Happy Halloween!

Wow, it's been way too long since I've updated this thing. No excuse.

Luckily, I haven't been up to an incredible amount of stuff the past few weeks so there isn't a whole lot to write about (good thing too, because I've had three essays and a lab report due the past couple days and my fingers are just about dead). A few highlights, though - I was involved in the making of the Currie Hall lip sync video (which hopefully will be up on youtube eventually), made another trip to both the W.A. Museum and the Perth Zoo, was involved with UWA's Relay for Life, and have had some good times mainly just hanging out with people. We also had the Currie Hall end of year/farewell dinner last Wednesday (a little early for most people as exam period doesn't finish until the 20th but some lucky fools have no exams and leave early).

The weather has been, on the whole, excellent as we're starting to move into summer here, although we've had a few days with some clouds and rain and even more that have been windy. I heard a couple weeks back, although I don't know the validity of this, that Perth is the second-windiest city on earth behind Chicago. If that is true it certainly wouldn't surprise me, we get a lot of wind here although luckily the UWA campus is pretty sheletered and most of the time it's warm enough that the wind isn't a huge factor.

The best day I've had in the past few weeks was two Fridays ago (the 22nd). That afternoon I had a field trip with my Wildlife Conservation class to Mandurah, about an hour south of Perth. We were looking at underpasses that had been built under a highway for wildlife use. The underpasses are a cool idea but weren't terribly exciting in themselves, but we did get to see a bunch of kangaroos, including this one:


Look really close and you can see a little joey sticking out of the pouch.

That night, a big group of Currie Hallers headed out to Fremantle to do the Fremantle Prison Twilight tour. The prison was actually a really large facility that only shut down in 1991. Here's the main ward:


Our tour guide was really good and very informative, and we got to see a whole lot of the prison - cells (some of which had been recreated to represent different eras at the prison, some of which had been left the way they were when the last prisoners were there), gallows, solitary confinement, the old morgue, the whipping post, even the gallows. All in all it was very enlightening, and it confirmed two very important things for me - first, I never, ever, ever want to go to prison, and second that I really wanted to watch the Shawshank Redemption that night.

The one annoying thing about the prison, though, is they had all these really annoying rules:


I mean, come on, guys.

To round off the night we all went to Little Creature Brewery, which makes the best beer you can get here in Perth. Really reminds me of home as it's essentially a little microbrewing operation like we have all over in Seattle:



Not a whole lot else monumental to report on since my last post. Mostly, it's just been about schoolwork as the term officially ended on Friday. Now I just have two more papers due Monday (mostly done with both, just in the editing stage) and then exams that start (for me) on the 10th and end on the 18th. Hopefully I will be able to fit in a few day trips/beach excursions between the studying. I know for sure that I'm going out to Penguin Island on Wednesday and that should be a blast, I will be sure to update you all on that - hopefully in a timely manner.

This Past Week

OK, well after finally putting up everything from semester break that brings me to the past week and a half or so, and oh what a great time it has been. School's getting busy, as we push into the last few weeks of the semester, but I'm still managing to have quite a bit of fun.

Last Wednesday was my friend Andrew's 18th birthday (an even bigger deal here as it's legal drinking), and his parents were generous enough to take a big group of us out to a nice Chinese restaurant, pay for dinner, and give us all several cases of wine to boot! All right for having awesome friends (and happy birthday Andrew!).

Thursday I started assisting with a research project, which I have to do at least two days of for my Wildlife Conservation class. The project I chose is a PhD project looking at the effects of climate and climate change on the behavior and potential movement/translocation/habitat selection of western swamp turtles, one of the rarest reptiles in the world (found only around Perth in a couple wetland reserves). As western swampies are so rare, Sophie was doing preliminary studies on oblong turtles, the common variety of turtle in W.A. She had 11 captured from a local lake held in this yard:

We took measurements on all 11, then chose 3 of the biggest ones to release, as she's only allowed to be holding eight at a time and wants smaller-sized animals (this is a test run for a smaller species in the western swamp turtle). So I got to go help release 3 oblong turtles back to the wild, which was pretty cool.

