Rest of the trip

I'm just going to cut and paste some of my emails to Chuckro.

Transit
So yeah, flight was mostly uneventful. In LAX, something set off the Alarm of Doom, which was terrible for like 15 minutes. And then we left 45 minutes late because of some baggage issue, but at that point as long as we left I didn't care.

Trying to sleep was a special kind of torture involving drifting off for 20 minutes at a time and then being woken up by turbulence or something. But I had my eyes closed for the better part of nine hours, and I'm still up and coherent at 5:30pm now, so apparently it was enough. (We'll see what tomorrow is like.)

Day 1 - Sydney
Arrived in Sydney. Balmy 81 degrees. Mix of sun and clouds, a pleasant amount of humidity (not enough to make me sweat, but a blessing on my parched nostrils. My hair has frizzed out of control.)

Met up with coworker and we basically walked the entire center city. Did a free walking tour for three hours. Had a lovely lunch. Explored a craft fair and a small museum. Got gelato. Walked half of the bridge. Walked to the Opera House. Walked all over the Botanic Garden. About to go get dinner. Have seen Sydney about as thoroughly as one can in one day. They've got ridiculous ibises who have the evolutionary niche of city pigeons, and they call them "bin chickens" (as in garbage bin). We watched them stalk and surround two girls to make off with the bottom of an ice cream cone. Don't sit on the grass with food.

Also cockatoos in giant flocks. And ficus trees significantly bigger than our house.

Day 2
Took a tour out to the Blue Mountains. Saw waterfalls, lots of eucalyptus, some very large valleys. Did a ridiculously touristy gondola/mountain railway thing down to a giant fern forest. Saw wild kangaroos. Took a river cruise back to Sydney, went under the big bridge.

Day 3
Conference is a little slow, which is very unfortunate. Doing my best to help keep things moving.

Went to dinner on the harbor with Jeff - everyone else bailed on us. Very pretty harbor (different harbor than the one with the Opera House, they have a lot of harbors here). Got kangaroo. Very tasty - kind of gamey, not dissimilar to venison. Apparently the locals don't actually really eat it, it's totally a tourist thing, although I don't need why not. It's delicious.

Day 4
Second day of the conference was more productive than day 1. Got a lot more traffic after J2 gave his speech.

After we wrapped up, J1 and I went to Bondhi Beach with R (who lives nearby). We walked up and down the beach and stuck our feet in the water, which was absolutely lovely. Watched the surfers. J1 and I had dinner at Icebergs, which is this awesome pool club (Bondhi and Icebergs are both fairly famous, apparently, just go with it). Took a billion gorgeous pictures of the sunset.

Day 5 - Cairns
Cross your fingers for me. Somehow this trip has swapped from cursed to charmed. Two or three days ago, this place was slammed with a cyclone. I was talking to one girl whose boyfriend ended up spending the night on a boat floating down the highway. Another cyclone is brewing...but shouldn't be here until probably Sunday. It's supposed to be mixed sun and clouds tomorrow and sunny Friday, and that's all I need. The lady at the front desk says cyclones need some time to build up power, and there's no way it'll get here before I get out. I definitely need to not miss that flight. Oy.

Cairns is an impressively ugly city. Think a really seedy highway in New Jersey. Only muddier. They don't have a beach. They do have a man-made lagoon I haven't seen yet and an esplanade. The esplanade is along the ocean...but Cairns is in an...inlet? I don't even know what to call this. They're at the bottom of a horseshoe in which the horseshoe appears to be filled almost completely with tidal mudflats. I walked along at low tide and it's impressively hideous. Coming back a few hours later when the water was in, it looked better. But you can't swim in the stuff--it's maybe a foot deep at most as far as the eye can sea, and entirely mud. Yuck.

So I was starting to regret some life decisions. All the tours had left by the time I got to the hotel, it was too early to check in (but they did let me check my bag), and there's no actual city to wander around here. Decided to go to the Botanic Garden because it's basically the only thing in walking distance. Ran into some lost Dutch girls also looking for the Botanic Garden and managed to get us all there. The back of the Botanic Garden, where we went in is...impressively ugly.

