I've wandered around some good geology sites, I've been confused by the southern stars, I've visited the Sydney Opera House, and last weekend I finished the list of reasons to visit Australia: I've seen koalas and kangaroos!  (This does NOT, however, mean that I'm done seeing Australia, and should come home just because I've finished the list of top reasons to visit Australia.)

Last Sunday, Richard, Bianca, Bianca's roommate Kat, and I took a half-hour train ride out to the Symbio Wildlife Park.  Australia has many standard zoos, but it also has an abundance of privately-owned wildlife parks that are way more hands-on.  We quite happily joined the large number of children under the age of six in all of the hands-on parts.

There were a lot of animals you could pet easily, and some, like peacocks, even wandered freely around the park.

The park focused on Australian animals, and they seemed to have all the requisite stereotypical ones aside from a platypus.  They did, however, have the other monotreme - the echidna - who was very cute!  He never stood still. 

They had an aviary that you could go into, with all sorts of parrots and such flying around.  Richard got the cockatoos to quite clearly say "hello" to him.  In one corner was a tawny frogmouth, which looked very much like an owl.  As we watched, a rainbow lorikeet landed directly on his head and spent quite a while sitting there.  We have absolutely no idea why.  We were then watching some lorikeets that were walking on the ground by one of the cages.  I bent down and held out my hand, and one of them jumped on.  Then he flew to my head, and two more simultaneously landed on my backpack.  Nobody else in our group could coax a lorikeet to climb onto them... I must have been wearing the right colors or something!

 Then we went to a reptile show, during which we could not hear the presenter all the time because of sheep and goats bleating outside (we're not sure why sheep and goats were displayed at the animal park with wombats and Tasmanian devils, but apparently they were).  The presenters brought out a turtle and a couple of lizards that we all got to pet, and then they introduced us to Ollie, the olive python.  At the end we could all stand in line and get a chance to hold Ollie, and we quite readily joined the line of small children for this opportunity.  He was really a very nice python.

My favorite part of the park was the kangaroo area.  There's a whole lot of kangaroos - I'd guess at least 20 or 30 - that just hop around freely in an area where visitors can come in and pet them.  Kangaroos are soft!  They gave us paper bags full of dried grass to feed the kangaroos.  Kat had about three of them around her when one abruptly grabbed her bag of food, tore it open, and spread grass all over Kat.  It then proceeded to eat from Kat's shirt.  Their claws are sharp, but they certainly weren't looking to hurt us.  And we got to see one with a joey in its pouch!  We spent quite a while playing with the kangaroos.

 At the end we went to a talk on koalas, and then they took us into a cage with two koalas who were awake for feeding time (they do sleep a lot!).  We all got to go up and pet the koalas.  They are also quite soft, but they don't smell particularly good.  They are, however, quite cute!

Around Wollongong

Weerona

A lot of people refer to Australia simply as "Oz."  It's perhaps fitting.  Though in many ways Australia does not feel that foreign, in other ways it feels like the kind of world one would only find in a fantasy film.  The natural world in Australia seems so wild and different from back home - from the jungle-like calls and bright colors of the parrots to the predominance of marsupials in the animal kingdom to the tree fern outside my second-story window. 

Wollongong is more of a city than I've ever lived in, but it doesn't defeat the wild feel of Australia, and the University of Wollongong campus, in particular, does a great job keeping the natural world around.  I thought people (or, more to the point, my mother) would enjoy seeing what it's like around Wollongong where I'm living. 

Weerona's main courtyard

I live in Weerona, which is just a standard dorm complex.  We have three different buildings (blocks) connected by a courtyard, with a front office and a dining room.  Three or four options are available for dinner and we pack sandwiches for lunch when we go to breakfast.  The food seems familiarly American or British, aside from an ample supply of vegemite available for toast.  I have a single room on the second floor of B-Block, with, as I mentioned, a tree fern that brushes up against my window.  In the morning the birds emphatically wake me up with repetitive, loud cries that are hard to sleep through.  I've noticed that students here get up earlier in general than Colgate students - I think it's just because nobody can sleep through all of the bird calls. 

Pond at the botanical gardens

Weerona, and all of the residential colleges, are separate from the university campus, referred to simply as "uni."  It takes me about twenty minutes to walk from college to uni.  There is a good bus system that is nice on rainy days, but I really enjoy the walk (or bike ride) to class.  If I detour by about a block, I can walk through the botanical gardens, which are spectacular and huge.  I haven't really explored them fully yet - but I definitely enjoy wandering through and seeing all of the plants and birds.  They're very spacious, usually not crowded at all (which is kind of sad, actually), and the exit is right at the bus stop next to uni.

