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2008 June - Back to index |
After a party and stay over at Sleepy Hollow on Saturday, we headed for Byron Bay for some diving/snorkelling on Sunday. The underwater scenery at Cod Hole was composed of lulling hills, hidden valleys, and crooked tunnels, with three-meter grey nurse sharks lurking behind every corner. I've stopped having dreams of flying: why bother, when I am doing it regularly awake, gliding weightlessly over wonderlands like this.
A minor mishap took place - we hadn't made bookings beforehand, so unfortunately not all of us got seats on the dive boat that took us to Julian Rocks. Luckily the backup plan, Tassie II wreck just off the main beach, had abundant sealife as well.
Things I've learned during my thesis:
Having such a good excuse, I decided to do a blind test with the Finnish guests, and lo and behold: Australians do make one sparkling wine that is better than Carrington Brut!
Our institute stores tens of thousands of tubes of biomaterials at less than -80 C and thus consumes copious amounts of liquid nitrogen. The loading area is right next to the bike shed, so when I leave work, I frequently pass by the tank wagons while they are unloading the stuff. Some of it inevitably escapes, covering the neighbourhood with heavier-than-air haze. The scene is particularly dramatic in the nighttime.
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Captain Cook, the commander of three round-the-world-voyages in an era when that was no pastime for newly graduated high school students, seems to have been a somewhat laconic person. Or maybe countless hours spent by drawing maps, inventing titles for places no one else he knew would ever see, and staring at the horizon just withered his imagination. Anyway, whenever he saw a landmark, he named it after some downright practical purpose. If he saw a peculiarly shaped mountain on the shores of a bay that required careful navigation, he called it Mount Warning. If he met a headland surrounded by potentially life-threatening reefs that can tear open the bottom of a ship as easy as a tin can, he named it Point Danger. And heaven knows what his day had been like at the time when he named the body of water he was crossing Desolation Sound.
Captain Cook is also the inspiration behind the name of Town of 1770. No prizes for guessing on which year he landed here.
The cruise on The Spirit of 1770 was a perfect success: it resulted in a random encounter with six manta rays at Smurf Bommie, so called because of its likeness to an underwater smurf village, or perhaps because of its color. The photograph isn't mine, unfortunately; it's from the gallery of UQ UniDive.
Tin Can Bay is a sleepy village, whose claim to fame is free dolphin feeding at the marina every morning. As it turned out after a two-hour wait, the feeding really is worth the money you put into it... However, I guess the pelican and the cormorants were happy, as the rightful owner of the fishes never arrived to collect the loot.
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Further up north, Fraser Island continues to be one of the most fabulous holiday destinations on this continent. Even the dingos crawled out of their nests to check out the 4WD buses shuttling on the 75 Mile Beach.
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What do you do when you miss the flight to your dream dive holiday on Borneo? Well, let me see...you step into a rental car and start driving towards the Great Barrier Reef! (Don't worry, you still feel like shit for a great number of days.)
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