All Aussie Adventures

It probably seems like ages since my last update, but that only because it's really been ages since my last update. Right after the last day of school, I packed my bags and took the flying kangaroo to Melbourne for a well earned vacation. And in the spirit of vacation time, I've been too lazy to write anything for the last 3 weeks ^^

No excuse now though, since I'm back in Japan and have actually been through a week of ankle-biting elementary school goodness. So here's a whittled down version of my couple of weeks back in the wide brown land (and it was a *really* wide, brown land).

First of all, I had my first camping experience in the bush the same day I landed. Thankfully mosquitoes weren't in season, and the weather was cloudy to fair, which made for a nice few days in the wilderness, far from civilization, electricity and modern plumbing. This is not to say we lacked creature comforts. Have bush oven will travel, they say, though in our case we had gourmet bush tucker, complete with a side of rare grilled kangaroo, courtesy of a camping buddy who was a very good cook.

Just in case the lot of us got lonely, we were accompanied by a koala in the tree next door to us. It was mostly asleep during the day time, and I kinda wondered if it might fall out of the tree by accident. If it did I'd be able to tell the kiddies about the dangers of dropbears, but alas, nature's design won out and it remained firmly attached to the top branches of the gum tree beside us.

If you look carefully you can see it in the middle of the pic. It's there, honest!


I didn't spend all my time out in the wild though; I managed to catch the Game On exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I wasn't allowed to take photos inside the place, but I was able to walk around and try out classics like Pong and Space Invaders as well as relatively new fangled Wii games. Relatively I say, because I live in Japan after all and the cutting edge stuff is available at the local denkiya-san. Nice to see that gaming is big enough to warrant a retrospective exhibition of it's own though.

Being a geek (gah, I admit it), I also took a look at Scienceworks which was just 20 minutes away from the city. Back in Sydney, the closest place that was even remotely similar was Questacon in Canberra, and I don't quite fancy driving 2 1/2 hours to a hole in the middle of nowhere just for a science museum. The one in Melbourne was fun though, with exhibits on household science, the environment. sports medicine, the universe and the old Melbourne sewage pump. The best part was the planetarium show about the possibility of life on other planets (narrated by Han Solo ^^), a very abridged version of the stuff in the History Channel's "The Universe" series.

A not so random road trip to Adelaide means I've officially visited 4 out of the 7 states of Australia (5 out of 8 if you count the administrative capital... zzzzz...) Lovely city, Adelaide, kinda reminds me of the area around Tokyo station, probably because all the buildings look like they were built in the 60s. The highlight was of course visiting Rundle Mall and playing with the mall's balls:

The most spectacular part of the trip was on the way back via the Great Ocean Road. Trying to get good pictures while avoiding the crowds of snap happy tourists is no mean feat, especially at major attractions like the Twelve Apostles (The Beatles, Abba, Simon and Garfunkel, Hendrix and Joplin with Elvis as the one true King, whoo!):



The salty sea air was good for the soul, though I prolly should have slopped on some sunscreen. It's probably the exposure to too much sun that inspires great things from Australian people, such as these monuments to randomness:


I should say that the lobster wasn't originally meant to be so big. According to the information panel next to it, its specs were in feet and inches but for some reason it was built in metric, so it's three times bigger than it should have been. *sigh* Oh well. ^^

We also passed by the Giant Olive, but declined to stop and take pictures because after you're faced with a stone koala several storeys high, a 5 metre tall olive just doesn't cut it anymore.

Now I want to go see the Big Merino, Banana and Pineapple, just to round out the lot of them. Maybe strike a few more states off my list, eh? Aussies are very strange people indeed. Good sense of humour though.

Lovely place, shame about the name.