Snippets

With our mission of mercy firmly ensconced in the past, your intrepid travel team moves forward with relish to Phase 2 of the Great Australian Adventure. 

We are presently north of Sydney following an evening's stay in one of the world's funkier hotels, the Ovolo Woolloomooloo. "Easy for you to say", you say. A former wool collecting and baling factory, the hotel, done up in 1980's kitsch, is about half a kilometer in length and occupies the full Woolloomooloo wharf, 

adjacent to a couple of Australian Navy frigates, battleships, and aircraft carriers.

Our stay was limited to one day; we now find ourselves in Palm Beach. Having trouble locating Worth Avenue and the Everglades Club but making do the best way we can, given the fact that I can't pick up a pair of Gucci loafers.

Now just some random thoughts on Australia. 

The people here are over the top kind and friendly, ready to serve and unflappable. As long as you don't throw them off their routine by asking a question while they are doing something else such as typing, looking at a computer, breathing, etc., at which point they get a bit snippy.

The volunteers continue to keep things fresh and entertaining. 

We have been asked by many of them to be adopted as our children. Ten years back when Lori and I began these adventures, we discovered that we were roughly the same age as many of the other volunteers' parents. We now seem to be closing in on the ages of their grandparents. While wonderful people, these millennials are a scary cohort, indeed. While (relatively) bright and (relatively) articulate, their attention span makes your average goldfish seem like Proust. Living in the present seems to be a challenge; many are on to the next topic before properly digesting what is on the table in front of them. It seems that the notion of the long term marriage has gone the way of the dodo bird. Virtually all of those we met are children of single parents, part of a mix and match yours/mine/ours arrangement. That Lori and I have been harmoniously hitched for 36 or so seems to relegate us to the Smithsonian Museum of Unnatural History.

The wildlife continues to astound.

A Cockatoo

Or Two

Skink

Skank 
(Just kidding. Annie is an amazing woman, despite having attended Lawrenceville and being a Bruins fan)

This is as Close as We've Come to Seeing One

It was very enjoyable living through two summer solstices in the same year.

Diving in the Great Barrier Reef was a thrill equivalent to seeing Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Northern Lights, or eating a fresh, steamy Special at Wilensky's.

There were three potential negative outcomes to this experience. I could have suffered a diving mishap and died. I could have been eaten or poisoned by a fish and died. I could have eaten and been poisoned by a fish and died. Glad to report that none of the above happened. Stay tuned for the next episode.

Comments from Cairns

Lori and I are not auditioning for the Australian Blue Man Group ensemble nor a Fruit of the Loom commercial. We are wearing stinger suits, ensuring our safety against some of the nastier creatures that float about these parts. Various jellyfish and other unsavoury denizens

of the shallow can really ruin a nice day by inflicting painful, burning injury or possibly death. A thin layer of lycra is all that separates us from a slow, excruciating demise, too horrible to imagine. Oh no, I'm channeling Steve Irwin.

Not exactly an earth shattering revelation here, folks, but Australia, being so isolated geographically, has evolved in a way that is different in a different way. Much is unique, beautiful, deadly, delicious and awe-inspiring. 

Animals,

Plants,

Fish,

weather. All have magnificence; all are deadly. Up here in Cairns, we just caught the edge of a cyclone (meteorology lesson for some: cyclones = hurricanes; they just spin in the opposite direction). So, the first full day we spent here, there was  a headline in the newspaper regarding TC Owen. I was not sure if he was a politician, football, rugby, or cricket player, or a leading Australian author. So I asked. Turns out that the name referred to Tropical Cyclone Owen, They name them here like we do with Katrinas. According to The Cairns Times "Was boomeranging across the Bay of Carpantaria towards Cairns."

Speaking of trying to kill you, I learned a new word here on my first day. Barramundi. Lunching at the Grand Hotel, Lori had a Royal Burger, I ordered a Barramundi Burger, anxious to sample a new cuisine. Turns out that barramundi is related to the barracuda. So before my regular readers go off on a tizzy, I had benedryl in my system within 2 minutes of ingestion and an epi-pen at the ready. 

