The Agrinautica

   Saturday (this past, the 18th), we awoke in Marlo for the penultimate day of our expedition to the far eastern end of Victoria. After probably eating a simple breakfast in our nice little hotel room, we checked out and went down to the shore of the Snowy River, where people had been so frolicksom the night before. It was perhaps cooler now than then but still a comfortable temperature, and dad wanted to go swimming. Mom and I suggested swimming across but he prudently pointed out every now and then a motorboat hoons down the river probably not looking out for swimmers, and the current in the middle is an unknown factor. So he swap upstream for awhile and then came back. While he did so I explored a nearby nature path along the bank, through literal littoral rainforest and vine thickets (I was sorely tempted to just substitute literal for littoral there but people probably would have assumed I just made a dumb mistake). As usual dad declared the swim to be great.

   Then we commenced on our way. The first bit of the journey was parallel to the Snowy River, which was separated from the sea by a big brush covered sandbar for awhile. Then the road turned north and meandered through stately tall trees.



   Once we rejoined the A1 Princes Highway (again I note this is the very highway that goes past my home, if we hadn't taken all these sidequests to see other things we could have done this whole journey on just this one road) and headed east on it, the road mainly took broad swoops through forested mountainous terrain. The trees were huge. This area had badly burned in the beginning of 2020 (remember when we thought the year was starting out badly with half of Victoria on fire and some other natural disasters and that was even before Covid showed up). We also noticed after awhile a suspicious... lack of roadkill. Obviously it's sad to see roadkill, but to see a complete absence in an environment that should have plenty (high speed two lane highway through thick forest) is ominous. It makes us think the animal population of the area has not yet come close to recovering.
   Finally we got off the Princes highway, which continues from the eastern end of Victoria north all the way to Sydney (and if one were to follow it west from my house it takes an equally circuitous route to Adelaide at its other end). About twenty minutes on the smaller road to Mallacoota and... we were there! (about two hours after leaving Marlo)



   "Some believe that the name came from 'malagoutha' a local Ganay Aboriginal term of uncertain meaning." (google result from "what does Mallacoota mean" ?) but there's an interesting either potential explanation or remarkable coincidence -- Mallacoota, generally regarded as a little paradise by many, means, my Iraqi coworker informs me, "paradise" in Arabic. Could be someone who named it knew some Arabic (and hey, isn't Walhalla, where we were earlier, also a sort of paradise in a non-Australian language). Honestly in balance I think it's probably a coincidence but it's still interesting to note.
   Anyway, we discovered Mallacoota to consist of a small core of a town of houses and cafes surrounded by an extensive caravan park surrounding it on three sides and totalling 60-75% of the land area of the "town," and surrounding this a picturesque bay with many little boats moored up, a maze of reedy islands beyond. We were feeling a bit hurried because we still had a four hour drive to where we'd be staying the night. I perhaps had had a bit of "target fixation" getting us here but hey we made it. It was now around 14:00 and we figured we needed to be on the road again by 16:00.
   We looked at the cafes but none of them that were open actually appealed to us greatly. We were keen on the bakery but it turned out to be closed. Mom was suggesting we just have cheese sandwiches again but I was at the end of my rope with gosh darn cheese sandwiches. So we went to get food at what appeared to be the most popular place, a chinese restaurant. While there we observed the clientel was positively geriatric. They hobbled about feebly, barely navigating the step at the front door. We got our bowls of stir fry and took them to a picnic beach by the bay (about from where the above picture was taken), and found the food to be thoroughly thoroughly bland. I reflected back on the clientel and mused that their customer base probably likes it that way.
   Then we went on one of the shorter walks I had identified in the area. We were feeling really pressed for time but I felt like if we didn't go on a walk it would feel to much like we just came here and turned around. The walk was nice though, we heard many bird calls we hadn't heard before and at one point two smallish kangaroos (but bigger than wallabies) bounded across the trail just in front of us. There wasn't actually that much evidence that this area had burned, if it had, but there were a few blackened stumps. The big trees here seem to have survived and the smaller shrubbery thoroughly grown back.



