Friday, March 25, 2011

Leongatha Star News Piece

Leongatha Star, 22 March 2011

I made the news!  Here's a bit that I worked on when I was in South Gippsland, to help out with the conservation of the Venus Bay beaches:

Down Under at The Top End!

25 March 2011 – Darwin, NT

Wow, did that week fly by!  It feels like I arrived in Darwin only yesterday and I’m already being whisked away by my own stubborn travel schedule. ;) I could easily stay here for another …year or so (which, I realized, is what happens to many travelers who come here!  I was told that I was wise to book my ticket out before I arrived….something magnetic about this place).  Well, here’s the tale of my trip to the Top End, already halfway around the continent from where I began!

On Saturday I found myself unexpectedly flying towards Alice Springs: a state of surprise altogether unexceptional, considering that it was just the most recent of unexpected events and happy accidents which I had been enjoying over the last couple of days.

I was somewhat reluctant to depart Coral Bay—after having such easy times and hanging out with lots of super people—and it seemed that the Greyhound bus was just as reluctant to pick me up.  Three hours after I had a farewell dinner…then desert…then drinks with Coral Bay friends, I was still waiting on the bus to come and sweep me away on my next adventure.  Some mysterious event had occurred somewhere along the 18-hour route from Perth that resulted in a bus rolling up to the backpackers at 1:45 am, completely empty and without apology.  Would YOU get on that bus?  I was too tired to ask questions, and desperate to get up to Karratha.  Nobody SHOULD be desperate to get to Karratha, by the way.  
 In planning my route from Exmouth to Darwin, I had believed that I had got my transfers perfectly scheduled, with a nice 3-hour window to arrive in the mining town of Karratha and catch my flight to Darwin.  With a 3-hour-late bus, I was a tiny bit worried (and I never worry, right? Haha).  It turned out that the late bus actually SAVED me from having to spend more than 30 minutes in Karratha.  This town was the pits, the only good thing about it was cheap airfare, which catered to the REASON that the town was the pits.  Karratha and its sister-town, Tom Price, are one of Western Australia’s fastest-growing mining towns.  The whole district is owned and run by big mining companies—from apartments to grocery stores to schools—even the taxi I rode in was owned by the mining corporation (much to the chagrin of the driver).  It was a very happy accident, therefore, that the bus dumped me at Mc Donalds at 8am, so that by 8:40am I was safely on board my plane bound for… …Alice Springs??!!
 
It hadn’t occurred to me that a flight from Karratha to Darwin should take 7 hours, but who was I to judge Australian distances?  Nowhere in the airport or on my Qantas ticket did the words Alice Springs appear, so I had assumed that the day’s surprises were done.  Haha, silly Heather...  When the flight attendant gave instructions that “All passengers should exit the aircraft in Alice Springs” I first got a jolt of anxiety—OMG, was I on the right plane?!—but then I felt like I had won some sort of Fabulous Prize!  I could just hear Bob Barker in my head: “Behind Door Number One:  iiiiiittt’s A vacation to the Reeeeeed Centeerrrrr!!” followed by music and applause.  Alice Springs is smack in the middle of Australia, called the Red Center, a name that evokes more images of a sweltering hellish underworld than of a dazzling region of dramatic escarpments, planes, valleys, and some insane seasonal rivers that give rise to the famous billabongs and unique landscapes.  This place was too far from the ocean and thus was excluded from my tour of Australia, but as you can see from my aerial photos, this region is definitely worth a visit!  I was just wish that I had been sitting next to a geologist, as we flew over alien dunes and rivers and mountains!  How stoked was I to get a bonus round to my trip!




I spent an entire Hour in Alice Springs, just long enough to breath the sticky air (we got to walk across the tarmac to the airport and back in the glorious heat), see a short lightning storm (I’m talking a 10-minute drive-by-shooting, pyrotechnic show), and read a pamphlet about etiquette for travelers [Gringos] when interacting with Aboriginals/Indigenous Australians (which was summed up as “If you’re a jerk tourist (which apparently we all are) you should probably just keep your trap shut…oh, and stop throwing your money around, buddy, not everything’s for sale.”  Then it was back onto the plane and THIS time I really was heading due North, to Darwin!

