Off to Oz Part I
We are off to Australia this week and next, and thus blogging will be light (it is August, after all). Our first trip to Australia was in 2004, and a wonderful trip it was--we saw Sydney, Perth, Alice Springs, Hobart, Melbourne, and Canberra. In two weeks (Mr. Improbable was giving talks for Australia's National Science Week). Oy. Here are some verbal snapshots of the highlights:
* Arriving at 6 am, taking a cab to our Sydney Hotel and walking around the botanical gardens in the morning sunshine. Seeing the Sydney Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. Then sitting in the park's garden for hours watching birds and flying foxes, which an elderly Italian man, on a morning walk with his wife, kept insisting we could buy from the park ranger and eat. "Slice like sashimi. Is good!" We think he was having us on.
* Hiking in the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens in Alice Springs. Olive Pink is not a color, but a turn-of-the-century outback feminist, nature enthusiast, aboriginal-rights campaigner, and general thorn-in-side. The garden, as befits a garden in a desert, is subtle in its effect. Training our eyes to the small beauties on the ground, we were surprised, turning a corner, by a herd of wild mountain kangaroos. They looked at us calmly and seriously, and then bounded away.
* Seeing the Milky Way for the first time, also in Alice Springs. It's so isolated there that there is virtually no light pollution if you drive twenty minutes out of town. A local astronomy club had put together a sky-watching party for Science Week.
* Feeding kangaroos and wallabies at a small native-animal zoo in Tasmania. Wallabies are distinguishable from kangaroos by the fact that they are smaller, have denser, more chocolate-colored fur, longer eyelashes, and dozier expressions. In short, a wallaby is like a kangaroo, which is already absurdly cute, that has had all of its cuteness factors racheted up to the point of unbearableness. One of the zoo's keepers gave us a personal tour and fed a Tasmanian devil for us. Tassie devils are about the size of a Jack Russell terrier, and their jaws are fifteen times stronger than those of a pit bull. When they smell meat their ears and the rims of their eyes turn red and they make enraged snuffling sounds. They have two states: vibrating with bloodlust, and asleep. They eat everything: bones, hooves, skin: everything but the skull. They are quite safe, however, because they are slow and dead clumsy. In the wild, they are scavengers. No one has ever been attacked by a devil, but there have been gruesome deaths reported of people who have passed out drunk in the bush and awakened with nothing but a skull and clothes.
Here I am feeding a kangaroo. See the joey in her pouch!
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Robin Abrahamswrites the weekly "Miss Conduct" column for The Boston Globe Magazine and is the author of Miss Conduct's Mind over Manners. Robin has a PhD in psychology from Boston University and also works as a research associate at Harvard Business School. Her column is informed by her experience as a theater publicist, organizational-change communications manager, editor, stand-up comedian, and professor of psychology and English. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, and their socially challenged but charismatic dog, Milo.
