Melbourne

So I’ve been hesitating to write anything about Melbourne or my life in it because I thought it would be premature to write about the city before I spent a lot of time in it…and because the task of describing an entire city seems daunting. But now it’s been long enough, and as it will be at least a couple weeks before I go traveling again, I’d better get to it.


Melbourne's kind of like New York City, just more affordable, smaller, cleaner, with nicer people and better weather. It's quite culturally diverse, though like the rest of Australia it has a familiar American/British feeling to it. It would go well on the west coast of the US.

Though it's smaller than Sydney by half a million--3.7 million residents here--Melbourne is the place to go in Australia for music, cuisine, art, sports, and just about anything good. Sydney has some beautiful harbors, and apparently there's an opera house, but it's also considered to be a worker's city and is the financial capital of Australia. Ironically, I just read today in a freebee newspaper that more international businessmen prefer to meet in Melbourne than Sydney, presumably so they can get more of a change of scenery.

Marvellous Melbourne gained its wealth from the Australian Gold Rush in the 1850s--right after the American one. Victorian architecture was all the rave back then, so when you go walking around Melbourne today, you'll see old buildings like this mismashed with skyscrapers. It's kind of like Cornell's West Campus, where Gothic meets Alice Cook--except it looks much better.

One of the central hubs of the city is Flinders Street Station and Federation Square. These are right next to each other, Flinders Station pictured below. I've been to a concert at Federation Square, walked to the National Gallery of Victoria, shot an interview on the Yarra River (pictured below), and spent a couple afternoons walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens, all of which are just a couple blocks from the square. If you're meeting someone in Melbourne, chances are you'll choose to meet here.

Those Gardens I mentioned are indisputably the best in Australia and among the best in the world. The central Royal Botanic Gardens are right in the middle of Melbourne, on the Yarra River, and cover 87 acres. There are more Royal Gardens in greater Melbourne, covering 900 acres, and tons of other parks and garden collections, making Melbourne "the garden city." The central Royal gardens grouped according to the environment they emulate—Australian rain forest, “dry” rain forest, California desert, New Zealand collection, Southern Chinese collection, New Caledonia collection--or the plants they contain--Cacti and Succulents, Camellias, Cycad, Eucalypts, Fern Gully, Grey Garden, Herb Garden.... They also have Long Island garden and Water Conservation garden, both of which don't suggest vegetation to me, but whatever.

I haven't taken many pictures of the gardens, not because they aren’t beautiful, but because every acre is so well landscaped that there’s a picture around every corner. Anyway, Melbourne has decided to make the most of a good thing, and there’s always a reason to visit the gardens. Couples treat it like Make Out Central, walkers do their thing (no running allowed; you can use an old carriage trail closer to the river), gardeners take notes of what they see, acting troupes stage performances like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I watched with two hall mates (pictured here), musical artists perform for thousands of fans in the outdoor amphitheatre (a couple weeks ago, Red Hot Chili Peppers), children can enjoy their own fenced in garden as their parents enjoy the sound of silence, and animal lovers keep a lookout for turtles, bats, flying foxes, little sisters, etc.


When Melburnians aren't at the Royal gardens or Federation Square, they're at a sports game. Melbourne is obsessed with sports, particularly "footy" (Australian rules football, see the previous blog entry), and there are usually 35,000 spectators per game of footy... and five games per week (Wikipedia says). But Melburnians also dabble in soccer, rugby, cricket, car racing, tennis, any water sport imaginable, and others. Australia may be sporty, but Melbourne is the national sports capital.


Moving on to transportation, Melbourne, like the rest of Australia, drives on the wrong (left) side of the road. But the quirkiness doesn't stop there. Remember those old electrical trolleys that used to run throughout cities about a hundred years ago? The rest of the world progressed, but Melbourne didn't, and Melburnians think their "trams" are "distinctive." I wouldn't have a problem with their freakishly outdated public transportation if it didn't include cables over every city street. I often feel like I'm caught in a giant spider web when I look up at a street intersection. To be fair, though, Melbourne also uses trains and buses, you can use one "metrocard" to get onto all of them, and the public transportation system is extensive (goes throughout the suburbs) and reasonably clean. If you're unable to walk you can still easily get around in this city.

