggans and we all climbed up on top of the sand dunes (DOC has several set aside for this purpose, don't worry no shortage of dunes to conserve!) and sled down at amazing speeds. It was great fun! I saw one unfortunate soul who didn't stop in time and launched himself into the stream remnants- oops. Another fellow hit a bump badly and fell head over heels, limbs flying everywhere. Oh, wait. That was Shanti. It was also good exercise as to sled down you must first climb up a really tall sand dune. You also manage to get a fair amount of sand everywhere :).

After sledding and driving up the stream bed to the ocean outlet, we made speed down the beach, so as not to get stuck in water. Mind you there are also obstacles to avoid: the odd abandoned car, other tourist buses, quicksand, and abrupt depressions. We did make one stop to look at a small island off the coast with a hole in it. The island, not the coast.

It was a long day, as once we got back to Kaitaia we headed back down Northland to Whangarai so we can get up for our dive date out at Poor Knights Island. However, it was a great day. I would recommend the tour to anyone.

I have to admit a bit of trepidation on getting in the water tomorrow as they also offer a shark dive near by and the water drops off to 100 meters off the island. Hmmm.... mind you I'm still going, but if these entries don't reach you, you'll have a good idea as to where to look.

Got up early this morning. Went back to Town Basin and poked around in the shops a bit. Then had a nice breakfast at a little cafe there. The fruit muffins here have kiwi and passionfruit and guava-- really yummy. On the way out of town, we hit Whangarei Falls. I nice photogenic falls, with three plumes and a scenic walk through some nice forest to the bottom of the falls. Water is very clear.

We hit the road and headed toward the Bay of Isands. Did I mention it was pouring yet? All day. Originally we were going to take a snorkelling trip today, but the guys we talked to at the dive shop recommended any day this week except today, as a large storm was gonig to blow in. So, we rescheduled the trip for Thursday. Instead of taking rt. 1 up to bay of islands, we took the caostal route 'Old Russell Road'. This went through beautiful scenery: rainforest filled with huge fern trees, which we were told you could eat the inside and it tastes like coconut; pastoral, thats right hobbit shiresque (the juxtuposition of the pastors with rainforest was amusing); and coastal views of tucked away beaches and rocky cliffs. The raods are really curvey, fun to drive - I'm not even being sarcastic! When we got to Opua near Russell, we took the ferry across the very edge of bay of islands to Pahia. Just as we pulled into town, a fresh uneashing of the skies started. We made time to a cafe, Cafe Over the Bay, for a lite bit to eat. We headed to Waitangi, right down the road to the Waitangi Visitor Center and Treaty House. The Treaty House is where the Maori and the English signed a the treaty to bring peace to NZ. The grounds also houses a whare runanga (Maori meeting house) and a war canoe.

After leaving the Treaty House we hit the road again to head up to the base of the 'Real Far North'. We wound around the northern route again instead of taking the direct highway. This lead us to Cooper's beach, where we got out to stretch our legs and play in the sand. The sun had finally made an appearance. After that we decided to detour and explore the Karikari Peninsula. The main road tears up the east side of the peninsula toward Whatuwhiwhi, glimpses of ocean visible on our right. Passing through the sleepy town, the road turns into gravel road and passes by construction of a new winery chateau. Thereafter, the road deteriorates steadily, but Martha pushes on and we arrive at Matai Bay, with its perfect, sandy, half-moon beach. The rocks at the south end are carpeted with purple-white oysters, while the high-tide line is littered with colorful dehydrating jellyfish -- some large and red, some with blue balloons. Do they sting? We didn't pet the wildlife.

Finally, we rolled into Kaitaia (kay-ah-tea-ah), the departure point for the bus tours to Cape Reigna. You can drive there yourself, but not on 90-mile beach.

Even less to do in Auckland on Labour Day, so we drive to Whangerei (Wh = F). On the way we stop off in Matakana at the Morris and James Country Pottery and Cafe. They had some really nice pices made from local clay of the Matakana river and also a good lunch.

After lunch we stopped at the Goat Island Marine Perserve. on one side not much to see. Water is cooler than in Aus. and kelp based instead of coral based. Lots of rocks to hopp around on. On the otherside of the beach is tons of tide pools since it appears to be low tide. We start poking around and low and behold they are just teaming with life. Thousands of brittle stars of various types (boy, they are fast and like to hide under rocks), spiney sea eurchins, chitins, sea slugs, and the creme-de-la-creme an octupus. Yes, I'm serious-- and we have pictures and video to prove it. Prove much less traumatic then my last encounter with n octopus! Was really neat to play with it. We had a 'discussion' on who was going to hve the rock in front of its den (not to worry we let him win in the end). That was a great stop, even though we chickened out of getting in the water.

We then drove up the coast to a 'wildlife refuge'. I use this term in quotes becaue we did not see any wildlife to speak of. We did get to walk through a mangrove swamp at Te Araui during low tide and see the sand dunes of Mangawahi Harbor. It was also starting to drizzle, so we did not make it a long trek.

We found a hotel in Whangarei and had a wonderful dinner at a resturaunt in the Town Basin called Gybe.

Hanging around Sydney. We had brunch with long lost friend Justin Harsel at Roy's on Victoria St. It took a few hours after that to update our journal, then we took the train to Hornsby for an Australian farewell BBQ. It turns out that an Aussie BBQ involves standing around the grill, cooking meat on a flat griddle, and drinking until you can barely stand. We got home in time to catch a few hours' sleep before taking a taxi to the airport. Don't let anyone convince you that it will take a long time to get to the airport early on a Sunday morning.

We arrived in Auckland around noon on a clear, warm, sunny day. We walked around town (not much to do in Auckland on a Sunday with all the shops closed) and had a reasonably priced fancy dinner at the America's Cup Village. Also we walked around sky city, which has several casionos (Martha was stopped to see if she was older than 18-- ahhh).

A lazy day in Sydney. Had brunch with Justin Harsel at Roy's in King's Cross. This afternoon, we're going to a BBQ at Glen's house in Hornsby. Kangaroo steaks, here we come! Tomorrow, it's off to New Zealand if we remember to set our clocks forward an hour tonight.

That means that Australia will be two hours closer to the US than before. Except Queensland. And some other states. In fact, just about every state will have a different time. Aack!

Hanging around Melbourne... Taking a tram into town, we notice that people on the street are all dressed pretty well. Personal fashion is more refined than in Sydney, which is again a little more sophisticated than at home. What? Aren't Angelinos noted for their superficial fashion sense? Perhaps, but what we see here is more individualized and more sophisticated.

The aesthetic sense carries over into the buildings, which range from the distinctive to the bizarre. For example, the industrial park where we returned our car has not a single rectangular building, no are any two the same color. Even the truck loading docks are given patterned paint jobs to break up the space.

On the other hand, it's devilishly difficult to get around in Melbourne. We've noticed before that the cost of communication is very high. Mobile phones usually bill by the minute, plus for each SMS sent. The same applies to transportation: Melbourne is paralyzed by its roads. Many of the main streets are serviced by trams, which have dedicated lanes in the center of the road. Despite this, the trams travel slower than the cars. And each has a separate set of lights, so the frequent five- or six-way intersections become parking lots. If you happen to be driving a car and want to pass through town, you'll find that the freeways all become tollways. The really annoying thing about the tollways is that you can't pay the toll. You have to stop, find a retail store, and register your license plate ($9.40 for one day). "Yes, I pay a fortune in toll fees," the woman at the post office downheartedly tells me.

