Contrary to popular belief, Fosters is not, in fact, Australian for beer. Respectable Aussie beer drinkers barely touch the stuff, opting for VB or XXXX in a pinch, but usually preferring one of Australia's wide variety of microbrews. On a per capita basis, craft brewing is huge in Australia, and if my admittedly unscientific sampling was at all representative, these folks know what they're doing when it comes to water, barley, and hops.
The highlight of our Australian beer drinking was a taster flight at a funky old pub in the Rocks, Sydney, where the bartender was happy to line us up a row of his favorites.
For the beer drinkers out there, in case you ever come across one of these beauties, here they are from right to left:
Can you believe we're still catching up on Australia & New Zealand posts? We even have one or two things from Okinawa in the queue. Good thing we're too busy with school to do any new interesting stuff.
I won't lie: Nana and I spent most of our time in Sydney poking around the city's many excellent museums. We both have soft spots for history and ravenously devoured anything we could find about the city's convict past. When we weren't in a museum, we were just ravenously devouring anything we could find.
But we did stop to take a few photos of this very beautiful city whenever the early winter weather would permit.
Huh, my opera looks oddly like air guitar . . .
That's better.
Now, you may not have realized this, but apparently that's a pretty famous building out there. There were, like, all these tourists taking photos of it and stuff.
An old street in the Rocks. Totally cool neighborhood, awesome little (free!) museum.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge.
This is from the top of Observatory Hill.
That's the observatory.
Looking down at the western part of the harbour.
The old clock tower at the central train station. This was conveniently right by our hotel!
For the very small percentage of our readers who don't know me very well: skiing is just about my favorite thing in the world. So when our holiday swing through Australia and New Zealand coincided with the start of the Southern Hemisphere ski season, I couldn't resist the temptation to slap on some skis and hit the slopes in July.
Incontrovertible video evidence:
Now, to a certain extent, skiing is skiing, wherever you do it. The same fundamental set of variables apply: snow conditions, run length, vertical drop, lift speed. Two mountains of a similar size and shape aren't made all that different if you drop one in Korea and the other in Vermont.
With that said: Mt. Hutt is crazy.
First, it's one of the largest ski areas in New Zealand, but in terms of sheer size it's not actually all that big. Sure, it's almost 700 m (2250 feet) from top to bottom, but there's really only one basin with one lodge and a grand total of three chairlifts. It was this more than anything else that drove home just how few New Zealanders there are: at about 4.5 million, the population of New Zealand is a bit less than the population of Fukuoka Prefecture, or roughly two Pittsburgh metro areas.
And that population supports 25 ski areas. No wonder even the biggest of them feels a bit small!
Nevertheless, despite the small size (and the vagaries of the weather), Mt. Hutt is still a really good place to ski. Like pretty much all of New Zealand's ski fields, it's entirely above the country's very low tree line, meaning that you get a lot of skiable terrain in a relatively small area. In addition, Mt. Hutt packs a surprising amount of beginner and intermediate terrain into a fairly steep and narrow basin. But mostly importantly, the top of the hill has some blisteringly fast, wide-open steeps - with views stretching out over the whole Canterbury Plain, when weather permits.
The gate to the back country.
You can see here why they built the place so high up: in New Zealand, the low areas stay pretty mild throughout the year.
But by far the craziest thing about Mt. Hutt is the ascent. The "base" lodge is actually about two-thirds of the way up the peak, roughly in the middle of the ski area. If Hutt were in Europe, where it would have a bigger client base, they would have solved this problem with a cable car or alpine railway.
Here, the solution is an unpaved access road that climbs almost 5000 ft (1500 m) in the space of 8 miles (13 km). Basically, you turn off a road in the middle of nowhere on the flat-as-a-pancake Canterbury Plain, then go straight up an even smaller road even deeper into the middle of nowhere.
See if you can spot the road snaking around in the distance!
PS: We're on a bus for this one. Not a road I thought either of us should have to drive!
Yeah, of the side of the road, that's darn near a sheer drop for a good thousand feet. Kiwis are a different breed . . .
Sydney is a big, cosmopolitan city, and parts of the city are really very Asian. Our accommodation was on the edge of Chinatown, for instance, so our culinary experience of Sydney was overwhelmingly Chinese. (Not that either of us minded!)
But nowhere in Sydney is more ostentatiously Chinese than the Chinese Garden in Darling Harbour. The garden, built in the classic Ming style, was a gift to Sydney from her Chinese sister city, Guangzhou, which is a huge metropolis no one really notices because it's vaguely near Hong Kong if you draw China really small. The garden opened in 1988 with the goal of promoting cross-cultural friendship and understanding.
