Last week we went to Heron Island. So Heron Island is in the southern Great Barrier Reef. The island is 0.8 kilometers long. To get to Heron Island, we had to drive 9 hours to Gladstone and from there it was a 2-hour ferry ride to Heron. On the island, there is a resort and a research station owned by the University of Queensland. We stayed at the resort but the students stayed at the research station because families with children are not allowed to stay at the research station. There are many labs at the research station, where scientists can go to do their research on the coral reefs and animals that live there. This was the last trip for the students as a part of The Marine Biology Class.

Heron Island is full of amazing creatures. While we were there I saw a lot of marine life and a lot of birds. The island is full of birds and I am serious. When you walk up from the beach there is bird poop covering the sidewalk and birds fly into your face. One even knocked an ice cream cone out of my mom's hand. There are over 800K birds on the island. The two main kinds of birds are The Black Noddies and The Shearwaters. The Black Noddies were the ones that would fly into your faces while we walked on the island’s footpaths. The Shearwater birds make their burrows underground and sound like moaning ghosts or crying babies, we couldn’t even sleep. In the olden days, sailors would not go on the island because they thought the island was haunted by ghosts!

Everyday me, my mom, and the other family= we would go snorkeling twice a day. We would see fishes, turtles, rays, and even sharks.

While we were on the island the turtles were laying their eggs. The 2 kinds of turtles we saw were green turtles which are really large and loggerhead turtles, which are smaller. One night we went out to the beach and saw about 10 turtles making their nests. The turtles at dusk start to swim onto the shore.  Then they walk up the beach across sand and rocks to the edge of the beach where there are grasses and trees. They shimmy themselves into the sand and use their flippers to dig and shovel the sand into a huge deep hole. When they start to lay eggs, they cover up the eggs with sand as they go.  Then, the turtles cover the entire hole with sand and they slide back into the water and swim away.  We watched a turtle dig her hole for 45 minutes and she barely even done with it. Sometimes it can take most of the night for a turtle to

find the right spot, dig her hole, lay her eggs, cover it up and go back into the ocean. The baby turtles will probably hatch in December or January. I wish I could be on Heron Island to see the baby turtles hatching and going into the water.

At Heron Island, there is a lot of different kinds of coral. While we were snorkeling we saw Staghorn Coral which looks like antlers. We also saw blue, orange and purple coral. To tell you the truth I did not know that there were so many different kinds of coral. In between the coral, we saw a lot of fish and even some turtles were hiding in the coral.

And basically, this is my trip to the Heron Island with my mom .it is indeed a very fun place to go for a trip.

At last my My favorite part of the trip was:

1. The food
2. All of the cool creatures
3. Snorkeling
4. Playing pool after dinner (the game pool *not swimming in the pool)

LIFE IN BRISBANE

I decided for this blog I would tell you about life in Brisbane, so here it goes. Every day I wake up and do some math. Then my mom and I go out somewhere in the city. Next, we come back and do some work. Around 3 I will head down to swimming. After swimming, we have dinner and repeat the day again. Brisbane has been my home for the last three months.

In Brisbane, we live in a small apartment. In the apartment, we have four rooms: the kitchen/livingroom, my room, my mom’s room, and the bathroom. We live 5 minutes from the campus, which means it is really easy to go to swimming and lectures. My favorite part of my apartment is how small it is. I like how small it is because you realize how much you actually don’t need in your life. We have a few clothes, some books, sketchbooks and my computer. Pretty simple.

The population of Brisbane is 2.4 million people, and the city is full of fun things to do and see. My favorite parts of the city are the street art, the CityCat and all of the museums. In Australia, there are many kinds of art. Street art is all over the city. When you walk along the river you pass beautiful masterpieces that don’t really make sense. Street art can be a lot of things, it can be a face, or a landscape, or even a statement that can hopefully affect the whole community. Example: street art in Brisbane can be the bridges that light up at night in different colors, or the sculptures around the city, even an abstract piece of artwork painted somewhere under a bridge. You can see it when you drive to the airport or even walking to the CityCat.