Woke up early and backtracked, since it was dark when we came into town. We started off at 'The Grotto', 'London Bridge', 'Loch and Gorge', 'Razorback', 'Thunder Hole' and 'Blowhole'. Then, the last stop of the limestone formations, 'The Twelve Apostles'.

We stopped for brunch in a small 'town' --- need to address the Aus. definition of what makes a town. Then it was on the road again. We took the Great Ocean Road to The Otways National Park, a rainforest park with wonderful waterfalls. Here we took a treetop walk on platforms that got up to 47 meters above the forest floor. This is not for the week hearted.

We then went 8 kms down a gravel than dirt road to Hoputurn Falls. A quick jog to the bottom as it was starting to rain and we were a bit concerned about getting up the steep incline on a muddy dirt road. But, wat a falls. Since it has rained quite a bit the last few days, the falls was booming.

Then we headed along the Ocean Road through some picturesque country. The road does not follow the ocean as closely as the PCH highway does until you get past a town called Apollo Bay. Martha saw two rare red bellied parrots on the roadside and a Koala in a tree. Then it is a windy cliff side drive with lovely views along the ocean. It took a few hours of drive to get us to Melbourne in time for rush hour traffic. We did eventually get to the hotel thanks to Shanti's excellent driving and Martha's excellent navigation.

The best time to see wildlife on the road seems to be in the morning, when the roadside is most active. Driving out of Robe toward Mt. Gambier, we saw two spiny echidnas walking through the grass on the shoulder.

Mt. Gambier's attraction is its blue crater lakes. An extinct volcano dominates the town, its craters filled with water. They're easily accessible and home to some interesting bird life. From the overlook of the lake, we saw some brilliant blue finch-sized birds flying around us.

To continue the Great Ocean Road, you return to the coast at Port Donnell. We were going to stop for lunch there, but the town's two cafes both looked suspicious, so we drove along the beach for a while before turning inland through the hills of South Australia. The roads are lined alternating lush eucalyptus forest and neatly planted tree farms. Breezing through Nelson, we changed time zones as we left South Australia ("The Festival State") and entered Victoria ("The Police State"), where the road slows down to 100 kph.

Having thus postponed lunch for a great while, we pulled into the visitors' center at the maritime museum in Portland. They gave us some great maps of the Victoria segment of the GOR. On the hill above the museum, we had lunch on the main drag, overlooking the harbor.

From Portland, we backtracked to Cape Bridgewater to walk through the petrified forest on the sandstone bluff. What they think were moonah trees were encased in limestone, leaving freestanding tubes where trees once were. Several stories below, the ocean pummels the cliffs, gradually undercutting the sterile forest. The surf at Cape Bridgewater forms a blowhole nearby in high seas. At low seas, it's just extremely rough, where the collision between outgoing and incoming waves sends spray high into the air well before tumbling onto the basalt rocks. A four hour walk will take you to a seal colony, but we didn't do that.

Driving back toward Portland, we saw a big koala on the road. It looked at first like a gray rock in the road, crossing as slowly as it was. We pulled the car to the side and raced for our cameras, only to find that the koala was in exactly the same place. Shanti filmed Martha as she sneaked up with a camera. The koala started to move in response, but not until a gravel truck roared onto the scene did it really get going. Galloping off the road, the koala scampered up a tree and stopped, watching us with suspicion as we gawked and took pictures.

Back on the road, we stopped at the bakery in Port Fairy for a snack, then drove on to Warrnambool. Just outside Warrnambool is a great waterfall, Hopkin's Falls, similar in shape to but much smaller than Niagara. Also in Warrnambool is Logan's Beach, the winter spawning ground for Right whales.

Further along the road, we came to the Bay of Islands at sunset. The islands are sandstone monoliths that the sea has not yet claimed (see photo).

We spent the night in Port Campbell in a cottage at the top of a hill, with a surprisingly good take-out tandoori beef pizza for dinner.

Day one of our Great Australian Road Trip. We leave Adelaide early, so as to catch the rush-hour traffic. We start by anti-commuting south to the wine-growing region of McLaren Vale (pronounced "valley").

This drive takes about an hour, and we arrive at 10:00, just in time for the tasting rooms to open. From the tourist information center in town, we get directions to our two main objectives: the Olive Center and d'Arenberg.

At a winery, you get a wine tasting. At the Olive Center, you get an oil tasting. On the bar are four saucers of olive oil -- a blend, two varietals, and the "really old trees limited edition" bottle. Sopping it up with a cube of fresh chewy French bread, we find that there is considerable variation among them. Not as much as with wine, but enough that a really serious cook would have several bottles for different purposes. Of the two varietals, we thought one was fruitier while the other was peppery. The really old tree bottle, while flavorful, was too bitter to be eaten on its own. Our favorite was the blend, which was probably designed for that purpose. They also had five bowls of flavored Kalamata olives (a different sort of olive than that used for oil), plain, garlic, herb, and chili.

Across the street is the celebrated d'Arenberg, best known for its Dead Arm Shiraz (a disease kills one arm of very old vines, so you get fewer grapes with more flavor) . The first thing we notice is that the wine maker has a sense of humor, giving the bottles whimsical names like "Lucky Lizard" and "Laughing Magpie." They offer a daunting 14 wines and a shiraz port for tasting, enough to drive a seasoned graduate student under the table. Not being seasoned graduate students, we didn't try all of them.

The wine maker at d'Arenberg must have a similar palate to Martha, because she liked everything they threw at her. Shanti, who has turned up his nose at all the other Australian whites, even liked the Viognier. We bought bottles of the Stump Jump GSM and the Other Side Chardonnay to bring back with us. You can get their Dead Arm Shiraz and the Fortified Shiraz in stores in the USA.

We backtracked to in town for an inexpensive lunch at the gourmet cafe Market 190. Food has been much cheaper since we've left the tourist traps. Here, two baguette sandwiches (turkey, brie, cranberry; salmon, pesto, avocado) and an enormous slice of goat curd cake set us back $16.

Driving out of town after lunch, we took the short cut suggested by the man at the Olive Center through the hills to the Murray River ferry crossing at Wellington. This mean that we wouldn't get to the mouth of the river at Goolwa, but the Murray dries up before it reaches the sea anyway. So there we were, driving along through cow country, when Shanti exclaimed, "Hey! That's pink!" and screeched to a stop. Indeed, the lake beside the road was pink (see the photo gallery). Pink and opaque, with salt deposits ringing the shore. We later found out that the color comes from bacteria that produce keratin. Nearby, the Murray river itself is muddy brown and smelly.

Crossing the river and speeding along the muddy Lake Alexandria gets us to Meningie and the Coorong National Park. Just south of Meningie is a partially developed picnic area called Pranka Point, a good place to look for Australian Pelicans. We saw two pelicans and a 14-16" skink. It's a better place to look for sea gulls.

The Coorong is a long sand spit fronting the sea, forming a 100-ish km lagoon between sand dunes and mainland. It's awfully difficult to get into the park, but there are a few places where a land bridge connects the road on the mainland to the dunes by the sea. One of these, 42 Mile Crossing (28 and 32 mile crossings exist as well) was recommended to us by the tourist info office in Meningie as accessible to our two-wheel drive vehicle. A reasonably good gravel road is all we need, and, passing a kangaroo and joey in the bush, we get within a kilometer and a half of the shore. From there, we hoof it. There's a road through the dunes for 4WDs, and a trail over them for bipeds.