The building where I work

Little creek in the middle of campus

The campus itself is one of the prettier ones I've ever been on.  There are several small duck ponds, with ducks tame enough that you can walk up to them and pet them, though they tend to hiss a bit, and nibble.  The girl I'm working with in lab said that a few of them will even sit on her lap sometimes.  The ponds have been naturally colonized by large freshwater eels, which apparently manage to wriggle across the grass somehow to get to new ponds.  There are little creeks connecting the ponds in places, and they've done a great job keeping thick greenery around the campus.  Apparently they tried to make it so you can never see more than two buildings at a time - that is, they want enough greenery around to block your view of buildings so the campus doesn't seem too developed. 

Mount Keira

Along the trail up Mount Keira

A three-minute walk to the west from campus brings you to the beginning of a trail leading up Mount Keira, a 500-meter peak, which is part of the Illawarra escarpment.  About two weeks into the semester, several of us spent a Sunday morning climbing it together.  There are an impressive number of steps that are tiring enough for me.  But the trail is beautiful, cutting through a lush forest full of ferns, eucalypts, and woody vines.  Eventually the trail connects with a road, and this leads up to an overlook over the city.

Walking twenty minutes in the opposite direction from campus brings you to a harbor with lots of moored sailboats (though, apparently, nobody in all of Australia rents out small sailboats...) and two lighthouses.  You can walk along a bike trail in either direction to get to beaches.  Headed to the north, you come to a rock pool, with man-made walls but filled naturally by the tide.  It is about four feet deep all the way through, and there's a palpable swell, but the walls make it safe and easy to swim in (though you may be joined by a few fish).  I went swimming at the end of flood week.  Australians thought this was crazy - it's mid-winter here.  But since that means it's usually in the mid-sixties and sunny, it doesn't seem so bad to me!  Continuing from the rock pool brings you along a beach full of interesting pebbles (including petrified wood from the Illawarra Coal Measures) and lots of shells.  This gives way to a rocky tidal pool area, and finally to a sandy beach that the surfers enjoy. 

I was able to get a cheap but nice bicycle off of the Uni Classifieds a couple weeks ago, and finally got to explore the bike trail along the beach.  It continues for about five miles from North Beach, leaving the coast to follow some roads, but soon returning.  At the end is a really beautiful beach that I had a lot of fun wandering.  Better yet, it was a five-mile ride each way, and there were no hills to speak of.  Definitely a nice way to relax!

I'll have some more interesting pictures to post soon, but that will have to wait until after my geomorph test this week!

The real reason to come to Australia

I learned the top reasons people go to Australia at an astronomy talk by Ranger Kevin Poe at Bryce.  If I remember his list correctly, the top reasons were to see the Sydney Opera House, koalas and kangaroos, and the southern stars - or that was the essence of it.  (Incidentally, the southern stars seriously disorient me.  It's easy to forget I'm in an unfamiliar hemisphere until I look up at the sky at night and don't recognize what's above me.  Someday I should do something about that... the recognition, I mean.  It would be difficult to change the southern sky.)

Anyway, that's not the point.  The point is that Ranger Kevin Poe missed what is, in my book, the best reason to go to Australia.  And that is, of course, the geology (I hope you guessed that).  I've only gotten to see a few good sites so far, but this stuff is seriously cool.

Wollongong is in the Sydney Basin, tucked alongside the low mountains of the Illawarra Escarpment.  The area is rich in coal seams, unusual minerals, and intriguing landform features.  I can walk twenty minutes to North Beach, wander around in a pebbly area, and pick up plenty of petrified wood that came out of the Illawarra Coal Measures.  And that's on a public beach.

Imbricated boulders

A couple weeks ago I was in the right place at the right time to sign up for the student geology club and grab the last seat on the bus to go see some interesting sedimentary deposits in Jervis Bay and nearby areas.  The only thing that I've heard about Jervis Bay is that it's beautiful, and nobody had lied to me when they'd said that.  It did not disappoint, complete with classic crescent beaches and a dolphin playing just offshore. 

Twinned glendonite crystals

There's controversy about whether some very striking deposits in the area were the result of major storms or of a tsunami.  Some of those deposits include imbricated boulders - 10-20 tons each.  A deposit is "imbricated" when the rocks line up in a preferred direction.  This is often seen in small rocks and pebbles in streambeds.  But it would take a heck of a lot of energy to do that to boulders.  In another area we saw glendonite crystals, which are pseudomorphs after ikaite - that is, they are minerals that replaced crystals that had previously formed in the area.  Ikaite only occurs at temperatures less than 4˚C, so it is an excellent paleotemperature indicator.  The crystals were sticking up out of the rock on the beach, and could sometimes reach six or eight inches long.  At another site we saw spectacular Permian fossils - bryozoans, brachiopods, gastropods, and others. 