Darwin is fabulous!  Ya gotta love a town that’s only 5x7 blocks in size, and surrounded by lush gardens and 6 distinct bodies of water (Frances Bay, Port Darwin, Lameroo Beach (open Timor Sea), Cullen Bay, Fannie Bay, Beagle Gulf).  I’m visiting at the end of “The Wet”, so the whole region is green and lush, although the air is so thick that one chews it just as much as beathes it.  I love it!  On the Wharf, you can browse $80,000 pearls or have your pick kangaroo, crocodile, or camel meat in burger, fried, or kabob form; and crocodiles in the sewers are actually a tourist attraction (Crocodylus Cove)!  I love it!
 Sunday morning I hit the pavement, then realized quickly that it was Sunday morning…so I mostly walked around until businesses opened up later in the day.  By the time the shops opened at midday, my clothes and I were completely drenched—whether from sweat or condensation, I know not—despite the conspicuous lack of rain.  Therefore, when I entered the Indo-Pacific Marine and Pearl Museum, my “moisture” froze instantly and painfully.  You see, Darwinians (Darwinites?) choose to live their lives entirely WITH or WITHOUT air-con.  Those who work in shops and museums, such as this one, rarely notice that it’s raining and over 90 degrees outside, but are more concerned with which wool sweater to wear, and probably nose-bleeds.  Those who live without A/C are primarily Aboriginal park-dwellers and the most desperate backpackers.   Those who do not choose suffer from both (that would be me), as the opening of every outside door causes one to wince from the sudden temperature and humidity change.

An interesting side note to that park-dweller issue, I found out:  there are lots of Aboriginal folks that hang around the streets and parks of Darwin, and many visitors assume that they are either homeless—which of course is not the case, since there are very few truly “Westernized” Aboriginal city-dwellers—or that they just enjoy the streets.  I learned that many of these people are mostly outcasts from their home tribes/mobs, for either A) breaking any of the thousands of laws imposed on them by the “Two Laws” system or B) had never returned from their adolescent Walkabout for whatever reason (drugs, injuries…video games…).  The Darwin city seems to have a pretty respectful situation going on, at least what I observed during the day, and it’s pretty cool to walk down the street to the rhythm of music sticks and didgeridoos, jams of which echo through the streets, from one group to the next.

But I digress:  this museum was the first thing to open on Sunday, and was of course an item of interest for me (doesn’t everyone design their traveling around parks and museums??), so I suffered the chills for the sake of education!...and shiny pearls.  Darwin is home to Australia’s largest saltwater cultured pearls, known as South Sea Pearls, which are grown to sizes as big as shooter marbles.  The process is really interesting, and this company, Pescales Pearls, does nearly everything on board a couple huge marine vessels that travel out to sea to collect and maintain their oysters, surgically insert the nuclei, then spoil the crap out of these filter-feeders (aka, let them sit for a while in the safety of mesh boxes) until they give up the shiny gems.  Now why didn’t I think of that?  So easy, for such a huge payoff!  I’m still not very interested in buying or wearing pearls, but understanding the process of “biomineralizing money” has me very glad that later this month I will be trying my hand at the industry in Queensland!