You can see where the oblong turtles get their name from; they have quite the neck!

Thursday night was Currie Hall Ball, which was a lot of fun and a lot of dancing. Friday I went to the beach for a bit with some guys, then that night I got to hang out, watch the Lion King with some people, and help Noam put the finishing touches on the Dance Down Under video.

Saturday I made the brilliant move of trying to jump over the Currie Hall tennis net and sprained my wrist in the process (as well as scraping up my knee). So other than getting than patched and healed (about 99.5% sure it's no big deal, been feeling better every day and x-ray results look good) and doing homework, nothing too exciting the past few days. And that brings up us to now.

I leave you with a couple new photos from international night, courtesy of Janan Loh:

Bollywood dance

...and the long awaited vision of me dressed as America, my best impression of a cowboy (thankfully you can't see I'm also wearing flip flops).

Last Bit of the Trip

Yardie Creek is the furthest you can get in Cape Range NP on a proper road, and it's a fair sized water flow, at least for the half a mile or so it goes into the mountains. We got to take a safari boat up into the canyon, which you can see in the distance here:


All those steep rock walls are inhabited by a variety of nesting birds and black-footed rock wallabies, which were a little hard to spot (made more difficult by the fact that an eagle was circling overhead when we first arrived) but very cool when you found them.



After an hour or so maneuvering the creek, it was time to head back towards Exmouth. Our guide kept jabbering on about how we would for sure see an echidna on the side of the road somewhere. We never did, which bummed me out a little, but we did get to be privy to a very entertaining osprey family (it was basically a young adult osprey throwing a fit over not getting food from his parents anymore), as well as this guy:


Our guide had to slam on the brakes as this perentie, Australia's biggest lizard (and this guy was a whopper, probably around 6 feet long) crossed the road right in front of us, pretty much oblivious to the car (he's at the top of his food chain, what does he care about cars?). Very cool to see a wild reptile that big. May have been my favorite thing all trip.

We wrapped things up with afternoon tea at Vlamingh Head Lighthouse, where we not only got a fantastic view of the sunset but also got a fantastic vantage point to watch dozens of whales passing by the Exmouth peninsula, very obvious from their breaching and spouting. It was quite cool and a good way to cap off the best day of our whole trip.



When we finally got back to Exmouth it was past 6 PM and nearly dark, but we had to ground to cover so we drove about 3 hours south before pulling over for the night at a roadside rest stop. With no other cars on the road, we did get a chance to see some incredible stars (it was so dark you could see the whole Milky Way splashed across the sky). Made us all wish we knew some constellations, but very, very pretty nonetheless. Tried taking a couple pictures on time-lapse exposure, but I need a much fancier camera to be able to pull that off. The next morning we got up early, started driving, and didn't really stop except for gas until we got back to Currie - in time for Saturday dinner, about 11 hours total driving. After all that, Sunday was truly a day of rest and recuperation; other than cleaning the car up a bit I don't think any of us got anything productive done.

All in all, an excellent trip and one I will always remember.

Exmouth - Touring Continued

Sorry about the delay in finishing my trip blog. Been busy. Anyways, here we go:

After picking up our delicious prawns, we headed back into town. Passed a few wildlife of note along the way, including the first of probably 20 to 30 emus we saw on the day. This group was a family - three chicks, plus dad (who apparently does most of the chick rearing while mom goes and hangs out at the bush day spa).


You can just see two of the chicks here next to dad.


A little further down the road we also encountered this giant spider, which was maybe six inches across when you count the legs. She (the males of these orb weaver spiders are tiny) was situated in the middle, largest web of a whole complex that our guide said was probably her daughters. There was also a really cool photo opportunity of an osprey sitting on a windmill eating a fish - but it was just a tad bit outside my optimal zoom range.