Kiama SS (bottom) and Bumbo flow

My favorite geology, though, is at Kiama and  Bombo.  Bombo is just north of Kiama, a couple bays over.  I'm spending the semester doing research with Professor Paul Carr, and my field site is at Bombo.  It really doesn't feel like a field site - it's way too convenient.  There's easy access from the train station and highway, and it's right next to Kiama, which has all the amenities you could wish.

Wall remnant with dike

Paul took Adam Burnett and I out to see the area around the site during the first week of classes, and I'll highlight some of the cooler bits.  We started in the Bumbo Latite, a basalt flow overlying the Kiama Sandstone in a fantastic, clean contact (the units in the area are about 260Ma).  We wandered around an old basalt quarry, where they'd left walls sticking up to block the spray from the sea.  The leftover walls have spectacular columnar jointing.  Running through the area are at least five dikes dating to 200Ma that come up between the columnar joints, sometimes making right angle turns to go through cracks.  The large and beautiful xenocrysts have been identified as originating from the lower crust/upper mantle, about 70km down in the earth. 

Altered breccia (including black calcite)

Then we went over to see some aspects of the Blowhole Latite, not far away.  There are three separate flows within this basalt unit, with the middle one being the most interesting.  The lava was emplaced in a shallow marine environment, so in some places interaction with cold seawater caused the basalt to crack and break apart into a volcanic breccia, which has since been hydrothermally altered into a truly fantastic mess.  There are lots of colorful minerals, such as green chlorite and orange hematite, that have replaced material or filled in the cracks.  Vugs are full of beautifully-crystallized quartz, calcite, and the white bladed clay mineral laumontite. Some of the calcite is black, which is bizarre, so we've sampled that and are planning to do some analysis on it (some of it is bubbling away in hydrochloric acid as I write this).

In addition to the breccia, the middle flow has spectacular infilled lava tubes.  These formed when lava was flowing in channels, in which the outside cooled but the insides were warm enough to continue flowing through the tube.  In some places in the world these tubes then empty out and end up hollow, but here the lava inside cooled enough to keep them filled in.  And they're huge - apparently getting to 20m across in some spots.  I'm in the picture next to one of them for scale.

Little Blowhole

The last thing Paul showed us were two blowholes - the large one in Kiama, and the Little Blowhole just to the south.  The smaller one was going the best that day, and looked rather like a geyser.  I loved the sound of it, as well - as the water bounced around under the blowhole, it made such a low-frequency noise that you felt it more than you heard it.

Last weekend the Colgate group went out to see the geology at Bombo, and I got to help lead the trip.  It was definitely exciting to me!!  And I think most people were at least marginally interested.   At very least it's an absolutely gorgeous area, and they enjoyed seeing that.

Flow tube cross-section

My field site, however, is down on a platform at water level, and floods at high tide (you can see the platform down to the left in the picture above showing the contact between the Bumbo flow and Kiama sandstone).  I've been to Bombo five times now and we were only able to get down to the platform for the first time this week - and weren't able to stay long, at that.  For some unknown reason, when the Bumbo flow was emplaced over wet sediments, it seems that the fluids in the sediments escaped in discrete horizontal tubes.  This isn't normal, and there are a host of mysteries surrounding the tubes.  It's like a huge puzzle with, for the most part, very clear-cut pieces that just don't fit together.  If we figure it out it will be amazingly cool, but we may not find anything at all.  Who knows.  In the meantime lab = life, with most of my time spent crushing rock samples. 

A note on Australian geologists.  There is a truly inexorable force that operates on all Australian geologists at about 10:30 every morning.  Around that time, no matter where they are, what they're doing, how many samples are left to be collected, or how much the tide is threatening the field site, they break for morning tea.  It is phenomenally consistent.  When there's no nice coffee shop in the area, they sense this in advance and come prepared with thermoses of coffee and tea and enough mugs for everyone.  I've astounded many by the fact that I drink neither coffee nor tea, but I gladly accept hot chocolate, which redeems me a little.  But only a little.  Not to sound like I'm criticizing - I rather enjoy this practice.  It seems very civilized to me, and it comes at a nice time for a break. 

