Rottnest at last

I have been wanting to go to Rottnest for a holiday again for ages.

The last time I went was more than ten years ago, but I've been there five times in the past and I have great memories of the place. I went there as a kid two years in a row with my friend and her parents, and later on our own when we were past high school, and then for third year University Zoology camp.

It's one of my favourite WA places when it's not crowded. Some people view Rottnest aa a cheap alternative, when one can't afford to holiday overseas. But to me it's an ocean ferry ride (the rougher the seas the more fun), haven of no cars, bicycling around for hours (exploring), amazing snorkling, and coastal wilderness. I love that there is no traffic there, I love the scrub wilderness, and the wide roads all around the island are pretty much claimed for the bikinis and bikes.

So finally I organised for Tim and I to take a break there for a few days last week. My agenda for our time there was to cycle a lot, sleep a lot, draw some landscapes, and snorkle.

DAY 1

Unfortunately there was another shark attack fatality just the day before, so all the beaches were closed until further notice.   

We rode around half of the island for a few hours, stopping at a few places lighthouse, beaches, and saw four helicopters patrolling, no doubt trying to hunt down the poor shark.

Checked into our holiday unit, which I had chosen as bungalow. They now come refurbished with kitchen goodness, and a private outhouse toilet and shower, while still maintaining it's beach house feel.

 

 Lizard welcome behind the front door.

 

 Welcome Swallows in the toilet outhouse.

Tim was spent. I was revved up for more and wanted to ride to the West end of the island and back. But instead I walked to the general store, bought a few things and painted my nails, and had a nice girlie chillout time while Tim slept.

A diversion to Queensland

Tim and I went on a four day trip to Queensland two weekends ago. The trip was motivated by an invite for a friend's wedding (Clay, fellow colleague from Blue Rocket TAS), and then it became our holiday adventure for the year since we hadn't planned on flying anywhere else. Plus I've never been to Queensland before, so I was excited and curious to go, despite having this collection of words I've heard people associate with Queensland over the past few years: plastic, tacky, humid, "I ran to Queensland the police were looking for me", "that junkie got sent back to Queensland".

Well, Queensland to me was nothing like any of that, it was like this:

It was not the sunshine city while we were there, it was balmy, wet, 30 degrees, and I don't know why, but I didn't mind it. I loved how there was lush green everywhere, green thick overgrown grass, overgrown bunches of creeping plants, covering huge overgrown trees, littered with palm trees, it was tropical indeed. And there were large pockets of areas like Fortitude Valley, the "Northbridge" of Queensland, where the seedy was making way for indi art. We were staying in a boutique hotel, Limes, that had woolly chairs, and a popular rooftop night bar that shuttled beautiful young things up and down via a small elevator the few nights we were there. In walking distance all around us there were unique cafes, bars, and art galleries.

Other things of note in the collage of photos above: the most AMAZING french toast at Cirque Cafe (bannana-honeycomb-passionfruit and strawberry-mint-walnut-mascarpone), Michael Zavros "The Savage" oil paintings at Phillip Bacon Galleries, and the kitsch decor and heart shaped butter at Flamingo Cafe (but be warned, the space is tiny and a couple of the wait staff were on the art-crass side).

Evening in Elwood

So we don't have much of a view out our apartment window here in Melbourne...
but a change in light does magic tricks as the sun sets and the sky flares out, aahhh! No more concrete and wire arials.

Melbourne Driving

Capable and excited is me

as I drive around the CBD

even in this manual car

starts and stops I still get far

Crazy drivers cut our lane

people run red lights again

imapatient peds get right of way

I've parked in a no standing car bay

It is a task to drive to town

especially with rain falling down

trying to spot roads and maps at night

watch out for hook turns going right

Behind trams and sliding on the track

I make my way through the city and back

Pidgeon coo

There's a pidgeon out my window

It coos like no one's business

at 6am most mornings

I throw things but I misses.



For real there's a pidgeon out our window that coos a wierd, annoying, machinery drill like sounding coo. The first day of sleeping in this rental apartment, I got woken up too early by it, and it took a while to realise it was indeed a pidgeon. And it had perched away so well I had trouble spotting it, even though it was so loud. It was almost like it was mocking me. I didn't really throw anything at it. I DID yell at it though and waved my arms like crazy to no avail. It finally flew away when I took a photo of it.

Easter Moving to Melbourne

I have lightly footed down in Melbourne since Saturday.