On Monday I rented a bike to check out the nearby East Point Reserve and Botanical Gardens, and I saw and immediately fell in love with wallabies and black flying-foxes!  No crocs, which was good for me because I spent most of the morning tidepooling around the reserve.  Darwin experiences tidal ranges of 8-10 meters (that’s 25- 32 feet)!!!!  At low tide, not only do the piers and wharfs look comically leggy, but the rocky intertidal and beaches extend almost forever!!  Being a near-full moon, I headed out near one of the lowest tides of the month to walk around lots of hearty exposed corals, sea cucumbers, beefy tunicates, and delicious-looking swimming crabs.  
Darwin has a very intimate history of WWII involvement, which they are very proud to remember (they were heavily attacked by the Japanese), with ruins and monuments just about everywhere you look in the city and reserve.  All of these grassy lawns with plaques and statues provide ample habitat for the adorable wallabies that graze in the sun all day long.  I loved seeing these mini non-kangaroos hopping back and forth behind bushes and ruins!  I finally caught one off-guard to snap a pic, but they were difficult to chase down!  I also had the pleasure of spending the late afternoon among the rainforest and shady habitats in the Royal Botanic Gardens, where I met those wily flying foxes.  Opinions are split—are they cute or creepy?  I think both, that’s why I like them.  But everyone agrees that they are startlingly large.  They feed on flowers and fruit, but can still give one the heebie-geebies as they swoop around just after sunset and cackle to each other in the dark trees.
Early on Wednesday I joined a 2-day 4WD tour through Kakadu National Park and World Heritage Site.  I was the only North American in the group (in fact, I’ve only met 6 North Americans in this country so far, mostly Canadians.  Talk about being a minority!) but most of the other 16 people  were very pleasant and/or awesome.  Ideally, I would not have planned to take one of these group tours—all the pamphlets in the visitors centers are so off-putting and kinda cheapen the experience by advertising primarily to obnoxious younger backpackers—but as it is the end of the Wet, most of Kakadu is covered in water and public transport was extremely limited.  So my solution was to throw away the ugly pamphlet and book the tour!
 
I can hardly begin to describe the immense beauty and indigenous cultural appeal of Kakadu.  In two days we merely scratched the surface.  Kakadu is intensely seasonal—6 months of flood and bounty and 6 of extreme aridity and fire.  It would take years to experience all of this park’s splendors, since it is so huge and changes so dramatically from month to month.  Because we visited at the end of the Wet, nearly the entire landscape for as far as the eye could see was covered in trees and various types of swamps/billabongs, some places reminiscent of Florida’s Everglades, but mostly a landscape completely wild and new to me!  Our first stop on the tour was a local cultural center just outside the park, where much of the land is now farmed, but where a few tribes still live semi-traditionally.  The caretaker and his daughter, part of the ___ tribe, told us the creation story (dreaming) of the area (the hills and rivers, etc., were formed by the wanderings of a [giant] long-neck turtle) and tried to teach us to play the didgeridoo and other instruments (it looks like I will have to be a music-stick slapper, hehe).  His daughter showed us her tribe’s weaving practices and products—weaving is a women’s secret—including multitudes of dilly bags for various purposes, baskets, seats, and eating plates, all beautifully colored and sealed with local seasonal plants and ochres.  Fantastic!  We also got a great demonstration of the men’s hunting practices:  since the Top End is all forest, they use spear-throwers to nab magpie geese, wallabies, and bandicoots.  They haven’t used boomerangs here since 18,000 ya, when the land transformed from desert to forest (indicated by ancient rock paintings)—boomerangs have little effect on trees and crocs! 

…Which brings me to the paintings!  Kakadu is covered in artwork, and Aboriginal people have been using the same techniques for painting for thousands of years—ochres (ground-up rock), painted with bone, twig and hair tools—and some incredible research has gone into describing and tracing the ages and meanings of the hundreds of thousands of old and ancient images around the park (plus the contemporary paintings, since people still live here!).  All this research is awesome, of course, but to the indigenous painters and their tribes, the images themselves are not sacred or anything.  They think it’s neat that Gringos take such interest, but to them, the act of painting is way more important than the paintings themselves.  They are just glad that the paintings brought the worlds’ eye to the Gagudgu and Arnhem Land region so that it could be preserved.
 
