Waiting at the Melbourne Airport

So here I am sitting at the Melbourne Airport waiting for my flight out of Australia. It is about four hours until my flight leaves. I had to check out of the hostel at 10 am, so I had the choice of waiting at the hostel or the airport; I decided to wait at the airport.

As I knew I would, I left a lot of stuff behind at the hostel that I knew I wouldn't be able to take on the plane. I left a whole bunch of food in the free food bin at the hostel; a good portion of that was produce, but I also left a nearly full jar of Vegemite, some peanut butter and jelly, and bread. I scarfed down as much food as I could for breakfast, until I was bloated, and left the rest. I also left some shampoo/body wash (which I had used as laundry soap too), and some hand sanitizer, in the bathroom.

I took the tram into town and then took the Skybus to the airport. It was pretty easy to find the check-in counter for my flight, but it doesn't open until three hours before the flight, so I'll just wait.

Penguins At St. Kilda

Today I wandered around the Shrine of Remembrance, the Royal Botanic Gardens, upstream on the Yarra River, and the bohemian neighborhood of South Yarra. I did a lot of walking today, as usual.

But today's highlight was seeing the penguins on the St. Kilda pier. There were penguins all up and down the rocks on the pier. 

I thought I was going to miss it, because a comedy of errors happened before I got there. First, three scheduled trams in a row failed to show. I was getting nervous, especially since it was getting dark, and I thought the sun was not going to go down for a couple of hours. But it turned out that when I Googled "sunset in Melbourne", the search engine had given me the time of sunset in Melbourne, Florida!

So I thought the venture was doomed. But, luckily, a local on the tram (that I finally caught) told me the penguins stayed out long after sunset.

I got off the team and scurried down the long pier. All I had to do was find places where there were clusters of people, and there were penguins there.

After watching the penguins for a while, I walked back to the hostel, which was not far away. This is my last full day in Australia; I fly out tomorrow.

Penguin Photos

Ocean Road

Well, I just typed a humongously long blog post, and it evaporated when I checked another window to get a place name. Aargh. So I'll type as much of it as I can again on my phone, along with all the attendant corrections of misguided autocorrects. Sigh.

I've just been lazing about the hostel this morning. It's almost 11:30 am, and I've just been taking it easy. I guess after moving and moving and moving every day, I can use a rest. But I'll be getting out and about soon.

I'll be leaving Australia soon. Now I know a lot of the things I'd want to see in a later visit, should I return, and I hope I will. But I'll move on to the next adventure, which should be even wilder and rougher.

I am just about out of the cash I've gotten, and I'm going to try not to get more if possible. I don't need to spend money...I have a transit pass and plenty of food. In fact, I probably have more food than I can eat before I leave. So I'll leave whatever I have left in the free food bin, since I probably can't take it on the plane, and don't really have room, even if I could. That will help out new hostelers, and repay the karmic debt I incurred from partaking of free food left behind by others.

Yesterday I went on The Great Ocean Road, which runs along Australia's southern coastline with the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean. Funny how I tried to get to the Arctic Ocean twice, and had to turn around due to attendant circumstances, but getting to the Antarctic Ocean was relatively effortless.

The Great Ocean Road has a widely varying topography. A lot of it runs along the coast, with gorgeous beaches, stunning cliffs, and a variety of artistic rock formations. But much of it also runs inland, through rainforests and gently rolling, striated hills. There are some castle and sheep ranches also.

I took a tour bus, led by Toby, our charming, capable guide, who somewhat resembled a redheaded Brad Pitt. I could have taken a public bus, but with all the stops, it might have taken more than one day. Or I could have rented a car. But getting native guidance and traveling with a group of people made it worth it.

We stopped in a few towns and vistas (I wish we could have made more stops, but it was already a long day with what we did). We took a hike through the rainforest, with massive Southern Ash trees (a type of eucalyptus that grows to stunning sizes, not unlike the California redwoods), and huge ferns with cuplike structures at the top to capture moisture from the rains.

The capstones of the trip were Loch Ard Gorge and the Twelve Apostles, magnificent limestone formations along the beach. Loch Ard is a massive shipwreck tap, and there was a famous shipwreck of the ship Loch Ard that the choice was named after. I hiked all around the area and down into the gorge.  At the Twelve Apostles (which are really much less than twelve, and some have collapsed into the ocean, making even less), we stayed until sunset and got great pics of the sun setting over the rocks.

Pics are on Facebook, sorry I can't post then here. It got dark quickly, and we stopped for dinner, whereupon I spent almost the last of my money, other than a small amount of change. Then I got back to the hostel, and hung out for a short time before crashing.

Melbourne

Well, here I am in Melbourne. I've been here a few days, and have done my usual walkabout through the city. I've checked out the city center thoroughly (referred to here as the CBD), have walked along the river, Victoria Harbour, many of the beaches, and random areas of town. Yesterday I just jumped on a random tram and got off at a random place, and I wasn't disappointed. I'm able to do that because I bought a one-week Myki Pass, which allows me too take as many trams, trains and buses  I want within the city.