We were very excited to find the kangaroo on the way in, but we weren't prepared for the excitement of the trail. Descending over the second hill, Martha disrupted a major conference of wildlife, with Shanti close behind with the camera running. Martha squealed with excitement as an emu ran in front of her, then fled to the right into the bush. Another emu, in front of Martha and to the left, ran to escape behind her left flank while a kangaroo dashed up the hill and hid behind a bush. The emu on the right was just disappearing by the time our hearts returned to their normal patterns.

The trail ends at a beach made from white, purple, and orange shells. The high tide line is littered with cuttlefish bones and bits of broken coral, still rubbery and pliable. The surf of the south ocean is merciless -- breakers stretching out to the horizon would pulverize a small boat trying to fight through it.

On the walk back, Martha picked a fight with a solitary ant whose body was nearly an inch long. A little later, a bird startled by Martha burst from the bush in a blur. As we waited for her adrenaline rush to subside, we took some pictures of the brush. At the top, trees of 3 to 4 meters are home to small but vocal birds. At the bottom, there are purple ice plant and woody shrubs.

Back at the car park, we pull away, only to spy an emu outside. And another. And an adult emu followed by two turkey-sized baby emus with long legs. And a kangaroo. And two more kangaroos, who, by staying still, escaped our notice until the first hopped toward them. They all seem to know that metallic wheeled vehicles won't eat them so, while they eye us warily, they don't run away and we can watch for as long as we want. So we watch the emus eat, and the kangaroos eat, and the emus move, and they eat some more, and the kangaroos hop and eat some more, until we're through watching and we drive off.

South of the 42 Mile Crossing at the southern end of the Coorong is the town of Kingston SE, best known for the ostentatious steel Larry the Lobster who welcomes you to town. In a blink, we're through town and on the way to Cape Jaffa, a delightful little beach town that is unfortunately 40 km out of the way.

Continuing down the coast, we stopped for the night in the pretty town of Robe, known best for its long sandy beach and inland lakes.

We picked up the rental car in the morning and drove up the South Road to Barossa Valley for wine tasting. Well, Martha tasted while Shanti took notes and drove (ok ok, so Shanti sipped). Martha, after tasting maybe 40 wines today, is feeling a little giddy.

When we've been to wineries in California, they usually offered us a choice of four or five wines for $20 if you didn't buy a bottle. Different system here. It's rare that an Australian winery doesn't have twelve or more different wines for sale (some the same wine from different years), spanning the full range of grape varietals and treatments available to them. They are eager to have you try them all. If they charged for their tastings, 39% would go to the government (ouch!), so it's not worth the paperwork.

Everyone in Barossa makes at least one Eden Valley Riesling, which turn out surprisingly different in flavor. Also, everyone makes a few signature blends, the St. Hallett GST being the best we found. Here are some of our observations. Most wineries also produce ports or muscats, several labelled "Age Unknown" or "Very Old," as in "This barrel is pretty good. When did we start it? Drat. I forget. Let's bottle it anyway."

First stop: St. Hallett. You are greeted at the door by Stewey the Parrot, amidst an abundant and colorful garden. Besides the GST, we liked their 2002 Old Block Shiraz and 2000 Blackwell, both available in the US from Paterno Wines in Illinois. The 2000 Third Century Shiraz is well rounded and will be great in about 3-6 years. Their vintage port, not available in stores, is our favorite from Barossa Valley and we picked up a bottle.

Next is Grant Burge, whose signature blend is modestly called The Holy Trinity. We didn't try all twenty of the bottles they had out for tasting, but of those we did sample, we liked their sparkling Pinot Noir, the Holy Trinity GSM (Granache Shiraz Mourvedre), and the 1999 Meshach Shiraz, which needs to sit around for ten years or so. Shanti also likes the 2001 Filsell Shiraz, but Martha finds it too tannic. Grant Burge's offices have an inventively landscaped garden, with rough limestone steps leading through a rockery to an elaborate formal garden among the vineyards. The gray stone courtyard is shielded from the summer sun by a ceiling of grape vines.

We stopped for lunch at an outstanding German restaurant, Die Barossa Wursthaus & Bakery. It's a crowded little hole-in-the-wall with lime-green tablecloths near the tourist information center in Tanunda. Get the grilled sausage meal or the roast beef with fresh horse radish-turkey-asparagus club sandwich. They call their Berliners "sugar buns".

Near town is Peter Lehmann's tasting room, in a ranch house set among a sprawling eucalyptus grove. It looks like the sort of place where people would hold weddings. We thought most of their wines too tannic for our tastes, but we liked the Eight Songs, imported to the USA by New World Wines. They have a few small-batch wines that you can only get at the tasting room, to reward you for the trip.

The last place we visited was Elderton, famous for its Command Shiraz. All their red wines are full-bodied drinks that fight back, just the sort that Shanti likes. The 2002 Tantalus blend has a nice raspberry aroma and the 2001 CSM blend will get even better over the next ten or fifteen years. Finishing with a generous glass of honey-like 2002 Botrytis Semillon, Martha was through tasting and ready to head back to Adelaide.

Shanti was ready to take our rented Nissan Pulsar through its paces on the windy mountain roads down to Adelaide. If we could only find the right road. The Australian convention is to label their transportation grid by the vertexes, while the US convention is to label the lines. So if you want to get somewhere in Australia, you have to know the names of all the towns you want to pass through. It's equally confusing for Australians travelling to the US, who are upset at having to know whether they want to go east or west on the 10 or the 210. Both systems seem to work, but we just wish that the intersections here had consistent labels so you can find out what street you're on.

The road back takes us through Barossa and Eden Valley, both of which sport hillsides awash with purple wildflowers. The ground is surprisingly fertile for a wine area -- there are grasses and wildflowers growing among the grapes. Lets elaborate here. The country side is gorgeous! The rolling hills with grape vines intermixed with wildflowers all in saturated hues of purple, yellow are unbelievable. Beautiful gardens surround the houses that are stone cottage type with metal gingerbread trim. Its sheep sheering season here so we saw many sheep who looked quite deflated, both physically and mentally. Many horses actually galloping over the hillsides. There were also numerous cow pastures and even a bull that scared the living daylight out of Martha, when she ventured near the fence to take a photo.

Sadly, we saw no kangaroos on the drive back. Plenty of cattle, horses, and freshly-shorn sheep, though.

Last night we arrived in Adelaide. Our hotel is the super-swank Ramada Plaza in Glenelg. (Ramada USA is licensed to Marriott. Ramada International is a completely different operation.) The hotel room is about the size of our apartment in South Pasadena, with a kitchen (including dishwasher!), laundry machine, living room, big-screen TV, entertainment center, trendy furniture, and recessed halogen lights. Downstairs there's a pool, hot tub, sauna, steam room, and exercise room. Oh, and the hotel is right on the beach. We're never leaving.

Glenelg is to Adelaide as Santa Monica is to Los Angeles. There's a beach from which nobody swims because the water's cold and the surf is small. Instead, you play volleyball, parade the boardwalk, and be seen in the trendy restaurants. As with SM, everyone wants to come to Glenelg on the weekend, but there's street parking for exactly three cars, and the only way in and out is through a single two-lane street. Which makes it tricky to cross the street at 1700 when all the stores close.

