Sunday, March 19, 2006
Featherwood and Manly: March 13
Today Lynn decided she had to pet koalas and settle our recent car trauma, so we got our car from the parking garage and managed to make the one-hour drive westward on the M4 to Featherdale, a wildlife park that specializes in native Australia fauna. It was a good day to leave Sydney, as Queen Elizabeth’s royal convoy caused many street closures and traffic delays. The Queen met with the Australian prime minister and his wife, who committed the unforgivable faux pas of wearing the same outfit as the queen! It was Commonwealth Day, and schools were let out so kids could see the Queen. However, remembering that the Queen left Windsor for London on the day we wanted to visit Windsor Castle in 2004, we left Sydney before she arrived.
In Featherdale, safely out of the Queen’s way, we found an extremely rich array of captive native birds, along with a good representation of kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and other marsupials. We were able to enter the enclosures where some of the kangaroos and emus roamed, and we petted the kangaroos, as well as some koalas that were tended by care-takers. The koalas were singularly unambitious creatures who accommodated enthusiastic school-children, fast-moving Japanese tourists, and assorted wildlife lovers. We saw many kookaburras (birds whose contagious hysterical laughter is iconic of the Australian wildlife experience), bowerbirds, cassowaries, pittas, tawny frogmouths, spectacular parrots and cockatoos, and – to our delight – brilliantly colored Gouldian Finches (causing us to remember our friend Roy, who is brilliant and colorful in his own ways). We watched the feeding of a 14-foot salt-water crocodile and waited in vain for the Tasmanian devil and the quiet, elusive quolls to show themselves. We got a lot of gravel in our sandals here and got our first taste of the ubiquity of flies in the bush (to wave a hand to brush away a fly is to ‘give the Australian Salute’).
We managed to get back into Sydney and find our hotel without major difficulty, although a glance at our route on a city map would reveal a street pattern of mind-boggling complexity. Downtown Sydney is very compact, like Boston, and its road and highway system are equally complex. Needless-to-say, we were quite proud of ourselves when we pulled into our parking garage.
In late afternoon we boarded a state ferry for the half-hour trip to Manly, a suburban town perched on a narrow isthmus just behind rocky headlands at the mouth of Sydney Harbour. This town, which seems prosperous and affluent, is surrounded by Sydney Harbour National Park, consisting of several major tracts of undeveloped land. We checked out the ocean beach and then took a scenic walk along the bay. I could see unidentified terns, swallows, and chunky white cockatoos, as well as enormous web-spinning spiders. Native plants were being cultivated here, including a coastal species of Banksia, which was in full bloom., We ate in an open-air seafood café across from the ocean, while Manlyites promenaded and ran along the beach across the street. As dusk approached, throngs of shrill lorikeets began to roost in the Norfolk Island pines in the narrow beach-front park across from us, a process that required that each bird buzz the small grove of trees several times before landing and commencing heated discussions with its perch-mates.
After dinner we took another ferry back to Sydney. On the deck we met two young men from Canada, currently vacationing at Bondi Beach: one was from Newfoundland and the other from Quebec. The latter had most recently been living in Portland, Oregon, though he had earlier worked in a bike shop in San Luis Obispo, CA, and had spent considerable time near Pismo, a beach town in which our family spent a week or two each summer. His mother lived in Maui, so he had become a very well-travelled fellow. We also talked with a man who was born in Cameroon, West Africa, had been raised in Niger, and spent a decade living in Jerusalem. He took his PhD in biochemistry from an Australian university and, although no longer living in Sydney, returned frequently to visit. If these folks typified the passengers on that vessel, it was a very cosmopolitan crowd! The view of the opera house, the sparkling high-rise buildings in downtown Sydney, and of the harbor bridge provided a satisfying conclusion to the day.
(Here’s a justifiable nonsequitor: we have found Australians to be a most congenial group of people, very gracious to tourists, and possessed of extraordinary humor and irreverent wit. They have also all mastered, without exception, an extremely quaint and cheerful manner of speech; they practice this accent and idiom constantly, so their mastery seems almost effortless. Most of the time we understand what they are saying, but when we don’t, they never fail to explain themselves cheerfully to dense Americans.)
In Featherdale, safely out of the Queen’s way, we found an extremely rich array of captive native birds, along with a good representation of kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and other marsupials. We were able to enter the enclosures where some of the kangaroos and emus roamed, and we petted the kangaroos, as well as some koalas that were tended by care-takers. The koalas were singularly unambitious creatures who accommodated enthusiastic school-children, fast-moving Japanese tourists, and assorted wildlife lovers. We saw many kookaburras (birds whose contagious hysterical laughter is iconic of the Australian wildlife experience), bowerbirds, cassowaries, pittas, tawny frogmouths, spectacular parrots and cockatoos, and – to our delight – brilliantly colored Gouldian Finches (causing us to remember our friend Roy, who is brilliant and colorful in his own ways). We watched the feeding of a 14-foot salt-water crocodile and waited in vain for the Tasmanian devil and the quiet, elusive quolls to show themselves. We got a lot of gravel in our sandals here and got our first taste of the ubiquity of flies in the bush (to wave a hand to brush away a fly is to ‘give the Australian Salute’).
We managed to get back into Sydney and find our hotel without major difficulty, although a glance at our route on a city map would reveal a street pattern of mind-boggling complexity. Downtown Sydney is very compact, like Boston, and its road and highway system are equally complex. Needless-to-say, we were quite proud of ourselves when we pulled into our parking garage.
In late afternoon we boarded a state ferry for the half-hour trip to Manly, a suburban town perched on a narrow isthmus just behind rocky headlands at the mouth of Sydney Harbour. This town, which seems prosperous and affluent, is surrounded by Sydney Harbour National Park, consisting of several major tracts of undeveloped land. We checked out the ocean beach and then took a scenic walk along the bay. I could see unidentified terns, swallows, and chunky white cockatoos, as well as enormous web-spinning spiders. Native plants were being cultivated here, including a coastal species of Banksia, which was in full bloom., We ate in an open-air seafood café across from the ocean, while Manlyites promenaded and ran along the beach across the street. As dusk approached, throngs of shrill lorikeets began to roost in the Norfolk Island pines in the narrow beach-front park across from us, a process that required that each bird buzz the small grove of trees several times before landing and commencing heated discussions with its perch-mates.
After dinner we took another ferry back to Sydney. On the deck we met two young men from Canada, currently vacationing at Bondi Beach: one was from Newfoundland and the other from Quebec. The latter had most recently been living in Portland, Oregon, though he had earlier worked in a bike shop in San Luis Obispo, CA, and had spent considerable time near Pismo, a beach town in which our family spent a week or two each summer. His mother lived in Maui, so he had become a very well-travelled fellow. We also talked with a man who was born in Cameroon, West Africa, had been raised in Niger, and spent a decade living in Jerusalem. He took his PhD in biochemistry from an Australian university and, although no longer living in Sydney, returned frequently to visit. If these folks typified the passengers on that vessel, it was a very cosmopolitan crowd! The view of the opera house, the sparkling high-rise buildings in downtown Sydney, and of the harbor bridge provided a satisfying conclusion to the day.
(Here’s a justifiable nonsequitor: we have found Australians to be a most congenial group of people, very gracious to tourists, and possessed of extraordinary humor and irreverent wit. They have also all mastered, without exception, an extremely quaint and cheerful manner of speech; they practice this accent and idiom constantly, so their mastery seems almost effortless. Most of the time we understand what they are saying, but when we don’t, they never fail to explain themselves cheerfully to dense Americans.)
# posted by Ken @ 4:34 AM 