The CityCat is a ferry that takes you up and down the Brisbane River. The Brisbane River runs through the middle of Brisbane and divides the city between the north and south sides. The CityCat ferry is a fun way to get around the city instead of taking the bus. You can just hop on the ferry and get off at any of the 18 stops.

At UQ I swim in their club team. Swimming here is so different from at home. Here we swim in a 50-meter pool instead of a 25-yard pool and we do dryland training every practice. The pool we swim in is outside, which means the only way we get out of practice is if there is a lightning storm outside. Many times we keep swimming in the pool even if there is rain (and a little thunder)!

     

ANIMALS

In Lamington National Park, we saw a lot of pademelons. Now, you might be wondering what is as pademelon?

 photograph Terri Mueller

This is a pademelon, cute right? Pademelons are macropods and marsupials, which means they are related to kangaroos and wallabies. The word macropod comes from two Greek words. Macro means big, and podi means foot, so ‘big feet’. The pademelons are much smaller than other macropods, they are about the size of an American possum. A marsupial is a creature that gives birth to a premature baby and keeps its little one in a pouch until fully grown. We mostly saw the pademelons at night, and every time we tried to take a picture of them, they would run off into the woods. They are so cute!!!

trapdoor spider burrow

One day in Lamington while we were hiking, John Hall pointed out a trapdoor spider burrow.

huntsmen spider

These spider burrows were everywhere on the side of the track. At night, trapdoor spiders leave out strands of silk and sit inside the door. When they feel the silk vibrate, they jump out of their hole and pull the creature into the burrow. The door shuts closed and the creature is trapped inside the burrow and the spider eats it. That is why they call it a trapdoor spider. We also saw a lot of funnel spider webs. Thank goodness we did not see the actual spiders. The only spider we saw was a big huntsman spider that was in our tent. It was bigger than a quarter.

funnel spider burrow

Lamington National Park

Last week we went to Lamington National Park. Lamington National Park is southwest of Brisbane and on the border of 2 states, Queensland and New South Wales. Lamington is a large park in a huge mountain range called the Great Dividing Range. The Great Dividing Range goes along the eastern side of the continent and goes through 3 states: Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. The Great Dividing Range is 180 million years old (that is way older than the Amazon forest.) The rainforests on The Great Dividing Range are the last example of warm moist rainforest from the time of Gondwana. Gondwana was a supercontinent that was formed 600 million years ago and broke apart 180 million years ago to form South America, Australia, Africa, Madagascar, India, and Antarctica. That is when The Great Dividing Range was born. That is also why some parts of Australia, South America, and Africa have similar plants and animals that you don’t find in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Great Dividing Range is mostly rainforest. Rainforests used to cover all of Australia. Then while we were having our ice age, Australia was having a drying period. This made the outback and desert in Australia, but some of the rainforests survived on the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range. The rainforest was able to survive because it gets a lot of rain clouds coming off the ocean to the east. It also has really rich soil from the basalt rock underneath. This area is a World Heritage Site and has lots of rare animals and plants.

       

When we were there, we stayed in a safari tent. The college students had to wake up at 5 am to go on a sunrise hike to hear the birds. I couldn’t even get up to go to breakfast!  Every day at 8 am we had breakfast and then a lecture from John Hall. Then we would go on a hike that would be about 12 km long. Around 12 pm, we would have picnic lunch along the hike (we had to make and pack our own sandwiches after breakfast and take them with us on the hikes). We would get back from our hikes around 5:30 pm and have dinner at 6:30 pm. Then another lecture, then bed. Near where the students were staying, there was a little hangout place called The Cottage. Every day when we had free time we would go there to talk or have a cup of warm tea.