Fortunately, there's a tram that takes you directly from the beach to the center of Adelaide City (about ten blocks on a side) for shopping and touring. The main shopping district is Rundle mall, a truly impressive labyrinth of escalators and pedestrian malls. If you want to buy something in Australia, this would be a good place to do it. Unless, of course, you need cold weather clothing. In that case, you're out of luck, because all the stores have their summer merchandise out. Too bad that we're rain gods. The only place the clouds didn't follow us is to Uluru.

We made a few great finds in the Rundle Mall. David Jones is department store like Harrods, and on their food floor we found Murray River sea salt, for which we've been scouring the stores. We also picked up some Cassia bark, the spice that cinnamon imitates. We've been searching for this in the US for years! A block away is our favorite department store, Country Road. In particular, they sell the perfect sofa, with deep seats and an extra-wide chaise lounge. Unfortunately, they don't ship to California, so we said our goodbyes to the couch and continued our explorations.

A few blocks away, adjacent to the botanic gardens, is the free wine making museum at the National Wine Center. Downstairs, you can sample six Australian wines for seven dollars. It turns out that, except for the special bottlings that can only be purchased directly from the vinyars, this is the absolute best place to buy Australian wine. They'll even ship it to the USA, but it'll cost about $20 per bottle.

Back at the beach, we strolled the shops on Jetty Road. At Vintage Cellars, the sales staff asked us what kinds of wines we liked and then told us about what wineries to look for. We took home a bottle of the Wine of the Year, 2002 St Hallett GST (Grenache Shiraz Touriga), for $16 (costs more at the winery, but the shops' supplies are limited). It's really good stuff.

And now, a joke. We're watching a footy (rugby) game on the telly. The guy at the bottom of the pile, having discovered the law of conservation of momentum, doesn't stand up right away, so the referee calls the medics onto the field. Announcer 1 says, "The trainers are looking him over. I think they're checking for any neck injuries." Announcer 2 replies, "I think they're trying to find his neck."

Martha would like to take a moment here and comment on the Australian hair aesthetic. It's great. People treat their hair as they should, like a renewable resource. The head is just a canvas and the hair is a pallet. If I come home sporting some wild hair, I will truly feel freed. Australia will then have truly rubbed off on me.

We took an early flight to Alice Springs, the biggest town in central Australia. With a six hour layover before our flight to Adelaide boards, we though we'd poke around. As it turned out, six hours was more than enough.

The highlight is the Royal Flying Doctors Service Museum, where $6 will let you see the pedal-powered radio transceivers that enabled communication throughout the bush. It's a very elegant design -- two variable capacitors for tuning the frequencies, six vacuum tubes, and a pedal-powered dynamo. Of course, now they just use mobile phones and satellite links.

From there, we take a stroll through the center of town. Five blocks later, we're out of town through which to stroll. About-face, and reinvestigate. There are three major shopping malls, arranged on parallel streets. The high end one on Todd Mall has the Bi-Lo supermarket, cinema, art galleries, boutique retail stores, souvenir shops, and a food court. The next street over has the Woolies, also with an indoor air-conditioned retail mall, but half of the stores are closed. One more block gets you to the Coles outdoor strip mall, where all the eating establishments are closed, and sketchy at best. We had a good sandwich (Martha's cambert, chicken, avocado and cranberry sandwich on a baguette was excellent) at the end of the Todd Mall at the Al Fresco cafe. Mercifully, their dining was not al fresco.

Around the corner from Todd Mall and across the street from the Mercure, we found the Mbantua (two syllables) Gallery. Mbantua means "this place." Hah. They have an interesting collection of ancient boomerangs, some for hunting, some returning, and some for use as general-purpose sticks. One 7-shaped throwing stick from the Alice Springs area is painted with white dots at the small end and has ridges running longitudinally along the airfoil surface, rather like dimples on a golf ball. We made our first souvenir purchase: two original paintings representing women's ceremonies (there are many more women artists than men, so that's what you get) and a shield engraved with a long-necked turtle design. We liked this gallery for its focus on nearby artists from a place called Utopia, so you see a consistent style underpinning the work. (Our version of Utopia has more running water, but the woman at the gallery, the one who told us that Wittchety Grub tastes like egg and peanut butter when cooked, thought that living in the bush was just grand.) That's not to imply that this gallery only has traditional art -- a number of the canvasses on display use a vibrant palette and more inventive brush strokes that you'd see in rock art, often deviating from the traditional symbolism.

There are a number of art styles from elsewhere in Australia at other galleries, but they preserve the theme of using fine lines and dots. Martha likes a style that has black-centered animal outlines, decorated in a manner reminiscent of Pacific Northwest native art, except the Australian version sticks to fine color lines, stippling, and cross-hatching, rather than the block color and highly stylized curves we see in the PNW.

Once when we were in Sydney, walking along Circular Quay, we heard a street musician playing didgeridoo for a large crowd. Shanti thought it was unusual, because it had a four-beat rhythm with a most decidedly non-western harmonic progression. Shanti was not surprised to discover that the musician looked awfully white (though that doesn't tell you whether or not someone was raised as an Aborigine). Didgeridoo music that we've heard before has a less regimented rhythm. Similarly, Aboriginal art eschews straight lines or regular curves. Perhaps if you rely on nature to provide your sacred images, like irregularly shaped Uluru, you might develop an aesthetic that emphasized what people from a European culture would consider irregular.

With a couple of hours before our plane leaves and the sun beating down, we think the best thing to do is to go to the airport. (Note to other travellers: it doesn't cost much more to rent a car in Alice than to take a taxi back and forth from the airport.)

Today, we woke up at 5 am to see the sunrise at Uluru, the Aboriginal meeting place. Us and a small herd of tourists. What a difference from Kata Tjuta, where we had our viewing spot almost to ourselves! The moon was high in the sky, and though the sun had not risen yet, it was pretty bright out. There was a nice glow that came across the surface of Uluru as the sun rose. The rock becomes more saturated in color and seems to glow.

After the sunrise, we drove over to the cultural center. There is some information, very general about the native people, but not specifics, as it is against their customs to tell people about their customs without going through the proper ceremonies. The impression we got about Aboriginal culture is that it places a high value on knowledge and experience, which may be revealed only at specific times and places. Therefore, you would never see a book on Aboriginal rituals and desert survival (the two are closely linked). But since they've managed to continue a society for several tens of thousands of years, whatever they're doing must work. It was a little disappointing to learn that we couldn't learn about the culture at the cultural center, but we did grab a bite to eat at the cafe and witnessed some baby birds making an awful racket to get some grub from mama bird.

At 8 am, we participated in a guided tour of the Mala Walk. This was really interesting. Our guide was Anangu (native) from south of Uluru. He told us about some of the sacred sites along this 2km trail. We learned very basics of a couple of the stories and why they are sensitive about people climbing the rock and taking pictures of certain areas. We learned to identify several of the native plants and animals (like the tawny frogmouth owl) that are used for bush tucker and medicine. We saw some of the old drawings on cave wall, which are estimated to be 50-60,000 years old. Holy Cow! We also learned that it is customary today that if a couple divorces, the man keeps the children (as with the Emu, who cares for the young birds). We also learned that the night before our guide, hunted a kangaroo with his grandfather and killed it, ate the intestines as an appetizer, sewed it back up and roasted it, drained the abdominal cavity for soup, and ate the rest. Some of the softer parts and organs are given to the elders who don't have many teeth. Yummy!

