Subject: Trip Report #6 - Darwin, Australia
From: "Sarah James" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 17:52:07 -0500

February 17, 2002                                           Darwin,
Australia

"Cause I'm just a teenage dirt bag, baby
Yeah I'm just a teenage dirt bag, baby
Listen to Iron Maiden, baby
With me"

"Turn it down." "No this is a great song." "Oh come on Mark, that's way too
loud".

. and so the Carlson family continues to ramble along on their year long
adventure.  Life is passing by all too quickly.

After a superb two week stay with the NZ Jamieson's in Tauranga we flew to
Australia shortly after New Years.  We are left with fond memories of a warm
Christmas.  We picked up a few Kiwi tips to add to our annual Xmas
celebrations - Santa gets left beer with cookies rather than milk, and the
kids have adopted Santa Sacks (decorated pillow cases) and can't wait to
ditch their smaller stockings.  My beautifully decorated Xmas stockings,
that I slaved away making for each of my dear children, obviously holds no
sentimental value to them.  Bigger is better.

This was the year that Chloe deduced, or was told, that Santa is Mum and
Dad.  Imagine that, no more Carlson children believing in the magic of
Christmas.  Response from all three children: "Oh yes we do Mum, Santa has
to come as long as we still live at home".  Well at least I don't have to
buy separate wrapping paper and go to great lengths to hide it so that the
kids don't notice that Santa has the same wrapping paper as Mum and Dad.
Chloe continues to grill us on why we lied to her about Santa all these
years.  It doesn't matter how many different ways both David and I respond
to her, as far as she's concerned she's been lied to!

We've taken in a number of Australia's sights: Melbourne, Great Ocean Road,
Phillip Island, Benalla and Kancoona, Glen Rowan & Beechworth (Ned Kelly
territory), Canberra, Sydney, Byron Bay, Brisbane, Gold and Sunshine Coasts,
Cairns and points north and lots of other places in between. We are now
enroute to Darwin.  We'll leave Tasmania, Adelaide, Ayers Rock and Perth for
another trip.

We haven't been killed by any of the dangerous Australians i.e. the
estuarine crocodile, any one of 10 of the world's most venomous snakes, box
jellyfish, red-backed and funnel web spiders, scorpion, paper wasp, stone
fish, sea snakes just to name a few.  We held on tight to the kids as we
were getting in to the Electric boat on Barratt Creek (a tributary of the
Daintree River), as it was right here that Beryl Wruck lost her life to a
crocodile while standing beside the water's edge.  We didn't spot any Crocs
during our riverboat cruise but apparently there are still plenty living in
these waters.

We've learnt a little bit of the Australian language: G'day mate, Oz, Aus,
Aussie Land (all names for Australia), chook (chicken), cozzie (swimsuit in
NSW), togs (swimsuit in Queensland), bathers (swimsuit in Victoria), barbie
(BBQ), billabong (water hole), bloke (guy), bitumen (paved road), blowies
(large flies), bottle shop (liquor store), bugs (small edible crustaceans),
esky (a cooler), tomato sauce, (ketchup), ute (flat bed pickup truck),
Mackers (McDonald's), mozzies (mosquitoes), icy-pole (popsicle), lollies
(candies), yabbie (crayfish) and Mark's favourite word at the moment is
"bugger" (darn) - but he is trying to stop saying it after we explained what
it may be taken to mean in North America.  We've started calling some of the
dangerous animals by their less scary names - salties (man eating
crocodiles), stingers, bluies and snotties (very poisonous jellyfish).

We've enjoyed the Australian flora and fauna.  Finding animals in the wild
rather than zoos was all the more rewarding.  We've seen kangaroos,
wallabies, wombats, possums and many birds in the wild.  The rainbow
lorikeets, cockatoos, red rosella's, king parrots and laughing kookaburras
were much enjoyed by everybody.  We still get a chuckle when we hear those
laughing kookaburras.  They sound just like the cackle from the witch that
goes up on our door at Hallowe'en.

At the moment we're in the Northern part of Australia.  We've had a car for
most of our time in Aussie Land.  I figured out how to disconnect the
radio/cd player by pulling on a wire in the trunk. It would magically work
when it got reconnected but the kids didn't know this and thought we had a
faulty radio/cd player.

Mark did a 4 day open water dive course in Cairns and did very well.  His
dives were out on the Great Barrier Reef. David joined Mark, while the girls
and I snorkeled.  Heather has been chomping at the bit wanting to dive too,
but they won't let her until she's 12.  She's been trying to get us to
promise that we'll bring her back to the Great Barrier Reef so she can do
the course here when she turns 12.  Not sure it will be the Great Barrier
Reef, but we can probably be convinced to take her somewhere other than the
murky waters of Tobermory where David taught me!

We enjoyed snorkeling on the Reef.  Heather has been an avid snorkeler for
sometime but Chloe has always been afraid of venturing in the Ocean, for
fear that sharks would get her.  We all attended "Reef Teach" which was a 3
hour education session on the Great Barrier Reef the night before we headed
out there.  Chloe was gripped and the next day she needed little persuasion
to join Heather and I snorkeling.  She seems to have overcome the fear she
had and she's as fascinated with what's under the water as the rest of us.
She hummed away quite loudly through her snorkel, which at the time just
made me think she was really enjoying herself, but upon reflection perhaps
this was a defensive reaction to scare the sharks!  None of us saw any
sharks, although the ones that frequent the area are the harmless black
tipped and white tipped reef sharks.  The girls and I saw a honeycomb moray
eel and a blue spotted lagoon ray both of which gave the girls a bit of a
scare.  I had two girls on top of my back for a bit like little suckers
attached to a big fish!

The kids are indifferent to Australian Rainforests.  Been there done that in
Malaysia where it was better.  Rainforests here have been logged or have in
the past been decimated by cyclones so they aren't as immense and they lack
the primates that we found in Malaysian Borneo.

We haven't been able to swim at any of the beautiful beaches in Queensland
as it's stinger and box jellyfish season.  However, we enjoyed some of the
beaches near Sydney, and had a marvelous time body surfing, boogie boarding
and surfing (the boys) in the hippy mecca of Byron Bay.

If you want to know more about Australia or you're contemplating visiting,
read Bill Bryson's book "Down Under".  I think it goes by the title "In a
Sunburnt Country" in other parts of the world.  It's a wonderful read and we
concur wholeheartedly about his observations of Australia.

We're out of tooth paste and there's no Crest tooth paste for sale in
Australia!  Plenty of Colgate, Sensodyne, MacLean's, Oral B and Close Up,
but no Crest, yuk we really are on an adventure, imagine ...we'll have to
try new toothpaste.  Found Johnson's dental floss for the costly amount of
$10.00 for 200M.

G'day from Down Under!

Sarah