My favorite part of the trip was one of the hikes we went on with some of the college students. The college students were Maddie, Laura, Lauren, Teya, Margot, Eva, and Ryann. My mom and Terri were on the hike too. The hike was called Coomera Falls Circuit and was 17km long! We hiked through the rainforest and many waterfalls. At one of the waterfalls, we had a picnic lunch and went for a really long swim. The water was so cold. At the end of the hike, it started to rain. The rainforest got really foggy, cool, and creepy. At the end of the hike, I was so tired. I had a really fun time hiking with all the girls. My next post is going to be about some of the cool animals I saw in Lamington.

Girraween

Last week I was camping in Girraween National Park. When we got there, we unloaded the bus and pitched the tents. The tents were set up in rows of 4. On this trip, there were 3 professors, 1 "tutor", 25 college students, and 1 11-year-old girl (me). The professors were my mom and her colleague, but the third professor's name is John Hall. John Hall is the professor who gives all of the lectures on this trip. John Hall in a botanist which means he is a tree hugger. Just kidding, his studies plants and he teaches students about plants animals and fires in national parks. On this trip, we had a tutor/assistant named Sheree. Sheree was so cool, she studies microbiology and she is a volunteer firefighter. Sheree went on hikes with us and she even brought special cameras so that we could watch the possums walk around our camp kitchen at night!  Every day in Girraween we would go on a hike. One of the hikes we went took us to Castle Rock, the Sphinx, and Turtle Rock. When we got to Turtle Rock we had the choice to go through Turtle Rock or just go back the way we came. The whole group chose to go through the Turtle. What I mean is we scrambled over and under 200,000,000-year-old granite rock, it was so much fun.

Girraween National Park is a 3-hour drive from Brisbane. Girraween is also part of the Granite Belt, which means that everything is made out of granite even the soil is made out of granite sand. The rock in Girraween is 200,000,000-years old, that means these rocks were around during the dinosaurs! Sheree told us how soil forms in the region. There are 2 different ways that soil forms from granite. The first way is when rainwater washes away tiny pieces of granite from the rocks and eventually forms a pile of sand. The second way is when algae and lichen are growing on the rock together.  Algae and lichen have a symbiotic relationship, that means that they help each other thrive without taking more or less from one another.  When lichen and algae grow together, they output an acid which decays the rock. When the rock decays, tiny loose pieces of granite come off and eventually turns into soil.

The quality of the soil that comes from this rock is very poor in nutrients. Not a lot of plants can grow in this kind of soil. The main things that grow in this soil are eucalyptus trees, banksia plants, acacia shrubs and different native grasses. Another plant that grows really well in this soil is the grapevine.  That is why the Granite Belt region has a lot of vineyards that grow grapes and make wine. On the way back to Brisbane, we stopped at 2 wineries and got to hear about how they make wine. The students got to taste lots of different wine. My mom got me a box of lolli's since I couldn't drink the wine!

On top of Turtle Rock, this is a granite boulder.

Invasion of the kangaroos in our campsite!

Climbing the Pyramid with the students.

Thumbs up! (under Turtle Rock)

John Hall lecturing us in the freezing cold.

A week ago I went to North Stradbroke Island with 25 college students, 3 professors, my family and a nice bus driver named Brentan. The locals call the island Straddie for short, so that is what I am going to call it. On Straddie, we stayed in a little house that was the color teal. The house was a one-floor house stuck in the 1950’s. The whole house was covered with pastel colors and jelly belly patterns. No joke. It was really cute. The house had a front porch, and we loved to sit out there and watch the sunset at the end of the day.

     

On Straddie, we spent most of our time at the University of Queensland marine research station, where we went to lectures. The lectures were taught by a professor named Tom Cribb. Tom Cribb is a marine biologist that studies parasites in fish and other marine animals. He has identified over 1,000 parasites in fish.

As part of the class, Tom took us on a few trips around the island. My favorite was when we went to a beach called Cylinder Beach, and we played football, soccer and swam.  We also climbed a big rock. From the big rock, we saw a humpback whale.

One day during low tide, we all went out searching for creatures and shells in front of the research station. We found a bunch of oyster shells, a large starfish, a needlefish, giant sea cucumbers, coral, and sponges.