After this walk, we continued along the base of Uluru for the 9.4km Base Walk, following the perimeter of Uluru. This was a pulsant walk. However, Shanti and I both enjoyed Kata Tjuta more. There is something very pleasing about being able to walk through the gorges and look at the various shapes. Uluru is an imposing formation, while Kata Tjuta is a collection of separate boulders. It is tempting to call Uluru a rock, but it's actually several disconnected rocks heaped together. We noticed that while the Kata Tjuta has pieces made of cantaloupe-sized smooth granite cemented together with red sandstone, Uluru is made from smaller, gravel-like stones.

We had already decided that we didn't need to climb Uluru, as per the wishes of the natives. It turned out not to matter, as the climb was closed due to high winds. It was really gusty this morning, which was fine by us since this kept the heat and the flies down. The walk took a couple hours and provided some nice views of Uluru and the surrounding bush country. I'm sad to say that we have not seen any Kangaroos in the wild yet. Though, given the story of our guide, we reckon there smart and realize they'd make a good supper for someone. We finished the hike around 11:30 and headed to a second very short jaunt through a dune region. Here we had good views of Kata Tjuta and Uluru in the distance. We also saw some animal tracks, from several large birds and a small snake or lizard (we think snake). On the way back to the car, we also saw a whirling dervish. It was really cool! It knocked over a dead tree, flinging a few dead branches high into the air with a gusty whooshing sound.

We headed back to the cabin, had some soy ice cream, and took naps :). Getting up, we went over to the pool at the campground and took a dip. Boy, that water feels cold, with the hot sun beating down.

Now, while I'm writing this up, Shanti is making us some supper of barramundi fillet, bok choy, green beans, and ginger tea. Yesterday, these would have cost a bundle at the supermarket. Today, all the vegetables were marked down to 99 cents. We plan to have a quiet evening tonight watching rugby (NZ vs. Canada), stargazing, and getting a good night's rest. Tomorrow morning, we are off to Adelaide. We are also pleased to report that two days here is just about the right amount of time. We have done most of the hikes and seen a good bit of the area. The average stay is 1-3 days. Two seemed just perfect for us. Don't get us wrong, its a totally neat place, but unless you want to live out in the bush, there is not much to see or do outside of the two rock formations. There's only one road, and its only exits are the airport, the resort, and the park. And the pamphlet they give you at the gate says it's a criminal offense to conduct scientific research in the park, so you might as well just take your pictures and leave.

We had a interesting taxi ride to the airport this morning. The cabbie is getting his Ph.D in Criminology and is using the taxi money to support the habit :). He worked with the Justice department of Oz for seven years and is trying to break out of that on to better things. Cairns Airport, by the way, has one of the nicest passenger lounges we've been to. The food selection is fairly limited, but the design of the building and the artwork are quite attractive.

The flight was pleasant, as the skies were clear, and you could see clearly that you were leaving "civilization". Australia's population is almost entirely located on the coast and as soon as you go inland just a bit there is no sign of people. The land turns arid and flat very quickly and then gradually turns redder and redder. There are sections of land that look like lakes with red islands. Perhaps this is where salt precipitated out of a seasonal river, or some other ore is present in the ground. As we got close to the airport, we could see Uluru (Ayer's Rock) and another formation of large red rocks known as Kata Tjuta (The Olgas). They are really impressive. Uluru rises out of this arid flat plain, and has a circumference of around 9 km. The surrounding desert is not barren, but contains some small, low trees and shrubs and several types of grass. All the colors are remarkably saturated. It is interesting to us that each of our successive stops in Australia gets less and less populated. In Sydney, it was nearly impossible to escape the city, all the people and civilization in general. It consumed you with its closeness. Then we went to Cairns, which has many fewer people and the tourist district is quite intimate such that you can run into people you know (after dinner last night we saw some people from our reef trip and stopped to chat). Now in Yulara, there is just so much open space that the vastness leaves you feeling a bit vulnerable.

After getting our rental car, mind you all rental cars in the area are white, which makes identifying yours in a parking lot intractable, we headed to the resort. Now, all accommodations are located in Ayer's Rock Resort. The whole area is own by the aboriginal people. Thus, this tends to mean you pay and arm and leg for everything since there is no competition (oh, but wait that's the cynical side peaking through). We have a cute little cabin at the campground. The cabin itself had one bedroom with a double bed, with cute little resort soaps, shampoos and lotions. It also has a second little room with two sets of bunk beds. Now, six people would be really crowded in here as the only other room is a small kitchen. That's right: no bathroom. SIGH.

We drop off our stuff and went to the supermarket to gather some grub for dinner, as Shanti was itching to cook. After that we had some lunch at one of the "resort" hotel's restaurants. Shanti had a Kangaroo Burger, which he thought tasted like mild skirt steak. Martha had a bite, and, while she agreed it has texture of skirt steak, she thought it had a tuna fishy taste. Martha stuck to an old fashioned cheeseburger.

We decided to head out to Kata Tjuta and hike around the trail there. Kata Tjuta is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning 'many heads'. The thirty-six steep sided domes create gorges, through which there is a 7.4 km hiking trail called The Valley of the Winds. We are learning that we can halve the time suggested for trails in Australia. They must have some really slow walkers as even doing walks in half as much time we are moving pretty slowly and stopping frequently for pictures and video. That being said, it really is impressive to hike in through these rocks. These formations were formed when river flowed through the area and are made up by river worn rocks that have formed aggregates with the red sand (we shan't dignify it with the name Soil). When you look closely at smaller areas you can see the individual smooth river rocks in the agglomerate.

The colors are so saturated it is unbelievable. The red of the rock changes with lighting and time, but the green of the shrubs is very vibrant as well and completely unexpected. There is even this blue green grass that Martha liked.

The hike wondered through several gorges and into a bowl shape, such that at one point you look down into the bowl and another you can look up out. It was warm, but not unbearably so. Definitely dry. You drank water every 15 minutes or regretted it. The only major downside was the flies; they did not bite, but there were just so many of them swarming all over. ACk! I think tomorrow is going to see the procurement of some fly nets.

We didn't dawdle through the hike because we wanted to be able to get to the 'sunset overlook' at sunset, which was a 6:51. We show up at the overlook and since there are only a couple people there, we say "Hmm, that's odd". Shanti looks at the position of the sun and says "You know, there is a least an hour before the sun sets". Ah-ha! We switched time zones and were to lame to realize it. Doh! Oh well, we decided to stick it out as we had nice seats and a good view. Only problem was the flies. So, we wrapped our fleeces around our heads with our Tilley hats on and sat and watch the day wind down. I grant you this is quite a picture to see as it was still hot out and here are these two yahoos sitting on a bend with fleeces covering their heads like bhurkas with Tilley hats perched on top. We have not decided whether those pictures will be released to the public. All I have to say to those who laugh is, "Oh yeah well at least I couldn't hear the flies buzzing in my ears any more!". It didn't stop them from landing on Shanti's nose.

Sunset was really special. The colors rapidly change in the rocks and in the sky. The rock gets deeper and deeper reds and the sky turns first pink at the horizon, then purple, and finally a deep blue. We had to hurry to get out of the park by closing at 8 pm.

