Wildflowers in the Sandhills

August 23 & 24 we headed north to Jurien Bay and Green Head to see wildflowers. We were looking forward to the trip because the last time we were here it was fall, which is very hot and dry. No flowers to be found except in a few cases. The is the end of winter now and the start of spring so we hoped that with the rain there would be a good crop of wildflowers. These are not the flowers that we would expect in the Midwest. The are some small plants like like our lilies but most are low woody shrubs and some large shrubs that have beautiful and interesting blossoms.

The first picture is of some bush lands south of Jurien Bay just along the road. Most of the yellow that you see are wattle bushes and I don't know what the bush is with the white flowers but I think that is a smoke bush. I found something similar a flower book. You can see two bushes in the next frame of this same bush but a little closer.

More smoke bush

This a Banksia bush which has the pink and white cone shaped flower. There are many kinds of Banksia and some species will be blossoming throughout the year.

Common Catspaw

This is a type of Grevillea.

This is a Grass tree that has the flowering spike found in an area where we were looking for other flowers. They are really quite interesting so I am making a link that will let you know more about these interesting plants.

And now for something entirely different, the Pinnacles Desert south of Cervantes a town along the coast. These are limestone rocks that were formed as part of the typical limestone formation that resulted from the raising and lower of the ocean levels over millions of years. These were the harder parts while all around them the stone was broken down. It makes for quite the stark contrast of standing in this desolate area and being able to see the ocean just a couple of kilometers away. It is not a large area but it is very interesting. The National Park is called Namung.

There were no flowers here but the parrots Galahs were nesting in holes in some of the pillars so we were told. We saw a flock of them flying but did not see any coming out of the holes. We saw some Black-Cockatoos when we stopped further inland and in another park. They were noisy but it was great fun watching them landing in these small bushes and the bush top would sway under their weight.

It was a very nice trip.

Improving health

I thought I needed to report that Nicole is improving. I think that the antibiotic that she got Monday is helping with the sinus infection. At least that will allow her to get better rest during the night. The throat is down a little because we can tell it in her voice but she still has a way to go. She needs to sleep a lot and drink lots of liquid, both of which she is doing so we wait.

Yesterday, I took an young man down to the doctor because of a very sore throat. If it is still really sore Friday, he will go back and get a blood test and we will know the result Monday. We hope that he does not have mono as well. They call it glandular disease down here. It is still the same nasty bug (virus). It have been good that we are close and have the spare bedroom for such a situation. We have not had an occasion to use it in the pass but there is always a time.

Other than that, we had busy day yesterday with class so afterward we had dinner at home with Nicole. Norma had purchases a chocolate cake for my birthday but it had raisins in it. I didn't think it was bad but Norma decided that she would not buy it again. By the way, raisins are called sultanas down here. So I have been buying Sultana Bran Flakes in the store.

This is a short entry and one just to say the Nikki is doing better.

Hope all is well you!

one sick kid

The weekend was going to be low key but we had decided that the wild flowers were starting to come out around here so we would go to Kings Park in Perth to see some. It is quite a huge park and has many wildflowers that are rare growing there. At first we were going to go Saturday but we had a number of things to do so we decided to do it Sunday. We hear from a student Friday night that she just got back from the doctor and she has mono. Norma went over to check on her. She was pretty sick with very swollen tonsils, sore throat, enlarged spleen and liver. The doctor told her to go to bed immediately, take lots of fluids and get rest. She also said to not go to class for two weeks. That is a lot to miss. Norma invited her to our place and on Saturday afternoon she called and said that she thought it would be better to come over. The P&O is an interesting place but the kitchen downstairs and you have to go outside to get into it, which is just not great when you are feeling this bad and running a fever. We talked to her this morning at breakfast and her nose is so stuffed up that I going with her this afternoon to check with the doctor to see if she also has a sinus infection. She says that her throat and everything do not seem to be better but mono does not improve quickly. If she also has a sinus infection, that will not help her get well either. We shall see how she improves over the week. This is one of those cases when we are glad that we have the spare bed room and are close so can offer Nikki the help to get better. Mono is virus so they can't give her antibiotics but they did give her some steroids to help her throat because it is so swollen.

We are glad to be able to offer her some help.
B.