   Then we drove to the bay entrance, where the above picture was taken, and then it was time to get back on the road! This was a four hour drive back across land we'd just covered, but it was all beautiful and interesting so at least as a passenger I didn't mind it. I'd offered to do some of the driving but dad seems content to do all the driving himself, and other than commenting that it was a lot of driving he didn't really complain. We passed a few random signs for walking tracks I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't seen the signs there, and if we were in less of a hurry it might have been nice to check at least one of them out. So for future note they are the "MacKenzie River Rainforest Walk" and "Cabbage Tree Walk"

   As is traditional for family road trips, we had some idle musingful conversations, like the subject of words that are almost the same but not, and whats the difference between them? Like I maintain there's subtle differences between "squish" and "squash," "floofy" and "fluffy" and "puttering" vs "pottering" about. I won't get into all of these (maybe a subject for their own entry?), but as to the last one, I think they both imply kind of doing various little tasks around the house, but while one might be accomplishing things while pottering about, one isn't really accomplishing anything while puttering about. And a special mention and this might literally be just a me thing, but I feel "hover" (hah-ver) and "hover" (huv-er) have subtly different meanings. Helicopters "huver," bumblebees "hahver."

   Anyway the purple line in the map at hte top of this entry is the new area covered headed out West on return from Mallacoota. It was mostly forested hills and low intensity pasture land until bairnsdale (which dad mispronounced as Brains-dale and I'll never be able to say correctly again!), and more thoroughly agricultural land west of there. We arrive in the town of Sale to get groceries and were rather shocked by how empty the town was. Traralgon (pop 26,000) on a Thursday evening had been really happening, Sale (pop 16,000) on a Saturday evening around the same time was like a ghost town. Also like a god damn labyrinth, major roads seeming to dead end. We wanted to go to Coles because we're more familiar with it, but literally couldn't find a way to get to the front entrance of the store and settled instead for a Woolworths we stumbled upon.
   Then we went to get KFC for dinner since we just wanted something quick. Here we had perhaps an error of differing national standards -- I never eat at KFC so I don't know the sizes of things, but my parents felt one piece of chicken for each of them would be sufficient and two for me. We asked for two breasts and two thighs but the bemulleted adolescent who took our order apparently interpreted that as two drum sticks and two breasts for some reason. And when my parents saw the small size of the portions they had gotten themselves they were very sad (I offered one of my two pieces, even though that was also insufficient for my appetite, but they declined). But that comes later because we took the food to the airbnb to eat there.

   From the town of Sale we continued on to our airbnb down on Golden Beach, arriving there just after the sun had set. This bnb, when we had looked at hte listing, had said "sheets aren't included but can be provided for a small fee." We thought that was really odd, who travels with their own bedsheets?? But whats a small fee, $5? $10? So we booked it and sent the host an inquiry about sheets. He had responded with "no worries" and a phraseology which lead my dad to think the host understood we'd need sheets and was agreeing to provide them.. and the fact that the "small fee" was $60 a bed (!!!!!!) WTF! We could probably buy our own sheets for that much! We actually considered doing so. But despite a lot of grumbling we were committed.
   Anyway, arriving at the place we found... NO SHEETS! And also no running water. And the host somehow had 4.83 star average and "super host" status. WTF. We sent him messages politely expressing our alarm and soon he was on the phone -- he hadn't thought we'd actually requested the sheets. He seemed reluctant to admit there were sheets on hand but eventually said they were in the locked garage and if we had a screwdriver we might be able to remove the lock deadbolt ... but that turned out to be removable simply by hand.
   As to the water, the host said tehre'd probably been a power outage earlier in the day and the pump needed to be turned back on. Which required dad to open a hatch on the side of the house and crawl ten feet in the (utter darkness at this point, with flashlight), under the house to figure out the right buttons to push to turn on the pump.
   And it's AFTER all this shenanigans, that we FINALLY sat down to enjoy our dinner, at which point we found ourselves looking at these meagre meagre portions. Fortunately we still had some leftover bland bland chinese food (it was so bland even now we didn't finish it and tossed the rest) and some other leftovers.
   OTHER than all these problems the house was nice, and right on the beach (though the ocean wasn't visible due to the sand ridge running parallel to the beach). Dad did go look at hte ocean and report back to us, mom and I just appreciated the sound of waves crashing from the house. Also mom saw a possum on the fence, which, since it froze when she shined the light on it (playing possum, as it were), we were able to approach closely and have a good look at. This one had a naked tail, I think it was a ring tail possum -- the only other possum here I've had a good look at was "Sancho" in my garage, who had a floofy tail and is, I believe, a brushy tailed possum.