But the front turns out to be beautiful. And it backs into a wildlife refuge. So I went on the shortest hike they had (an hour loop, as opposed to the "do not start this after 2pm" serious hike). A couple lookouts (one in which the city looked somewhat better because it mostly disappears into the very dramatic and beautiful rainforest-covered mountains surrounding it, one of...the airport). Lots of little rivers and stuff. And a wallaby who bounced right past me, like a couple feet away. And lots of awesome birds who didn't care I was there in the slightest. I found out after I got back that the entire thing is cassowary country. Glad I didn't meet any.

There was also a really cool boardwalk through a swamp, and very nice botanic garden with impressively shitty signage (three different numbering systems, none of which corresponded to the map at the entrance). And a lot of warnings about crocodiles, so I duly stayed far away from the extremely swollen river.

Now I'm in my very small but surprisingly cozy little room with blessed blessed air conditioning and some dry clothes. Because it's ludicrously humid. Also, I was an idiot and checked my sunscreen, and now I have a very awkward burn on my chest. Oops. In a little bit, some nice people will pick me up and take me to an Aboriginal cultural center night fire and buffet. (Oh, I did discover a lovely Balinese restaurant for lunch. I took a picture, the platter they brought me was so pretty, including my own tiny little coal grate for my mixed meat skewers.)

Day 6
Today's reef expedition was glorious. Diving and snorkeling, perfect weather. Saw two rays, a shark (small harmless shark), royal blue starfish with arms the width of my wrist, giant clams as long as me.

Day 7
Irritatingly, I'm at the airport like an hour and a half earlier than I need to be, because of the vagaries of the tour shuttle and Good Friday closures. I would have loved an extra hour in Kuranda, but the only way to get to the airport in time was to be super early or else cut out much too close. Ah well.

When I get home, I need to contact the travel agency and get a refund for the washed out train.

It was an ok day-did the best I could under some narrowing constraints. Tried to get my over optimizing brain to shut up. Bought an extremely cheap opal necklace and held a koala. (They're not soft, they're wooly.) Also saw a wild snake that "isn't so bad, it could only kill you once or twice" and another one "oh, that's a bad one. Pretty, itn' t it?" Snake 1 slithered under us on the board walk, snake 2 was may be 5-6 feet away. Oh, and a spider larger than my spread hand and I have no idea how poisonous that one was. It was hanging out next to the gondola.



Amount of writing per day...mostly determined by how tired I was. Reef day=best day=fewest words.

Books on a plane

#20. His at Night by Sherry Thomas. 3.5. Stereotypical but well done Regency. He's a secret agent pretending to be a total moron. She's desperate to escape an abusive household and tricks him into marrying her anyway, to both their regret. They...fight crime?

#21. Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Henry Thomas Riley. 3.5? How do you rate something 2000 years old? Interesting from a historical perspective. Extremely repetitive - basically 75% of these consist of someone engaging in sexual misconduct (raping someone, lusting after someone inappropriate, or chasing someone across the entire damn country - seriously how many times do we have to describe someone's hot breath on someone else's hair) and getting turned into either an animal or a tree. 90% of Greek wildlife used to be someone horny/sexually assaulted. You know the best stories already and the rest got forgotten for a reason. (The best stories are quite lovely, though.) Somewhat amusing is Riley's commentary, in which a guy form the 1800s who believes the Bible is literally true and has a shaky grasp of anatomy himself tries to interpret the origins of this myths in a very condescending way. I'm sure people 200 years from now will have similar feelings on our literary criticism.

#22. The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis. 4. After WWII was fought by Nazi supermen and British warlocks, we bounce forward to the 60s in which everyone's lives are ruined. But that doesn't mean a certain precog doesn't still have a plan...

#23. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer. 3.5. Subtly written unsubtle play about a very unsubtle woman who thinks she's subtle. God, I'm happy not to be a Victorian. Hedda is unmitigatedly awful. But I'm genuinely unsure how much is Ibsen fully grasping the terribleness of women's lives in his time and how much is him still thinking they're emotional and irrational. This is like the "Always Sunny in Philadelphia" of classic theater. Everyone is awful.