On arrival of Townsville, I met up with the group in the airport, the rest of the group seemed to be a little more jet lagged than me, probably because, I showed up about 20 hours earlier in Sydney. The group is really cool, I knew I'd get along with folks from the moments they all landed.
We have a professor from OSU with us on our trip, his name is David. This him getting off from the long flight across the Pacific.
There's 8 students besides myself and they're all a little younger than I am. I haven't really spent a huge amount of time with people yet so maybe shouldn't try to describe the whole group in this blog.
After hellos and compensatory greetings at the airport, we took a shuttle through Townsville, took a ferry to Magnetic Island and walked a kilometer walk to our accommodations.
After some settling in at the Island Leisure resort (the place we're staying for a week) they let us have roam of the island. Some people slept and tried to recharge after the flight, I opened an ice cold Victoria Bitter and plunked down in the nearest sand.
A few folks made their way down to the beach, and we jumped into the luke warm ocean water.
We hiked around the island a little bit, check out the tropical plants, and saw some really cool wildlife. From left to right, this is Sean, Micheal, Rachel, Kim.
It really is amazing here. It really does feel like I won a vacation package from the price is right. I'd like to post more photos, but I only have a few minutes of internet left.
Yesterday we had our first in class lecture, and learned about reef structures, reef biology, and Australian aborigines. Really cool stuff. I'm learning more about the environment of Australia and the past of native aborigines than I ever knew existed. It really is interesting stuff.
Then we took a hike through the jungle to a private nude beach. None of the students got naked (even me), but we all swam around in this beautiful private little bay.
The hike to the beach included seeing a koala bear and other wildlife and talking about native and invasive plants. Our guide Dani is a pretty awesome lady, she did the whole hike through the granite and plants barefoot.
Along the hike, we came across these little ants with green butts. They make nests in the trees and like to bite humans that disturb their nests. Apparently these little green-assed ants are edible, but only their green ass, so ate an "ants bum" (tasted a little sour), and I also ate some type of native wild plum (which was also sour).
After trekking through the tropical forest, we hung out at a local latin restaurant called "noodies" while waiting for the next bus. I didn't have my books with me, so I couldn't study, so I got a tequila sunrise and watched the sunset. We ended up getting back much later than planned.
When we got back we had to hand in a quiz. With all of the activities we had been doing and the busy schedule, I had failed to give myself enough time to actually finish it. I ended up passing in an incomplete quiz. So, I'm not proud to say, but I failed it. Oh well, I'll just have to play catch up and do really good on the remaining assignments.
That's cool that you're learning about the aborigines. We spent a whole week learning about the migration to Australia in my archaeology class. Did you know that they brought dingos with them to the continent?
ReplyDelete