Melbourne's trams are given a high priority on the road, since they're often packed full of people. Their tracks are in the middle of the road, and car lanes are outside. In some areas, cars can drive in tram lanes. But not in the Central Business District, where I go to school. This creates some strange road rules--such as Hook Turns. To turn left in the CBD, you need to get over to the right lane, wait at the side of the intersection, and when both lanes of traffic have finally stopped, you cross all lanes to turn right. Only in Melbourne.




There are so many Asians in Melbourne that sometimes I feel like I never left Cornell. There's a big Asian influence in Australia in general, given its geography, and Melbourne's Chinatown is one incarnation of it. Great atmosphere, cheap restaurants.

And last but certainly not least, I have just been made aware of the "Melbourne Shuffle," an underground dance movement that's been going on here for decades. I haven't seen the shuffle in person, but when I do, you can rest assured that I will certainly point and laugh. It looks like the unwanted combination of break dancing and river dancing, with an emphasis on unwanted. Hope you enjoy the video. Just don't try this at home.

Belated Easter Eggs

Great Barrier Reef, Cairns, Daintree Rainforest, Waterfalls

Lotsa pictures! And some videos!

These three are courtesy of Agnes, French fry extraordinaire. I stole them from her blog, which you can access via one of the links on the left side of my blog. See "Other Blogs." Anyway, these are from the Grampians trip, where we were all forced to sing our national anthems. The Americans did pretty well, considering Francis Scott Key was a $*&^% for setting his lyrics to such a difficult song. Cedric got up, after singing the French national anthem with Agnes and Maud, and did a ditty of his own. I think it's called L'hymne breton.



Also had a didgeridoo player who demonstrated how versatile his instrument is, with a little imagination. Here he imitates a kangaroo.



Agnes also got a wombat hopping about on camera. Those huge birds in the background aren't ostriches (wrong continent), they're emus. Closely related to the cassowaries I saw in Cairns. Both have incredibly sharp talons and no sense of humor.



And this last clip is very recent. Yesterday afternoon I went to a footy game with German Christina. "Footy," or Australian rules football, is just like American football, except without padding and or any discernible rules. The point starts when the ref throws the ball into the ground and any number of players try to catch it or bat it away on the rebound. No more than 18 players from each team are allowed to participate in this organized chaos at any one time. Players tackle each other all the time, and generally treat the green like one big Slip 'n' Slide. Final scores were Fremantle 21.11 (137) to Melbourne 13.14 (92), capping off two hours of total bewilderment on my part. (I would have tried to learn the rules, but I don't know American Football rules, so comparisons would have been lost on me.)

I WILL talk about Australian culture and Melbourne...I swear. So, my one faithful reader, keep hanging in there.

Sinking the Loch Ard

Occasionally I find myself doing school work in Australia, though it doesn't really compare to Ithaca. This Thursday I have two presentations coming up, one of them about the Shipwreck Coast (Great Ocean Road area). The Coast gets its name from its coral reefs, jagged cliffs, rough seas, poor visibility, and its location on the Bass Straight. Ye olde tyme sailors referred to sailing through the Straight as "threading the needle" because there was so little room for error. The sinking of the Loch Ard is probably the most famous wreck on the coast, though it is one of only 800. Fifty-two people died when it sank, but they were British, so don't worry.

While researching articles I found one that tried to make the sinking sound particularly gripping. I'd like to share it, with some of my own embellishments.

The Loch Ard was almost 263 feet long, 38 feet wide, and weighed 1693 tons. It was a three-masted square rigged shipped that was built out of iron. It had been built in Scotland in 1873, but usually sailed out of England.