So yes, fish can kill you by having you step on a spine of theirs

Lionfish

or bitten and injected with lethal venom

Rockfish

or the old fashioned way

In my case it was camouflage that nearly got me - a fish disguised as a hamburger.

Another strange phenomena pertains to trees, and what grows on them.

Australian Fox Bats

Fox Bat Close-Up

Eventually, they turn into chrysalises and in a few short weeks evolve into sausages, ripe for picking and eating.

Flowers and trees and rainforests cover much of the coastal regions. Water is not a problem here as it is in other regions.The snorkeling has been wonderful; even Madame has been getting up close and personal with some of the liquid life. So much more to tell, but let's save that for another day.

L & B

Hide in Your Shell

Wall Art made from Plastic Retrieved from the Beach

So here's what we do. Wake up time is 6:30, or about 3 hours earlier than we wake up at home. A kilometre walk to the terminal building where we catch the ferry to Fitzroy Island, home to a resort and some incredible beaches, and a resto bar. More on that later. 
Forty five minute ride across the bay and we disembark, walk 250 meters to the rescue centre, passing a cluster of cockatoos along the way and our morning travails commence. 

There are turtles of various shapes and sizes belonging to 2 species - Ridley and Green. The Green turtle is thusly named based on the colour of its meat, due to its dietary ingestion of sea grass. I will take their word for it, having no desire to verify the veracity of the claim by cutting one open. How Ridleys are named remains a riddle to me.

Lunch

Step one is creating a siphon to allow a vacuum to be created. The hose is attached to a plastic tube that looks like a standard vacuum cleaner cylinder. With siphon siphoning we begin to suck out the overnight turtle excrement from each holding tank. It is an easy task since most of the turtle dung is captured in three filters, which we also remove and clean.

Next step is skimming the surfaces to allow for the collection of any particles which may have eluded the siphoning and filtering process. Is this getting too technical for you? 

While the skim/clean/siphon procedures are underway other volunteers are preparing the turtles' meals. 

Squid Tartare

They consist of 1) some type of small fish - head removed, 2) shrimp (prawns in Aussie), peeled also sans tête, and 3) squid in their entirety. At Milos, the same meal would cost $150.

All the turtles are named, and suffer from a variety of health issues, the primary one called floaters being a collection of gas between their bodies and shells. Had you told me at any point in my life that my volunteer work would involve encouraging turtle flatulence, I might have thought probably not.

What is truly amazing is the interpersonal relationship one can develop with these creatures (full disclosure - on more than one occasion, people I know have likened certain physical attributes of mine as being reptilian). And not just because I'm in the Real Estate biz. My eyes turn down at the corners, I enjoy warming myself on large rocks and I identified more closely with Koopah as played by Dennis Hopper in the Super Mario movie than I did with the "good guy" primate strain.

Shaz

Let me tell you about Shaz. She has a dent in the side of her shell, the result of having netting wrapped around her for numerous years. Had I named her, she would have been Bucky but that's another tail. Turtles love having their shells scratched; like people and their backs. After feeding Shaz, I hung out, gave her a good scratch and invented a game called Turtle Launch. I would grab the back of her shell and shove it, propelling her across her tank. She loved it. How do I know? Because she would swim right back to me and wait for another ride. 

To determine how much of her actions were merely based on repetition of motion, I moved to different parts of the tank. She would lift her head out of the water, determine my new location and swim over for another push. Shaz and I spent a couple of hours playing this game together. One of the on site vets mentioned that my new friend had not had that much enrichment in the six months she'd been there.

Now I know that this may sound a bit weird but the interaction I shared with my new reptile friend is on par with volunteer work in previous years in various countries teaching children English, cleaning them up, cooking them lunch or sending them to school. Improving the lot of any living creature on this beautiful Earth, four legged, two legged, rooted in the soil, is in and of itself a good thing.

Lori going from Turtle Pool to Pool Shark

Turtles, Turtles, Turtles

Greeting from Cairns, Australia. 