Where the heck are we . . . ?
China, did you pull something crazy again?
It's also as Chinese a Chinese garden as just about anything we saw in China. How's that for cognitive dissonance?
It is really, really hot here. The temperature itself is bad, but the humidity is just lethal. Our Californian coworker Kevin spoke longingly the other day of 105 degree dry heat back home, which I thought sounded silly since it's only 93 here, until I used a heat index calculator and learned 93 with 73% humidity is the equivalent of 118 (or 48, for those of you reading in Celcius). At midday, this places our front porch firmly in steam room territory.
Justin had to cycle into the school around noon on Saturday to pick up some materials. Poor guy came back looking like this:
Except smellier.
In a situation like this, there's nothing to do but reach for a nice, cold, refreshing bottle of...
Salty Watermelon Pepsi?
We've been in Japan so long we don't even ask anymore.
It turns out that, as with Kit-Kats, the number of soda variants in Japan are, as Lady Bracknell would say, considerably above the proper average which statistics have laid down for our guidance. This is not the first seasonal summer Pepsi tried out here. Others included Blue Hawaii Pepsi ("just a little smurflike"), Shiso Pepsi ("really reminds you of the sort of thing you'd use to scrub your floors"), and Ice Cucumber Pepsi ("kind of like Satan's in my mouth.") So Japan does not have a totally unblemished record in the novelty Pepsi department.
What, then, of Salty Watermelon Pepsi?
You know what? It's actually pretty good. Disconcerting, but good.
The thing is, Salty Watermelon Pepsi tastes like real watermelon. Which is unexpected, to those of us for whom "watermelon" flavor means Jolly Ranchers. This is a very mild flavor, and not at all tooth-fuzzingly syrupy. If you threw watermelon in a blender and then somehow converted it to soda form, it would taste kind of like this. It might even be this color of pink. At the very least, we finished the bottle. We certainly wouldn't clean floors with it, and Satan was nowhere in sight.
And if it strikes you as odd that those two statements constitute high praise for a beverage, then you don't live in Japan.
It has been about three months since we went to Patara Elephant Farm. Clearly it's past due for me to finish the blog post.
After you leave the Patara main area, you ride the elephants up into the mountains to a waterfall. I took some pictures at the waterfall, but I was in full bikini and I feel weird putting those pictures on the blog. They look pretty sweet with the Instagram filter, though.
Here, you dismount (a bit stiffly, after all that crouching!) and eat an incredible picnic lunch:
Top row: Bananas, lychee, mangosteen, fried chicken, coconut and banana fritters, banana.
Second row: banana-leaf wrapped rice balls, with different meats.
With the other tour members
Just like with horses, you have to care for the animal after it's been exercising. Vegetarian lunch leftovers went to the elephants, and meat went to some locals, who I suspect were the guides' families. (That felt slightly awkward, but I can see them putting the elephants first, since the elephants create jobs).
Then we helped the elephants cool down by bathing them again in the river.
Nice technique.
My elephant, Ma Ree, is on the right.
You can tell it's Ma Ree because she's whacking me in the head with her ear again.
And then, swimming time!
Baby wants in!
They can keep their faces under because they're breathing through their trunks. Like submarines!
Elephants feel really weird and prickly on bare legs.
I should have mentioned in the last post that photo credit for a lot of these shots go to the Patara team. They have photographers following you around all day, so even if you go completely by yourself, you're guaranteed great shots of you and your elephant. They give you a CD of pictures and video when you leave. They would also take pictures on your camera if you showed them which one it was. The pictures and videos in these posts are a mix of Patara photogs on Patara cameras, Patara photogs on our camera, and Justin and me photographing each other on our camera.
Family shot, with elephant, and random person's back.
How's it going down there?
Discovery: Justin and I are the only Western people under 40 without tattoos.
It was incredibly chaotic in the river. Elephants are big, and with all the people and elephants shoving around, sometimes you got a bit squashed. Justin had a bad knee injury a while back and has to be careful not to get his leg pinned, and you just can't rely on baby elephants to look out for anybody but themselves.
Nobody puts baby in the corner.
So Justin finished early, leaving me to carry on with the blithe confidence of the perpetually lucky. This explains why there are a lot more pictures of me here. (Sorry, Kathy). I had a complete blast. If the combination of a rodeo ride, a water park, and a mosh pit sounds fun to you, you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did.
Mind your manners.
Elephant surfing.
Then my elephant - I have no idea which one it was at that point, actually - gave me a lift out of the water and back to the trail.
