By Janet and Karl
Note: Returning to Kurtz Stories for the first time in many years, we found the following draft post from July 1, 2015 that had never been published.
G’day Mates,
We are now back home after a great five weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Here is part two of our Australia travelogue. Part three will cover our New Zealand adventures.
Australian big cities are remarkable in their "Americanness". The streets of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide could be those of any large American city with an extensive waterfront--Chicago, Seattle, Miami. The people look and dress the same, the cars on the street are familiar (albeit driving on the left), the goods in the stores are familiar (an Apple store in Sydney looks the same and is just as mobbed as the one in Boulder), the food in the grocery store does not seem exotic, and, perhaps most welcome of all, the language is the same. A funky neighborhood in Melbourne has its own character but could be located in Denver. Even the currency is expressed in “dollars".
It's the landscapes, the countrysides and the wildlife that set Australia apart. There is nothing in America like the Mornington Peninsula, the Whitsunday Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest, the Sydney Harbor and the Blue Mountains.
The Mornington Peninsula, which we toured with our Melbourne friends Ken and Julia Coghill, provided stunning views of two different bays on the west and the east. We had a marvelous lunch and talk about Australian life with the Coghills at a resort/spa with a view of spectacular gardens descending to Phillip Bay. At sunset we climbed down to a rocky outcrop overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It seemed wonderfully exotic to us denizens of the Northern Hemisphere to look south and say, "There's nothing but ocean between us and Antarctica." We also loved feeding and petting kangaroos and wallabies and viewing koalas, emus, cassowaries, wombats and cockatoos at a wildlife sanctuary that provided great access to the animals.
The Whitsunday Islands at the south end of the Great Barrier Reef provided a marvelous introduction to tropical Australia. We enjoyed a portion of this visit with Andrew's mate Trevor Roszkos, a roommate from Pitzer College who is also studying in Adelaide this year and whose parents, Bob and Lisa, were traveling Down Under during the university's fall break, as we were. The landscape consisted of beautifully clear, blue-green shallow waters dotted with green islands, lots of bronzed young people in board shorts, muscle shirts, bikinis, and flip-flops, and sailboats and cruise ships everywhere. We could not get enough of the stunning coral and fish on a day-long best-ever (sorry, Hawaii and the Bahamas) snorkel (for Janet and Karl) and diving (for Andrew and the Roszkos) cruise. Whitehaven Beach with its pure silicon white sand is one of the most beautiful in the world and well worth the three-hour round trip boat ride to get there. At our hotel in Airlie Beach, we had a lovely two-room suite, reminiscent of where we stay at the Ko Olina on Oahu at Christmas, overlooking the ocean and the islands and boasting three infinity swimming pools.
Cairns (pronounced Cans) is a bustling tourist city of 160,000 at the north end of the Great Barrier Reef. Its dedication to tourism was a bit over the top, but it is friendly and accessible, not ostentatious. Best of all, the tropical Daintree Rainforest is just an hour's drive to the north. A day-long tour took us on a cruise along the mangrove swamps of the muddy brown Daintree River to spot crocodiles and hear tales of their ferociousness. On a walk through the rainforest we saw hundreds of exotic tropical flowers, trees, spiders, crabs and snakes. We descended from the mountains to the ocean to see Cape Tribulation, so named by Capt. James Cook because he ran his ship aground there on the coral reef on his discovery voyage to Australia in 1772 and had to spend weeks first getting the Endeavor off the reef and then repairing it before he could sail on.
Sydney's Opera House may be the icon of its harbor, but it is the harbor that sets the scene for the city as a whole. The 16-mile long harbor organizes the city into north and south and provides unending pleasure walking along its shores or cruising its waters on a tour boat--which we did twice, once during the day and once at sunset for dinner. Australian glitterati like Nicole Kidman and Rupert Murdoch (well, not sure he "glitters") live along it. Most interesting sites are within a few blocks of it, and one gets glimpses of the Harbor Bridge from almost every part of the city.
A day-long excursion from Sydney took us to the Blue Mountains National Park. The Blue Mountains are not terribly high but they are filled with impassable gorges and dramatic cliffs giving rise to breath-taking waterfalls that we viewed from multiple different angles. Despite the "blue" name, the mountains are clothed in a soft green.
Needing to do laundry and being too cheap to pay exorbitant Marriott Hotel prices (we were staying there "free" using reward points earned through our numerous Christmas stays on Oahu at the Marriott Ko Olina), we set out one rainy morning to walk to a launderette that was supposedly less than a mile away. In increasing rain, we took several turns around Robin Hood's barn, and our feet were sore when we finally found it. We must have been a strange sight--two limping, aging and bedraggled American tourists--as we dropped our laundry off with the Vietnamese family that ran the launderette.