Sorry about the mix up on the previous post; Australia, Austria, Iceberg, Goldberg, etc. etc. 

Cairns, BTW, is pronounced Kens. If one dare says Cairns, one would be directed to the nearest funeral parlour.

This year's mission of mercy centres around rehabbing turtles. I figured that the skills that we developed last year working with drug addicted youth in Colombia were transferable. We went to our assignment yesterday but couldn't find a single crack pipe or syringe in the entire complex. It seems that the type of rehab needed in this instance is somewhat different. 






We are living in the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world's best known aquatic areas of biological diversity and beauty. 

Up until lately. Much of the coral has been bleached as a result of global warming. Numerous sea turtles have been victimized by irresponsible placement of fishing nets, motor boat propellers, oil spillages and, most damaging of all, ingestion of micro-plastic fibres. 

Fully 90% of all turtles have been harmed by irresponsible environmental activities. 

What I am divulging is not news. Any literate human, and probably many of the non-illiteratti are aware of the effects of global warming, indiscriminate dumping of garbage and a general disregard for the Earth. All well and good to be conscious of the issues but it is another thing entirely to see half a dozen holding tanks populated by sea turtles who are known as 'floaters'. 

As a result of swallowing plastic, their digestive systems are compromised. Their intestines and stomachs are unable to digest their contents so they develop air bubbles ending their ability to dive below the surface to feed. Imagine eating Passover seder dinners every night for a year, no matzoh abatement, no Ex-Lax. The bloat factor is similar.

Other of these creatures suffer from severed limbs as a result of being trapped in nets or have shells crushed or broken as a result of boating accidents.

Cracked Shell

Our typical mandate is to feed the beasts and encourage them to pass the plastic micro fibres through their system. It can take weeks, months or years. Since the average sea turtle lives over 80 years, without a health care plan, our intervention is required. Each morning we siphon turtle excrement out of their tanks, 

feed them fish and squid (not all of them eat properly; I prefer advising them that they are digesting calamari as opposed to squid; all about the marketing).

Believe it or not, turtles enjoy having their backs scratched! The material of the shell is similar to human fingernails. They will respond to a good scratch as would a dog or a husband. 










Afternoons are very different and will be dealt with in future instalments. We are having great fun post labour but I want this blog to focus on the problem, not on the distractions.

I’ve been looking forward to getting here for many a year. My level of excitement elevates as the plane circles the airport. I don’t know which of so many facets of this wonderful country appeal to me most. Is it Vienna? The Blue Danube? Schönbrunn Palace? The famous Lippezanner horses? Mozart’s birthplace? Waldheim’s gravesight? So much to see.

While having traveled extensively, there are always surprises in store. For instance, geographic variations result in linguistic differences that are extremely localized. As an example, my rudimentary knowledge of German is helpful but within limitations. ‘Gutten Tag’ here is pronounced G’day.

Here are several visuals that have made our arrival exciting and eventful. I am eternally greatful to 50 plus years of my subscription to National Geographic for providing me with a level of knowledge and understanding of local regions and customs that most other folks do not have the luxury to access.

The famous Shobrunn Palace and the Danube

Has not aged particularly well. 

Not nearly as Blue as I expected. 

This country is the birthplace of Strauss and Mozart. The same way that the Mississippi Delta was home to the Blues, this place is home to the Waltz. Supposedly. While trying to obtain a broad stroked overview of the musical history, the only Waltz that seems to resonate with the local populace involves somebody named Matilda.

Obviously more research is required.

The Famed Lipizzaner Horses

These magnificent equines have been trained to dance, trot, gallop in formation, moving as one. They have entertained royalty and guests of state for centuries. I managed to get up close to one of them. It was amazing to watch him move with grace and style. And the funniest was how he was able to hop like a kangaroo!!

The mountains. After seeing “The Sound of Music” I must deservedly express a bit of disappointment with the mountains. They are rather red, flat, and dusty.

They must have been green screened or photoshopped behind Julie Andrews.

Lori and I look forward to getting our feet