Two Saturdays in Sydney

One thing everyone is supposed to do in Australia is to see the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge.  I actually find this a little bizarre - I don't think of Australia when I think about great opera, and yet it is a theatre first and foremost meant for opera with a big bridge in the background that often comes to mind when Australia is mentioned.  However, Wikipedia readily supplies a list of 81 Australian opera singers that rate an entry.  There are 588 listed for the US.  If you do the math, Australia seems to have twice the concentration of opera singers that rate a Wikipedia entry based on total population.  But regardless of the concentration of famous Australian opera singers, the Sydney Opera House is indeed impressive, though not as bright white as we had expected.

We flew into the Sydney airport when we arrived, but didn't actually see any of the city until the Saturday at the end of flood week when we went with our Colgate class.  Weerona was supposed to go that day, as well, but canceled because of rain and cold.  It was a warm and beautiful day.

We started out at the Australian Museum, which now rates high on my list of favorite museums.  It's a very old museum, founded in 1845, though planning and collections began in 1821.  This was around the time that people were suddenly discovering how interesting Australia is and forming various scientific societies to discover more about it.  Many famous scientists - James Dwight Dana and Charles Darwin among them - visited Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

The museum now is thoroughly packed with specimens and displays, ranging from a high-tech digital table display meant to scare you as snakes and spiders crawl out of nowhere to virtually attack your fingers, to a very old room of skeletons, including a domestic scene with a skeleton man sitting in a chair, his skeleton dog on the floor and bird in a birdcage, and a skeleton cat chasing a skeleton mouse.  One whole room is dedicated to mounted insects and stuffed birds, which are stuffed into the cases to fit them all in.  The stuffed mammals were also fantastic, and included realistic renditions of the thylacine (tasmanian tiger) and the diprotodon (giant wombat).  It seemed sometimes they had specimens that they really liked but couldn't fit in a display, so every once in a while you'd see a stuffed dingo peeking out from behind a pole or a stuffed wombat watching you from under a shelf. 

I of course loved the mineral room, and we spent a lot of time in the dinosaur room.  Looking at a display on eggs, I noticed that the Australian Museum was displaying precisely the same model of an oviraptor embryo that is in the Colgate geology museum.  Bianca pointed to the egg cast next to it and proclaimed that it looked precisely like the dinosaur egg that Colgate is lucky enough to possess.  I expressed my doubt that a cast of our egg would have ended up in Sydney, but she snapped a picture and we compared it to the pictures of the Colgate egg later.  After corresponding with several Colgate geology faculty members, it does seem that for some bizarre, unknown reason there is indeed a cast of the Colgate dinosaur egg in the Australian Museum in Sydney.  The best guess is that the egg was cast by the Natural History Museum in the US before Colgate came to possess it in 1924. 

I could have spent the rest of the day at the museum, but we headed to the Royal Botanical Gardens, another location where I could have happily spent most of the day.  They've really done a nice job making the gardens spacious and pretty, and they're set right down on the water.  The plant specimens were amazingly cool, and so different from what I'm used to seeing in the US.  But I was just as interested in the "wildlife" we saw in the gardens (they were all wild, but exceedingly used to having people around).  In the tops of a lot of the trees were "flying foxes," which are actually the largest species of bat in the world - fruit bats.  They were mostly asleep but a few were moving around, and I loved watching how they used their feet and wings to get around the trees upside-down.

In one part of the garden, Richard and Bianca and I ran across a concentration of the ubiquitous and loud sulphur-crested cockatoos.  A guy in among them held his arm next to a fence and a cockatoo climbed on, while another sat on the man's head.  I decided to try this, walked up to the fence, and sure enough one of the cockatoos climbed right on.  We had a whole lot of fun with them.  We weren't, however, feeding them, and they seemed okay with this as long as they could chew on anything within their reach - hats, glasses, notebooks, backpacks, hair, ears, fingers... And they have STRONG beaks!  You can still see the mark on my finger where one latched on hard.  And another took my sunglasses off my head, and seemed likely to fly away with them, but Bianca took them away.  After a while of standing there, they'd just abruptly arrive on your head or shoulder.  It seemed as though they were just bored, and found landing and chewing on tourists amusing.  It certainly amused us.





We walked out along the water to see the opera house and bridge, took a group picture, and that was about all we had time for that day.