I still think these things are uglier than American opossums

   And then we put the sheets on the beds and went to bed. The end (until tomorrow).

   I still don't know if the host did indeed charge us the $60 or waived it in a desperate attempt not to get the less than stellar review he was clearly headed for. And for that matter I'll have to check with mom if dad did indeed give him less than five stars -- dad can be tooo nice sometimes, and I think while I could have actually forgiven the lack of water as an unforseen circumstance if the host seemed like he'd done everytihng reasonable to ensure a good stay, calling $60 a "small fee" loses my assumption of good faith.

   Ghana and Guinea both require visas. I forget, I mentioned here right I'm going to Ghana and Guinea? The visas require one to have flights booked before one applies, which held up applying until the relatively last minute because figuring out flights was a bit of a Thing, one of the organizations even cancelled the project and then I booked flights and convinced them to uncancel it. Anyway by then it was getting on to less than three weeks to the trip so I didn't want to send my passport to DC for visa stamps. Guinea has a visa on arrival (but you need an "eVisa" approval first which I applied for). Our man in Ghana felt he could arrange a visa on arrival even though it looked like Americans weren't eligible, but you know, this is Africa, rules are flexible.

   And then last Friday, a week before the trip, we had an emergency "zoom meeting" (actually Team Viewer for whatever reason), he didn't think he'd be able to get the visas. So we discussed both the possibility that I could rush to Sydney for an emergency visa at the consulate and/or significantly shortening the projet to account for the potential 15 day processing time if I couldn't get an emergency visa appointment.
   I also left the consulate a voicemail and email immediately after our meeting, though I didn't expect to hear back from them until Monday.

   Monday our man in Ghana is now very confident he can get us visas on arrival. Crisis averted. The consulate emailed me back, saying they could fit me in whenever, but I didn't even respond because I'm sure they're busy they don't need my "nevermind" message.

   Then on Wednesday the consulate called me because they hadn't heard from me. I said oh yeah sorry mate I have a visa arranged for arrival. They said "but they won't let you on the plane without a visa!!" and they were very sure of that.
   At thihs point it was the middle of the night in Ghana / Germany, where the rest of the team are located. I saw there were affordable flights ($350, whereupon last month booking well in advance I think Steph and I had gotten tickets to Melbourne for less than half of that) at that point for the one remaining day (Thursday, yesterday), and I was unsure they'd still be available (from my experience when you find a good flight ticket if you don't immediatelybuy it you never again find one nearly as good). So I took a leap and bought the ticket -- if the rest of the team approved it I'd get reimbursed but if they were like nah we have this sorted I'd presumably just have to eat that cost so it was a financial leap. ...Fortunately when I was finally able to talk to the others they approved the decision.

   So the very next day, Thursday, I was flying to Sydney again. Flight at 6am, so had to be at the airport at 5am, so had to leave my house at 4am, so had to set my alarm for 3am.

   Got there without incident. I'e barely spent any time in Sydney at all. The conference last month I didn't really see any of the city other than the public transit between the airport and the venue. I've been in Sydney for two brief 24 hour or so stints about ten years ago and that's it. So walking around downtown Sydney was a pretty new experience to me and... frankly it seems nicer than Melbourne ::hides from angry Melbournites::. It had broad pedestrian only thoroughfares (Melbourne has maybe one?), grand old buildings, and most of all wasn't freezing.

   Easily found the consulate, which turned out to be a law firm on the 7th floor of a downtown building, with a Ghanaian flag in their lobby. Had been expecting at least the consul-general to be Ghanaian, if not the rest of the staff, but they all looked thoroughly European-Australian. ::shrug:: They were very nice though. Got my visa.