Our next stop was the old US Army base just north of Exmouth. The place shut down in 1995, but the US military still maintains a small presence as it operates some seriously impressive radio towers in the area (there was something like 14 of them, all taller than the Empire State Building). Being on the base meant that technically we were on US soil, which was a bit odd. But since no one really goes there anymore, the local fauna seem to have made themselves at home:



After the army base, we headed down a dirt track looking for more big red kangaroos, but it was getting close to noon and none were really out (we saw a couple, but they were laying down a good distance away). I did get a good, up-close-and-personal look at this little bug(ger) though:

He hopped on to the window next to me when we were probably doing about 25 mph, and was clinging on for his dear sweet life. He managed to climb up to the top of the car eventually, though what happened to him from there I do not know. Judging by the number of grasshoppers and other insects we had to clear out of the front grill of our car after our trip, my guesses are it wasn't pretty.

We next proceeded to Turquoise Bay (apologies for the lack of pictures) where we snorkeled and had lunch, then it was on to Yardie Creek and our boat tour!

Update on the Dancing

So we briefly had to take our Dance Down Under video off the web - we were concerned about copyright issues as we didn't own the music in it and were submitting it for a competition that had a monetary prize.

The good news, though, is that after a brief hiatus the video is back up! The cheesy intro and conclusion don't work as well when not part of a competition, but it's still a hoot to watch and I hope you can all watch enjoy it even without getting to vote for it. Feel free to send it along to anyone you think might enjoy it, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVc2N_UXWZg

Dance Down Under

Hey everybody -

I have a few more pictures/commentary from our Exmouth tour to come, but first is a much more interactive way to experience our trip: we have a youtube video!

That's right, we filmed ourselves at various locations along the trip doing crazy dances and compiled it into a 2-minute video, which we've submitted to the UWA International Study Abroad video competition.

To view our video, go here:

http://www.youtube.com/group/UWAvidcom2010

And click on the "Dance Down Under" video. If by any chance you feel inclined to vote for our video and help us win the competition, it takes just a couple easy steps.

First, you need a youtube acount (if you have a gmail account for email that works as well).

Using that, join the UWA International group (at the top of the page I linked to, there's a button that says "Join Group")

Then, watch our video and click "I Love It". Simple as that. Voting closes Monday night, Australia time, so if you're going to vote please do it soon!

Hope you all enjoy. And if it looks familiar to anyone, our inspiration came from the popular "Where the Hell is Matt?" video, which also makes for a good internet watch if you've got a few minutes to kill - you can find it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

Part 7 (Exmouth)

The drive from Shark Bay to Exmouth is long, about 8 hours, and there's not a whole lot along the way to break up the monotony of the Australian scrubland. Probably the highlight of the last leg of our roadtrip was this:


That's right, we crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn, which meant that officially speaking we were in the tropics! I can now say I've walked, driven, and flown over the lower Tropic of the earth.

We checked into our accomodation, Blue Reef Backpackers Caravan Park, late in the afternoon and it was HOT, probably about 95F, and as none of us felt like doing much of anything we settled down into a combination internet cafe/bookstore/tour company/car rental joint and spent a couple hours in happy, air conditioned surroundings checking up on news from home and browsing through what books had managed to find their way up into a secondhand bookstore in Exmouth, Western Australia. Our caravan park was actually quite nice, we met some fellow UWA exchanges there and hung out for a while, plus took the chance to enjoy the free outdoor movie on offer - Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was possibly one of the top ten worst movies I've ever seen but at least it held our attention for a couple hours.

