Day 302: Calm Waters

The weather reports had predicted that the second day of the trip would be even worse than the first - but weather reports are terrible. It was a bit overcast but less windy in the morning, and as the day progressed it turned into a beautiful, sunny day.

In the morning I did my one dive of the trip. I'm not a water person, and I was pretty nervous about how I'd react, but I felt it was an amazing opportunity and something I really had to try at least once (especially since it was included in the price). As feared, I'm definitely not a natural. The fact that I'm not a great swimmer made me more concerned about how to react if anything went wrong, and it just led to me being very uncomfortable underwater. I tried, and I did learn a lot from the experience, but I was quite happy to stick to snorkelling for the rest of the stops. If I try scuba diving again, I think I'd want start the more conventional way and do the first few things in a pool instead of open water so that there's less to worry about while I get comfortable with things.

We had a total of 3 stops for diving and snorkelling on the second day, and ended up getting back to Cairns around 3pm. Overall, it was great to see the reef and do some things out at sea. I don't foresee many times where I'll pick being on the water over being out on a mountain or hiking through a forest, but it's nice to mix it up and get some variety when the chance presents itself.

Day 301: Stormy Weather

I got up early, stored most of my things in the hostel luggage room, and headed to the harbor to board the small ship I was heading out to sea with for 2 days at part of the Great Barrier Reef. It was a pretty small group, with just 8 travellers and 4 crew. Because they were having trouble selling space on the boat due to a cyclone warning and a week of constant rain I had got a substantial discount on the cost, and then also got a free upgrade to have the only private room on the ship since it was available and I was travelling alone. The first day at sea, especially the first 4 or 5 hours, were pretty miserable. There was a lot of wind, and it was pouring rain so that no matter what you did you were going to end up getting cold and soaked. All the wind was also making the sea quite choppy and was making me feel pretty queasy. I don't normally get seasick, but I haven't been on small boats in choppy water much either. By the time we got to the first dive site I was pretty nauseous, but jumped into the water to do some snorkelling. It was a lot warmer in the water than on the boat, and as soon as I was floating in the water all my nausea went away and I was feeling great.

Through the day we stopped 4 times for dives. My package only included one introductory scuba dive, and doing extras was going to cost more money than I could afford with my dwindling funds. Even without diving, the snorkelling was still amazing. In many places the reef is so close to the surface that you have to take care not to kick it when you swim, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of types of colourful corals and fish everywhere. I don't know that much about tropical fish, but clown fish (aka Nemo fish now, apparently) were one distinctive type. We also saw a few sea turtles, a sting ray and some small sharks between the thousands of fish and plants.

Unfortunately my camera isn't an underwater one, and it cost a lot more than I wanted to spend to rent one ($30 per day to rent a camera) so I don't have any pictures. Really though, it's one of those things that thousands of other people have posted pictures of online.

By evening the weather had calmed down quite a bit, and I found getting to sleep at night quite easy.

Days 299-300: Exploring Cairns

As I mentioned, Cairns, as a town, is pretty dull. I had planned quite a bit of time in the area, so I wasn't really in a huge rush to take off on tours right away. I spent a few days walking around town booking things and just exploring around. On the second day I tried to walk to the botanical gardens because somebody had mentioned a rainforest hike there, but I ended up taking a wrong turn somewhere and getting lost, so in the end I gave up on it. The most interesting part of town was probably the harbor, which is the launching point for a lot of boats heading off to visit the reef.

Overall, not a terribly exciting couple of days. I bought a few groceries from across the street, since Australia is getting too expensive to eat out often. I also just relaxed and sat around the hostel talking to people and reading. I was just noticing the other day much I've read in the last 10 months. There is still a lot of empty time in the evenings and while waiting or travelling, but there are much fewer ways for me to spend that time lately, so I just settle on reading. At some point in Cairns I got around to reading the last book of Wheel of Time - feels a bit like the end of an era.

Note: Falling Behind

I've been having a hard time keeping up on posts again. In Cairns my hostel required me to pay per day for wifi, and Australia is expensive as it is without me having to pay lots of money to use wifi. I'm in Sydney now, and my hostel has free wifi. Unfortunately in the evening, when I normally have my internet time, it's converted into a dance club. At some point I'm sure there will be a rainy morning where I don't want to go out and can catch up a little, but as long as the weather is nice I don't want to be spending a lot of daylight hours inside, so I fall further behind.