Winter in WA

What is winter like in Fremantle Western Australia? To be a typical winter here, it should be cool and wet and it has been up until this past week. In fact it has been as wet as it was back in 1991 with a little above average in rainfall. When you are this dry a little above normal is great. The reservoirs are still only 35-40% full so they need more but it is still better than it has been. If I were looking at 35-40% full, I would be looking at the clouds for more. Australia in general is the driest continent in the world except for Antarctica but we will give it some special exceptions status. Australia has for many thousands of years had long severe droughts and ones that can be unpredictably as to when they will arrive and how long they will last. So the one they have been in for nearly ten years or so is not completely typical so it is still long even for here. When we were here in 2004, they were in it so it is nice to see that it seems to be breaking a little. Temperatures have ranged from the middle to upper 60's and lows in the 40's to middle 30's. There ares some below freezing temperatures in the interior of WA but they are only 2-4 degrees below freezing. The first few weeks we had a lot of clouds and showers would come zipping by with some drops some rain and move on. It made things very changeable. The Friday before the students arrived, there a very deep low that moved through that blew down trees, damaged roofs and did other damage but most are not that strong. Most are not nearly the strength of good old Midwestern storms.

Now in a country that is so dry would you expect to find a white water race down a river? Well they did and it was on the Avon River, which is a tributary of the Swan River that flows out through Fremantle. They held it again this past weekend and the water levels were so high that they had to close two segments because it was too dangerous. One because of the clearance under a bridge and another simply because the section was just too treacherous. Even with the two diversions, they were setting record times getting down the course. I was fascinated because they did the run in single kayaks, doubles and in flat bottomed power boats with a maximum of 10 horses outboards for power. The kayaks are not the whitewater style we see in the US but long narrow ones that I think of as racing kayaks for flat water. There were kayakers who did not make it through the rapids without getting upset. One picture in the paper showed a fella in the middle of a rapids standing on a rock and diving to his right. The caption said that it was his kayak that he was trying to catch but it was not visible in the picture. Another kayaker, a South African, stopped and helped another kayaker who tipped over in one area and when on his way to win the event anyway. I would have like to have watched it but I do not have a car so it was not possible at this time.

Winter stays on through August and starts to moderating in September. What am I saying! We are already moderate at least by Minnesota standards for the only snow is in the Sterling Ranges south of us. Now the southeastern part of Australia has some higher mountains and they area little further south so there is snow there in the high country. They are having a great ski season in the mountains there this winter. But again that is not here.

Here is a link to the Australian weather bureau so you can see what is happening here weatherwise. I used Google map street function and gave our address here and found myself looking at our gate. Hmmmm very interesting. Much discussion about privacy.

As always more to come!

B.

first six blokes for dinner

This will not be sent via email message sent to everyone. I thought that I would take a moment to comment on the first six students that we had over to dinner. We will have all of them over at least once and likely more. I am sorry that I did not get the chance to take pictures but next time or have posted them.

Norma put up the sign-up sheet last Friday only saying that it would be seafood and she marked out six slots. One young man signed up right away but than it stayed untouched for a while. I asked them last night if they muscled aside the young women to sign but they said no. I guess the next week will be lamb or so says Norma and we will see who comes then.

We like to get them to try different things so Norma got three kinds of fish: one red snapper, one pink snapper, and ??? I can't remember. Norma had read and listened to people's receipts and did not decide until just before she put them in the pan. White wine and some olive oil plus some herbs. She couldn't get the lower part of her oven to work right (This was the first time that she tried to use the oven. She just assumed that would operated normally.) so she used the broiler. We kept and eye on it and it turned out great. The fellas even commented how good it was. I also had them try some green tiger prawns, which they helped to clean and we boiled. We also had a taste of yabby and bug. What is he talking about!?!?!? Well a yabby is a crayfish and these were of good size and tasted great. The bug is some kind of "sand" lobster I guess but a very strange looking one. Think of Bobcat with the scoop on the front but flattened out. [I hyper linked to a web site that has a picture because my description just does not do justice to it.] Tim thought that it had a hint of blue cheese and some others thought so as well. My piece didn't but it was good. Norma also had a great green salad plus for another dish potatoes, green peppers, and onions sauteed together which were good. Finally dessert Norma cleaned a custard apple and put custard over it. Now this is custard that comes from the store and you just pour it over whatever. Tim since his home is in the UK had grown up with this kind of custard and he loved it. By the way, we had first seen this fruit in the Bahamas and they called it soursop (Although I only found a reference to a sweetsop in the grower information on them from Australia.). I think the fellas enjoyed the meal because there was little left of it. Oh - I forgot to mention that they had slices of zucchini sauteed with garlic so they could be eaten with crackers along with some Havarti cheese. At a little after eight, they went off to a dorm meeting and I cleaned up. We also had the requisite bit of Vegemite for them to try. No one loved it but Tim again because it is similar to Marmite back in the UK.