   Then strolled around a bit, took a nap in the botanial gardens. Even though I knew the appointment would only take half an hour, these last minute flights I was able to get had only allowed for arriving first thing in the morning and departing at 5:40pm so I had all day. Flew home without incident.

   This morning double checking my ticket for the airport shuttle I realized I'd accidentally booked it for yesterday! That was frustrating though the least-bad such mistake I could have made. Booked a new airport shuttle ticket since it was too early in the morning to call them and didn't want it to be sold out if I waited. As it happens when I finally arrived at hte airport shuttle place and explained the situation they actually refunded me the cost of the extra ticket which I really hadn't expected, so that was nice.

   Leaving my car at work for the 40 days I'm gone, and a coworker, Thomas, drove me to the shuttle bus stop. Again appreciative of the great support from my boss and coworkers.

   And now I'm sitting at the airport gate, flight boards in ten minutes!

UPDATE: Now in the Dubai Airport and just got the email with the pdf of my visa on arrival. Ahaha last minute much?

   Once upon when I was relatively wee, I looked out my bedroom window, which opened out over a section of roof sloping away at a relatively slight angle, and out there in the dark silhouetted by the streetlights there was something moving. Something large and furry. A wild animal! A opossum!
   "Mom! Mom! There's a opossum!" I called out as quietly as I could in a projected whisper when she came to the door to say goodnight.
   I don't recall whose idea it was, but we quietly placed a bowl of catfood and a cup of water on the flat area intended for some flower pots just outside the window. We closed the window and I lay down to sleep. Just as I was beginning to drift off I heard a munching noise! Excitedly I slowly raised my head up to look out the window and there was the possum munching catfoot happily a mere foot or two away. He had a white triangular face with dark eyes and round black mickey-mouse-ears. His face looked a bit bulgey as he chewed so I creatively named him "Bulgy-Face Opossum." He'd munch for awhile and then drink some water and then go back to munching, before finally sauntering silently off. Thereafter every evening until we finally moved from that house I left him food and water and would often delight in hearing him munching just outside my window.

   At our new house I left catfood out sporadically but because there was no convenient place outside my bedroom window I had to satisfy myself with putting it outside the door to the backyard downstairs, and that wasn't as satisfying since I couldn't see who was eating it, for all I know it could have been a gosh darn cat eating that cat food!
   Opossums were around though. There was a latticework awning over part of the back patio and in evenings opossums would sometimes walk across it, which they could do very quietly, but with an adorable naivety to the fact that their long naked tail would often hang down and give them away.

   For awhile when I was in high school we actually had a pet opossum mom named Emmaline, but I'll let her write about that (mom, not Emnaline). (It's funny actually how her memory of the events differs from mine in some key respects, most notably in her recollection I was there and in mine I was not!!)

   Later, after I'd gone to college and/or moved away, a funny thing happened. Beloved cat Pelekea "Pele" Cachaça had gone to cat valhalla after dying valiantly in battle with coyotes, but my parents had left her food bowl full in the kitchen. Then they noticed the bowl continued to get emptier every day! There hadnt' really been a normal cat door so much as they had always left the door open into the garage knownig that one of the ground level vents didn't have a screen on it and the cat used that to ingress and egress the house -- so they concluded a neighborhood cat had been coming in at night and eating the catfood in the bowl, and so they closed the door to the garage before going to bed.
   But the catfood continued to disappear from the bowl! Was it the wandering ghost of Pelcat??
   They only discovered the answer to the mystery because they happened to also close the door to their bedroom, which they didn't usually do. Mom woke up at night hearing a scratching on the inside of the door, sleepily thinking to himself that the cat wanted out before realizing there no longer WAS a cat! She grabbed the flashlight we Californians always have near the bed in case of earthquakes, and pointed it at the door. Next time there was a scratching she turned on the flashlight -- there was a possum, caught looking flummoxed at the door!
   The opossum had hidden itself by the time dad was up too and had turned on the lights. He went to the garage and came up with beekeeping gloves to grab the opossum and evict it. Now the stow away opossum had to be searched for, and it was discovered it had actually been living for some time in the back of the walk in closet in the master bedroom, behind a wall of shoes!!! While we had thought whatever was eating the cat food was coming in to eat it and going out again, in actual fact the opossum had probably been snacking on it as a little breakfast before going out for a night of rambling! After certain pranks detailed in mom's entry, dad evicted the opossum into the back yard.
   When I heard this story I felt like that sounded like a perfect living situation that didn't require opossum evicture at all but dad evidently didn't quite share my view.


