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I will be going on a trip in September with Terry of No Horizons: Australian Adventures, and about 20 other American students here. Already, I'm pretty excited about the schedule of places we will visit!

The Twelve Day North West Adventure

copied from Terry's handout
note: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner provided, kilometers that we will travel

Sept. 26
Day one: Today we depart Perth at 0500 hrs. We need a good early start today as we travel north up the Inland Highway passing through the gold towns of Paynes Find, Cue, Mt. Magnet, and Meekathara, on route to our overnight campsite at three rivers. We set camp and settle in for a BBQ and beers. D, 1100

Day two: It's up early for breakfast, then break camp and head for Three Pools, 30 KM West North West of Newman. These pools are in the heart of the area where we will spend the next two days exploring. We will take in Kalgan pool, Eagle Falls (track conditions permitting) and Wanna Munna Initiation Gorge, where there is a huge gallery of aboriginal rock paintings) B,D 190

Day three: We have all day today to explore the area and swim and relax in these magic surroundings. Tonight round the camp fire, we can relive the last couple of days highlights over a cold beer or two.

Day four: Today we break camp and head off to the Karajini Gorge. We are camping tonight in our own special part of the Bee Gorge. We stay here for three nights, under the stars in the Great Aussie Swags. B,D,450

Day Five: The whole day is spend exploring Weno Gorge, Handcock Gorge and time permitting Joffery Falls. We return back to camp to camp in the late afternoon to get ready for dinner and a few drinks. B,L,D 100

Day Six: Again today we have a full day in the Gorges. We spend most of the day in Knox Gorge. This place is just fantastic and seeing is believing. We track the gorge right back to it's source, which is a spring rising from the desert floor. Time permitting, we will see the visitor centre to get a complete picture of this area. We return to camp for dinner and wine. B,L,D 100

Day Seven: We break camp this morning after an early breakfast and head west to Exmouth. The day is spend traveling through the outback, and arrival is timed for early evening. Our Dinner tonight will be at the "Rock Cod" fish shack. B,D 660

Day Eight: Today get ready for some fantastic snorkeling. We are going to Turquoise bay where we normally swim with Sharks, Rays, Turtles, Sea Snakes, hundreds of species of fish, and of course view the pristine coral. We return to Exmouth for dinner at the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant. B,L,D, 70

Day nine: For those qualified, today is your chance to SCUBA the deep reefs. The diving here is great, so if you are thinking about this, don't miss out. Dinner tonight is Pool Side at the postshot inn. B,L,D, 50

Day ten: After breakfast, we leave Exmouth, and drive to Monkey Mia. This is where wild dolphin come in to greet the humans on a regular basis. On arrival, we will take the sunset dolphin cruise. This is a wonderful way to end the day. We camp in the campground at Monkey Mia and Dinner will be after the return from the Sunset Cruise, in the Monkey Mia campground. B,D, 700

Day Eleven: This morning, we do another wild life cruise and hope to see turtles, dugongs, tiger sharks, and of course dolphins. As soon as we dock we leave Monkey Mia en route for Northbrook Farm just north of Northampton. As this is our last night, we will have one of Regs' Famous Roasts and have a last camp fire for the trip. Of course a couple of drinks may also be had. B,D, 370.

7 October Day 12: This morning, we depart Northbrook farm, and begin our journey south to Perth. We will stop for breakfast at McDonalds in Gereldton and along the way for a lunch break. We should arrive in Perth around mid afternoon. We will get together in about two weeks time to have a photo night and look back on what will have been a great trip. B, 460

By the way, people really do walk on the left side of the sidewalk down here. Let me know which way water spirals down a drain in the US, and I'll get back to you on that one too!

Software technology earlier this evening... It seemed to be a lot of review for the first portion of the class, then we started a few new things such as file reading and writing, which I think would be really good things to learn. I got the sense that there were a few things that I'll have to look over though before I start writing programs. They have a style guide just like K does. Hopefully it won't be too different. Also, there are a few administrative things that I wasn't aware of. I have to sign up for a keycard to get into the building, and a new computer card to access the labs there. I also need to learn how to use linux.

More classes today... Indegenous Australians 101, and Digital Electronics. These went pretty well. I'll update my schedule as soon as all of my tutorials and everything are in place.

Tonight, I went to the gym at Curtin and signed up for a one month membership. I'm looking forward to getting in shape again.