Norma went over to the meeting to hear what was happening to the students and say goodbye to a student that was leaving. The student was from Purdue and doing this all of this adventure on her own. She had been suffering anxiety attacks for a while and although our students were befriending her, it was too much. It is a shame that she was here only a week and a half and things are only getting started now. It is too bad.

That is all from here for now.

B.

Adventures in Oz

July 20, 2008
I am starting this update at 4:45 PM with six lost “sheep” still to come to the barn (dorm -P&O) exactly when we do not know. With bomb scares on the plane in L.A. and general confusion in Sydney because World Youth Week with the Pope ending Sunday, we have students straggling in over a much longer time than expected. It may be a late night before they all get here. I hope not too late because we are fixing them breakfast tomorrow morning at 8:00 and their orientations starts at 9:00. We had a pizza dinner in the P&O during the evening since some would not have had a chance to get to the store for food. (Note: They arrived at 11:00 PM but were not able to get their phone to call us so they came over in taxies. They were all tired but all arrived safely.)
Actually this email was to say what happened on our flight as I promised in my earlier short email to some of you but the students had much more arduous trek than we. Monica and Dave dropped us off at the Holiday Inn to catch the Executive Express to the airport and all was good. We thank them for doing the service. It was very nice. Our flight out on NWA was a tad unusual. We had a couple asking or sort of demanding that the stewardess find three seats together because they had a cranky two year old. I would have left the two year old in the seat by himself while having mom and dad sit together. (Well maybe not?!) Finally because this was delaying getting us off the ground two men volunteered to swap seats just to get us going but at this point it was two late, so said the stewardess, to make the switch so their were going to make do at least after the start of the flight but it didn’t happen. The little boy was good for a time but than he was not so happy. I was not certain that his lungs and throat would hold out. They did.
Our flight out of L.A. was uneventful except for an hour delay to replace a temperature probe. I don’t know where or what it was being probed but it seemed to be important to the pilot. The flight was long as usual but not unbearable. As we were within a couple of hours range of Brisbane (yes, this is a good distance when you consider the total flight takes 13 hours) in particular, the captain came on and said that we were a little short of fuel and that although we might have enough to make it, it would be outside the safety margin so we were to stop in Noumea capitol of New Caledonia. This is a French speaking island just to the northeast of Australia. It appeared lovely looking out the window but who knows we might go back. Captain said at the start of the process that it should take less than an hour to get the needed fuel. Of course it didn’t. As he told the stewardesses to prepare for take off, he said that the ground crew had never fueled a 747 before so they had to get out show them how. There was also something about hand pumping but that is foggy in my mind. So when we landed in Brisbane, we were several hours late and there were many people needing to make new connections. I must give Qantas a lot of credit because they put some of us who had longer delays up in a very nice hotel in downtown Brisbane with lunch and a snack, and taxi to and from the airport. When we finally arrived in Perth, Neil, the landlord of our flat, met us at the airport at about 1:30 AM to bring us to the new apartment and show us around for a moment. That was awfully nice of him to do this.
We will talk more about the orientation week in the next entry. We see some changes at the uni (Australian for university) and in Freo which we will describe. I will send this out via email and enter it on the blog. Some find it easier to read via email and others may not want to read it until they can bring it up on the blog. Here is the connection: http://bndickau.blogspot.com/index.html - B

Post 10 - Cape Town

Cape Penninsula (Cape Town)

We started this trip by going up the Garden Route from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town, which was why we were showing you pictures of Storms River and Knysna. This entry is about a few of the things we saw in Cape Town and some of the pictures. You would notice that I don't have many pictures of the city but that is just me not being as interested in cities in general.