A random baby opossum I met sometime in 2015

   When I moved to Australia I found Australian possums to be somewhat different. As dusk set in these creatures could be seen scuttling along the ground near trees or racing up and down the trunks, or more often heard making unearthly screeches. Occasionally one would run across the roof of my first flimsy accomodation sounding like a miniature freight train. They had stubbier faces, bigger round eyes, non-mickey-mouse ears, and fluffy tails. More people seem to think of Australian possums as cute than American opossums, but I personally feel American opossums are much cuter.
   While playing D&D with my friends, because I'm a huge nerd, I would sometimes tell them I was "sneaking silently along the wall like a opossum" and they'd look at eachother and then inform me "Kris, our possums aren't like yours, they're anything but silent."
   Interesting o/possum fact -- in America we're usually accustomed to our things being named after things on other continents and not vice versa, but the Australian possums are named after the American opossum. They are "related" inasmuch as they're both marsupials, but Australian possums are more closely related to kangaroos than to their distant American opossum o-cousins.

   When I moved into my current little house, the very first night I discovered that Australian possums not only screech, they also, far from quietly creeping across fencelines with only their dangling tail to give them away, seemed to like to jump on my roof and gallop around, possibly holding entire wrestling competitions up there. Nearly every night I hear the thump and clatter of enthusiastic possum sports on my roof, which is not nearly as charming as the sound of old Bulgy-Face eating.
   One day I went out into my garage and saw a possum sleeping on a rafter there. I named him Sancho. It was kind of a mystery to me how he was getting in and out since he seemed bigger than any openings I knew about. Now I had a name to complain about when I heard Sancho making a racket at night. "Damn you Sancho!"
   Later one morning I found Sancho had knocked over an empty glass jar in the garage and it had shattered on the floor. When I grumblingly informed Cristina of this, her first response was "oh no, is Sancho okay??"
   One evening in the summer I was up late just finishing extracting some honey, just slowly draining the extracting machine into some buckets so at the time I wasn't moving much or making any noise, when I heard a scrabbling noise. Looking up I saw Sancho actually climbing up the glass window slats and coming through where one was missing. I hadn't thought he'd be able to get through there. As he came through he saw me and stopped. For a minute we silently locked eyes. Finally I said
   "Hi, Sancho."
   And he backed back out the window slats and disappeared into the night. I had the window slat replaced because I don't need him breaking things in my garage, though I felt guilty depriving him of a shelter he was accustomed to using and thought about getting a "possum box" put onto one of my trees or something.


Sancho himself, looking like he got brain freeze from eating some ice cream too fast

   Just as I pulled into my driveway Friday, my friend Mick pulled up in front of the house. He had had business in nearby Colac. Mick works as a "machine programmer" for a laser etching company. I haven't been to his work but I picture it as some wild sci fi scene with lasers shooting everywhere. I always have very interesting conversations with Mick; soon we were discussing why I can't cut things while holding scissors in my left hand -- I hadn't realized it's actually because of the way the blades are set up, and thought it was just something existential about scissors. He mentioned there's even left handed and right handed tin-snips, and that the left handed ones are always green, to which I objected, that the left should be red and the right should be green, as the running lights on a ship are.
   Then we moved on to the symbols I was using on my beehives. If they have the highly contagious and deadly-to-bees disease of foulbrood, I mark them with unmistakable red Xs made with red duct tape. After 75% of the hives I got from this one beekeeper came down with foulbrood I automatically places a quarantine on those hives of that batch which didn't even have foulbrood symptoms, and marked them with a red slash of tape, ie half the X. It's interesting to note that a red cross and a red X look VERY similar, but I try to make sure my Xs don't meet at right angles. Once a hive has been infected with foulbrood, one must put the bees down immediately :( , and then either burn the equipment or you can send it to get irradiated at a commercial sterilization facility. Since there's a general ban on burning things outdoors here throughout the summer, and I had a lot of affected equipment, I've decided to take it down to the sterilization center east of Melbourne. I picked up the first batch of sterilized hives on Thursday, now how to mark them so they don't get confused with nonsterile hives?? I googled around for insternational standardized symbols for sterilized, you'd think there'd be one, but other than a circle with "STERILIZED" in it, there didn't seem to be one. So I got some green duct tape and slapped an = sign on each hive -- I figure that's as opposite of the red X as I can get.