In the afternoon we took some beautiful hikes to visit some of the super-ancient paintings and took a lovely river cruise down the Home Billabong and Alligator River.  The swamp was beautiful and diverse, and while we only saw one crocodile during the whole cruise (a female on a nest, see image), it was clear that we were constantly surrounded:  just the hint of bubbles, startled fishies, or a hearty splash amidst the placid water reminded us that the Top End is home to about 100,000 crocodiles—that’s a little more than the human population!  Meanwhile, we got some close encounters with the avian megafauna: White-Breasted Sea Eagles, Whistling Kites, Magpie Geese, Spoonbills, Royal Ibises, Pied Herons and Egrets, plus “Thousand-Buck Ducks” and JABIRU!!  The gigantic pairs of Jabiru were spectacular, but I think my favorite birdies were the Jacanas:  their bodies are quite small, but their feet are huge, about a quarter of their size!  Their spidery feet help them stalk the lily-pads and floating plants for bugs and fish, while dodging reptile predators (we saw a tile snake make a jump for one wily bird!  Wild!)

We watched the sunset from atop the escarpment, which forms the water catchment for the gigantic flood-planes, with amazing views of the monsoon forest and billabong: SO many shades of green and red and blue, SUCH an amazing time!  Rumor has it that the opening scene of Crocodile Dundee was filmed in Kakadu, most likely the one we looked down upon, but this place would also make a perfect setting for the next Tarzan movie, too!
 

Thursday was filled with lots more great hiking (in humidity-drenched clothes, as always) and bathing in waterfall pools…pretty much right next to signs warning about “Freshies”, or mostly-harmless freshwater crocodiles!  We went way too far upstream to run into any vicious “Salties”, and were probably too loud for any of the Freshies to hang around.  Since the park was getting so much rain, even the minor waterfalls were running full-steam, with amazing deep swimming pools with fish and yabbies.  In fact, the major waterfalls were pumping water so powerfully that they were closed to all vehicles except helicopters and ultralights.  So we were very happy to enjoy the “minor” huge waterfalls!  Dan, our fabulous bush guide took some of us up some rockwalls up to “See a View”, i.e.,  breathtaking rock-top lookouts, where we could check out evidence of how the area had been formed not by floods and rivers, but by coastal erosion ~0.3 mya—fossils, conglomerates and marine sediment, oh my!  …So I got to nerd-out a bit before we headed back down into the monsoon forests, but not before goofing around with some bush-glamour photos! (Even uptight biologists get silly when it’s ridiculously hot and sticky) ;)

As we drove back to Darwin, I was kinda jealous of the Aboriginal people who know how to survive and still thrive in that wonderful world, and who get to live there all the time!  And of course all of us on the truck kept repeating that Kakadu deserves at least a 2-week stay on our NEXT adventure in Oz!  I spent the night in Darwin and caught an early flight to Cairns, where I am hangin’ out today (actually I started writing this on Tuesday, today is Friday) so I can catch another early flight tomorrow to head up to Torres Strait!  I can’t wait to escape to Turtlehead Island, in the mouth of the Escape River on the East Coast.
 


Sorry this was a really long entry!  As always, I hope you are doing well and having your own amazing adventures this Spring!  

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Truly, Sincerely HOT ... I'm Loving It!

15 March 2011 – Exmouth, WA (2 backlogged entries)

G’Day, Y’all!
(Below:  Exmouth sunrise, from my "free" campsite)
 Since you last heard from me, I took a quick skip clear across the Australian continent!  I departed Venus Bay, way down in the SE corner of Victoria, on Tuesday, and a mere 37 hours later found myself in Exmouth, on the end of an isolated peninsula on the central coast of Western Australia.  One day folks will be able to do the trip in about 5 hours, much like flying from Atlanta, GA, to Monterey, CA.  In fact, that service starts NEXT week!  Well, I just couldn’t wait to get out here, that’s all. :) So I took the adventurous way, sticking with my plan to make a circumference around the continent!
The insides of airports and bus stations aren’t exactly the exciting images by which I’d want to remember my journeys (or have them viewed by others), so I’ll skip the details—if you’ve never been to an airport or rode on a bus, you’ll have to use your imagination.  I will include here, however, that to accomplish this 2 day journey, I experienced nearly every sort of overland transport offered in Australia, just getting from one side of the country to the other, in the following order: local bus, regional bus, trolly, metro, shuttle, airplane, local bus, train, and Greyhound bus (“The Bus to Hell”, the only bus running from Perth to Broome, 18 hours, full to the brim with backpackers, mining workers, and large families on holiday (always including at least 2 crying babies each)).