This fateful journey began on March 2, 1878, a day that will forever life in infamy, or something close to it. Young Captain Gibbs, a newly married man in the prime of his short 29 year life, knew nothing of the terror that awaited him three months later. Neither did the 53 other passengers and crew, who you can be assured were as pretty as Angelina Jolie, and as innocent as Michael Jackson’s boy toys.

On the night of May 31 the travelers held a party to celebrate the anticipated end of their journey. Little Tom Pearce danced for the amusement of the lovely Miss Eva Carmichael. Even though he was just a sailor, and she was the daughter of a wealthy philanthropist, he spent his waking hours dreaming of her. Would she ever notice him?

As Eva lay in bed that night, she thought of how much she loved her family, and how empty she would feel without them. She roused herself out of bed and checked on her parents and siblings, who were peacefully sleeping, safe and sound. FOR NOW….

Captain Gibbs spent a sleepless night awake at the wheel. He kept looking to see the Otway Lighthouse in the distance, but the fates seemed to be against him, and a thick fog rolled in, as if on cue. At 4am the fog lifted enough for one of the crew to cry out in an anguished voice that he could already see breakers, which is a very bad thing to see. The unwelcoming cliffs of Mutton Bird Island came into view, and little Captain Giblet realized that he had seriously effed things up. He tried to turn the ship around, but it lost momentum as it came about, and the bow turned back to the cliffs. The crew dropped their anchors to stabilize their boat and prevent it from going any further inland. The port bow anchor caught, water slopped over the poop deck, and lovely Eva was thrown up into the aft starboard mizzen rigging. The bow swung around, the boat was pointing away from the cliffs, and Captain Gibbs unfurled the sails to tack out to sea. Passengers and crew rejoiced. They would all survive this horrible ordeal!

JUST THEN the hull of the boat struck a reef half a mile off of Mutton Bird Island. “Waves broke over the ship and the top deck was loosened from the hull. The masts and rigging came crashing down knocking passengers and crew overboard. It took time to free the lifeboats and when one was finally launched, it crashed into the side of the Loch Ard and capsized. Tom Pearce, who had launched the boat, managed to cling to its overturned hull and shelter beneath it. He drifted out to sea and then on the flood tide came into what is now known as Loch Ard Gorge. He swam to shore, bruised and dazed, and found a cave in which to shelter.

“Some of the crew stayed below deck to shelter from the falling rigging but drowned when the ship slipped off the reef into deeper water.

“Eva Carmichael had raced onto deck to find out what was happening only to be confronted by towering cliffs looming above the stricken ship. In all the chaos, Captain Gibbs grabbed Eva and said, ‘if you are saved Eva, let my dear wife know that I died like a sailor.’ That was the last Eva Carmichael saw of the Captain. She was swept off the ship by a huge wave.

“Clinging to a spar, the young woman spent five hours in the water until she too was swept into Loch Ard Gorge. She saw Tom Pearce on a small rocky beach and yelled to attract his attention. He dived in and swam to the exhausted woman and dragged her to shore. He took her to the cave and broke open a case of brandy which had washed up on the beach. He opened a bottle to revive the unconscious woman.

“A few hours later Tom scaled a cliff in search of help. He followed hoof prints and came by chance, upon two men from nearby Glenample Station three and a half miles away. In a state of exhaustion, he told the men of the tragedy. Tom returned to the Gorge while the two men rode back to the station to get help.”

And that, my friends, is the mostly true story of the Loch Ard’s last voyage. The wreckage can still be seen to this day and is accessible to scuba divers. Other artifacts, including a Minton porcelain peacock and floor tiles, are on display at the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum in Warrnambool. Whatever happened to Tom and Eva, the sole survivors? Well, I’ll tell you. Tom was given a hero’s welcome in Melbourne: one thousand pounds from the Victorian government, a gold medal from the Royal Humane Society of Victoria, and numerous concerts to honor him and others who lost family members in the Loch Ard disaster. Eva spent six weeks convalescing at the Glenample Station. When her health had returned, she bid Tom adieu and left for Ireland, this time on a steamship.