To dry out and pass the time while our laundry was being done, we set off for the nearby Australian (natural history) Museum for a couple of hours. Following Bill Bryson's advice in "In a Sunburned Country" we spent most of our time in a fascinating room that contained an exhibit of all of the things that can kill you in Australia: snakes like the five-foot long taipan with venom 50 times more lethal than a cobra or the tiny eight inch desert death adder; the box jellyfish ("the most poisonous creature on earth”); the fennel web spider ("the most poisonous insect in the world”); the great white shark; and, of course, the crocodile. "It truly is a lethal country," says Bryson.
We loved visiting botanical gardens in the Blue Mountains, Cairns and Sydney, not because we are dedicated botanists or gardeners but because we enjoyed the quiet and the peace of these urban reserves and poking around among the exotic plants and trees.
And of course Karl had to indulge his inner legislative junkie and visit the state parliaments of Victoria in Melbourne and New South Wales in Sydney--the 94th and 95th legislative assembly buildings that he has visited around the world. The buildings were great--especially the ornate neo-classical Victorian Parliament built during the last decades of the 19th century and decorated with the fruits of the gold rush of the period--but the chance to soak up Australian politics was even better. Ken Coghill, the former speaker in Victoria, and Ronda Miller, the clerk in NSW, provided expert guidance to both the physical and the political. The remarkable thing is that Karl did not find the time to make it to the South Australia Parliament, which he could see from the balcony of Jana Mathews' apartment in Adelaide.
The friends we already knew or met along the way also made Australia special. Jana Mathews, the ex-pat from Boulder who runs an entrepreneurial development program at the University of South Australia, opened her beautiful penthouse apartment to us in Adelaide and offered us her warm hospitality. Ken and Julia Coghill went out of their way to show us around Victoria, giving up two full days to host us in grand style. Getting to know and share time with Trevor, Bob and Lisa Roszkos as we explored the Whitsunday Islands added to the fun. Everywhere we went, Australians went out of their way to welcome and help us along the way.
Andrew left us in Sydney to return to University of Adelaide for the second half of his fall semester, while we continued on to New Zealand--which will be the topic of part three of this travelogue.
G’day Mates,
We are now back home after a great five weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Here is part two of our Australia travelogue. Part three will cover our New Zealand adventures.
Australian big cities are remarkable in their "Americanness". The streets of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide could be those of any large American city with an extensive waterfront--Chicago, Seattle, Miami. The people look and dress the same, the cars on the street are familiar (albeit driving on the left), the goods in the stores are familiar (an Apple store in Sydney looks the same and is just as mobbed as the one in Boulder), the food in the grocery store does not seem exotic, and, perhaps most welcome of all, the language is the same. A funky neighborhood in Melbourne has its own character but could be located in Denver. Even the currency is expressed in “dollars".
It's the landscapes, the countrysides and the wildlife that set Australia apart. There is nothing in America like the Mornington Peninsula, the Whitsunday Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest, the Sydney Harbor and the Blue Mountains.
The Mornington Peninsula, which we toured with our Melbourne friends Ken and Julia Coghill, provided stunning views of two different bays on the west and the east. We had a marvelous lunch and talk about Australian life with the Coghills at a resort/spa with a view of spectacular gardens descending to Phillip Bay. At sunset we climbed down to a rocky outcrop overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It seemed wonderfully exotic to us denizens of the Northern Hemisphere to look south and say, "There's nothing but ocean between us and Antarctica." We also loved feeding and petting kangaroos and wallabies and viewing koalas, emus, cassowaries, wombats and cockatoos at a wildlife sanctuary that provided great access to the animals.
The Whitsunday Islands at the south end of the Great Barrier Reef provided a marvelous introduction to tropical Australia. We enjoyed a portion of this visit with Andrew's mate Trevor Roszkos, a roommate from Pitzer College who is also studying in Adelaide this year and whose parents, Bob and Lisa, were traveling Down Under during the university's fall break, as we were. The landscape consisted of beautifully clear, blue-green shallow waters dotted with green islands, lots of bronzed young people in board shorts, muscle shirts, bikinis, and flip-flops, and sailboats and cruise ships everywhere. We could not get enough of the stunning coral and fish on a day-long best-ever (sorry, Hawaii and the Bahamas) snorkel (for Janet and Karl) and diving (for Andrew and the Roszkos) cruise. Whitehaven Beach with its pure silicon white sand is one of the most beautiful in the world and well worth the three-hour round trip boat ride to get there. At our hotel in Airlie Beach, we had a lovely two-room suite, reminiscent of where we stay at the Ko Olina on Oahu at Christmas, overlooking the ocean and the islands and boasting three infinity swimming pools.
