Midwinter Solstice Party

Tonight is the longest night of the year, with a 4:43 pm sunset (according to Geoscience Australia) and in Hobart that means a party. It’s time for the Antarctic Midwinter Festival 2008. This stretches out over several days, but tonight was the Midwinter Solstice Party.

The evening started with the March of the Snow Petrels, a parade of people carrying large homemade lanterns in the shape of birds. There were standing, sitting, and flying birds as well as eggs, ranging in size from a foot long and six inches high to a foot long and three feet high. (The largest looked like penguins and not at all what came up when I typed “snow petrel” into Google image search. Snow petrels are pure white, pigeon-sized birds.) All of these were lit by candles placed inside, and the parade was led by a troop of musicians. Coming down the dark street, the line of softly glowing birds was enchanting.

Then the crowd, following the large bird-shaped lanterns, moved into Salamanca Square, where a Latin American music band began to play. I had a very Australian dinner from a bakery while there: chicken curry pie. Australians are very fond of their pies as meals. They come in all sorts of varieties, although the standard beef and vegetable pie is always popular. I have read, and been told, that the international influence in Australian cuisine has only been going on for about twenty years or so, but I think that the curried chicken pie is a good example of that. Today’s Australians do like their Asian dishes, or at least Asian-influenced dishes, but they still like a good pie, so someone decided to combine the two into curried chicken pie. I thought it was tasty.

After dinner I went back out and listened to the music for another twenty minutes or so, until it was time for the fire dancing. This was performed by two young women from Melbourne who were very good. Now, I don’t like too many lit candles all at once unless they’re safely tucked in bowls, and at one point these two were using large rings lit in five places as hula hoops! The crowd loved it, and it looked like the performers enjoyed themselves as well. I had a hard time seeing this, because there were a lot of people clustered around and, as usual, most of them were taller than I am. However, I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see.

From fire we went to ice, as the other event was an ice sculpture. It was a long process, but I watched it with interest because I’ve seen finished ice sculptures but I’ve never seen one being made. The artist wouldn’t tell us what it was until someone guessed, and it was over an hour before anyone did. He started with two large rectangles of ice fused together, then moved to a cylindrical shape with extra ice removed from the middle, which was then cut in half. It wasn’t until he started chipping certain sections of the halves away that someone said, “It’s an hourglass!” Indeed it was, as we saw when the two halves were fused back together, with some snow inside. (The snow was saved from when he shaved the ice, because there certainly wasn’t any on the ground!) It was interesting to watch the progress, and the finished product was admirable.

While watching the ice sculpture progress I amused myself by listening to everyone around me talk about how cold it was. “It’s freezing!” some of them would say. It was certainly not freezing; it was noticeable that the ice was getting softer as the sculptor chipped away at it. It couldn’t have been below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I asked someone what they thought it was, they said the equivalent to 45 degrees Fahrenheit! I had tucked my gloves and fleece earband into my purse because the advertisements said to “bundle up.” I didn’t need them. Being a Mainer born and raised, I thought it was pretty warm for winter. There are still some roses blooming, even!

Nevertheless, while I didn’t feel very Antarctic, I enjoyed the Midwinter Solstice Party. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday evening, and it was all free as well.

Plus, we start getting more daylight after this!

Blue Mountains

While in Sydney I took a day trip to the Blue Mountains. About 30 miles west of Sydney, this geological wonder is misnamed. It’s really more a complex series of gorges than a mountain range. Nonetheless it’s stunning, but I’ll get to that in due time.

It was 25 years before early settlers managed to cross the Blue Mountains; tourists today have a bewildering number of options. I selected OzTrek, a tour company highly recommended by one of my tour books. There were about 22 of us, plus the tour guide, and we headed west in a van.

We took a detour to drive through the 2000 Olympic grounds. There I learned that the Olympic Village, temporarily home to over 10,000 athletes plus their trainers, became another suburb of Sydney after the Games were over. Some 6,000 Australians moved in.

Then it was on to the Blue Mountains, and here is an excellent time to say how glad I was not to be driving! At one point our tour guide was navigating the van around steep hairpin curves, one after another. It was good to be in a passenger’s seat. However, on the other side of all these hairpin curves we found a mob of kangaroos. (While Australians use “mob” frequently for groups and it has no sinister mafia connotations, “mob” is also the technical term for a group of kangaroos.) These were Eastern Grey Kangaroos, and they were lounging in the sun without a care in the world. I’d not seen kangaroos yet, because there aren’t as many in Tasmania. They have such funny little hands (or paws, but they really look more like hands.) One of them had a bulge, our guide pointed out, so there was a joey in her pouch, but its head wasn’t out for us to see.

This was in a national park, so feeding the roos isn’t allowed. However, I suspect they get a lot of tourists gawking at them, and as long as we were 20-25 feet away they weren’t bothered by us in the least. Our guide said that campers and tourists benefit the kangaroos because “a dingo isn’t going to run through your legs to attack them.” So we watched and took pictures as they grazed and groomed themselves. The grass where they were was a prime example of “marsupial lawn.” You’d think somebody mowed it, but that’s the kangaroos, wallabies, and other “hoppies” keeping it down. They’re much cuter than traditional lawn mowers.