Next morning, we set out bright and early for snorkeling. Exmouth is situated on a big pensinsula that is dominated in the middle by the Cape Range National Park - the only "mountains" of any note I've seen since coming here, not terribly impressive in the grand scheme of things but still imposing enough that unless you have a serious 4-wheel drive you have to go all the way around to get to the other side of the peninsula (which we did as that's where all the good snorkeling is). Our first stop was Turquoise Bay, aptly named as it has totally gorgeous blue water and an awesome current that runs parallel to the beach so you can basically just lay on your back and get drifted over fish, coral, and a whole bunch of marine life. I got especially lucky and saw a sea turtle, but even if I hadn't it would have been well worth coming - fish EVERYWHERE, plus some other weird things like sea cucumbers. Around lunchtime we headed to the next beach down the road where I saw a pretty decent-sized reef shark, maybe 6 feet or so (it bolted as soon as it saw me).

By that point we had to head back to Exmouth because Noam and I were going on a tour the next day (Friday) and we had to pay and make final arrangements for that. The tour, which started bright and early around 730 AM, was a little pricey (about $200 AU) but it went all day and it was absolutely worth every penny. Our tour guide rolled up in an absolute monstrosity of an ex-army vehicle that you could probably have driven through an active volcano and come through unscathed. This was ideal for conquering the terrain of Cape Range, where we went first.


We went on two roads; the first was on old riverbed at the bottom of a canyon


Then we went along the top of the canyon, where we had morning tea.


And on our way back out, we stopped by the local seafood company to pick up some prawns for lunch. They were delicious and decently sized, but not quite as big as the whopper they had out front...

Part 6 (Monkey Mia)

Monkey Mia, which is a little spot on the beach located about halfway up the Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay, is about as close to a world-famous attraction as one finds in North Western Australia. What makes Monkey Mia famous is that, since the 1960's, dolphins have been coming very close into shore every morning to get fed. If you get there about 745, which we did, you can catch the first and usually best feed of the day. Access is pretty tightly controlled - they're very worried about health problems to the dolphins so no one can actually touch or swim with them (as was once the case) and only a few people are selected to do the actual feeding. But you do still get to stand a little way into the shallows, get a ery up-close look at the dolphins, and get some cool information from the guides, which made the program well worth it.


Here's two of the dolphins, a mother and a calf. There's actually only five dolphins that get fed, all females, and they often have their calves with them as they swim in close to shore. One of the reasons they don't let everyone feed is that the calves need to nurse about every 15-30 minutes, and they have to back off into deeper water to be able to pull the logisitics of that off.


None of us were chosen to feed, but this lucky lady was. I think it was height discrimination.

Random point of fact - I was quite confused as to why the place was called Monkey Mia, as clearly there were no monkeys anywhere near. The visitor center said that in the old days pearl divers were quite common in the area (pearl farming is still quite big in the region). Many of the pearl divers had monkeys as pets, or alternately were Chinese and so were called "monkeys" by white settlers, but anyways that answered my question for the most part ("mia" is aboriginal for "place of")

After seeing the dolphins feeding, we walked a little ways down the beach to a boat hire place and each rented out a sea kayak for the day. The service was excellent, $30 for the whole day and that included a waterproof bag each and some expert tips on where to go. We ended up pretty much just hugging the coastline and heading up north for a few hours. Much like at Shell Beach, there was a coastal shelf that extended really far out, probably at least a half mile in some places, and made the water shallow enough to stand in (and not just for me!). The farther away we got from Monkey Mia, the more sea life we saw, and there was quite a diversity - sea turtles, sharks, cormorants, and, quite a ways out, probably 30-40 stingrays all swimming around the shallows looking for food. It was pretty cool.


This was at least a half mile out, and we tied our kayaks up to this post and took a swim in the shallow water (no stingrays here!). Longkuan was new to kayaking, but after a little struggle early to get the paddling down, he beasted through the rest of the day, even staying out later than Noam and I to get some extra paddle time in. I think we may have found him a new sport.


The beach we stopped at for lunch was totally deserted and covered in a whole variety of shells, very cool.

