Australia and new zealand photos
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2003
1
56
70
Trip End
Feb 14, 2006
Banking town, Madagascar
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Other than my sometimes rough reintegration into 'civilization,' though, the trip really was great. It started with a night at the apartment of Avril Alba, a staff member at my university's Hillel until my junior year; it was really nice to see her, and to spend the day at the outdoor mall near her house! My parents and sister arrived the next day, and we flew on to Auckland, NZ. My mother adored Auckland, but in all honesty, I best remember the grocery store. :c) After a day in Auckland, we drove to a city called Rotorua by way of some glowworm caves, filled with incredible little buggers, found only in New Zealand, that glow blue to attract the tiny flying things they eat. The caves reminded me of a planetarium with blue stars - just gorgeous.
Rotorua features bubbling hot springs and geysers (the smell of which had my family gagging, but I didn't notice) and a great Maori cultural show. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, and unlike their counterparts in the US and Australia, they are completely integrated and celebrated in white NZ culture. Lots of signs on the north island, which has 90% of the Maori population, are in both English and Maori and, in Rotorua, we stumbled on an outdoor concert that featured both popular (NZ Idol winners, for one) and Maori acts, and that drew about the entire population of the town. It's a great model for how things should be in other parts of the world.
From Rotorua, we flew to Queenstown, a ridiculous but quite fun tourist trap on the south island. Queenstown is one of NZ's major centers for adventure sports; I wanted to try hang-gliding, but the most adventurous we actually got was riding a 'jet boat,' which can ride through about an inch of water and turn 360 degrees in its own length. Not as cool as hang-gliding, but we did get a thrill out of some very close shaves with river canyon walls. We also took a day trip to a beautiful bay, where we took a boat ride and saw gorgeous waterfalls and fur seals; on the way there and back, we also saw a bunch more breath-taking waterfalls and some of the mountains where Lord of the Rings was filmed.
We rented a car in Queenstown and drove north along the west coast, a beautiful (if slightly harrowing) trip as my father negotiated the left lane of winding mountain roads. Our destination was a tiny town that's the base point for trips to climb Fox Glacier, a half-day hike that includes wearing cramp-ons (metal boot attachments that dig into the ice) - I felt so cool! The hike was deemed too rigorous for my parents, but Jen and I had a good time, particularly getting photos with one of the ice picks the guides use to carve temporary steps into the glacier. The best part for me, though, was the glacier's blue glow - I could have stared for hours longer.
We then took a cross-island train to Christchurch, a lovely city on the east coast that made me really nostalgic for Cambridge. We looked at the botanical gardens and greenhouses, then found a teddy bear picnic and it was Jen's turn to be nostalgic.
From Christchurch, we flew to Melbourne, where we took a couple of day trips out to kangaroo and koala country. One of these day trips was a group tour with an Arkansas ranching couple, a cigar-chomping, Bush-extolling man and mullet-haired woman, who comprised an endless source of entertainment for our family but ended up becoming our friends. At a kangaroo petting zoo, I saw and asked about the duck-like birds that were the bane of my existence (or one of them) during Peace Corps training, as the family next door to mine raised about 30 of them; the aggressive, hissing, hideous black birds with lumpy red faces are "dookitra" in Malagasy but muscavy, apparently, in English. We also had a run-in with a nest of bull ants that left my dad slightly hysterical (he thought he might be allergic to them) but fine. Best of all, in my opinion, was a trip to the "Penguin Parade," where bleachers are set up on the beach for tourists to watch the daily return of a couple hundred tiny penguins from the ocean to their nests on land.
After the day trips, we made a three-day loop to small towns along the coast near Melbourne, where we saw lots more kangaroos, wallabies, and silver-crested cockatoos.
We also stopped every few miles along the coast to check out a different water-carved rock formation, most of them arches with the ocean spectacularly running around and through them. Our last night in Melbourne, I dragged my family on a search for Jewish food, which I'd been craving my whole time in Madagascar, and reveled in the matzo ball soup and blintzes we finally found in a German restaurant.
My sister then flew to Sydney for her semester abroad orientation and my parents and I flew to Cairns, in the northeast of Australia. Cairns is a beach resort town that's also the closest major city to the Great Barrier Reef. We spent our first day in Cairns back in the grocery store, which still held endless wonder for me, and then sat in a park by the beach watching the hoards of young couples with babies and dogs. The second day was snorkeling (and diving for my dad) on the Reef which was, of course, fantastic - the largest coral and some of the most amazing fish I've ever seen (with a fair amount of snorkeling under my belt.) We next went for a rainforest tour, where we had a lunch that featured exotic fruits (including something called "mamy surposi," or something like that, that tasted just like sweet potato casserole), got caught in a pouring rainstorm (lots of the other tourists were upset, but duh, it's the rainforest), and heard several make-you-want-to-bang-your-head-against-the-wall stories from the guide about Australian environmental errors. For instance, dingoes are wild dogs that sometimes eat livestock and very, very rarely, people. The government succumbed to pressure from farmers and worried parents and culled the dingo population. Dingoes eat wild pigs, so the pig population went way up; wild pigs eat sea turtle eggs, so the turtle population went way down; and sea turtles eat the box jellyfish, the deadliest jellyfish in the world, that populate Cairns beaches. So the population of jellyfish exploded, killing exponentially more people than the dingoes ever could. Durr.
From Cairns, my parents and I flew to Sydney and met up with my sister. We got to see her room (in the Jewish dorm) in her school for the semester, the University of New South Wales. The school is huge but lovely, close to great beaches and downtown Sydney. We went to the city's conservative synagogue for Friday-night services and dinner, which was absolutely wonderful for me; along with Jewish food, I've been craving services and Jewish community my whole time in Madagascar. We also went to two different shows, the amusing-in-its-awfulness Dirty Dancing: The Musical and the mostly-good The Lion King. More entertaining than the two put together (and free!) was an outdoor short film festival that attracted several thousand young people with wine, brie, and lawn chairs; the films were generally fabulous and the atmosphere was great (reminding me of Boston's Carmen on the Common, for those who were there.)
My parents flew out a day before I did, and I spent the last afternoon with Jen at Bondi Beach and the last evening at a Mexican restaurant (something that would make a killing off Madagascar PCVs if one existed in this country.) Saying goodbye to all three of them was really tough, but I had one more night of vacation to look forward to: a paid-for layover in Mauritius, courtesy of the country's airline. Incredibly, they put me up in a gorgeous hotel right on the beach (with craggy green mountains framing the view) with buffet dinner and breakfast thrown in. The rooms also received South African tv, so I watched an episode of Kelly Osborne's My So-Called Life-esque teen drama and actually enjoyed it. On the Sydney-Mauritius flight, I'd noticed a young man wearing a Madagascar tee-shirt and made friends with him and his fiancée, who both work in Tana; they had the same layover, so we swam in the ocean and had our meals together, which was great.
Then back to Tana and Peace Corps. I certainly was sad to leave my family and the developed world, but I was actually glad to get back here; I only have 10 months left, and there's still a lot I want to do and people I want to spend time with. More on that next time, though!
The last thing I wanted to mention is that the internet connection at my site is down, so I won't be able to respond to emails as quickly as I used to. Keep writing, though, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Love, Jessica
*****
And now, some legalese:
The opinions expressed and experiences described in this travelogue are those of one individual Peace Corps Volunteer. Nothing written here should be interpreted as official or unofficial Peace Corps literature or as sanctioned by the Peace Corps. I have chosen to write about my experience online in order to update family and friends; I am earning no money whatsoever from this endeavor.