One of the sponges we saw was the poisonous, black slimy sponge. I didn’t touch it. On the last day, we went to Point Lookout for a walk on the boardwalk.  From the lookout, we could see more whales and dolphins and we even saw THREE wild kangaroos next to the path!

                                                                                      

One day during afternoon tea at the research station, Tom brought out a box of Weet-Bix and said, “So guys, we are going to have a contest, to see who can eat the fastest. Now what you will be eating is a piece of so called food that looks like cardboard and tastes like cardboard, but is actually compressed cereal flakes that are really dry. Good luck.” The students were split up into three different groups and whoever ate their bar first moved onto the final round. The student who won the challenge was Will, and he is from Union College. I didn’t try the Weet-Bix, but I know at least one of the students liked them, even though they looked really dry.

student excited for the WEAT-BIX challenge

            

Tomorrow morning we are leaving really early for a camping trip. I am not going to have internet. I promise to write more when I get back next week. I hope everyone is having a great time back to school!

Fun fact: The sea cucumber when it’s under its last resort for self-defense, it poops out all of its organs. We learned that first hand.   

Family photo

                

Poems

I would like to say how much I miss my brother Emil and my friends from school. I also want to wish you a good year at school.

Poems

Since I’ve been in Australia, I’ve gotten into writing short poems inspired by songs I hear. I pick a song, and from a line or a phrase I create a short poem from it. I thought it would be cool  to share them with you.

So here it goes. The first one is from Paul Kelly - From Little Things Big Things Grow. I heard this song in the car, when my family was driving from Darwin to Litchfield National Park. That’s the park where the termite mounds were. If you don’t remember, check out my old blog post. This song is about the Aboriginal people trying to get back there land. Here’s my poem:

I am not one big thing,

I am many little things woven together.

The next song is from Mumford and Sons - White blank page.

A blank page is the difference between history and  the unwritten future.

The poem I wrote was inspired from a song by Lisa Mitchell - Neopolitan Dreams.

I turn my head up to the sky

I see you flying high.

I also have another poem I wrote, it goes like this:

When I close my eyes

all I see is light,

but when I open them

all I see is darkness.

Here are the songs that inspired me so you can listen to them.

Neopolitan Dreams - www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RowAc-H3EM

A white blank page - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw-ko6aINI4

From Little thing dig things grow - www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_ndC07C2qw

Safari Excursion

A few days ago we went on a four day excursion in what is called the Top End of Australia. It is called the Top End, because it is the northern tip of the Northern Territory (NT for short) of Australia. The NT is very large, but there is a very small population of people living there. The population is so small that the Territory is not an actual state. Our excursion started in Darwin, the capital of the NT, and ended in Darwin. In this excursion we went to Kakadu National Park, Arnhem Land, and Bamurru Plains.

"Jumping" saltwater crocodile

Day 1

The first day of our excursion we went across Fogg Dam. Fogg Dam is a road that goes through a failed rice field. Australia is covered in outside culture. What I mean by that is a lot of people in Australia are not originally from Australia. People have tried to bring a lot of outside ideas, like growing rice. They built Fogg dam to grow rice. The rice project failed because the water levels in the wet season were unbelievably high and the magpie geese were eating the rice. At Fogg Dam we saw a bunch of birds. Fogg Dam is a huge wetland so it is covered with different kinds of grass and a bunch of little patches of shallow water.

Wetland at Fogg dam

After Fogg Dam we went on a jumping croc cruise on the Adelaide River. We saw so many crocodiles and birds. The skipper of our boat put raw meat at the end of a long pole and got a few crocodiles to jump out of the water! They are so big! When the crocodiles want to cool down, they get out of the water and open their mouths.  It looks like they are yawning, very funny. The next stop was at a resort that was near the campsite we were staying. At the resort we got drinks to cool off. Next we went on a sunset cruise on the Yellow River, which was really cool. On the Yellow River cruise we saw crocs birds and a magnificent sunset. In Australia ,the sun sets really fast and it sets at 6:30 pm, so it will 7:00 pm and pitch black. The reason it sets so fast is that Australia is so close to the equator.  