I had a transportation pass left over from Sydney with some money on it, and I ended up giving it to a German woman in my hostel room who is headed to Sydney next. Glad that somebody was able to use it.

The hostel here...well, I don't really want to denigrate it; it's a nice place to stay in some ways, but it is grimy, noisy, and the bathrooms are nearly unapproachable. That's saying a lot, because I have a high tolerance for conditions most probably couldn't tolerate. Also, the floors in the bathrooms are super slippery. I've been moving on them like I'm walking on ice; positioning my center of weight directly vertically above my foot and moving slowly and deliberately. A couple of people have told me they fell in the bathroom. You would think they could invest a little in some floor grips.

Also, there are some really messed up things about hostel culture, and this place seems to magnify some of those things. The drunken parties are no big deal to me. But there were a couple of drunken oafs in my suite who just rape cultured all over the place. They were saying really filthy, sexist things, climbing into bed with some of the women in the room in an unwanted fashion, beating on their beds in the middle of the night and jostling them to wake them up, and engaging in other forms of harassment. One woman asked them to please be quiet when they were making massive amounts of noise in the room in the wee hours of the morning (I mostly slept through this, but sort of woke up briefly in the middle of the screaming match); they berated her and called her a cunt, and she rightfully went off on them. She filled me in on the details in the morning, it sounded horrifying and I wish I had been more awake so I could chime in that was not OK. The sad thing is that she had been really helpful to both of them in helping them find job leads in the area she had just come from, and had given them lots of contacts and advice.

But all in all, despite the grime and weirdness, I've met some good people, seen some cool things, and had a good time most of the time.

I've just about given up on posting pictures here. It is an incredible ordeal. The other night, it took me about nine hours to upload three sets of pics and some blog posts, and then two of them just disappeared and all three froze up when I tried to publish them. So I guess my pics will have to just go on Facebook...look there if you want to see images. There is the possibility that I may set up a WordPress blog on a subdomain at some point, but I'll have to take the time to figure that all out, and I don't have a huge amount of confidence that would work better with my slow computer and spotty connections.

Emergency!

So I'm sitting in the hot tub at the hostel, just getting into that relaxing alpha-wave state, when all of a sudden alarms start going off everywhere, and a booming voice comes from the roof,  saying, "EMERGENCY! EVACUATE THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY!"

I'm thinking, "You've got to be fucking kidding." I'm trying to figure out a way that I won't be outside sopping wet, in what I'm using for a bathing suit, but is basically my spandex travel underwear. I dry off as best as I can, and plus outside in the chilly air barefoot, nearly naked, and with clattering teeth.

Then a fire truck shows up. They all clamber in. Then a second fire truck shows up, and they join the crew from the first. After about ten minutes, they told us we could go in. I don't think there was any fire or anything, they just reset the alarm.

I came back in and took a sauna, and now I'm back in my room.

An Interesting and Bizarre Coversation

I just had an interesting conversation (well, conversation is not really the word for it, it was more like a monologue) in the hostel kitchen with a guy from New Zealand who designed solar race cars.  He started with the materials and designs of solar race cars, complete with diagrams and equations that he furiously scribbled as he was talking, and he interspersed that with talk of recumbent bicycle design, US interventionism internationally, corruption in the Philippines, the fabrication techniques of all the devices and things in the hostel kitchen, the difficulty of finding flat spaces in New Zealand, the specific problems with military bidding protocols, how Texas Instruments poisoned their workers, different grades of military aircraft and the folly behind each, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.  He talked a mile a minute in this fashion that was densely packed with concepts, backed up with furious scribblings, and almost devoid of social cues. It was really interesting to listen to this person who had a communication style that was pretty different from the usual.

And now I'm off to explore Canberra.

Arriving in Canberra

Today I took a bus from Sydney to Canberra. The scenery on the way was nice, varying between forests and dry hills.

When I arrived, I found that the hostel was about a kilometer away, so I decided to walk it in full gear, that is with my loaded backpack and incidentals. It was not a bad walk at all. The hostel is nice and the room I'm in is pretty empty and quiet so far.

I walked around looking for a grocery store and I found the Aldi, where I picked up some supplies. Then I returned to the hostel, where I took a hot tub and sauna. I might take it easy on the walking some until my feet stop throbbing. But tomorrow I'll undoubtedly check out the city more.

Canberra is cooler and drier than the places I have been so far. It really feels like fall here, whereas most of the places I've been (except for the Blue Mountains, which were REALLY cold) have felt more like summer. I hear that sunburns down here can be brutal because of the ozone hole. Shane the tour guide said his girlfriend fell asleep at the beach and had third-degree burns and had to get skin grafts.

So I'm just going to chill at the hostel tonight rather than get all jiggy. I'll let my feet test at least for the day. I only walked a little over 6 kms today, and that's good for now.