As we are driving back to the campground, stars are popping out of everywhere in the night sky. We hadn't seen the Milky Way in a while and it's really neat to see the different constellations, or rather since we don't know most of them, groupings of stars that would appear to be constellations if it were left to us to name them. Once back at the campground we observe the sky for a few minutes before going into the cabin to make dinner. Menu tonight was lamb and apricot sausages, Japanese pumpkin, mixed green salad, and for dessert, Mango vanilla soy ice cream. Shanti also got some of his favorite new drink, apple-mango juice.

Our days seem to start early and thus they also tend to end early, so we sign off for the day.

We were ready to leave the hotel room on Tuesday at 0550, to check out and meet the van from Pro Dive. At 5:55 the phone beeped to tell us that Martha's sister had a girl, known as Althea "Thea" Sage Byrne, after 40 hours of labor (web site).

Ten minutes later, we were on the way to the dive shop. With the whole party assembled, we picked up the plastic bin containing the wet suits and fins we selected on Monday, and loaded back into the vans for the drive to the pier.

Snorkeling sites: Tennis Court, Gordon's Mooring, Tracy's Bommie. What's a bommie, you ask? One of those coral thingys. All three of these are part of a larger reef known as Flynn's Reef, located a good 2 3/4 to 3 hours out to sea. That is a big difference between a place like Hawaii from the Great Barrier reef -- in Hawaii, the reefs are easily accessible from the shore, here it appears to get to the reefs, especially good ones you must go out to sea. We decided it's a trade off as the diversity of life here is just so immense it makes it worthwhile. However, don't come to Cairns thinking you will be able to stroll of the beach and Boom! you're at the reefs. Cairns has the feel of an estuary with some pretty wide mud flats.

Our trip offered seven dives in two days. We did six of these dives. The first two dives at 11am and then 2:30 pm were at the tennis courts. The 4:30 pm dive, the night dive (the dive we didn't do), and the 6:30 am dive were at Gordon's Mooring. On Wednesday, the 8:30 am and the 10:45 am dives were at Tracy's Bommie.

The diversity of both the fishes and corals was phenomenal! We loved the last site, Tracy's Bommie, as it had some really accessible snorkel regions that were just jam packed with all sorts of interesting critters. We had several early dives there, and all the fishes were out, corals were feeding, and the water visibility was great. Not to mention the sun was out, which made the colors that much more vibrant. Tuesday, we had some rough weather and overcast skies. This affected a couple of things. The first is that it was a pretty darn rough ride of 2 3/4 hours out to the dive site. Shanti was one of several people to "feel" the sea a little bit too much. The water was a little more turbid and the colors not as bright.

We had a guide on the first snorkels in both Gordon's Mooring and Tracy's Bommie. This was great. You got both a good "lay of the land" of the particular dive site and the guides, Carren and Steve, were able to point out some things we might have missed and help us identify some others. It made our second dives at these sites more rewarding as well. It helped to know where to head, as it was easy to get a little bit turned around. Your only marker is the boat and you can get a good distance from that.

So, since we are writing this, we obviously did not get eaten by a shark. We did not actually see any sharks; however, a number of the other groups did. The largest, being well large, maybe 4 meters. We also had no encounters with any jellyfish. Now, that we've gotten what we did not see, you might be wondering what we did see. The answer is just about everything else. This includes green sea turtles, the blue spotted lagoon ray, barracuda, many giant clams of various colors, a gazillion different types or corals (one of the most amazing was a boulder coral, about the size of a four story building and grows about 1 cm a year), many surgeons, damsels, wrasses, box fish, puffer fish, trumpet fish, bat fish, angel fish, gobe and shrimp, trigger fish ... just to name a few. We took underwater photos with a disposable camera. We will see how they come out.

We had a calm ride back to shore and a nice view of the rainforest, which in parts abuts the ocean. There are also mangrove swamps. We also got a view of the Mountain we tried to climb on Monday, where it looked like it was still raining :).

The first thing we did when we got back was to take all the salty clothes to the laundry and ourselves to soak in the bath tub (we did get to shower on board the boat, but the salt precipitates out of the air onto your skin really quickly out there).

It was a rewarding trip, and now we're tired and hungry. Tomorrow, it's off to Ayer's Rock!

Drive to Kooroomooroo National Park for a walk to the top of Mt. Berra Kai, the tallest mountain in Queensland. Not much of a mountain at 1622m, but there's a nice steep walk through the rainforest to get there. We arrived at the trailhead (follow the signs to Josephine Falls) in a downpour, to the absurd sight of a ranger washing the roof of a picnic shelter with a hose. It makes more sense if you know that he's also scraping off moss and debris.

The short, paved path to Josephine Falls takes you to a nice little creek, complete with a swimming pond and rock slide. We were the only ones there, the hour being early and the sky being dark. We took a picture of the falls, scampered back to the car park, and began our trudge up the mountain trail. The ranger on the roof suggested that we take the undulating forest trail until it becomes steep and slippery. So we did.

The rain forest is thick, with dense underbrush and tangled roots underfoot. Quite tangly. Don't know the names of the trees, but there are a number that clearly started as vines, apparently strangling and replacing a host. We also see a number of ferns, ranging from a few inches in length to trees taller than us. A few old trees are as much as three feet across, but most of the trunks are small enough that you could wrap your hands around them. But you don't want to, because some of them bite. A few hundred meters in, we encountered our first wildlife, an Attack Turkey. They don't call it that, but it's a turkey with a red head, a yellow ruff, and the knowledge that it's not going to be eaten by people.

The trail is well defined, but it makes a few tricky creek crossings. These are dry-footed rock hops, but the granite boulders are both abrasive and covered with slippery algae. Martha has some nice scratches and bruises on her legs from these.

After the big creek crossing, the trail turns into a staircase, with water pouring down each step. It was at this point, with Martha leading the way, that Shanti felt a bite on his leg and plucked a leech from his ankle. Martha says, "Eww, gross. Do I have any?" and looks at her boots, which are coated with bloodsuckers crawling toward her legs. "Gross! Get it off!" At this point Martha wants to interject that it was Shanti who suggested that we stop the hike and head back (just for the record).

Stopping only long enough to disinfect our shoes and liberally apply bug repellant (it didn't work before, but more can't hurt), we decided we had experienced as much of the rain forest as needed, and we could turn back without any loss. We walked briskly back to the car, picking leeches off one another as we went.

Back at the parking lot, we changed our sopping wet clothes (good thinking ahead!) and started our driving tour of the Kooroomooroo National Park.

The main tourist sights around the edge of the park are its waterfalls. Following a clockwise path, we stopped at Mungalli, Millaa Millaa, Zillie, and Ellinjaa Falls. The theme for the waterfalls is that a small creek is winding along, minding its own business, and then it meets a sheer rock face, whence it falls down into a pool, which drains into another peaceful little creek.

They do all have their own character. Mungalli Falls is accessible from the top and the bottom, where wild impatiens grow in colorful clumps among nonchalantly scattered boulders. All it needs is a cocktail bar and Walt Disney couldn't do better. Millaa Millaa is where you go when you need a waterfall in your movie, because you can drive right up to a perfect view of the base. If it's warm out, you can even go swimming in the pool. The sign at Millaa Millaa says the trees sting, so you don't want to wander off into the jungle and there's no path to encourage you to do so. At Zillie Falls, you walk down a forest path (past an Attack Turkey) past curly vines and spiny plants that remind me of Devil's Club, only not so tall. Ellinjaa falls is partially obscured by vegetation from the lookout, trails down being washed out. Martha's favorites were Mungalli and Ellinjaa, because they had character.