Day 298: Flight to Queensland

My flight out of Melbourne was a pretty relaxed one. The plane didn't leave until 3:20pm, so getting to the airport wasn't as rushed as it sometimes is. The flight to Cairns was lower than a lot of the others I've done, so I got to see quite a bit of the terrain as we flew over.

Cairns itself is pretty small, and without anything much to do. The evening I got there I wandered around a bit to get some dinner, but other than little travel shops and restaurants there isn't anything exciting. For tourists it's mainly just a launching point to get at some of the interesting things in the area, which is what I also planned to do.

Day 297: Opening Round

Prior to going to Healesville the day before I had stopped by Federation Square and waited in line for awhile to get a day pass ticket for the Australian Open for the following day. The day pass ticket lets you hop between any of the matches going on other than the ones in the two big stadiums, and since all 3 of the Canadian matches going on during the day were on the outer courts, it was a pretty inexpensive (especially by Australian standards) way of getting to watch some tennis and have a fun day out.

It was one of the hottest days since I'd gotten to Melbourne, but still quite comfortable. The Open is only a short walk from the city center, so I joined the flow of people walking down.

The first match I went to, at 11am was between Rebecca Marino and Shuai Peng. It was one of the smallest courts with maybe only 60 people watching, and not surprisingly the bulk of the crowd was Chinese, cheering for Peng. The loudest and most amusing of all the fans were two Australian guys dressed up and painted in Chinese flags who had loud and often elaborate cheers in mandarin almost every stop in play. In the end, Peng was just a lot better than Marino and the match was a bit of a blowout.

The next match was Milos Raonic vs. Jan Hajek. It was on the larger Show Court 2, and while it's nothing compared to the stadiums it was still a large crowd. My take on the game is that Milos, as expected, has a devastating serve and had a huge physical edge, but he still made a lot of unforced errors when it got to rallys, and he seems to give up on plays a lot. It's hard to tell much from watching a single match, but Milos could bail himself out when he fell behind a bit on his serve by just acing his opponent over and over. In the end Milos won in 4 sets.

The last full game I watched was Jesse Lavine and Tommy Robredo. This was the most entertaining game of the day for me, as it was pretty evenly matched and there were lots of rallying and net play. Neither player was terribly physically dominating, but they both worked hard and were always running. Lavine ultimately won it in 4 sets, but two of the sets ended in tie-breaks and the other two only had one servìce break in them. Overall the Canadians went 2-1, which isn't bad, even if it was only the opening round.

I watched bits and pieces of a few other matches going on throughout the day, but only watched the Canadian matches all the way through. Afterwards I walked back to Federation Square where they were playing the tennis on a giant screen and watched a few of the main court games from there.

Day 296: Healesville Sanctuary

Since the bus schedule was more convenient on Monday I attempted my trip to Healesville again. It was a 20 minute tram ride to the city center, then maybe an hour by train to Lilydale. The bus at Lilydale was waiting when I got there, so it was just another 40 minutes to Healesville and a final transfer for another 15 minute bus ride to Healesville Sanctuary. In simplest terms Healesville Sanctuary is a zoo - one of 3 in the Melbourne area. Unlike the other two, however, the one in Healesville only contains Australian animals. Since the animals are in their natural habitat it's pretty open. It also contains a large animal clinic that nurses and looks after both animals from inside the sanctuary and other wild animals that are brought in with injuries. Since I'm probably not going to get a chance to go deep into the outback to see all the animals in the true wild, I figured this would be something of a compromise.

I've always loved animals, and been fascinated by marsupials. I'm not going to go through animal by animal, but here's a mix of pictures from the sanctuary.

I had an seconardy reason for wanting to visit the place as well. I've mentioned Belgian street artist Roa a few times when I was travelling around Europe. One interview I had read with him explained how he always paints animals native to the country he's in, so he really looked forward to being able to travel to Australia or Africa or something to have new, interesting animals to paint. Well, in November he came to Melbourne to do a show and while he was there he visited the Healesville Sanctuary and did some paintings!