Today, I took my first classes. First was 3D computer animation. It looks pretty interesting. He showed us some animations from last semester's class. One was of an eagle flying through a city. The sound effects went along with the flight pretty well, and the viewing angles rotated around the eagle. It looked pretty good. We'll be using a program called 3D Studio Max, which is in a computing lab in the school of design. I got a keycard to the computing lab. Some of the computers have CD burners, which we'll be using to create our projects.

Later, I went to solid state physics. It doesn't look too difficult, but I'll need to do alot of review in order to be ready for the materia.

Today, I enjoyed a sunday session (a drink with a few friends), and some footy (australian rules footbal). Footy is violent sport, worse than hockey, and very fast paced. They also don't wear any protection, with one exception--we were told. Now, I'm getting ready for classes tomorrow. My first class is 3D computer animation at 10:00 am. If I can figure out how to create a table, I'll post my whole schedule soon.

Today, I've done laundry, and that's about it. Laundry was the biggest waste of time ever. I used detergent tablets, but they didn't disolve completely, so I washed my clothes twice, but there was still detergent on them. I also missed going to the gym waiting for my clothes to dry. Hopefully it will go better next time.

Today, we listened to a lecture on the indegenous people of WA. A professor at the center for aboriginal studies gave the talk. He was very nice about waiting for everyone to arrive--the meeting was supposed to start at 9, but actually started around 9:45. They really are more relaxed about being on time here. It turns out that the professor is also teaching a class of mine. Later in the day, we went to a national park an hour outside of Perth, and saw koalas and kangaroos, as well as a traditional aboriginal dance.

Today, I woke up and went shopping for a little while at a local indoor mall. I got tired of that after a while, so I caught the first bus back to Vickery. From there, I decided to try out the bus system and go downtown. The city transportation is pretty good, but you have to plan out when you want to come back since the busses are not too frequent. I rollerbladed around downtown parth, and by the Swan river, and around King's Park a little. There was a great view of the city from the park. Check out my photo album for a few new pictures.

Email addresses and postal addresses: Please provide yours by commenting to this post. I'm don't have most people's email addresses in my address book anymore.

The last day of absailing(rapelling) and caving was amazing too! We absailed 60 meters, or about 170 feet, into a solution hole of a large cave. A solution hole is where tree roots slowly break through a cave ceiling over thousands of years. I've got some great pictures of this to post probably tomorrow. Everything has been going pretty well here. It's been a struggle adjusting to a new place, just like moving to any new city in the US would be, and not having a car to get around makes it a little tougher to buy groceries. I have no major complaints though :) Tomorrow morning (by the way, the time here is exactly 12 hours later than Michigan while daylight savings time is in effect, then it becomes 13) we're going shopping in downtown perth.

Nannup:

This morning, we went to enroll in our classes. I haven¡¦t finalized everything, but it looks like it is going to work out. Later, we went to get our ID cards

Around 1:00, 3 4WD drive vehicles came to pick us up for our drive down south.
The trip to Nannup started with a 2 hour drive to small town of Mandurah. It¡¦s a town built on canals on one side, and an estuary on the other. I had a beef burger, which was a little bit of a surprise. The cattle is allowed to graze here rather than being grain fed, so the beef doesn¡¦t have as much flavor. They also tend to have huge rolls of bread, and not a lot of meat on them. The lettuce on the roll is called salad. I had a great cookie for dessert. Cookies are biscuits, crackers are biscuits and cheese (with or without cheese), and biscuits are called scones. It can be very confusing. After Mandurah, we also passed through the second largest city in WA, which is Brunbury. We went through the outskirts of town, so I really didn¡¦t get to see too much. After about 3 hours, we arrived in Nannup at the Nannup Valley Resort, and had a quiet evening. We had some of the wine with dinner this evening at the Nannup Valley Resort. We thought we would be camping, but instead, we have nice chalets, and everyone has a bed. Not a bad deal. Tomorrow, we¡¦re going to go off-roading. One of the central themes seems to be, ¡§why walk when you can drive?¡¨