   While Mick and I were chatting on my back porch, my dear friend Koriander called me (via facebook) from Washington state, where it was 2am and she couldn't sleep. We put her on speakerphone and for the next three hours she was part of our conversation, it was kind of fun having a long rambling group international conversation. When I sent Koriander the picture of the hives marked with the symbols, the sterile ones on the left and the nonsymptomatic quarantine ones on the right, Kori wrinkled her nose and said "that's alright but... the red ones should be on the left."



   I had been vacillating wildly all week about whether or not I'd go on this camping trip with the Invertebrate Group five hours drive from here. On Friday I got so far as opening an email to apologize to the organizer that I wouldn't be able to make it after all ... and it was at that moment that I decided I would go. To shorten the journey just a bit I crashed at Mick's place that night, since he's about an hour in the right direction. I'll spare you the overwrought travelogging on this occasion since I can only talk about rolling eucalyptus covered hills so many times (theory: writing every day will help you avoid cliches because the cliches will become your own cliches), but the last hour was winding up a very pretty lightly forested valley. And very excitingly, a goanna --a lizard nearly two meters long-- (possibly a lace monitor) darted across the road. I had seen goannas every day when I used to live in subtropical Queensland up north, but hadn't seen any down here in cold Victoria.
   Since the itinerary I'd been sent for this trip noted they'd come back to camp at lunch on Saturday, I'd timed my trip accordingly, leaving Geelong just after 7am and arriving at 12:46. The campground was a nice quiet place by a river in the forest. There was no sign of anyone, and no reception of any kind. I pitched my tent in a nice grassy spot under the trees, idled about a bit till 1:16 but still no sign of anyone. Consulting the itinerary, they were going to walk along the river before and after lunch, so I set off up the river.
   No sign of anyone but it was pleasant. It was maybe 80f, sunny but with a nice breeze and I was wading along upriver since there weren't really trails on the banks. Returned to camp around 6pm to find the group sitting around a table under the awning of an RV, listening to classical music and eating cheese on crackers and wnie. They had flipped the itinerary and had driven for the day to a nearby location they had been going to visit the following day, due to weather considerations. I had been feeling annoyed, as one might imagine, having driven five hours to join a group that hadn't been where they said they'd be, but they said they had waited in the morning and I realized I was probably entirely at fault myself since I never told them I w as planning on catching up at lunch not morning. The members of the invertebrate group turned out to be a bit on the older side, when I went out with them the next day we had to restrict ourselves to relatively even tracks. I greatly enjoyed talking to them though, and it was nice to be able to say things like "when you say 'European Wasps' you mean Vespula germanica I believe?" without feeling like the colossal blow-hard I'd ordinarily feel like for dropping scientific names into a conversation. Because common names often vary between countries I find in Africa it's often only by resorting to the binomials that we can be sure we're talking about the same plant though.

