Our first full day of Australia began with the sun, around
6:45. It was supposed to be 6:30, but my clock is set wrong. You would expect
to be an hour off, or maybe 2 minutes early. Instead it’s 13 minutes slow.
Today we were to explore the Blue Mountains, a well-known Australia landmark
for birding and nature. If you don’t like me talking about birds and such this
will probably be a really boring story.
After some driving we arrived in the
blue mountains and found that we could not see 15 feet in front of our faces,
there was tons of fog. Our guide Tim tried to guess were the fog would
dissipate and when so as to find the best spots. He did a pretty good job and
we ended up hiking the Grand Canyon (yes, we hopped on a plane to the US)
Trail. We started in a Eucalypt forest that was pretty incredible. Birds aside,
these forest are meant to be burned. Within a year of a forest fire the same
trees, not same species, actually the same individuals, have returned to their
previous state. American tries cannot do this. Also Tim explained that in
Australia everything is opposite. Leaves stay all year while the bark falls
off, you smell leaves rather than flowers, forests try to burn themselves, and
female trees have the nuts. Also there are no indigenous cats, bears, hoofed
animals, and other things I forgot already. So yes it was very educational and
there were a good deal of birds for a sometimes rainy day. A little while into
the walk the ecosystem changed. I don’t mean a couple species changed and we
saw a different bird or two, it literally went from a Eucalypt forest to a rain
forest within the space of 100 meters. I know this doesn’t sound like much, but
it was a pretty incredible change. Eventually we had to book it out because a
thunder storm was coming in to kill us all. We took a ferry back to Sydney and
got to see a pretty cool view the skyline from the water. Tomorrow is another
travel day, to Kangaroo Island where we will see kangaroos and koalas.
PS, the blue mountains are not blue
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