It’s been a long time since my last post, and a lot has happened since. My last exam was yesterday, so I’m through with classes. I’m sad to be leaving Australia, but I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends back home.
As my classes wrapped up, I completed exams and papers for three courses. My fourth course finished with an assignment using the CAD program CATIA. We were given this program, and instructions to construct a model of an existing airplane. The airplane I modeled is the F-106, an interceptor designed in the 50's. In the CATIA file the aircraft can be driven using cockpit controls such as pedals and a steering column (meaning the user can make the flaps move), and the tail or wingspan can be adjusted by changing one value. There's even a missile. And you can fire it.
In my spare time I finished reading The Fountainhead and Into the Wild. These books fit together pretty well, both discussing the theme of individualism. I believe Into the Wild could be viewed as a case study for a character which, in Ayn Rand's fiction would be a protagonist with a powerful ego. Of course, Howard Roark meets a much happier end than Chris McCandless.
In terms of traveling, I’ve made several trips. The most nearby was to Royal National Park (again). This time I made the 26 km hike from Otford to Bundeena along the well-traveled coastal trail.
Near where I started in Otford is a small town in the national park which looks like a model for sustainable living: the houses use extensive rainwater systems, solar and wind power, and many of them appeared to be constructed partially from recycled material.
I went on a caving trip with the Outdoors club to Bungonia, which is about a two-hour drive southwest of Sydney. The picture here is of a different set of caves I visited (more on that late). Although it is great for amateur cavers to make these underground passages easily accessible, the downside is the rocks are so well worn they get slick, and few formations remain undisturbed.
Once classes finished, I went on a trip to Kangaroo Island with a few friends I’ve made while in Australia. Two of the people I went with also go to Duke, so I’ll still get to see them when I go back. Kangaroo Island is located south of Adelaide and is considered the best place for seeing wildlife in all of Australia. After this trip, going to any Australian zoo would be anticlimactic.
After getting to the Island by ferry, we spent the first night in Kingscote, the Island’s biggest city. The beaches around Kingscote are known for being a home of the ‘Fairy penguins’. A park ranger took us on a tour on the beach at night to show these little birds scurrying around on the beach and in the bushes. These little guys have problems holding their own against the island’s feral cats, which are significantly larger than the average housecat. It is possible, I am told, to make a car seat cover from a single feral cat skin. (The picture here came out well because it’s a snap shot of a video I was taking when someone used the flash on their camera by accident. Most pictures people took came out very poorly because the only lighting was the dim red light.)
The second day we drove across the island to the Remarkable Rocks, which are, as they say, ‘remarkable’. It’s like mother nature built a giant stone playground, with a spectacular backdrop of the cliffs below.
The Remarkable Rocks are THE place for tourist busses to stop and is therefore a busy place. Here I have climbed rock to get a safe vantage point to photograph the common tourist.
Perhaps the highlight of the trip was a nighttime nature tour we attended. We got there about 30 minutes early, and we met a wild koala that crawled down from its tree, said hello to us, and ran off to another tree. It was lucky to see this, since koala spend about 20 hours a day sleeping.
Kangaroos, wallabies and several species of possum appeared everywhere we turned once it got to be dusk. We even got to see some possums and wallabies fight over the bird feeder, just like squirrels do back home. The fence in the kangaroo picture is an enclosure to keep out feral cats. Most of the wildlife we saw was outside of the fence, but some of the species of possum we only saw inside.
The island features the ‘Little Sahara’, which is a tiny desert with big sand dunes. We stopped there and ran across a tour guide who was leading a family around the island. She was kind enough to let me use one of her sand boards to try out. It was tricky, since sand doesn’t work quite the same as snow, but I managed to get down the dune.
Seal beach is where dozens of seals visit when they want to lounge around. They are truly lazy when they’re on the beach, but apparently this is where they come immediately after being out at sea hunter for three days straight. So I’ll cut them some slack.
In a few days I'm making a trip to Melbourne, then to Cairns, Mission Beach and the Great Barrier Reef!