Cairns (pronounced Cans) is a bustling tourist city of 160,000 at the north end of the Great Barrier Reef. Its dedication to tourism was a bit over the top, but it is friendly and accessible, not ostentatious. Best of all, the tropical Daintree Rainforest is just an hour's drive to the north. A day-long tour took us on a cruise along the mangrove swamps of the muddy brown Daintree River to spot crocodiles and hear tales of their ferociousness. On a walk through the rainforest we saw hundreds of exotic tropical flowers, trees, spiders, crabs and snakes. We descended from the mountains to the ocean to see Cape Tribulation, so named by Capt. James Cook because he ran his ship aground there on the coral reef on his discovery voyage to Australia in 1772 and had to spend weeks first getting the Endeavor off the reef and then repairing it before he could sail on.
Sydney's Opera House may be the icon of its harbor, but it is the harbor that sets the scene for the city as a whole. The 16-mile long harbor organizes the city into north and south and provides unending pleasure walking along its shores or cruising its waters on a tour boat--which we did twice, once during the day and once at sunset for dinner. Australian glitterati like Nicole Kidman and Rupert Murdoch (well, not sure he "glitters") live along it. Most interesting sites are within a few blocks of it, and one gets glimpses of the Harbor Bridge from almost every part of the city.
A day-long excursion from Sydney took us to the Blue Mountains National Park. The Blue Mountains are not terribly high but they are filled with impassable gorges and dramatic cliffs giving rise to breath-taking waterfalls that we viewed from multiple different angles. Despite the "blue" name, the mountains are clothed in a soft green.
Needing to do laundry and being too cheap to pay exorbitant Marriott Hotel prices (we were staying there "free" using reward points earned through our numerous Christmas stays on Oahu at the Marriott Ko Olina), we set out one rainy morning to walk to a launderette that was supposedly less than a mile away. In increasing rain, we took several turns around Robin Hood's barn, and our feet were sore when we finally found it. We must have been a strange sight--two limping, aging and bedraggled American tourists--as we dropped our laundry off with the Vietnamese family that ran the launderette.
To dry out and pass the time while our laundry was being done, we set off for the nearby Australian (natural history) Museum for a couple of hours. Following Bill Bryson's advice in "In a Sunburned Country" we spent most of our time in a fascinating room that contained an exhibit of all of the things that can kill you in Australia: snakes like the five-foot long taipan with venom 50 times more lethal than a cobra or the tiny eight inch desert death adder; the box jellyfish ("the most poisonous creature on earth”); the fennel web spider ("the most poisonous insect in the world”); the great white shark; and, of course, the crocodile. "It truly is a lethal country," says Bryson.
We loved visiting botanical gardens in the Blue Mountains, Cairns and Sydney, not because we are dedicated botanists or gardeners but because we enjoyed the quiet and the peace of these urban reserves and poking around among the exotic plants and trees.
And of course Karl had to indulge his inner legislative junkie and visit the state parliaments of Victoria in Melbourne and New South Wales in Sydney--the 94th and 95th legislative assembly buildings that he has visited around the world. The buildings were great--especially the ornate neo-classical Victorian Parliament built during the last decades of the 19th century and decorated with the fruits of the gold rush of the period--but the chance to soak up Australian politics was even better. Ken Coghill, the former speaker in Victoria, and Ronda Miller, the clerk in NSW, provided expert guidance to both the physical and the political. The remarkable thing is that Karl did not find the time to make it to the South Australia Parliament, which he could see from the balcony of Jana Mathews' apartment in Adelaide.
The friends we already knew or met along the way also made Australia special. Jana Mathews, the ex-pat from Boulder who runs an entrepreneurial development program at the University of South Australia, opened her beautiful penthouse apartment to us in Adelaide and offered us her warm hospitality. Ken and Julia Coghill went out of their way to show us around Victoria, giving up two full days to host us in grand style. Getting to know and share time with Trevor, Bob and Lisa Roszkos as we explored the Whitsunday Islands added to the fun. Everywhere we went, Australians went out of their way to welcome and help us along the way.
Andrew left us in Sydney to return to University of Adelaide for the second half of his fall semester, while we continued on to New Zealand--which will be the topic of part three of this travelogue.
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