We started off the day with a hearty breakfast including grilled bacon, and sausage. Australians really like to barbecue anything that they can. We drove the Land Cruisers to an old timber mill. Only, nothing was there. It turned out that we were looking at an old town site that had been re-planted with trees. The mill was in operation in the 30s, but there was very little evidence that remained. The few things that did, were pretty interesting though. There was still a huge band saw blade , which we were told was the largest in the southern hemisphere at the time, left to rust on the ground. As we walked, Terry (of No Horizons¡XAustralian Adventures, our guide) told us about the history of the area. The next thing we did was a survival game. Given the resources in the forest, and a specific scenario of our plane landing in the bush, we were asked to start figuring out how to survive. My group won from an innovative thatch that was made from the leaves of a grass tree. I¡¦d like to put up as many pictures as possible, but you¡¦ll have to look at my Fotki site to see most of them. The best example of how to survive in the bush was given to us by Terry, who said that we should eat grubs, weave a net to catch fish in, and build a good shelter to keep warm and dry. After the survival game, we drove over to a few really tall trees. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the 27 of us just stretched around a giant Jarra tree. On the way home, we stopped in the town of Nannup to have a look around. There was a very nice antique and old book store, with quite a few traditional tools. We got back to the resort a little early, so there was plenty of time to go for a little hike. Terry owns the Nannup valley resort, and quite a lot of land there. We walked up into a pasture, the second highest point in the area, and had a great view. You could just barely see the ocean form there. The scenery was amazing! Only one problem¡K the grazing cows were a little too friendly. They started so surround us, and began making pretty ugly noises. We were scared for a minute, but stayed calm, and slowly walked away to avoid startling the cows and being trampled to death. I have a video of the cows

We arrived at Perth International Airport around 3:30. Just before landing, they sprayed the plane with a disinfectant. This is just what Bill Bryson described in A Sunburnt Country, but I still wasn’t expecting it. In fact, customs was quite strict. They say this is because of Australia’s isolation, that any contaminants could cause a lot of harm. I said I had cereal in my bag, so they had to open it to take a look. It turned out ok, since the official really seemed to like Fruit Loops! The other problem was with my visa. I had a student visa, but the airline had issued me a temporary visa, which would only be good for 3 months. By mistake, I showed that 3 month paper first, so they thought I would have to leave in 3 months. It turned out that I had two visas, so the only thing that had to be done was to merge the two files. But, for about 10 minutes, I was a little worried. The only other major problem was with Steve Shelden who had soil on his football cleats. It took him about half an hour before they finally decided to just wash and spray his shoes for him. Then he was able to go thorough. After going through customs, Olivia Tanner met us with a sign saying Curtin University. The airport shuttle took us back to Vickery House, where we checked into our apartments. I really like mine. My room mates seem nice too. So far, I’m in the same flat with Steve, and a student from Erlon—a school in North Carolina, which is a school that has a similar program to ours. Later in the evening, Olivia, and the RAs from Vickery met us at a local tavern. I had Kangaroo filets. They were actually pretty tasty—lean and tender like venison, with a little bit of a sweet taste. Later in the evening, I un-packed most of my things, and re-packed for our trip down south to Nannup.

Wow, where to start! We ended up taking a Taxi into the city from our hotel. Seven of us decided to go into the city: Mara, Zandie, Matt, Charlie, Steve, Andrew, and I. It was actually pretty cheap, costing only $15 US per person for an hour cab ride both ways. The driver was nice enough to drive us around a few places too, before he dropped us off. First, we stopped at the country's royal palace. I took a picture of the unmovable armed guards that were stationed there. After that, we stopped at a Chinese temple. There were stairs leading up to the main room, were people took their shoes off before lighting candles and worshiping Buda. As we were driving down the hill from the temple, we almost ran over a monitor lizard the size of a medium-large iguana! On our way to the Petronas twin towers; we also stopped by place with a good view of the city. We got into town around 4:00 and stayed until 8:00. When we got to the Petronas twin towers, we had intended to take the elevator up to the bridge that connects the two towers, but we were just a little too late. Instead, we walked around the park, which was beautiful. It surrounds the area around the twin towers and covers quite a large area. There were lots of interesting native species of plants covering the grounds. We walked around for quite a while, just taking in the sights of the city. It looks like it would be a great place to visit for a few days sometime. The US dollar seems to go a long way too. After a few hours, the girls decided to go into the mall for a while we walked around the city some more. Inside the KLCC (the building between the two towers), there is a large 6 floor shopping mall. We walked around the mall for a while too, and then stopped at the California Pizza Kitchen (of all places!) so Steve, Matt, and Andrew could have a beer. The beer was called Tiger, and is brewed somewhere in Asia.