Great Barrier Reef!

THE PLAN had been to either check out the Great Barrier Reef or New Zealand for Easter break. But I had been offered a tour of NZ by a Kiwi friend at the end of the semester, and my break was only a week—not long enough to really explore a new country.

Some other friends were originally looking at the reef—the two French girls, the German couple, this American girl—but plans fell through when push came to shove, and France stayed in Melbourne to save money, while Germany went westward to Perth. America did go to the reef, but her boyfriend was meeting her there. “We’re not like one of THOSE couples,” she promised, though she later admitted “He’s the ONE!” I discreetly gagged and told her I’d see her when she returned to Melbourne.

So it was that only two weeks before break I planned my unintentionally solo trip to Cairns, one of the popular hubs to access the Reef. The trip actually wasn’t bad at all, and I met some good people.

Cairns has pretty much tried to become what tourists expect for a small city that straddles two natural wonders—the Reef and the Daintree Rain Forest—plenty of hotels, hostels, dining for every budget, and every other shop sells postcards or is a “tourist information centre,” usually affiliated with some tour companies. It's located pretty far north on Australia's east coast, so tourists expect a bright sun and white snady beaches. The sun’s bright enough, but underneath the imported sand you’ll find mudflats. So Cairns also installed a “lagoon,” or “big fancy swimming pool,” where lifeguards are on duty from dawn to dusk and anyone can swim for free. My travel book told me there were supposed to be topless bathers there, but I was disappointed.

My first three days were spent on the reef with other snorkelers and divers. I had passed up the chance to take a 4-5 day scuba certification course because it would have involved two days in a pool before I got out to the open water, and I only had 8 days in Cairns. This was a bit of a mistake, as guided introductory dives are expensive, and scuba certification lasts a lifetime. Something to remember if you find yourself at the Reef.

Anyway, I found scuba to be pretty lame, considering dives tended to last only a half hour, while I was allowed to snorkel for an hour at a time. Also, I saw the exact same stuff snorkeling as diving, and the colors of the reef were much more apparent in shallower waters where the sun could penetrate. When you dive you're supposed to conserve your air supply and move around slowly--you also don't want nitrogen to boil out of your blood, another reason for limiting your vertical motion. By snorkeling I could dart around as much as I wished, chase sharks, and dive under my own air as fast as I wanted. Finally, flippers are cool because they let the weakest people (me) pretend they can swim butterfly. After a day I was convinced that scuba diving is just the couch potato’s snorkeling, and my opinion hasn’t changed.

I didn’t bother renting an underwater camera, because I did the next best thing and bought 300 digital diving pics for $10. The pictures below are a pretty adequate representation of what I saw.

Lots of different corals, anemones, 3 sharks, 3 stingrays, a couple turtles, giant clams (second picture), sea cucumbers (third picture. This animal regurgitates its organs if it feels threatened and breathes through its anus. And you thought your breath was bad), and lots of small fish. According to the convenient labels on these pics, most of the fish I saw were broadstripe fusiliers (first pic), false clownfish (sixth pic), parrotfish (seventh), moorish idols (eighth), and yellow tail fusiliers (ninth), among some others.

I had to include the sepia turtle picture, because it turns out that the color of underwater shots are pretty arbitrary. Most of your pictures will look blue-green. One person told me he adds more red to his pictures, another guy just lets Picasa alter the colors. This is supposed to bring out the “natural colors,” which of course you don’t see naturally. Whenever you see a postcard or inviting picture of the Reef, you can bet your behind that the colors have been intensified to look more inviting. They aren’t completely misleading, but you’d only be able to see such beautiful colors at very shallow depths and with great water visibility. Personally I think the shark and giant clam pics are the closest approximations to the colors I saw on the reef, at depths of three to twenty-five feet, and visibility from four to ten feet.