We got back from Monkey Mia around 4 and bought some steaks to barbecue at the caravan park. In a true moment of Aussie hospitality, our campsite neighbors also invited us over - completely out of the blue - to have a couple drinks and to share some homemade sausage, cheese, and olives, and we hung out with them for a few hours. Good times.

Part 5 (Kalbarri to Shark Bay)

Meet Percival. Percival is a pelican (hopefully you've already seen that) and was the star attraction of the pelican feeding show we saw Monday morning in Kalbarri. The local pelicans are given fish around 8:45 every morning, and this particular morning Percival was the only male to turn up, and evidently very hungry as he pushed all the females, and a few little kids, around in his quest to get as many fish as possible down his gullet. Don't let his unassuming demeanor fool you, Percival is one nasty bird.

After watching the pelican feeding, we had to get back to the main highway, which meant passing once again through Kalbarri NP, where we stopped at another lookout point. From there it was around a 5 hour drive up to Shark Bay, which, rather than a single town, is actually a huge region consisting of several peninsulas, bays, and inlets that has been designated a World Heritage Site, meaning that it meets preservation criteria for having special cultural, historical, natural, and scientific properties. Other than being an important site for early settlers and scientists, Shark Bay is also home to some really cool organisms, perhaps none cooler than the stromatolites, which were our first stop.


The stromatolites are behind me in the background. Don't look like much, but what they actually are is a living fossil, basically the same thing that was the first life on earth 3.5 billion years ago. A stromatolite is a rock formation that's made by cyanobacteria, tiny organisms that can only survive in very harsh conditions - in this case, the hypersaline waters of Hamelin Pool, tucked into the southeast corner of the Shark Bay region. As the cyanobacteria colonies grow, they produce little bits of mineral leachings that form the stromatolites, but also tiny bubbles of oxygen - which was what first formed our atmosphere and allowed other life to evolve. I think that's pretty cool.


Just a little ways down the road from Hamelin Pool was Shell Beach. Unlike most beaches which are made of sand, Shell Beach is composed entirely - yep, you guessed it - of shells. They're actually all shells from one type of tiny snail that can survive in the super-salty water, and they've been accumulating for a long time, so that in some places they go down almost 20 feet. The shells also form a big shelf that stretches way far out into the ocean. The picture above looks like it's taken just offshore, but I was almost 1/3 of a mile out into the water.

After Shell Beach, we made our way into Denham, the only real town of the Shark Bay area, and checked into the Blue Dolphin Caravan Park where we finally got to set up our tent, which mercifully was really easy to do but which, for whatever reason, seemed to make Noam angry:



We finished setting up the tent around 3:30, then headed out into Francois Peron National Park. This park covers the majority of the peninsula on which Denham is located, and is named after a French zoologist who explored the area heavily back in the day. The land it's on was once a popular area for sheep stations, but it's now ground zero for Project Eden, which focuses on the restoration of native species including mallee fowl (a ground nesting bird) and the bilby (which is my favorite marsupial just because I think they look awesome; a picture of them is here). Unfortunately we didn't see any bilbies, but we did get to check out the Peron homestead, an old sheep station that's been preserved as a museum to bush ranching. The homestead is also home to a century-old "artesian" hot tub, which uses a windmill to pump up groundwater, then heats it and dumps it in a big metal tank. I wasn't expecting it to be anything more than lukewarm, so I was very surprised when I stepped in and the water was near-boiling; it took some time to adjust! No pictures, unfortunately.

Part 4 (Kalbarri National Park)

We got up really early, around 5 AM, on Sunday morning and headed out to Kalbarri National Park. Our destination was the landmark Nature's Window rock formation and the hike, rather blandly named The Loop, which starts from it. Nature's Window is located at the end of 26 km of corrugated dirt road, which wasn't incredibly difficult to navigate in our little car (it was well-maintained, no potholes to speak of, just not paved and basically like driving on a washboard) but pretty time-consuming (it took us more than an hour to go about 16 miles). Once we got there, though, it was definitely worth it.


