Kayaking leg of Adventure Race
Originally uploaded by Heather and Rob.
We're a bit behind in our blogging updates... never having made it past day two of our honeymoon (maybe we'll finish that story someday). But, February was a lovely month back in Australia. Rob and I participated in our first Adventure Race. This adventure race was a mixture of kayaking, mountain biking, and running (with many legs of each style). The whole race was completed in tandem, i.e. we had to stay together the whole way. :) Luckily, we were both a bit out of shape, so neither of us was as competitive as we are known to be sometimes. :) The race works like this: about an hour before start time each team is given and map and a list of the order of the check points where they to stop and punch their card along the way. Teams may have different routes. Because the race involved three different methods of transport, the route ends up looking like a big flower-structure, with many loops that lead back to more central locations. Unfortunately, being novices at this game, we didn't bring laminating paper with us to protect our map and list from the water in the kayaking leg. And what a pair we were after that... first Rob lost the list of stops in the change between kayaking and cycling. Later, Heather slipped in the water while trying to punch their card and dowsed the map in the water. A wet map easily rips into many pieces, and soon we were depending upon other racers, and tried to guess from their route what ours might be. As you can see in the photo, it was great fun. We'll have to try again some other time when we're more prepared.
I also took a couple of field trips around Australia in February. First, I headed off with a volcanology class to New South Wales (the province along the E coast of Australia). It was gorgeous country and I saw all sorts of new wildlife. I saw my first goana, a large reptile with a long tongue that slithers quite quickly along the ground. This particular goana was interested in the food left out by a cyclist who left some food out at his campsite. The goana saddled up to the apple, gave it a few licks, decided it wasn't so good, and then slithered away. We couldn't find the cyclist, and I'm afraid to say, he may never know that the apple had been licked by a large lizard before he ate it. yuck...! The students were great, mapping during the day and working on coloring in their maps and writing descriptions in the evening while the other instructors and I cooked dinner. We had a huge portable grill. Dinner with the Aussies wouldn't be complete without barbeque, so every morning was full of bacon and eggs, and every evening involved barbequed meat of some sort. One night, we barbequed up enough chips (french fries) for the 25 of us! Without showers, at the end of the hot humid New South Wales summer days, we all showered in the ocean. One student even brought her surfboard to get in a half hour of surfing here and there.
The next field trip, a trip with a visiting scientist from Canada, was to Southwestern Victoria. Also a coastal trip, the views were great and the wildlife abundant. My first koalas (incredibly sedentary creatures that sleep almost the entire day... and in the most uncomfortable looking places - one koala literally looked like it had a stick up its butt), and kangaroos (those kangas have such strong tails! I had no idea that they could put so much weight on their tales and practically use them as another limb), and plenty of emus.
Summer was lovely... but fall is now upon us. Heather is headed up to northern New South Wales to visit Rob and participate in a crazy relay race with Rob and his coworkers. We'll be pushing a wheelbarrow for 3 straight days (in relay) from Mareeba to Chillagoe. Those wacky Aussies.. I'll have to go just to find out what it's all about. Stay tuned.