My reasons for coming to Exmouth were to catch me a whale shark (or at least snorkel alongside one) and to meet up with my second WWOOF volunteer host.  It’s funny how things turn out, you know?  I ended up doing neither of these, and had a blast!  
I was dropped off at the edge-of-town bus stop at 1:30 am and all of the businesses had been closed for 8 hours at that point, so I got a free night of camping at the nearest caravan park, woo!  After a "balmy" night shared with the stars and dozens of mozzies, I awoke to a fantastic sunrise filled with the raucous calls of the little rosellas (beautiful white parrots), snooping emus, and then sudden sweltering heat as the sun inched up in the sky.

My fist mission, of course, was to hit the water!  On a map, Exmouth looks like it has 2 coasts; in reality, it is 3km from the nearest (Exmouth Gulf), and a 45 minute drive to the other (Indian Ocean/Cape Range NP/Ningaloo Reef).  Therefore, it was necessary to RENT A CAR!!  I was told that Exmouth, and WA in general, is a great place to get used to driving in Australia because there are no roundabouts nor stoplights, and only two stopsigns.  Plus, because of the town's history as a U.S. Navy Base, most of the intersections have signs that say "Keep Left".  (Until the 1960's the whole peninsula operated under US road rules, and there are still some left-side-steered cars in town.  Go USA, for being THAT thick headed, haha).  Anyway, so I got myself a little Ford Laser for the day, and spent one sweltering day exploring Cape Range NP, part of the Ningaloo Reef.  In a few words: hot, very hot, shadeless, and stunningly beautiful.  Snorkeling at Turquoise Bay was amazing!  Coral, fishies, reef sharks, turtles, and humongous turbo and bubble snails! The water there was so warm it would have been easy to just never ever ever get out.

Day 2:  Navy Pier Dive.  So sorry there are no photos of this!  My first SCUBA dive in Australia was fantastic (although decidedly the most expensive dive I will ever do).  Let's just say that this place is the #6 Shore Dive in the world for a very good reason.  We got special permission from the Navy Base to enter the pier (I was only disappointed that there were no active submarines to be seen, hehe), where our little group splashed down among huge schools of fishies, hung out with a few 8-footer snoozing reef sharks, and had some adventurous encounters with the refrigerator-size potato cod!  But I thought the best part of the dive was the pier pilings themselves, which were COVERED...no, more than that, PILED with enormous and colorful sponges and masses of brilliant tunicates!  There wasn't much coral down below the pier, of course, but the fauna made it an interesting transition from the California waters.


Next up, I was ready to go find me a whale shark...and wasn't it time for me to be heading over to my WWOOF site?  After being in town for 2 days and having lots of splashy, sunshine fun, I realized that neither of these was going to happen.  I met up with Jim, the owner of "Wilderness Island", an Eco-Retreat on an island in the Exmouth Gulf, who's mission is to give visitors a true “wilderness” experience while teaching them the benefits of no-hassle, eco-friendly “luxury” principles, such as
(Above, huge termite mounds and scorching terrain at Cape Range NP.  Left, wind turbines left down after the cyclones)
 
non-fossil-fuel cooking, composting, organic gardening, etc.  It turned out that his island retreat had been mowed over by the 2 recent cyclones (hurricanes), and that the rebuilding materials had not come in yet.  “So,” he said, “Enjoy Exmouth!”  At first I wasn’t super stoked to spend an idle week in a tiny town 100 miles from anything, without any transport options (being the tourist low season), and where temperatures daily soar above 100 degrees, but things always have a way of working themselves out, you know?