Nature's Window, which is a rock formation that's had a hole blasted through it by sand and wind, is Kalbarri's picture icon (like Old Faithful for Yellowstone) and it gets pretty crowded with people wanting to take pictures so we were glad we got there early - we were the second car to arrive, and the first ones on the trail. The Loop is only 8 km (5 miles) long, and we all wanted something a bit longer but that was really all that was available. Australia's "National Parks" are more like our state parks (there isn't one national agency that runs them) and most are just set-aside parcels of land without any trails or really development at all.


What we did get, though, was pretty phenomenal. The Loop starts out walking along a ridge atop a river gorge (you can just see Nature's Window off to the left in the picture above). After a mile or so it starts to drop down and goes along the bottom of the gorge (cared by the Murchison River, which ends at Kalbarri town) for most of the rest of the way before looping back to Nature's Window. Although it would have, again, been nice to have something a bit longer, I think we all really enjoyed the hike - apart from the flies, which were worse here than anywhere else we went. Saw some cool birds, a bunch of little skinks, a few kangaroos, and sadly two herds of feral goats.



Although we finished hiking around 1030 and avoided the heat of the day, it took a little more out of us than we realized as we all took a "little ten-minute nap" when we got back to the hostel that turned into a three-hour siesta. After waking up around 2, we had a very enjoyable afternoon reading and swimming at the beach, barbecuing some burgers for dinner, and watching the incredible Kalbarri sunset. The Kalbarri Pub also has a merri-go-round out front, so naturally we had to check that out and spent a happy couple hours there that night.

Part 3 (Geraldton to Kalbarri)

The next morning, we slept in a little (got up around 730, which I think was the latest we woke up all trip. It's incredible how I can sleep in all day when I'm in school but on vacation I'm happily up at the crack of dawn). We then were treated to our best breakfast trip - Stevie made toad-in-the-hole for us, which I'd never heard of but now am quite fond of - it's buttered bread with a hole cut out of the middle, inside which an egg is fried. After packing up and saying goodbye (we also got to meet their chickens), we stopped on the way out of town to see the HMAS Sydney II Memorial, which is built in memory of the Sydney, an Australian battleship which was sunk by the Japanese in 1942 after having served with distinction in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Everyone on board was killed. Although they didn't find the ship itself until 2008, a lot of the wreckage washed ashore at Geraldton.


The memorial.

After that we ventured forth once again, this time headed for Kalbarri, a town about four hours' drive north that is a major center for lobster fishing as well as a very popular vacation spot. Along the way we stopped at Pink Lake, which true to its name is a pink-tinged salt lake that, at least at the time we visited, was about half salt plain. Inexplicably, as it was really just a random turn off the road, at pink lake we ran into another group of Currie exchanges also venturing up to Broome. Really an unexpected place for a reunion.


Pink Lake.

Kalbarri is not just a town but also an extensive and well-known national park, and we stopped at the seaside portion of it on our way into town. Here there are some pretty spectacular sea cliffs and rock formations, as well as big waves and really strong winds. Around here was also our first introduction to Australian flies, which are INCREDIBLY annoying and will stop at nothing to get into every possible body cavity they can - ears, nose, eyes, mouth. They at least don't bite, but they were probably the worst part of our trip.



Just a short drive down the road later, we pulled into Kalbarri, which was probably my favorite town out of everywhere we stopped. It's located at the mouth of the Murchison River, which means a nice long stretch of beack just in front of the town's main drag as well as some nice swimming. We stayed at the YHA hostel about a block and a half from the beach, which looked like this:

Part 2 (The Pinnacles and Geraldton)

After witnessing the sunrise over Lancelin, we headed north yet again. Our ultimate destination was Geraldton, the only town along our route that really deserved the name (at least, the only place big enough to had stoplights). First, though, we had to check out Nambung National Park, which is renowned for the Pinnacles, rock formations that rise above the sand and cover the landscape.


