It's Hot in the Bush

So I know it's been a while but I have been way too busy to blog... I'll go chronologically and tell you about my trip to Tumut first.

I walked to the front of the school of fine art with my entire supply of camping gear because i forgot to ask my roommate for a ride, oh well. Anyway, we packed into a bus that uncomfortably seats 12, fortunately there weren't that many of us, and drove off into the bush. The natural australian landscape is extremely dry and rolling with lots of greyish gum and eucalyptus trees; it looks pretty alien to any american landscape i've seen. It's odd though ebcause apparently there are a LOT of species of plants and animals that have been brought here from other countries that are messing with the ecosytsem. the result is pine trees and willows that look really familiar to me are actually exotic here, and they're messing everything up. Even most of the grass is no longer native.

I fell asleep about half an hour into the ride, as those of you who've ridden buses with me know, they mput me to sleep walmost immediately, which was annoying because later in the trip we would take short 40 minute rides that just made me REALLY tired. Plus it was always hot (hich thirties in celsius, ninties for you imperial system americans, temperature is one of the most difficult culture shock things for me because it is totally foreign AND requires me to do math in my head) and the a/c in the bus was just too wimpy for all of the hot air & people in it.

Anyway, the trip was interesting for me, but it was quite academic and would eb broing to go into detail with you so I'll just give you a list:

Orchard
I had never seen an orchard before, or heard so much about apples, so this was pretty cool. Most of the trees aren't that much taller than me, and those nets protect the trees from hail.

Forest Plantation & Fire Tower (sooo high in the air!)
In this part of the adventure, we saw all of the harvesting equipment at work, thus the hardhats. I got an extra extra large yellow vest, you know, for my broad shoulders. the dude with his hand on his chin was out guide, very Aussie backwoodsman and a real fave with the older ladies in the group...
This was one of my views from the fire tower before it got windy and the tower started to sway....shudder.. The dark green stuff is the plantations, the open land was caused by a fire. (started by some idiot who stole a car and burned it to hide evidence) and the grey forest is natural australian forest, they aren't allowed to cut it down so they grow right up to it. They have a TON of land because this particular buisiness has been around long enough to be sustainable, but it takes 20-30 yrs to grow a tree. The blank land you see used to be worth millions of dollars in wood.

Hike/ four wheel drive through a farm and a national park

So the national park was called Kosciuszko by a Polish explorer, after a Polish saint, but everyone here pronounces it Kozzyosko, so you would never know. To get to it, we drove though a family farm where they were grazing cows. The cows, and people were very friendly.
The park itself was very pretty, this is a spot by the creek, the dude is our project photo documenter guy, Dean.

Snowy mountain scheme (huge dam that generates power)
In order to make this dam they filled up an entire valley with water from a river, this yabby lives in the lake that they've made. It's picturesque, but bizzare to think how monumentally we've changed the land.

These pipes supply water for the power generating turbines from the lake above, each one can fit a bus inside. Wow, I sound like our tour guide, except she kept throwing numbers at me, in metric, in the heat.

We camped every night at a drive in camp site by a creek, which was awesome when it was hot, but not awesome when there were 50 8th graders sharing the site with us. (luckily only for two nights.)

After that whole marshmellow poll myself and one other american girl decided to teach people how to make s'mores, which if people have heard of them it was in movies. It was pretty difficult though, because things I have taken for granted all my life were unavailable. Marshmellows here are mostly small, tough, covered with sweet powder of some kind, and flavored. that's right, flavored, ti is impossible to find plain ones in most stores that aren't in a bag with pink, raspberry flavored ones that taint the whole bag. After searching two small town stores we found some plain ones, but these were mushroom cap shaped and proved to taste better but were difficult to toast evenly. Also, thin chocolate bars like hershey do not exist, and so we had thick, not easily melted chocolate. The toughest obstacle, however, was the graham cracker. People have no idea what it is, and try explaining a slightly sweet but not really cinnamony biscuit to someone. We stood in the biscuit aisle holding up boxes of crackers to the stock guy for forever before we found a replacement (crackers similar to animal crackers in flavor) and he finally looked at us and went, "you're not from around here, are you?" In the end, the aussies were suitably impressed, but also a little shocked, I think, at the extravagant sweet cravings of the American taste palette.

My trip ended with a ride in a ute (pickup truck) with a sculptor who makes dogs, they are really cool looking actually, and she wanted to stop in a town called Gundagai to see the Dog on a Tucker Box. It's apparently part of a well known Australian legend, sort of like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan I think, you can look it up here if you like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_on_the_Tuckerbox

Well this took longer than I thought it would, mostly because I was watching Sixteen Candles and attempting to clean out our broken fridge while writing it. I will post soon about how I spent my most recent weekend; Riley and I got to got to Sydney--it is a really beautiful city.