Following a dinner of uninspired Chinese food at the Night Markets, we went to the Reef Teach presentation on Spence street, where an enthusiastic Irish marine biologist named Paddy taught the crowd about the reef's geology and how to identify corals and fish.

Rising early again, we take a van to the airport for our flight to Cairns (pronounced "cans," as in "Hey mate, would you pass me one of those cans?"). We sleep through Legally Blonde II and awake refreshed as the plane crosses a steep mountain ridge, and the rain forest drops away beneath us. Descending in lazy circles through puffy clouds, the airplane finds the airstrip on a wide plain on an otherwise narrow coastline pressed up against the hills. The flat, transparent ocean changes hue from Arizona turquoise along the beach to lapis lazuli at the horizon.

As the plane taxis, we peek at the map in the in-flight magazine and notice that Cairns is at the same latitude as French Polynesia. Emerging from our 767, the air feels warm and moist but not oppressively hot.

Our hotel is on The Esplanade, the long road that snakes along the beach promenade north from the town. Beach is generous -- above the high tide mark are a few feet of sand, while the receding waters reveal wide, shallow mud flats. If you're missing the beach experience, there's a sand-lined pool in the middle of town for swimming and sunbathing. Otherwise, the rest of the beach town experience is there: shoulder-to-shoulder cafes, ice cream shops, and souvenir shops hawking cheap trinkets.

A few blocks in from the boardwalk, we find Pro-Dive and book an overnight cruise to the Great Barrier Reef. The salesperson is covered in cuts and bruises, and she gives us directions for hiking in the rain forest to entertain us until the cruise starts.

Back at the hotel, we book a car for tomorrow and take a dip in the hotel pool, which has a nice burbling waterfall. Following a short rest, we take a cab to the Night Market, a mecca for tourist kitsch. Disappointed by the dinner choices it presents, we head over to Dundee's for a dinner of Trinity Bay Bugs on linguini. These are Shanti's new favorite crustacean -- they put all their yummy bits in one convenient place, and there's almost no animal but yummy bits and shell. Martha puts their flavor on par with Maryland Blue Crab, only sweeter. They look like pumpkin-orange trilobites, a little larger than and about as round as a saucer.

The waiter tells us that he finds the Trinity Bay Bugs to be superior to Balmain Bugs, which "taste like chicken." Surely them's fighting words. We still have to find out about mud crabs, widely regarded as a worthwhile snack.

After dinner, the grocery store ("Wollies" = "Woolworths") is closed, so we find a convenience store to pick up water, preserved meat, and bug spray for tomorrow's hike. The clerk says, "You've got everything you need. Water for when you get thirsty, spray to spray about, and ham you put strategically about your body to ward off Aussies."

Today, we conquered driving downunder. That's right craziness :) Determined
as we were to see the Blue Mts., we rented a car from Avis, right around the
corner from the hotel. The only problem with this.... well let me back up as
there were several problems: (1) We are located in the heart of the city.
Thus, this is like jumping overboard in the ocean to learn to swim; (2) The
traffic here is not unlike Manhattan only with narrower lanes; and (3) have
we mentioned they drive on the wrong side.. ahhm... oppoite side to us? Now,
on the cities behalf, the streets are well labled, there are no crazy
roundabouts, and we didn't hit anything.

The metropolitan area of Sydney stretches all the way out to the base of the
Blue Mts.There is nothing too wonderful to report about the trip out of the
city -- just strip malls and suburbs. We drove by, but in the interest of
time, did not stop to tour the olympic grounds. This is also where they are
playing some of the rugby world cup games.

Climbing up the foothills, we get to the Blue Mountains, where the national
park is split by the highway. They're called the Blue Mountains because they
are covered with a blue haze from the fragrant eucalyptus oil (see pics). The
overall impression it left on me was a region much like the Catskills. There
is no single sight that is a must see. Instead, it's a puttering kind of
area. You can imagine escaping Sydney proper to spend time in these quaint
villages and cafes, maybe taking a short hike here or there. Notwithstanding
that, the rock formations of sedimentary layers also remind me of the
Catskills. We took a short hike to view Wentworth falls. This hike, like much
of Sydney, is characterized but some OBSCENE staircases. We have video to
prove they were almost a ladder that descend down the side of the cliff. What
we both found amazing was that this huge multitiered waterfall (though there
was not a ton of water) starts from this dinky little stream seeping out from
the forest floor, making it seem like the whole mountain is weeping and
oozing-- kinda creepy actually.

After our hike we were both famished and headed to the Hydro Majestic Hotel
in Meadlow Bath to have a buffet lunch, with a killer view of the whole
valley right in front of our table! I have to say I've become a fan of
Tasmanian cheese! Shanti for his part realizes the merits of pickled roasted
veggies and I can hear his brain schemeing from here.
After lunch, we backtracked to the town of Katoomba, home of the famous Three
Sisters rock formation. The were cool, but they have nothing on Bryce
Canyon.We were able to take a cliff drive through some nice scenic overlooks
on the cliffs edge. Martha for her part could have enjoyed them more from the
other side of the road. Martha got rattled around a bit in the Mitsubishi
Magna (it's not an Audi), but Shanti had a good time with the ratchet
shifter.

The highlight of the day for both Shanti and myself was the drive back from
Bell to Richmond along the north side of the park. This was incredibly
scenic, relaxing drive through the countryside. There were many farms
(apple??), Tt. vistas, eucalyptus tree forests, and a beautiful sunny day. We
stopped at a country store and bought ourselfs two different types of honey,
a dark mahagony honey and a light coolumbah (what's that?) honey. We can't
wait to get our teeth into them. However, in short of dipping our fingers in
we will have to wait to get to a store to get some bread ;).
We stopped off at the fish market to see if we could get some of the famed
Balmain Bugs, but it was closed for the evening.

Tonight, after our return, we have been packing up our stuff, as we are
leaving for Cairns tomorrow morning at 7:15am, while watching France kick
Fiji's heiney in rugby. We had Harry's famous meat pies with chili and mash
again (rapidly becoming a favorite Sydney food stop) for a mere $4.50 apeice.

Today was Shanti's last day of training (Yay). He thought the week went well,
and he met some pretty cool people. After working through lunch, the gang
quit early and headed for the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel ("Rockers") pub for
some grub and beer. Shanti picked up a RAN tie, pen set, and stress ball at
the base and a stubby cooler (a beer cozy) at the pub. The fashionable
backcountry sophisticate keeps his the stubby cooler around his wrist, for
quick access whenever a drinking opportunity arises.
Martha, still being a little tuckered of tourist stuff in Sydney walked to
the Royal Botanical Gardens and enjoyed a few lesurely hours reading a book,
watching the flying foxes, examining the plants and enjoying the view. There
was a whole section around government house and opera house that I had not
seen yet and had some great views of the harbor.
We took the train to Little Italy, Leichhardt. This turned out to be a
questionable decision, as half of the population of the free world was trying
to get on the train to Olympic Park for the rugby match! However, we got
there, and with a little bit of a hike and a keen directional sense managed
to find Mezzapica Resturant where we met up with Meryl and Yusuf
(theirfavorite restarunt). Had a good time, good food and good company.The
seafood pasta had lots of yummy tidbits.