18 March 2011 - Exmouth/Coral Bay

My week has been filled thusly:

To be honest, I did some serious pool-side sitting during the first couple of days—I came up here specifically FOR the tropical heat, after all!  The idea was to spend as much time in the ocean as possible, but the pool suited nicely, too.  The big draw in Exmouth, as may already know, is the whale sharks!  There were said to be whale sharks all around the peninsula, but I had to make the difficult decision to not meet any of them.  While I'm sure that snorkeling 15 feet above the largest fish on Earth would be a great thrill, I wasn't sold by the $400 price tag, and felt that seeing them behind glass at the Georgia Aquarium was enough of an encounter as I would/could pay for!

After a few nights of "free" camping at the caravan park, I got caught by the caretaker one morning when I slept in, so I spent the rest of the week staying at a backpackers, which was conveniently attached to a fancy resort (yay, pretend luxury!!).  That was where I met Christa, a lovely gal from Vancouver, a solo traveler like myself, but which the important distinction of having a car.  We had agreed that 6 days is way way too long to stay in Exmouth after having exhausted all of the beaches, dive spots and pools, so we checked out early and drove down to Coral Bay, about 170 km south of Exmouth.

(Above:  Why did the emu cross the road?  To Monitor and 'Roo!....maybe the heat's gotten to me, hehe. Below, the adorable yet raucous Little Rosellas, aka, alarm-clock birds)

 Coral Bay was fantastic!!  I officially recommend this town to everybody traveling in Western Australia.  It was about as tiny as Exmouth, but with some very important and amazing differences!  First of all, all of the town stuff is actually located withing hopping distance of the beach (so it is filled with very smart people, haha).  While there is only one backpackers, one caravan park, one resort, and one dive shop, everything there is coordinated around happy hour, and everybody knows everybody.  I was only there for 36 hours, but met so many awesome people.  Maybe it helped that we showed up on St. Patrick's Day?  So by the time we settled in and booked our dive trip, it was time to party!  After living in Monterey for so long, I forgot that St. Patrick's Day is Internationally celebrated!!  The other reason Coral Bay totally rocks is that it is 100% fossil-fuel-free!  Except for the cars and boats (many of which run on natural gas), they operate on solar and wind energy.  Definitely worth my patronage :)

Coral Bay Dives:  Again, I really wish I had photos of these dives, but that would just make you all too jealous, right?  So on Friday morning Christa and I joined about 12 other visitors at the Ningaloo Dive Shop ans we set out at a leisurely 8:30am for a full day of diving and manta ray snorkeling!!  I can't remember the site names, of course, but the first dive had us down to just 11-13m in the Inner Reef.

WOW, this place was soooo pristine and sooooo chock-a-block full of corals, like swimming inside an aquarium, but better!!  On the first, we saw lots of nudibranchs and pipefish, and little juvenile boxfish that were sooo cute!  On the second dive, we patrolled a Gray Reef Shark cleaning station, and although the crappy viz gave the ambiace of a foggy Jack-The-Ripper kind of day, we saw several nice big sharks, which were not in the least interested in us.  The sharks were great and all, but the best part was that I found SPIDER CONCHS, some bigger than my open hand, and with big heavy spines!!!!  They are soooo cool.. Trust me, I know cool snails.  I was interested by the fact that each one I found was somewhat isolated on little sandy patches in huge valleys of corals...I guess they really had their work cut out for them to ever run into each other!