We drove a bit further and got out for our first walk. There were bushwalks with OzTrek, which I quite liked. It was a lovely day with clear blue sky; we couldn’t have asked for better weather. Suddenly the Blue Mountains were stretched out before me: undulating gorges, heavily treed, with sandstone edges gleaming in the morning sun. The blue haze got thicker the farther I looked out, slowly melting the sharpness into blue. This effect is from the evaporation of eucalyptus oil.

Since it was a long way down and the ledge path was narrow, I appreciated the nice solid metal railing. (Nevertheless, for multiple reasons, this wouldn’t be a good excursion for young children.) As our group was taking in the delightful view, another tour group came huffing and puffing up. They had climbed all the way down and walked back up. My group had just walked to a nice lookout, and it was clearly steep enough that I didn’t want to trudge all the way down and, worse, back up! I wasn’t at all jealous of the panting, exhausted other tourists. Breathing easily, a few of us in my group commented on how the trees rather looked like broccoli.

We then retraced our steps, piled back into the van, and headed to Katoomba. Katoomba is one of the major towns in the area, and we had a lunch break there. From Katoomba it was a short drive to Echo Point, where the famous Three Sisters rock formation is seen from an angle you’re likely to find in most of the pictures of them. I quite liked the Three Sisters but noticed a smaller, fourth rock; it looked like one of the sisters had a baby. The gorge system, with small mountains or random rock formations, continued for kilometers until it was consumed by the blue haze. I drank in the beauty.

At this point we had a few different options for a bushwalk. I chose the walk most of the group did, which was a good walk down the Furber Steps, and then got a ticket to ride the Scenic Railway back up. It was a delightful walk through a cool rainforest and we got to admire Wentworth Falls from several angles. Our guide told us about a spot where you can see a man’s face in a rock with water cascading down. He was of the opinion that it was the most realistic rock face anywhere. (I, personally, think that New Hampshire’s Old Man in the Mountain was, until it crumbled, more realistic, but I kept that to myself.) Being a cool rainforest, there was a lot of water – water flowing in streams, water in the humid air, water cascading in waterfalls and making muddy spots along the path. Where the first bushwalk had smelled slightly tangy, this one smelled damp and earthy.

Eventually, after some very steep stairs, we reached the Scenic Railway, which is the world’s steepest. Riding it was a fun, if short, experience. The seats weren’t very comfortable, but I think a lot of that was because I’m so short I couldn’t get on the neckrest properly. At one point we went through a tunnel, and of course were at an incredible angle, so this is clearly not for the unadventurous.

The Scenic Railway isn’t part of Blue Mountains National Park. This is important because it means they let you feed the birds. When we disembarked, there by the platform was a large hanging birdfeeder with several king parrots and a couple of blue rosellas. The attendant asked if we’d like the opportunity to feed the birds. I was about to unzip my purse, figuring that the birdseed would be at least fifty cents, when he pulled a dustbin of birdseed out and offered everyone a handful. Australians are big fans of inclusive prices, and I suppose since it was $10 for a one-way ticket they could afford the birdseed. Later, our guide expressed disapproval of feeding the birds, because the birds might live in the national park. I, personally, was delighted. Now, I took the attendant’s remark that they were wild birds with a grain of salt. They’re wild in the sense that they don’t live in cages, yes, but tame enough to know where the tourists will reliably be feeding them.

The rosellas didn’t like eating out of hands and preferred the bird feeder or seed spilled on the platform, but the king parrots would happily eat out of anyone’s hand. Some would perch on your hand, but I fed a female who didn’t stay on my hand long. Feeling sympathetic, I moved my hand close to the railing and she resumed her meal. Then a male came over, and I was treated to having two gorgeous parrots eating out of my hand at the same time. King parrots have green bodies with red heads; the males have much more red. The attendant informed me that when two will eat out of one person’s hand they are a mated pair. Otherwise, as some other parrots thoughtfully demonstrated, they were territorial.

I only tore myself away from the parrots because I was afraid of holding up the group (I didn’t.) We then headed to one more stop, a nice lookout. The sandstone looked warmer bathed in the fading afternoon light, and it highlighted a rock feature known as Boar’s Head. “You Europeans with your dragon stories will probably say it looks like a dragon,” noted our guide. I could see a boar, but it did look more reptilian. In the end I decided it looked most like a crocodile, which seemed fitting because Australia has plenty of the creatures.

On the way back we saw flocks of white cockatoos, which are active at dusk. In one yard I saw a single tree that must have had close to twenty! The darkness put an end to my bird watching. As I settled in for the ride back to Sydney, I marveled again at how blessed I am to be here and have the opportunity to see and do so many wonderful things.