   I haven't had a lot of campfires while camping in Australia because I'm never sure if it's allowed. I would have thought it wasn't but a ranger had happened by and said it was, so that evening I had myself a little campfire by my tent, with a glorious panoply of stars visible in the gaps in the trees overhead. When I put the fire out and turned my flashlight on to my tent, there was ... what I can only imagine was a fox but I swear it was bigger than a fox, its tail was longer and less bushy. It moved like a fox though, darting away a bit, turning to look at me with it's eyes sparkling in the light, then darting further away. Maybe it was the Tasmanian tiger ;)



Yesterday, Sunday, March 18th - First I led the group to see the colony on the underside of a nearby bridge wihch I had first taken for bees, but were in fact wasps. I think they were Ropalidia revolutionalis as that's the only I'm seeing on a list of Australian wasps that matches their mostly dark brown appearance. With the group we examined many little beetles and other bugs but I found I definitely am mostly interested in wasps and bees. We found some clusters of "green and gold gnomia bees" roosting on some plants (they look kind of like honeybees, indeed one of the volunteers said she'd sent a picture to an entomologist who, granted, wasn't very interested in bees, and he'd said they were honeybees). Also a spider wasp trying to haul its hapless prey, a spider, back to its burrow.

   The weather was overcast, on and off lightly sprinkling, temperature in the mid 70s, it actually felt perfect. During the lunch hour during which we were back at the camp I enjoyed just sitting in my campsite reading, thinking about just how serene this place in the forest was.

   Ducked out around 2:30, though the rest of the group will be there through today. Drive back home was uneventful. On both the way in and the way out I was listening to Paul Theroux's semiautobiographical book My Other Life. I love his writing, which includes several book length travelogues, but his travelogues are so much more than travelogues, but philosophical journeys. His writing always inspires me to try my utmost to write as best I can.



   I went straight back to Mick's actually, since we had made plans to play D&D. I've never played D&D before, though I like to make D&D references, and I've been saying I was D&D curious for awhile. I think the rest of my friends were similarly interested and inexperienced at it. We'd been meaning to get together to do it for awhile, and they'd finally done so on some recent occasion when I was out of town. So this was the first time I was able to actually catch up with them. I played a criminal halfling (hobbit?) which I named Dillweed Tosscobble, and was disappointed to find my friends had all given themselves boring names. During the evening I slaughtered two wolves and a goblin. I'm looking forward to playing more so that maybe I'll have some ideas to write a sequel to the D&D entry I wrote awhile ago that I'm quite pleased with (set in our contemporary time, as envisioned by people in the distant future). I also have an idea for a story where the protagonist is a naturalist in the style of the great 19th century expeditionists, and journeys around a D&D style world studying and writing about the specific ecological attributes of the fantastic beasts of the D&D universe. Explore ideas like how does a sphinx fit into it's ecosystem? A cockatrice? What's the natural balance between roving bands of orcs and elves?


Next Adventure: I've signed up for night shift Tuesday night volunteering on the continuing wildfires about an hour West of here. I think I'll start work early tomorrow, sleep till the shift starts, and then just survive as much of Wednesday at work as I can.

Saturday, February 24th, 2018 - We awoke to the first rainy day of our whole week in Tasmania. People say "it's cold!" down in Tasmania and allege the weather is much worse, but from my brief experience, we had a solid week of lovely sunny days in Tasmania whereas at home in Victoria I don't think we've had more than three days of sunny weather in a row all year, and even three in a row has happened maybe once or twice. I asked friends back home if they were getting the same week of nice weather and they said they were not, so there you have it, weather in Tasmania is great, case closed!

   We'd spent the night at an airbnb in a rural area on the peninsula between Hobart and Port Arthur, in this case a woman was airbnbing out a self contained section of her house. She was very nice. Mom wanted to visit with the farm animals and chooks (chickens) said to be on the property but in the pouring rain it wasn't very appealing to go mucking about. Well for some of us. For my dad, there was one thing he wanted to do: go swim in the ocean!!
   Following directions from our kindly host, we proceeded to nearby Pipe Clay Lagoon, which as were driving up beside it appeared to at the time consist of mud flats and/or a centimeter of water with happy water birds walking around looking for tasty snacks. What was really kind of neat though was on the sand bar section between the lagoon and the sea, there was literally no road but one drove on the sand (on the lagoon side) and there were houses on the sand bar whose driveways just went into the sand. Our host had mentioned that at high tides the water is up to the bottom of the driveways. Guess one has to plan one's comings and goings!
   Because it was still raining, when we parked and walked to the sea-side there was no one at all on the beach there. Dad declared the water to be (62? 65f?), which is actually similar to the ocean water temperature in California, in which he swims alll the tiime. So he went in and soon he was just a distant splish splashing arm. While he did this mom and I strolled up the beach looking for keen shells. There was quite a large amount of nice shells on the beach. Also the boiler of a ship that ran aground there in the 20s or thirties I believe (there was an informational plaque but I don't actually recall the date).