We spent our surface interval between dives hunting down some Manta Rays to chase about.  En route, we spotted a solo bottlenose dolphin and were for a moment convince he, too, wanted us to snorkel and chase him about (turned out, no.).  The spotter plane helped us track down a couple of rays in a matter of minutes (being that there were dozens of resident coastal manta rays here, another reason to come to Coral Bay!!!), and before I knew it, we were gliding along in the shadows of two female rays.  They were not feeding or doing their famous acrobatics, but I was just glad that these were not inclined to zoom straight at my head (like my initial hilariously terrifying manta ray encounter in Costa Rica).  So we just floated along and dove down to get a pilot-fish-eye view of the rays' identifying markings on their bellies.  It was a breathtaking experience, both figuratively and quite literally (they stayed at about 17ft).

And best of all, as we paddled around (there were like 6 of us), another great sea beast came to say hello!  Suddenly I spotted another humongous object swimming toward us on the seafloor, to find a large brown Shovel-Nose Ray!  They're called rays, of course, but in fact they are SHARKS!  Ok, very chill, genial sharks, but nonetheless!  Imagine if you will, a big fat brown shark, and instead of a mean toothy face, stick on a flat, triangle head like a stingray (see right).

Next up, Northern Territory!  I catch the bus tonight and will soon reappear in Darwin!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

1 March – Venus Bay
The V/Line dropped me off at Leongatha, the “big town” on the way to Venus Bay (not on most maps, but it is near Wilson’s Promontory National Park (the southernmost point, and Mae picked me up to head over to her Eco Resort.  She’s a delightful woman who has been running the Eco Retreat all on her own for two years.  By the time we arrived in Venus Bay, it became apparent that she had big plans for me.  She is one of the leading members of the Friends of Venus Bay conservation group, who lead volunteer efforts to curb invasive plants and animals, as well as protect the many habitats and wildlife on “this wonderful little spit of land”.  On the big bus, I had stared hopefully out the window trying to catch a glimpse of kangaroos.  I saw tons and tons of lovely cows, but no wildlife (Melbourne is completely surrounded by pastures and agriculture).  Therefore, it wasn’t until we entered the peninsula that I saw my first wild kangaroo!  Not only one, but 50!  Just before dusk, whole families popped out from the bushes to graze in backfields, bush, and saltmarsh.
 
 
2-7 March -- Venus Bay

Here I am again in Melbourne…didn’t I JUST leave the city?!  Actually, I’m just swinging by for some internet access and, oh right, a 4-hour flight across the country to Perth!  The past week went by so quickly, sorry if I haven’t gotten around to any of your emails.  The Venus Bay Retreat WWOOF-stay was fantastic.  It is an oasis of wildlife and native bushland, where tons of songbirds come to play, black cockatoos swoop noisily overhead, and kangaroos, wombats, and 3 types of opossums visit daily/nightly.  My initial impression, of course, was that all of Venus Bay is like this.  It is located nestled between Cape Liptrap Coastal Park and Anderson Inlet, both of which are beautiful coastal environments that have some level of protection through Parks Victoria.  However, I soon found that the area was actually torn among many land-use agendas, most of which do not involve native vegetation or wildlife.  But I digress…
Have I told you how AWESOME of a gig WWOOF-ing is?  During the week, I performed some general household duties when it was cold and raining (my parents would be proud, and honestly surprised at my cleaning skills!) and lots of outdoor garden/conservation tasks when the weather was good.  I helped out a bit with the organic garden, from which we ate every meal, and had a bunch of hours of pulling invasive plants all over the retreat property, including some pretty sketch brush and saltmarsh (I had a great opportunity to try out my various forms of insect repellent, and I was surprised and relieved that the common brown king snakes were nowhere to be found).  After just a bit of work every day, I explored the area’s beautiful coastlines!  Anderson Inlet had some beautify marshy-goodness, with mangroves, grasses, and wonderful birds.  The Beaches were really schizophrenic—the first day I went down I could have sworn that I was back at Moss Landing, with the cold and high winds, huge waves, etc.  But later in the week the water was completely placid and crystal clear—FINALLY I got to pull out my swimsuit and snorkel!!!  Yesterday the beach was aaalll mine, not another soul for miles (that’s what happens when you holiday on a workday, lol).
This weekend was a different story, though….  So, when I had first settled into the retreat, expecting to be put to work on menial garden work, I soon found out that I was brought here for another purpose.  Mae, as crafty as she is, had chatted with some of the other members of the local conservation group and decided that I must come to Venus Bay and put my marine science skills to work!  Most of the sandy shores in southern Australia are dominated by the edible “Pipi” clam (Donax deltoids)—I’m talking about millions of them on a healthy beach.  The problem in the last couple of decades has been that many beaches have experienced overfishing of these bivalves, by recreational and commercial harvesting.  The local community of Venus Bay has started to get concerned about the Pipi stocks at their beaches, all of which are part of the Cape Liptrap Coastal Park.  It’s a funny situation, because “EVERYTHING” in the dunes, beach, and near-shore is protected by law….EXCEPT fish, octopods, and Pipi’s (specifically).  Therefore, my task for the week was to come up with an information packet for an upcoming community meeting with conservationists, pipi harvesters, Fishing Department, and Parks Victoria.  I’ll post the info here later on, if anybody’s interested.  The bottom line was basically that Pipi’s are super proliferate, but are very prone to local population crashes which could take 3-7 years to recover, and the harvesting of them probably affects the rest of the coastal ecosystem just as much as it depletes pip stocks.  Primarily, the concern is that the beach destruction (which in summer is left in craters from all the digging) prevents the sand crabs, the threatened and endangered seabirds from feeding (particularly the endangered Hooded Plovers, and the Sooty and Pied Oystercatchers).   I was super-glad to use my research skills, and I hope that the community can reach a resolution or plan soon. 