We are getting poor real quick, not having found a rental yet and eating out, everything else being closed. We start work in one day, which is good for the pockets but kind of stressful that we don't know where we'll be living yet. We are lucky enough to have got a shiny new job. But the pressure will be on, and I can't say I feel relaxed about Melbourne, since we have spent most of it driving like crazy from one real estate agent to another and one rental viewing to the next, and getting a headache by 5.30pm.

The first evening we were here, Tim looked out the window and told me the sky was orange, wasn't I going to take a photo of the sunset? And I snuffed and said, of course not! nothing can compare with the views in Tasmania, now that I've been spoilt with all the Hobart panoramas of azure skies and cloudy mountaintops, I wasn't even going to care to look out the window. But after a moment, I took a peak, and what do you know? Not bad for the first day here in Melbourne. A good omen in any case...

Tasmania Regatta day off

We (peeps from other states) all happily found out it that we had a day off on Monday for the Regatta. Boats, carnivals, and fireworks at night. I caught them out the window again and under a wonderously, glowing, wicked moon.

Finches rock out with Gibsons

There was a very cool art installment last week, over here in Hobart, at the Long Gallery in Salamanca Place. I've been doing a few days in the design department again at work, and the head of design told us to check out the birds playing guitars... say again? like sculptures, or paintings? No no, real live birds on guitars!

So during the lunch break I went to have a look, and I was not disappointed. It is done by a French artist, Celeste Bousier-Mougenot, and has to be one the most unique and original things to see. You walk through two doorways of chain curtains into a medium sized room, where in the centre is a large, curvey, garden bed of pebbles complete with small grass tussocks. Spread around the garden are five shiny Gibson guitars on stands, hooked up to amplifyers, and after awhile you realise with delight, these little finches freely flying and landing around the space. 35 finches to be exact.

As they land and hop about on the guitar strings, they "play" the guitars, the sound and music choreographed to their movements, amplified to speakers, also set about in the garden. There were extra perching space for the birds, should they get tired of standing on guitar strings, with a few microphone stands, and also water and birdseed filled in guitar cases on the pebble garden floor. The whole experience was both novel and cute. And dont' worry, the whole thing was RSPCA okay'd and personally, I think the finches looked quite unbothered. (although I hope the recapturing and transporting was not too stressful for them).

I went back again on the saturday to take photos, but because of the low light and finches being super active birds, these are the clearest the shots got without a tripod.

The Dawn after Halloween

Alice the (Giant) Dawn vampire is still roaming the streets of the city here in Tasmania. She likes her freedom.

It's a Happy Halloween

Some people might find a huge rabbit peering into their window scarey, although personally I'd love it if Alice was giant. She's probably sniffed out some pumpkins and sweet potatoes.

Hallows

Halloween 'boo's from some rosey and tim monsters in a tree on our street.

Sketches to distract airplane time

While on the plane, after playing all the brain training games for the day and with nothing else to keep my mind off, being scarily in the air for another 3 more hours, I drew each of my characters...I haven't revisited Merle mouse for awhile, I'm not sure how their (Merle and Gigi) story ends yet...

my bad bird photography

Today there was a fire nearby that was quelled quickly, but enough to make the setting sun a great orangey light. And as I took a photo of the smokey sky, a little bird flew into the frame to make the boring suburban sillouette a bit more cuter. Reminded me to mention a new fantastic photography blog I've been visiting almost daily, to see what new bird Nickolay Tilcheff has put up. Nickolay was the Head of character design for Pixel Pinkie, And someone I've had the priviledge of knowing and working near. Not only was Nickolay's character drawings amazing, but he is a very talented animator also, and also amazing wildlife photographer. One would never guess, seeing Nickolay who is this 7 foot tall guy, rugged whiskers, logger's checkered jacket and scandanavian punk jeans.

His wildlife photography and observation and annecdotes are worth a look at everyday. Makes me cringe at these crude bird photos I took on MEGA-ZOOM with my digital camera. I love to capture wild birds when I see them, but unfortunately don't have the equipment or skills to do so with quality! (see Nickolay's blog).

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by the way, these two photos are from when Tim and I visited Port Arthur. I found the birds a lot more interesting than the tourist park of Port Arthur.

