Blue Mountains

Today we woke up early to catch a tour bus to take us up into the Blue Mountains, a beautiful nature reserve area right near Sydney. The bus driver was basically completely what you would expect an Australian who lives out in the bush to be like. People on the tour were from all over the world, Thailand, Sweden, England, and a couple of ridiculous brothers from Poland, etc. They were all fun to talk to, and more fun to listen to. The bus was a big, old, rattle-trap kind of bus with a stick shift. About half the time I felt like it might just give up. On one big hill going up the mountain, we made it almost all the way up when the driver decided to stop and talk to another bus on the way down. When we started up again, we could not get back up. You could smell the clutch burning, so we had to back all the way down the windy mountain road and try again. Also, this was my first experience driving on the wrong side of the road. Every once in a while I would have "Oh my god what are you doing we're all going to die-oh wait no we're supposed to be on this side." moments, but in general it was totally fine.

Bush fires are terrifying. I've never really thought of fire as a serious danger, because Minnesota is basically a marsh. They had one of those "rate the fire risk" signs in Quetico (Canada) last summer and they only had four levels and it was on low. This is what we saw today:

They were putting up "Fire Ban" signs in every town and park we passed all day. Last year a bush fire killed something like 200 people in Melbourne. Luckily today everything was fine, but that is really scary.

On to happier things! We got to the bottom of this valley and we all piled out of the car to look for kangaroos. On the way out the driver said casually "Oh yeah, and watch out for snakes." so then I was paranoid. I am not usually afraid of snakes. I actually really like them and think they are cute, but the ten most poisonous snakes in the world all live in Australia, and I don't know what any of them look like, so I feel this is not an unfounded fear. But I saw no snakes! Instead, I saw this:

A magpie. Which made me think of Maggie and her beautiful drawings and the poem where you're supposed to be able to count magpies and they are omens of certain things. It flew over and joined another one, which makes two! "Two for joy" which turned out to be incredibly apt, because then we found this:

There were three of them, two adults and a joey! It was SO EXCITING!

They let us get pretty close, too! They didn't seem to mind. They were just trying to stay cool in the shade. At first the joey was hiding,

But then it came out and gave me a perfect shot!

I SAW KANGAROOS OH MY GOD!!! It is still really hard to believe that I saw them in the wild. Next hopefully I will see a monotreme and then I will be the happiest little bio major!

So, although that was the highlight of my day, that was not all we did. We also saw lots of beautiful scenery:

And this rock formation called the Three Sisters:

And then took a long walk down into a rainforest in the valley of the Blue Mountains (it didn't seem super rainforesty to me. I suppose when classes actually start up I will learn why it is classified as a rainforest). Anyway, it was pretty:

Then we rode the steepest railway in the world back up to the top and headed towards civilization once more. We stopped by the Olympic Park from 10 years ago, which was pretty cool but hard to take pictures of.

Now I am trying to upload pictures to this and Facebook simultaneously and it is taking about four million years. The internet here is pretty slow. But that's okay. I'm going to do the first installment of:

Words that are Different in Australia

Some of these I was warned about in my touristy books, but I was uncertain about listening to some of the things they said because I worry some of the stuff is crap people just made up to make tourists look stupid (mostly because it is what I would do). But most of them are true so far! For example:

-They call a certain type of lettuce (I don't remember which one) "Rocket"

-Peppers (red and green bell peppers) are "Capsicum" (which I think sounds like medicine)

-Rice Krispies are "Rice Bubbles"

-They use entree correctly! It's supposed to be like an appetizer - but since we use it to mean "main course" now I find it confusing that they use it the way it's supposed to be.

-This I thought was weird - they call fries "Chips" like the British, but then they still call what we call chips "Chips" as far as I can tell. Confusing.

I can't think of any more right now. I will gather more and report back.