So I've been in Australia for about 9 months and have yet to see a kangaroo. One might think it's a total sham. Kangaroos are like Bigfoot, a mythical cryptid that only lives in stories and some plaster footprint casts. Well, today, my advisor and friend Harald, along with his wife and son, took me out on a long road trip, some bush walking, and all around fun time. We went way north of Melbourne, a little more than an hour away, to a few towns and met up with their friend, a vet, who owns some farmland out in the bush. We spent some time in Castlemaine and Daylesford. Way cool! The stars were so bright and vibrant, it was amazing. The Milky Way was beautiful! There is so much beautiful foliage around here, the hills, it's totally not the outback image people think of when they ponder on Australia. Oh yeah.... I saw kangaroo, they are not mythical creatures! Frikkin' beautiful, kinda intimidating. While at their friend's farm, she let me pick an apple and eat it. The largest and also best-tasting apple I've ever had! It was the size of a small baby, a delicious, baby.
-Matt
I'm really enjoying your photos. There's no tree in the world that has quite the sinewy non-regular shape of a eucalypt, except for all the ex-Australia eucalypts now growing in the four corners of the globe. There's something haunting about the shape, especially when set against a beautiful sky. I've tried to capture that feeling in photos, but it never works. It always comes out as "straggly stick against light background".
ReplyDeleteThose of your photo viewers who are "not from around here" may like to notice the absence of the brown layer of polluted air near the horizon that often mars the photos I've taken in the US and China. I think our air is cleaner.
If you want to see all the Australian animals in one place, it's well worth spending a day at Healesville Sanctuary, about an hour's drive east of Melbourne. It's one of the three campuses of our zoo. It's a great place to take pictures. Last time I was there, the tasmanian devils were copulating. Talk about noisy lovers!