On Friday and Saturday I was thrilled to participate in some real shorebird conservation action, and I’m sure my shorebird friends will be incredibly jealous, haha.  Mae and I had walked down to one of the beaches Friday afternoon so that she could show me the work that had been done to protect the 3 breeding pairs of endangered Hooded Plovers.  As we were walking, one of the friendly Parks Victoria rangers met us, with the intention of setting up some wire fencing around the nest of “Pair 1” (imaginative name, right?  Let’s call them Shelby and Matt-Jean, for the simple reason that I haven’t gotten them a wedding present, hahaha).  The hooded plovers have been called by many visitors “silly little birds”, and here’s why.  They are so perfectly adapted to the southern Australia beaches (from Perth to Sydney) that they don’t make nests at all!  In fact, a “nest” is merely a scratch in the sand…often nothing at all, they just stick their eggs right out on open sand, just a couple feet about the high tide line.  What’s more, the eggs are cryptic and somehow chemically protected so that even keen-nosed/eyed foxes, eagles, ravens, and humans pass them by completely.  In the case of humans, though, it means that the eggs are very likely to get trampled, booo L  The birds themselves are adorable…well, you know plovers, they are tiny and cute and their little legs move a mile a minute. 

Anyway, so we joined Ranger Jona to set up signs and a 100m2 perimeter around the nest.  We got the rare privilege of riding the entire beach with him, and I met my first Fairy Penguin and Albatross (both carcasses, unfortunately…does that still count?) and watched the dramatic sunset over the Bass Straight.  Then on Saturday I had the pleasure of being stationed on the beach to educate beachgoers about the fences and interviewing Pipi harvesters.  Bottom line:  sunny funday hanging around the beach all day!
By the way, all of this business with me, Pipi’s, Plovers, and People will soon appear in the South Gippland Newspaper!  I’ll link it here when it comes out, stay tuned. J
Now I’m getting ready to board my flight to Perth, from whence I will connect to a Greyhound bus bound for EXMOUTH!!!!  Wooo, diving mecca!!!!  Now that I’ve had a little taste of the Australia sun and water, and just a little of the heat, I’m ready to head north. 
I hope everyone has a great week, enjoy my continued photo-tour my Everytrail.com page (see previous post)