Gives a sense of how widespread they are.


Some of them were pretty big, too.

After a good hour or so checking out the Pinnacles, we got back on the road to Geraldton. There were a couple brief stops for points of interest - a lookout, the cute little fishing village of Dongara, and of course the leaning trees. These trees naturally grow just like you see here. The winds whip over the hills and stunt all the growth on one side, so they are forced to adopt this hunched, tortured appearance.



Eventually we reached Geraldton, which is a very nice seaside community of something like 30,000. We had a look at the local museum, then we met up with a fellow group of exchanges (Matt, Sindre, Alyssa, Cindy, and Leslie, who were roadtripping like us except trying to make it to Broome - look it up, it's a long ways from Perth, they still aren't back yet). All of us had afternoon tea, then we met our friend Stevie, who is from Geraldton. She (and her parents) were kind enough to host us for a barbecue at their family's farm outside of town. At the farm, they had a large pile of brush they'd been accumulating over the winter, and they chose the night we were there to light it, which made for a really good show, some awesome pictures, and a lot of heat. The other guys had to take off after dinner (they had accomodation booked further up the coast), but we stayed the night, which was very nice of them (we brought beer) and a lot warmer than the sand dunes.

The Great Western Australian Roadtrip: Part 1 (Lancelin)

All right, I've finally got all my pictures loaded from our great roadtrip. Since for whatever reason I can't seem to figure out how to load more than four at a time, I'll do my best to present the trip sequentially, as it happened, and you all can try to follow along. All in all, the total numbers were 3 guys, 1 car (a Hyundai Getz), 10 travel days, and ballpark 3500 kilometers (for those following in the states, about 2100 miles).

The first leg of our journey started two Thursdays ago, the 23rd of September. We picked up our Getz in the morning, drove it around town a little to get a feel for the car and to run some errands, then after dinner we set off for Lancelin (all of us had class we had to attend or it would've been earlier).

Lancelin is a town about 2 hours or so drive time north of Perth along the North West Coastal Highway. Although it has some nice beaches and good surfing, what it's really famed for, and what we were there to see, are the massive sand dunes that are just north of the town. We got there around 9 and, it being a full moon, were able to spend several happy hours frolicking on, climbing up, and rolling down the dunes. The sport of choice for many people who visit Lancelin is to go sandboarding (snowboarding on the sand dunes). This looked awesome to us, but a little expensive, so we instead opted to bring some big sheets of cardboard along with us and try to use them like sleds. We had seen this done successfully on youtube, but unfortunately it didn't work out so well for us and none of us could slide for more than a few feet.

Nevertheless, just being out on the dunes under the full moon was pretty darn incredible, and since we didn't have any set accomodations for the night, after climbing out to the top of the tallest dune we decided that would be a pretty epic location to spend the night, so we hiked back to the car and got our sleeping bags and pads. Unfortunately, the night air feels a little warmer just after you've been climbing dunes for several hours than it does when you've been laying down for a while. Longkuan, who didn't have a sleeping bag (just blankets) and who is used to a slightly warmer climate in Singapore, just about froze. Noam and I had two sleeping bags we'd borrowed from my RA. One was a fleece, insulated bag, one was not. We didn't know that at the time, however, and each grabbed a random bag from the dark car. I ended up with the warm bag and had a fine night's sleep. Noam did not have as good of a night.

Luckily, we were only up on the dunes for about 5 hours or so, since we all wanted to get up to catch the sunrise. The two other guys were pretty chilly standing around waiting for it, but they managed to put a brave face on (we did some dune sprints, too, which helped):




And the sunrise was pretty darn epic.


Plus, not only did we get a sunrise, we also got a simultaneous moonset.


Imagine this with the opening music from The Lion King and you'll get a sense of how awesome it was.