   By and by dad returned, invigorated and happy. He had swam in the ocean at the southernmost point any of us has ever been (save for Port Arthur the day before which looks like it has a few kilometers southing on this place but hey thats quibbling)! Now he was feeling celebratory so we decided to look for a nice place for breakfast. We had noticed on the maps a canal that appeared to not quite cut through a narrow neck in the peninsula and decided to investigate!! While so doing we found a nice restaurant overlooking the canal and settled in for a rather fancy brunch (at first I mom and I were thinking it looked a bit fancier than our usual lunch budget, but like I said, dad was feeling very festive - "it's our last day in Tasmania!"). While there we learned the canal had been built (in the 20s? 30s? I'm just gonna go ahead and assume every date I can't remember falls in that area) after intense lobbying by local farmers who wanted to I guess shorten the shipping route to bring their products to market in Hobart by boat (though looking at the map it really doesn't look that far around). After building the canal at a fair expense it was only briefly operational before storms silted up the seaward end of it, and constantly dredging this build-up proved unfeasible. So today it's just a canal to nowhere, with the seaward end completely built-over.



   Our plan for this morning WAS to go to the famous Salamanca Market, which everyone was saying we needed to go to, but being as it was totally pouring we decided to maybe take a rain check on the market (I can picture tassie_gal throwing up her arms in utter consternation at us here ::hides::).

   Instead we decided to hit an animal sanctuary on our way back north. We headed north, off the peninsula, and skirted along the east side of the Derwent estuary, with Hobart town across the way (though a fair bit of it had overgrown onto this side as well). About half an hour north of the city we came to the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary, here, conveniently, the rain had stopped and the weather was once again rather pleasant. We caught a guided tour by an elderly guide who mom (and dad agreed I believe) swore was the spitting image of my dad's mom, whom I barely knew, so I tried to get a good look. Here I suppose I really ought to describe said guide but I'm not sure how. She was a bit wirey, with white hair that looked like it had once been red, irish features.
   The sanctuary had the obligatory hundred or more tame kangaroos one can feed, lounging around living the good life, but we steamed right past these boring dime a dozen animals to see the famous Tasmanian devils. It turns out, you know, they look nothing like the cartoon character at all. They look kind of like large (small dog sized) stocky rats. And apparently are prone to tumors which makes them, um, really a bit ugly most of the time. I couldn't really get a good picture of one, they're very restless and I kept getting pictures of their back or otherwise ruined pictures, this is the best I got. They're mainly scavangers and opportunist eaters of anything they can get their hands on, and I realized they share their belligerent temperament with a lot of other animals that also fill that niche such as hyenas, and jackals; I guess it comes with the territory. Some of the enclosures had a chew toy on a bungee as an "animal enrichment item" to simulate the tug of war over a piece of meat they might regularly get in with their compatriots in the wild.
   When my grandmother's lookalike moved on to the koalas we peeled away, admired the cute echidna a bit (sign there said that echidnas are actually very smart with an unusually large brain for their size), fed some kangaroos (look at this cute kangaroo family, and note the tail and leg of the joey hiding in his mother's pouch here), managed not to accidentally feed the kookaburra, and were all a bit mind-bizorgled to learn from the sign that one cockatoo they had was over a hundred years old!! I knew some parrots live a really long time, such as the alleged* parrot of Winston Churchill which is still alive at 119 years old, but now I'm looking around at the huge flock of cockatoos that live around my house and thinking jesus any of these could be a hundred years old!

* while fact checking this claim I was sadly disillusioned to learn that the Churchill estate firmly maintains he owned no such parrot.