Yellow river

Saltwater crocodile on Yellow river

After the cruise, we went to a campsite that had safari tents. We spent the next two nights there. That night  we had dinner by the fire. For dinner we had salad, steak,  sausage, and pork. It was so good. Dean, our guide called it a meat-fest. That night we slept in the safari tents. The tents were so small you could only fit two beds in there but they were so fun to stay in. that night I stayed with my mom in the tent. In these tents you could hear everything outside which was so creepy.

Cooking dinner (meat fest)

Day 2

Rock art - Injalak hill

The next day we went to Arnhem Land. This is a sacred land  to the Aboriginal people, and we had to have a special permit to enter this region. On our way to  Arnhem Land we crossed a road that went through a river that was infested with crocodiles. In  Arnhem Land there are many little different villages. The village we went to was called Gunbalanya. In this town is a big art center. In the art center they sell  art that the villagers make. The villagers make painting and baskets.  They also do  silk screening. We got to see women weaving baskets and men painting. The men painted animals and plants. They planted with acrylic paint and traditional paint made out of rocks and charcoal.  After we went to the art center we went to a sacred hill that the Aborigines took shelter on during the wet seasons.  During the wet season, the entire valley floods, so indigenous people had to leave the lowlands and go high on rock hills. We hiked the hill with a really nice Aboriginal guide named Gabriella, and when we got to the top we had lunch. Gabriella showed us the three resting spots of her people. We saw a bunch of cave art and Gabriella told us that the paintings were two hundred years old. Gabriella told us the  stories of her people. When we started down I saw a skull sitting there, just sitting there! The skull was pure white and it was sitting in between two rocks. Gabriella told us it was a burial site. That many Europeans have stolen the old bones and taken them to museums all over the world.  After that we made our way down the hill  and got back in the car and went back to the village and got a few pieces of art. Then we went to the resort to swim in the pool. Next we went back to our campsite and had dinner.

Yellow river

End of another great day by the fire

Day 3

The next day we went to Maguk Falls. We swam at the falls for about an hour, the water was warm and there were no crocodiles, so it was safe. After that we got in a car and drove to the Bamurru Plains. In Bamurru we stayed in a cabin. Before dinner we went for a swim and we went on a drive to a billabong to watch the sunset. at the billabong we saw horse, water buffalo, and a lot of birds. We even saw a buffalo skeleton. Then we went to sleep.

Sunset on the billabong

Day 4

The last day went had breakfast and swam. Then we went on an air boat ride which was so cool. I even got to drive it. We saw a lot of water buffalo and birds. After lunch we drove back to Darwin and a few day later we took a plane back to Brisbane.

I want to thank Dean our guide. My mom and dad for taking us on this excursion and Lord's Safari.

http://www.lords-safaris.com

Litchfield National Park

Yesterday I went to Litchfield National Park. On the way everything was red, brown, and orange. We went to Lichfield National park because we wanted to see the giant magnetic termite mounds and swim underneath the water falls; Wangi Falls and Florence Falls.

There are two kinds of termites. They are called Nasutitermites triodinae which make cathedral shaped mounds and Amitermes mederidionalis which makes magnetic mounds where the flat side of the mound faces north and south and the point faces east to west so the mound does not overheat. The Cathedral mounds are built on top of dry soil so that is why the mounds from those termites are red and the Magnetic mounds are built on seasonally flooded black soil so the mounds are gray. Some of the mounds can get up to 5 meters high (thats 15 feet high!).The mounds group around dead trees until there is no tree left then the termites move onto a new tree.

After the termite mounds we went to Wangi falls. Wangi falls is a beautiful water fall. There was two water falls at the site and a giant swimming hole. We also saw a lot of fruit bats. We had lunch there and then we drove to Florence falls. We also swam at Florence falls.

A poem I wrote inspired by the song "From Little Things Big Things Grow".

I am not one big thing 

I am many little things

Woven together 

Wangi Falls

Cathedral termite mounds

Us

Magnetic termite mound