The backpacker lodge is an interesting place because it is in an area that is doing various environmentally friendly things. The lodge itself composted organic wastes from the kitchen, which they used in their garden. To illustrate the unusual nature of the area, there were horses in a field nearby and they got out frequently. It was all the instigation of the large work horse could push the gate or fence over when it wanted to be grazing quietly down the avenue. There are not a lot of wandering work horses in our neighborhood (probably not in your either) so driving in the morning requires some caution that more drivers on county road 51 by our house could use. There is more that I could say about the lodge but I will move out keep the entry from being too long.

The very next day we caught a commuter train part way down the peninsula and got off at the last stop - Simonstown. The bus caught up with us there and took us on to Boulders where saw wild South Africa penguins nesting, walking, resting, and other penguin stuff. This was a nesting site and they have protected it to help maintain the population. I read in the paper yesterday that the populations in Algoa Bay (This is the bay that we are living on.) are down 50% and apparently around S.A. There are a number of potential reasons but global warming may be a prime candidate for the decline here since the sardines and anchovies now school many kilometers south of the bay. They would a prime food source during nesting but now they are too far south for the parents to feed and get back in time to regurgitate the remainder for the young. At any rate it was great to seem them so close. The picture shows the young which are nearly as large as the parents but grey in color.

We drove on south around the eastern shore of Cape Peninsula with great views of False Bay. This is the huge bay that shows up on even large scale maps. The water was not particularly clear because the wind was really blowing from the SE in what apparently is typical Cape Town fashion. We arrive at the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula, where most of the students walk up to lighthouse, while a smaller group goes on a walk lead by a Gary (A relative of Alan’s.) down the hill to a beautiful beach between cliffs. I follow

with a few who wanted to catch-up. I did not go down the walk to beach because frankly it was quite a way down and I could see everything that I wanted from up on top.

Cape Town is a very windy city and we got the feel of it this first day touring the area. This spot is up by the lighthouse at the very end of Cape Point. The picture looks empty but there had been several people around and I had concluded that I could not stand up and take this picture because I could stand still because of the strong wind. I had to sit down behind the rock wall and point up to take the shot. I had just helped an Asian women take one and she had a hard time hanging on to the pole. One of our students got blown over in a gust. They were not hurt but surprised - yes.

This is a rock dassy, which, believe it or not, is related to elephants. I am sure you can see the family resemblance. They live in rocky areas all over S.A. where you know their presence by the white color stain on the rock visible from long distances. This stain is caused by the strong urine that they excrete. They are a favorite food for eagles and a host of other predators. From my brief encounter with two on the trail I can see why their population is holding steady may be increasing even though there are many things that eat them. I was walking up the trail and some others were coming down and these two found each other on the trail in spite of our very near presence and carried out the “multiplication” act. It was fast but they were clearly not shy reclusive about it.

The plant life on top of Table Mountain is very unique. It is what is called fynbos (Afrikaans for fine bush), which also extends along the coast to Port Elizabeth. It is one of the richest floral regions of the work with 8600 plant species with 70% endemic (live only here) and Table Mountain and Cape Peninsula are part of that zone. A case in point is this plant, which I thought was most unusual. I took this picture of one up on the cliffs on the walk down from Cape Point. They always note how unique the plant life is on Table Mountain but low and behold I found it down along the shore here is P.E. Actually down the shore away from the city. I guess that means it is not so unusual but it certainly looks strange in comparison to any plant that I am familiar with. I hope I can find the name and family before I leave.

We drove on up the Peninsula toward the popular and trendy beaches on

the Atlantic side from Cape Town. This is Camps Bay at sunset. We waited in a park for the sun to go down and see the light change on Table Mountain and the sun to sink into the Atlantic Ocean. It was quite beautiful. By the way in that low point between the two mountains, you can see the cable car going up to the top on the right. (Not visible in this picture because they stop it before it is this late.) It was off this side where I repelled down the cliff.

That is all for this segment. One more Cape Town entry will show a few things from Table Mountain and Robins Island. Good by for now!

B.