I've been somewhere Majestic

Before leaving Hobart, we hopped into a rented car and drove straight West of Hobart to see what there was to see. If you look at a map of Tasmania, the whole of the SouthWest corner is a dark green, with almost no roads and riddled with many river lines and ranges. Accross it is the label "Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area" (1). And that's where I wanted to get to. First stop was a wildlife rehabilitation sanctuary, where we got to watch a wild platypus swimming free in a nearby river, found that Tasmanian Devils are so much more cuter in real life, and sadly learnt that the Tasmanian Devil is declining by 50% in population over the last years, due to a cancer that could be linked to fire retardant used in the area. I don't know if it's anything to do with the fact that the forestry dep. has to combat rampant bushfires that are lit in State Forest in Tassie every Summer by bored and stupid teenagers. There was a week in December when we came to work and found the whole city down to the harbour, filled with smokey air and lit with a grey-orange tinge from one such fire.

Second stop was the Mount Field National Park where we bought a park pass and got carried away doing one after another walks in the mossy forrest and waterfalls, getting back to the car 1.5 hour later than planned, and then drove all the way to the top of the mountain on a narrow and unsealed super-windy road, round and round, goign through amazing vegetation changes. Starting off with thick mossy prehistoric looking fern cover, to decomposing bracken and brown viney trees, to masses of white skeletal gum trees and silouettes by the time we were almost at the top.

Then we began the journey into the deep of the West of Tasmania. We drove through the Styx valley and made a small diversion into the heart of it, where we could see the tallest hardwood trees in the world. The landscape was old and immense and beautiful. We saw walk cabins far off in the distance near more mountains, that I made a mental note to come back to one day if I ever wanted to trully getaway.

We drove until the sun dipped, and kept going, and we were the only car on the road for more than 4 hours now, and the road had gotten more unkept, and looked smaller, although it stretched out on and on in front for miles into the west. We were surrounded by mountain peaks that were far away, but so ancient that we could feel it's immensity as we saw the fading light touch them. We stopped at a poorly marked resevoir area that I can't locate on the map again (these are the best places to find in travels!), and Tim took a perfect photo of it from a point where I think we weren't meant to climb past.

Onwards we drove, and the old trees and plants all around us, looked and felt so QUIET and awesome as it surrounded us. It's hard to describe this Heritage Wilderness. Why its so different to National Park Forest, as beautiful as they are, this is distinctly different, and goes beyond that simple beauty, it goes into grandiosity. It's like nothing I've seen or felt. Maybe we were just lucky, that it was now dusk, and there were rows of clouds straddling the sky so that not only was the sky a brilliant orange and creamy blue-yellow, but there was neon pinks and fleurescent orange, creating this amazing light through the silent trees and dinosaur plants around us. I looked over to Tim and could not wipe the grin off my face I felt so happy. If I were to die then and see no more, I'd be truly happy. That is how amazing it was. I have seen many awesome things hiking in New Zealand for 30days, but this was MAJESTIC. Nothing else can describe it. Both our cameras ran out of batteries by then, but I think I wouldn't have even been able to capture what we saw and felt. It was humbling, it was inspiring, it gave awesome perspective, and it was the most Majestic thing I have ever seen.

We drove until there was no light and made it as far as seeing Lake Gordon, which was in the heart of this Wilderness World Heritage Forest from a hazy lookout point.

footnote (1): 1 of only 16 places in Australia that has been inscribed on the World Heritage List.

New Years morning

. 4.45am & 10.34am

I got up at the crack of dawn to capture what the sunrise on the first day of the year here in Hobart, Tasmania looks like. At 5am, and then later in the morning at 10.34am. It's amazing how clouds can just obliterate mountains so that they totally disappear. So as you can see over here in Hobart, the weather was grey and wet for most of the morning, which was fine for us as it meant more Scrubs (borrowed season 1 and 2 off our colleague Air) while eating bacon and eggs and more sparkling grapefruit juice over a drawn out brunch.

Shipstern's Bluff

I did another hike a few weekends ago to see Shipstern's Bluff, a world famous surfing spots for some of the biggest swells and breaks. The walk itself was pretty impressive, we passed through every type of grounding, mus, rocksw, steep inclines, declines, sand, 4 hours of walking in fact.
My camera battery ran out before i got to take a photo of the actual main bluff once we finally got there. so I did the next best thing and sketched it, and watercoloured it soon after getting home while the colours were still vivid in my mind. Clayton, one of my colleagues saw me sketching and said I was a hardcore (artist).



There were no amazing waves, or surfers down at the Bluff, it was an overcast day, and even started sprinkling as we ate our packed lunches, although we got to walk aroudn the ridge as it was lowtide, and there were still lots of huge crashing of waves against the edges of the rocks to make us feel cautious.

7.25am and 7.17am. twas raining today. very grey and wet.
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7.23am and 7.29pm
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7.29am and 7.32 a.

7.31am and 7.32am
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