The first three are from buildings at the sanctuary, and the last one is from the cafe at the National Victoary Gallery in Melbourne, which led to me finding out about all the Healesville stuff in the first place.

Days 294-295: Idling

On Saturday I was supposed to meet up with my second host in the city for his 21st birthday party, then go to his house in the evening. Due to unexpected circumstances that plan fell through, the birthday party got cancelled and I stayed at my original spot for an extra night to make things easier. The party was supposed to be at the botanical gardens, and even though it got cancelled I figured the gardens would be a nice place to take it easy and relax after a few days of pretty extensive walking. The botanical gardens were more of a big park with lots of open green space for lounging and picnics. Unfortunately the weather had gotten cooler again so while it was still nice out, it was a bit chilly to just lie around.

The following day I tried to make it to the town of Healesville, outside of the city, for something I had been wanting to do. Unfortunately Sunday is a horrible day to try to use the bus system around Melbourne, and I ended up spending about 4 hours trying to get there before giving up and coming back to the city. I gathered all my bags from where I'd been staying and took the train and a tram to get to the new place I'd be staying at for the last few days in Melbourne.

Melbourne Street Art

I wanted to continue my tradition of putting this up as a seperate post because the street art I found was spread throughout my time in the city, and it makes it easier to put it all in as one post instead of spreading it everywhere. Melbourne has an incredible amount of street art, possibly the highest concentration in the world. Although it does get a few international artists visiting, the vast majority of the art is done by locals. Unlike places like Berlin or London where it's easy for artists from neighboring countries to come over for a week and collaborate, Melbourne is pretty cut off, so they largely have to do things themselves. The city seems to take a much looser approach to street/graffiti art than a lot of places. They have dedicated areas for artists to paint freely, but a lot of restaurants, bars and other businesses also seem more willing to either hire artists to paint their buildings or to appreciate nice art that gets put on without permission, and leave it alone. I'm going to try include the artists where I can, since it'll be a good research project for me and add to my evergrowing mental database!

These three colourful pieces are all by artist Loadz (who I can't easily find any more information on) down Hosier Ln, across from Federation Square.

This large, patchwork mural is in Melbourne Chinatown, painted by a well-known french crew DMV (Da Mental Vaporz).

These two murals in the same little alley are done by prolific local artists Matt Adnate and Shida. I've actually come across artwork by both these artists (and posted both of them) earlier. Adnate does the almost photo-realistic faces, and I had a mural by him from Berlin (he likes the style where you have a piece of a face cut out from a larger design, which helps me recognize him!) and I had a collaboration from Shida and Knarf from Vienna. Shida in particular is all over the city (or at least most recognizably all over the city, since the style is very distinctive. Mostly Shida does these weird little creatures, and they seem to be down almost every alley with any sort of art all over the city.

Here's a couple more Adnate pieces from around the city as well. There aren't as many of them (but still lots) but you can tell they take quite a bit of time to put up.

Another Melbourne artist I really like is Japanese-born Hiroyasu Tsuri, aka TwoOne. The artwork I saw was all of human/animal hybrids, but they all have a dream-like quality to them, and the details in the features are gorgeous.

Much simpler, but equally distinctive is local artist Civil. He does murals (often large ones) of large crowds of stick figures. The ones I saw were pretty small compared to some of his other art I see posted online.

The final artist I have to mention is Ghost Patrol, since he's what got me interested in Melbourne street art in the first place. I first came across a sticker that he did in Berlin, then found more in Tokyo (which also gave me enough information to figure out who the stickers were by), and all through Melbourne I was keeping an eye out for his art. In the end, other than a few more stickers the same as the ones I'd already seen, the only street art of his I saw was this collaboration.

There is a very awesome art gallery / shop selling prints and books, primarily by street artists, in the city center called Outre (my stupid tablet won't let me put the accent on the e) which did have prints by ghost patrol, as well as a sketchbook by him, as well as a lot of amazing other artwork. I have enough to carry as it is and had to pass, but I might have to order some things online once I get back to Canada...

Here's a random assortment of a bit more artwork from around the city that I either haven't been able to figure out the artist of, or am just too lazy to keep looking for!