We went back to the hotel and had a buffet dinner. There were all kinds of bizarre tropical fruits, and strange dishes. Everyone was a little reluctant to eat the food, and drink the water, but it seems to have turned out ok. The hotel was much nicer than the shops across the street from it. There were shops inside what looked like garages, with things strewn all about the stores, which didn't seem very clean. One thing I noticed most places where we went were large rain gutters. I bet, that when it rains, it really pours. It was looking like rain for a while we were in KL, but somehow we escaped the storm. A few other things I’ve noticed are that Malaysia drives on the right hand side of the road, and there are quite a few motorcycles. The drive to KL was long, (an hour) but not because of traffic, it was actually just a long way to drive. The highway winded through the jungles along the way, which consisted mainly of royal palms, which Mani, our driver, told us are used to extract palm oil. Driving also seemed to be much more aggressive than in the states, with a lot of tailgating, and motorcycles driving between cars.

While I was on Malaysia Airlines, they offered to pay for postage for postcards advertising Malaysia Airlines. I was going to send some out, but I realized that I didn’t have most people’s addresses. Friends back home, and abroad, please send me your addresses by replying to this thread.

Please read a few days back. I’ve written some entries, and then posted them later for previous dates.

My phone number here at Vickery House at the university is:
My address is:
I’ll also be getting a mobile phone soon. I’ll post the number for that son too.

Landing in Kuala Lumpur:

We landed on time, around 11:30 AM local time. Watching the scenery as we landed was a little unreal. We were surrounded by jungles, with all kinds of new tropical plants that I haven’t seen before. There were muddy rivers winding through the country side. The airport was new and modern, with a large glass atrium containing tropical plants. It’s the nicest and cleanest airport that I’ve ever seen. Going through immigration was easy, and customs was just a guy waving his arm, probably saying go ahead in Malaysian. We met a girl from Canada, who is now following us around, as we went to the hotel. The ride from the airport to the hotel was very quick. Pretty soon, we'll probably go into Kuala Lumpur to see the sights.

Tonight, we walked around the Marina in Marina Del Rey--where we're staying until tomorrow. The Marina is huge, and looks like it probably holds a few hundred very nice yachts.

L.A.

I'm in L.A. now, on my way to Kuala Lumpur, then to Perth. I arrived around 9 pm (pacific) on Friday night. Arriving here was a little bit of a shock since I've never been west of St. Louis. I slept for most of the plane ride, and didn't look out of the window much--then all of a sudden, we were landing in California, surrounded by the Rocky mountains, and a beautiful sunset as the plane descended. Meeting Kim and Hark at the airport went pretty smoothly. They found me at the baggage claim.

The next morning, we went to the "Hollywood bowl" and saw the sights in Hollywood. We drove up the mountain next to Hollywood, up to Griffith Observatory. The observatory, with telescopes and a planetarium is closed for a few years, but the view was awesome. We walked along Hollywood Blvd., and saw the stars on the sidewalk, and went in a few shops. For lunch, we had California pizza, which seems to be very thin crust, and cut into huge slices. Three slices we so large that they took up an entire pizza box, and one had to be stacked on top.

I posted some pictures of LA on my fotki site, but it's been slow since I'm using a dial up connection right now.

Today, we went shopping in Beverly Hills at Rodeo Drive, which is a very very ritzy shopping area, with stores like Gucci and Prada. I did buy a shirt at Guess though. Later, we drove up Pacific Coast Highway (highway 1) to Malibu. The scenery in that area is amazing, with million dollar homes high on the hills above the highway. It was just what I imagined of California beach culture.

Lastly, a girl on the beach asked my if I wanted to be in a MTV music video! I said, "Sure, why not." They took me into a sound-proof van, and shot footage of my reaction to Linkin Park's "Papercut". The camera work was done with night-vision, with no lights on in the van. If they thought I was interesting, then they'll use me in the video. Let me know if you see me in it!

I'll write another update when I get a chance. Tomorrow, we're going to Santa Monica, and to the Santa Monica beach.

Tomorrow, I fly to L.A., where I'll be meeting Kim and Hark. We're staying in Marina Del Rey for a few days. It's just south of Santa Monica, on a marina, and within sight of the beach. We'll probably go to Universal Studios, to Hollywood, and Santa Monica. I'll keep you updated... If you need to reach me, call my cell phone 616.218.9758