Kangaroo Island and much else

Hello again!

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!

NEW ZEALAND

Hey everyone! I just got back from New Zealand, and it was an awesome trip! Adam and I toured the south island for 6 days in a camper van, and we put in about 2000 km to get around to some of the highlights the island has to offer.
After picking up our van on Saturday we started driving west from the city of Chirstchurch. This is considered to be the most scenic drive in New Zealand, and along the way we stopped at a few places, one of which was this group of huge limestone rocks.
Sunday we hiked on Franz Josef glacier, as in we followed a guide up stairs cut in the ice and tunnels bored through the ice.
We chose to do the half-day hike instead of the full-day, and I'm really glad we did. Hiking on the ice was a lot tougher than hiking on ground. Although you get crampons to keep you from sliding around, you're still on difficult steep terrain and after just a couple of hours I was ready to take a rest.
We kept driving south, and camped at at the Boundary Creek campground. The next day we drove into Queenstown, where I did a bungy jump!
This was a lot of fun, and VERY safe. It was at Nevis Valley, which is the highest bungy jump in the southern hemisphere.
We continued south from Queenstown, and then went west and north, taking the circuitous road to Milford Sound. The campground we stayed at here was the most remote (it didn't even have a water faucet) but was scenic as always.
Milford Sound is perhaps the most famous tourist destination in New Zealand. It rains 7 meters a year here, but there are gorgeous fjords and amazing waterfalls.
We took a boat cruise around this amazing place, and got a fantastic perspective of the landscape, and of a few seals.
The seals make me think of Magic with flippers. They looked very lazy.
From Milford Sound we retraced the road back to Queenstown, then continued up to Mount Cook Village. This village is not on most bus lines, so if we didn't have a campervan we wouldn't have been able to get here. It ended up being my favorite part of the trip.
On three sides of this little town are the tallest of the Southern Alps. We only had time to do two of the many hikes accessible from around the village, but the two we did were spectacular.
Below is Mount Cook, the village's namesake and the highest mountain in New Zealand.Adam's flight left two days before mine, so I spent two days at a youth hostel in the town of Lake Tekapo, where I hiked around on the many trials before catching a bus back to the airport. Lake Tekapo is a glacier lake, so the water is bright teal from the sediment and stuff from the glacier ice.
One of the highlights of this little town is that it has the best night skies in all of New Zealand. For this reason the U.S. Navy set up an observatory on Mt. John right next to the town, which it turned over to NZ in the late 80's.
One of my hikes took me by Lake Alexandrina, which has two little towns of holiday homes (mostly for fishing) along its coast. This region is also part of central Otago, which was the location for the filming of much of the Lord of the Rings.

South Coast trip

Yesterday I went on a University sponsored trip to the South Coast. A bus took a bunch of Uni students first to see the Nan Tien temple, which is the largest Buddhist temple in the southern hemisphere.


Next we visited some blowhole on the coast. When the water is rough, the waves crash into the rocky cliffs, and this one 'blowhole' formation of rock causes the surf to shoot really high. When we went the surf was calm, so the blowhole wasn't active, but the cliffs are really cool nonetheless. The guide didn't say anything in particular about the rocks, but as far as I can tell, they're volcanic. Hopping around on them was also a lot of fun.

Seven mile beach was our next destination, which is a beach, that is seven miles long, and is also not crowded at all since it's remote, and is a National Park. Two National Park guides taught us a few things about Aboriginal culture, including how to throw a boomerang!



The last stop of the day was at Kangaroo Valley, which is a spectacular valley and waterfall. Although we didn't see any kangaroos, we did see a Lyre bird, doing some weird song and dance. To finish the day, we got dinner at the Gaff, which is a restaurant and hangout in downtown Sydney that is popular with backpackers.

Hoppers and Flyers

The semester is about a third of the way over, and I've adjusted well to apartment living, UNSW classes and the city of Sydney.

Two of my courses (Material Science and Fluid Mechanics)are essentially introduction courses. This is to say that they are at a similar level and of a similar structure to course I've taken in my four previous semesters. My Aerospace Design course, however, is an upper-level course. This means instead of regular problem sets, we're given large projects. We typically have two such projects at a time, and they require use of computer programs, flow-charts and calculations. What really sets this class apart from the introductory courses is that there's very little guidance as to which direction to take in the projects. Using class notes, online resources and a few hints from the professors and TA's, we have to independently figure out what to do. There's no single correct solution to any problems, because all of them are real-world problems, which have uncountable working solutions. (Pictured is the Library Lawn).