It was raining again. Martha went to the Maritime museum. This is a great
Museum. Had a tour with a guide who was totally Arnold crazy; "I knew when I
saw that man in True Lies, that there was a man with talent."... okay don't
get me started because it got even more amusing, but its better told then
written. Anyway, had a great tour and learned all sorts of interesting things
about the history of the waterways in Australia. Had a plesant walk back
across town through some of the shopping districts and city center to the
hotel.
Shanti also went to Darling Harbour with the navy folks (on a boat) for a
lunch of pie (steak and bacon) and chips. Didn't run into Martha, but we did
hear a few stories about Glen's first assignment, the HMAS Vampire, a
decomissioned destroyer that you can tour in the harbour. The ship's insignia
was a bat, and its theme song was Bat Out Of Hell. Its sister ship has the
unfortunate distinction of being the only ship in the fleet to shoot itself.
We had dinner at Cafe Extra, the ordinary-looking diner at Circular Quey
right behind the ferries, which was way better than we had any right to
expect. The pumpkin soup was really good! They were great about getting us in
and out in time to get us to the Opera.
At the Opera House we saw Bizet's The Pearlfishers. The inside of the Opera
House is really amazing. The acoustics are great and the view from the
waiting room in the back of the harbor is phenomenal! The opera itself was
well done. It was great fun to sit in the third row (though hard to see the
surtitles). You could see all the costumes and into the orchestra pit (the
strings had a fit of giggles) and all the workings. The singer's voices were
very well matched which was important since much of the aria highlights are
duets or trios.

Martha walked around South Head (the south side of the harbour mouth). It's very villiage-like, with lots of parks with people picnicing. While the South Head is nice, it doesn't have quite the same impact as Manly and the North Head. But it does have suicide hotline posters conspicuously displayed at the edge of the cliffs. Ate the famous Doyle's Fish & Chips and called it a day due to tourist burnout.

Shanti had a good day with the Navy folks. The Chief (Glen) took me to lunch at Sydney's best burger joint, Charlie's in Woolloomooloo. A Works burger here includes bacon, egg, cheese, pineapple, beets, grilled onions, lettuce, tomato, and BBQ sauce.

Tonight: lay low, do laundry, and try Harry's Cafe de Wheels pie. You may think we're obsessed with food from this diary. In fact, we are. All of Sydney is.

Shanti found more M & M's for the navy folks, and Martha took the ferry from Circular Quay (pronounced Key) to Manly. After sitting on the beach and watching surfing lessons, Martha ambled along the Manly Scenic Walk from the beach to The Spit. Amble being a loose term here for trek! The entire walk (see pictures) was beautiful-- gorgeous views of the harbor from many different angles. Lots of marinas. Favorite part for the wildlife, views and seeming isolation in this huge city was the part that went through Sydney Harbor National Park . The main trek was about 10 km. However, there were several worthwhile side treks; one to grotto point light house and a second to a little beach tucked away. This walk ended near the spit bridge which crosses the harbor from north head to middle head. After taking a bus back into the inner city and the subway back to the hotel. Shanti was back and raring to go. So, we headed off to explore the Paddington area, known for its abundant shops and cute houses.

Walking along Darlington St, we passed a photo shoot of two tall women in wedding dresses in front of the Kirketon Hotel. It was obviously an unofficial arrangement, so the photographers across the street had to wait until there were both no pedestrians and no traffic. Further along Darlington, we came to Oxford St, home of the gay district and high-end fashion boutiques that close at 6 o'clock. We're told that Thursday is the designated shopping night. But that's OK -- we have doubts about the local fashion sense anyway. The furniture aesthetic is very DWR, but the clothes say Hollywood. That's Hollywood the neighborhood, not Hollywood the film studio. We like the home division at Country Road, but we can't figure out how to carry home a couch.

Continuing along until Centennial Park, we turned toward the harbour and walked back toward King's Cross through the parks as the sun set. Looking up, we saw the bats (from the Botanic Gardens) dispersing throughout the city. We're talking about a lot of bats here.

Back at King's X (cross), we walked back to the Kirketon to check on dinner. We weren't really dressed for it, and I was only going to ask whether I could make a reservation, but the nice folks at Salt set a table for us for dinner. So, at one of Sydney's best restaurants, what does one eat? Apparently everything. Martha liked the Mojito, but likes her own better. The tasting menu:

Lightly poached quail egg, rolled in celery salt, herbs, and brown sugar.

Yabbie (a sweet crustacean?) and truffles in a coconut-cilantro broth. Served with a sharp Reisling that contrasted nicely with the buttery broth.

Kingfish sashimi with poached quince, cilantro, and shaved avocado in a rich truffle sauce.

Barramundi (Crispy on one side, soft on the other) and Yabbie on corn risotto with coconut sauce.

Quail tempura (wrapped in nori, then fried) with daikon-carrot-noodle salad. It came with a wasabi-soy dressing, but the sauce tended to overpower the rare, delicate quail.

Rabbit loin wrapped in chorizo and rabbit ravioli. Skillogallee cabernet.

Beef tenderloin (rare) and beef brisket (falling apart) with blue cheese in a veal and wine sauce. Celery garnish. Very rich. Couldn't finish it. Perenga Estate Pinot Noir.

Martha: licorice parfait. Shanti: carmelized green mango crepe with red jalapeno (sugared) and lychee flavored sauce (with little tapioca balls). Oyster Bay Reisling (syrupy, like an ice wine).

Shanti started teaching his class for the Navy and was gone all day. He had lunch at Roy's restaurant on Victoria street, where he learned that, when at a restaurant, you should order whatever the Chief does. In this case, breakfast.

This is a national holiday (Labour day), so Meryl had the day off. After walking around downtown, Martha met Meryl and Yusuf and two of their friends at the quaint (small) Museum of Sydney for lunch downtown.

In the evening, we went to the Sydney Opera House for As You Like It, with plenty of singing and dancing. Shanti particularly liked the performance by the jester -- wit rolled off his tongue like flip-flops on an icy roof. Martha liked the costume interpretation and the singing. How often do you see a Shakespearian fight scene translated into WWE-style wrestling (seems to be a common theme around here)?

By the time we got home, it was past 10 pm, and all we could do was flop into bed.

This morning started with a walk about town, down MacLeay St. toward the base at the end of the point. A side trip took us to a hidden highlight: a hillside garden across from the Elizabeth Bay house with a beautiful koi pond surrounded by quite a selection of irises. From the end of MacLeay St., we walked around Wolloomooloo Bay and across the Domain to the city, where we wandered around the shops.

This trek about the town took us to all the trendy shopping centers in downtown. The inside of the old Post Office is opulent avant-garde-meets-Victorian, with a hint of M. C. Escher in the maze of balconies and staircases. The PO is adjacent to Martin Place, hitherto an unassuming subway stop, but now revealed as a center for retail where they sell the same stuff as we can get at home (Armani, Polo, Levi’s) at about the same prices. Sigh.

Having had our fill of tall buildings and loud shops, we walked down Pitt St to Circular Quay, where we found approximately half the town waiting to buy tickets for the ferry to Manly Beach. Well, that clearly wasn’t going to work. Then we got a text message from Meryl, instructing us to meet her at a train station on the North Shore. From there, we picked up Yusuf and drove to Sydney’s best fish and chips joint at Ba