One week later, Weerona decided that rain and cold withstanding we were going to go to Sydney.  It was a warm and beautiful day.  We did some wandering around shops and flea markets in the morning, and then split up for a bunch of different activities in the afternoon.  Several of us opted to see the aquarium.  It's built right on - and into - the harbor, and several of the large displays use water from the harbor.  It was a very nice aquarium, though not as extensive as I'd expected.  They had hardly any jellyfish, for instance.  They did do very well, however, with gigantic sharks, rays, turtles, and dugongs (Australian manatees).  And the tanks with large animals were split by glass tubes that tourist could walk through, which made for some really cool angles.

We got some dinner after the aquarium and then decided it would be fun to walk over the Harbour Bridge in the dark.  The Harbour Bridge was a depression-era creation, and remains the largest (though not the longest) steel arch bridge in the world.  When it was built, it was supposed to be the longest single-span arch ever built.  Unfortunately, the Bayonne Bridge in New York managed to open five months earlier and beat the Sydney Harbour Bridge by 29 inches.  I believe it is now the fifth-longest single-span arch in the world.  Regardless, it's a very long bridge, and was fun to walk across.  We spent some time on the other side seeing Luna Park, which is a small, brightly-lit carnival-like amusement park that sits on the water.  Then headed home, quite tired!

Flood Week

I'm in Australia as a member of a Colgate "study group," which means that there are seventeen Colgate students here and one Colgate professor.  We were all allowed to choose between two residential colleges, and I chose to live in Weerona, with just three other Colgate kids: Richard, Bianca, and Ryan.  This, I think, was a fantastic decision.  Apparently Weerona, of all the residential colleges, is known for sponsoring great events and getting people to really know each other.

We arrived a bit over a week before classes started so we could have a lot of time for orientation activities first.  This included the boring listen-to-safety-talks-and-tour-campus day at the university, but for us at Weerona it also included a full week of organized fun to get to know the other people in our college.  Apparently this week is referred to as flood week for the creative reason that one year there was a flood during this week.

Sunday started flood week with an early-morning trip to see the sunrise at a point overlooking the city.
It was COLD waiting for it to rise, but well worth the wait!  To our right, the beautiful lights of Wollongong began to dim as the sun rose to our left, with a truly spectacular display. 

Later that same day we took the train out to Kiama, which is a quaint little seaside town about an hour away by train.  Incidentally, the train system here is fantastic.  We spent a lot of time wandering around the rocks and tide pools, watched some very large pelicans who were much more interested in the fisherman than they were in taking pictures with us, and enjoyed a large blowhole right below the lighthouse.  The afternoon was spent with a lifeguard who gave us a highly entertaining talk about surf safety.  On warning us about the blue-ringed octopus, one of the world's most venomous animals, that frequents tidepools in the area:  "If you get an octopus on your hand, you might want to brush it off.  Just... brush it off." 

All of the new residents at Weerona were split into teams for the week, and we competed against each other in various ice-breaker activities that ranged from pretty standard to pretty off-the-wall.  One of the more off-the-wall days was spent running all over the city as part of the "amazing race," which led us through a variety of tasks - finding a large stick to carry around with us the whole day,digging in the sand until we could locate a tennis ball, tying ourselves together to walk to McDonald's, finding three items at Woolworth's that added up to precisely $3.12 (this was easier than it would have been in the US, because here all tax is included in the price of an item), getting a recipe from a local resident, collecting thirty coasters, etc.  The goal was to complete everything as quickly as possible.  I was on the red team, and we ended up winning.  It was all silliness, of course, but definitely a good way to get to know other people in the college. 


The rest of the week continued with lots of different activities.  One day we had a girls' day including yoga and lunch in town (the guys' version of this organized activity was to hang out at the beach and do nothing).  Friday included an "arts fest," which is basically just a talent show, which was a lot of fun (I wasn't planning to play, because I only brought my piano dulcimer with me, which I'm not particularly good with yet.  But following heavy peer-pressure I gave in and set her up, played a rendition of Für Elise with more mistakes than I'd like to admit, and everyone loved it).  We also had an African drumming workshop that was fantastic, and various evening events where "returners" were included so we could get to know them. Ultimately our team ended up winning the whole week, with almost twice as many points as any of the other teams. 

So that is flood-week-in-brief, which brings us up until about Saturday before classes started. 

Only a month in...

So, it suddenly occurred to me that updating people would be much more efficient if I'd do it in a blog.  Actually Lauren Frisch may have had something to do with that idea occurring to me.  But regardless of the origin of said idea, I have decided to at least attempt to keep a blog, to share some pictures and stories of the best parts of studying abroad.

That being said, I've already been in Australia for a month (which seems unbelievable).  But that doesn't mean that I can't catch things up and also continue with, I assume, many more adventures in the next three months here.  I'll start the first update in a separate post!