On another note, I've seen some interesting sports since I've been in Australia. The major sports here are cricket, footy, rugby and soccer. The way they name sports is very confusing. They call Australian Football ‘footy’, soccer is called ‘football’ and American football is called ‘gridiron’. I really miss sports at Duke, because there aren’t any scholarship athletes here, so nobody goes to University sporting events. No Cameron Crazies here.

Two weekends ago I went with my housemates to see an Australian Football League game (known as ‘footy’). Footy is more like soccer than American football, because there aren’t any pauses in the play. The participants are running continuously for the 25-minute quarters, and the play is full-contact; unlike American football they don’t wear pads. The particular game we saw was exciting because the home team (the Sydney Swans) was playing the Melbourne Saints, who were undefeated for the season. The Saints were winning for most of the game, but Sydney came back and the game was tied with less than a minute left. They couldn’t pull if off though, and let Melbourne score just before the game ended. It was a really fun game to watch, even though I couldn’t totally understand what was going on. The rules are confusing because there’s 36 players on the field, and players pass by punching or kicking the ball. (Unfortunately I was in a rush to this game and forgot my camera. The picture here I found online, and is of a ball being caught. You're allowed to throw a teammate into the air to help catch a high ball).

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Frisbee. I bought a Frisbee at the a nearby sports store. The place I bought from is located in Bondi Junction, which is a five-story shopping mall. I throw around with my housemates when I get the chance, either on campus or at the beach. There’s also an Ultimate Frisbee club at the University, so every Thursday I play with other students. The club is nice because there’s a few people who are very good, and can teach the rest of us to play. Most people who go on Thursdays are casual players, so I’m able to compete well.


We've discovered two foods here that I bet you can't find anywhere in the United States. First is kangaroo, which tastes much like steak, but is cheaper and fun to eat because you know that meat was hopping around once upon a time. We've made kangaroo steaks, kangaroo burgers and kangaroo kebobs. The other product is Vegemite, which you won't find in the States because Americans usually don't know how to eat it properly. Taken plain, it is probably the grossest thing you could find in a grocery store. However, the beauty of this is that you need to eat it in very small quantities. On toast with cream cheese and grated cheese is how it tastes best.

One day I found a book that Adam had called Outliers, and I picked it up and started reading. It ended up being very interesting. The primary focus of the book is to determine why certain individuals, such as Bill Gates and Rockefeller, became so successful. His conclusion is that it takes a little bit of smarts, a lot of hard work, and many lucky breaks. It isn't a very radical conclusion, but he comes to the point very well. The author also looks to the cultural histories of groups of people to point to why come societies produce great students, and others produce mediocre students. I would definitely recommend this book.

Greetings from Sydney

Hello family and friends! During the next few months I’ll use this blog to keep all up to date with how I'm doing in Australia.

Last Friday my plane departed the L.A. Airport. Because I crossed the International Date Line on the way over, I skipped Saturday altogether and arrived in Sydney on Sunday. Once I got to my house I met up with Adam and Barrett, who I knew in high school. We took a ferry to Manly Beach, which passed right by the Oprah House.


For the next semester I'm staying in a one-story house with 6 other guys. We're all international students, but only America and England are represented in our household.


The school here is huge, but only two of my classes are in large lecture halls. I think the aerospace course I'm taking will be interesting. Students studying here graduate with their Master's in four years, so although I'm in a third year course, in the U.S. this level of study would be fourth year.

Yesterday I had no class, so I took a bus, a train and a ferry out to Royal National Park. This place holds the title of the oldest national park in the world, older even than Yellowstone.


In the park there's jungle, shrub-land, beaches and stunning coastal cliffs. The ferry arrived in the little town of Bundeena, which would be a wonderful place to live, on accont backs up to a huge National Park. I first hiked through the jungle, then out to the coast where I followed the cliffs back to the town.

One of the highlights of this trip is that I saw a wild echidna! This little mammal looks like a hedgehog, but has an anteater snout and lays eggs. It also moves by waddling really slowly. By the looks of it, in a pinch it would make an easy meal.