Some reef highlights: three friends from Hong Kong, two chiropractors from Seattle who had just sold their practice and were taking a year off for travel, an alleged Chief Financial Officer from Denver who would speak around a mouth full of food, an alleged law firm owner who sported bangs and spoke grammatically incorrect English... and the sort of games that twenty year olds can contrive using only four decks of cards, a dozen spoons, and two bananas.

Then two days in a rental car with a German, Marco, I met while diving. Germans are everywhere in Australia. Over in Germany I bet the social security system is collapsing, because all the twenty year olds that should be working or studying are abroad in Australia. There are probably more Germans than sheep here, and that's saying something. Anyway, Marco and I got along well enough, and being social for two days saved me $100 for the car.

First day we checked out the sites to the south and east of Cairns, which includes a bunch of waterfalls, a cheese factory (we didn't make it), Innisfail, Mission Beach, a crocodile farm, and other things. Millaa millaa falls weren't that large but were still stunning. They would look good in Ithaca.

Crocodile farms are located throughout the wetter parts of Australia, and probably owe much of their popularity to Paul Hogan, Steve Irwin, and Steve Irwin's infant children, whom he dangled in front of crocs like Michael Jackson did with his kids off that balcony. I don't mean to say that all crocs are pure evil, but most of them are, and it looks like this little one will be, too.

If I had more presence of mind, I would have taken a video of one of the newer adult crocs. Many crocs are captured and sent to farms if they show aggressive behavior to humans. The owner of this farm caught a 16 footer about thirty years ago that was responsible for the deaths of 45 to 50 full grown cattle. No joke. He's been named "Gregory," and the owner will lie on Gregory's back at the slightest provocation. If you ask the owner why one of his legs has two noticeable scars, he'll tell you that the smaller one is from Gregory (he was laying on him with his legs within biting distance, which the owner now admits was "a bit foolish"), and the larger one is from his doctor.

I did manage to take a clip of an incredibly well-trained croc, Graham. While most crocs will lie perfectly still while they're contemplating killing something, when they've made up their mind they can move pretty quickly. Graham, meanwhile, moves like an old dog.



Also on the farm were cassowaries, huge flightless birds related to emus and African ostriches. They're kind of like great grandparents, because they have a plate in their head, they're endangered, and they have incredibly wrinkly necks.

They also had roos, peacocks, snakes, lizards, and the like. But never let an Australian crocodile farmer to make you into "A Real Australian Man," because this involves putting a python down your pants and having "A Real Australian Lady," in my case a nice British girl named Jenny, fish it out for you. Marco and I were still cracking jokes about this long after we left the farm. Then I realized that a crazy, pudgy, sixty year old Australian farmer had been able to convince a girl to get into my pants much, much faster than I would have been able to alone. I mentioned this to Marco and we drove on in silence, contemplating some of life's injustices.

Then onto Mission Beach, which looked amazing, but my camera was dying, so this is one of the only pictures. Imagine a very long and slowly curving beach with mountains behind and islands in front, with a rainforest coming right up to the perfectly soft sand.


The next day we decided we wanted to spend less time in the car, so we went North from Cairns up to Port Douglas, which has many great beaches where you can usually swim, or in our case, just look at the water. The "stinger" (jellyfish) nets had been removed on account of the strong wind, which meant the water was probably writhing with stingers and saltwater crocs. Sharks too.






Spent the afternoon at Mossman Gorge, another natural wonder that belongs in Ithaca. There were some amazing mountains on the way there.


To wrap this up, also spent some time in the Daintree Rainforest, really an amazing place, World Heritage Area, etc. This forest has been pretty much unchanged since Australia was part of the supercontinent Gondwana about a million bijillion years ago. I wished Jake Barnett, my fanatical biology friend, was with me to explain everything. As it was, all the info went in one ear and out the other. I think these pictures feature the Hercules moth, world's biggest, Boyd's forest dragon (the lizard), mangrove trees, the Daintree River, and the sort of vines Tarzan would have swung on, among others.



Then one last day in Cairns on Fitzroy island, to do some more hiking and snorkelling.



That's all, folks! Back in Melbourne.