Port Macquarie Boat Tour

As previously mentioned, Monday was Australia Day, therefore Public Holiday, ergo Long Weekend.  We left for Port Macquarie on Saturday morning and arrived around noon.  First stop, we hung out at Black Duck Brewing for a little while and got the full tour and all the discussions about heat exchangers and keg cleaners and so on that you can fit into an hour or two.  Drove into town and (after we settled into our room at the hostel) we headed for the beach.  Found our favorite restaurant in Australia for dinner, Glass House Thai.  (Duck salad and tofu pad kee mao: delicious.)

Sunday morning we took a boat tour along the Hastings River estuary.  Along the way up the river we saw a couple osprey and an eagle as well as a couple of their nests, cattle and kangaroos finding shade under some tea trees, and oyster farms... lots and lots of oyster farms.  It's a big industry in the Port Macquarie area.  The highlight would have been the jellyfish we saw floating by if we hadn't seen the dolphins on our way back to the harbour.  It was really special to see the dolphins up close like that, even if only for a moment.

Osprey nest

Oyster farm

They seemed to be a bit curious and came right up to the boat

Pelicans

We had seen a couple pelicans here and there in Coffs before but
never close up.  They're actually a bit scary looking when you get
a good look at them..

Bunya nut adventures (pt. 1)

Last week was an exciting week for us when we got our hands on two bunya nut cones.  The Araucaria bidwillii, or bunya pine, is an enormous coniferous tree which grows these giant cones every few years.  The cones are massive.  They don't look it but they're actually really heavy, weighing somewhere between five and ten kilos each (11-22 pounds).  The first task is to break apart the cones, pull apart the seed pods and remove the seeds.  Each seed or nut is about the size of of an avocado pit, albeit a little more elongated. 

We got a full bowl out of the two cones (not all of the seeds are large enough to bother with) and a heaping garbage bag full of the seed pods.  After breaking apart the cones and getting all the nuts out of the husks, we still have to roast and shell them.  (You can eat them raw, but raw we thought they tasted kind of like bitter green beans, and after roasted they are sooo delicious.)  Shelling the nuts involves bashing each one both before and after to get a crack in the shell to be either pried or cut open.  We used a rolling pin and a pliers, and with two people the whole process from beginning to end took a few hours.  Part two we'll have some photos of the second stage!

The seed pods are really interesting - kind of like a giant fish scale

Words we didn't know we didn't know how to spell.

Perhaps it is most fitting to post this blog entry today, on Australia Day..

I think most people in the US have a good idea that British English utilizes different letters and spellings.  Spelling with ou when we only need an o, turning around their r's and e's, and using an s instead of c.  Colour, favourite, theatre, fibre, practise, civilisation.  Here are some of the words which have come as a surprise to us over the past nine months:

Kerb instead of curb (this was the very first new word to me.  I can't help but wonder if they use the colloquialism "kerb your excitement")

Tyre (pretty sure I had seen this before but it was still a surprise to see giant TYRES signs.)

Verandah (why the h.)

Enrol and enrolment (still looks weird every time I see it.)

Oesophagus, poediatrician (oesophagus really caught us by surprise.)

Artefact (I run into this a lot at the cultural centre)

Aeroplane (this really should not have come as a surprise, but it did.)

[Water] Buffalo Milk Yoghurt

Just recently we were looking a little closer than we usually do in the yoghurt aisle.  Or yoghourt, rather.  (A lot of the brands in AU spell it with that extra letter, as you do in the commonwealth.)

There are numerous varieties of yoghurt in the store, of course, same as the US.  But here's something that (we thought) seems new and interesting: buffalo milk yoghurt.  We did not buy it, but we've been making more granola and eating more yoghurt as a result, so maybe next time we'll give it a go.

They had goat's milk yoghurt as well, but was apparently not
interesting enough to take a photo.

Armidale State Park Pine Forest (take 2)

Last Sunday we returned to the Pine Forest.  It was a rainy day but it let up a bit after lunch, so we grabbed our raincoats and took the chance to get out of the house.

It was so incredibly verdant compared to our last visit at the end of September!  The open meadows were filled with wildflowers and the grass was green.  The grove of trees which we'd assumed dead did eventually leaf out, though it must have been pretty late since there weren't any buds last time.  The sound of the rain was spoiled a bit by the flies, but it was a lovely walk nonetheless.

We startled some yellow-tailed black cockatoos out of an apple tree
and they settled in this tree for a bit before flying away.

Dumaresq Dam

This was a fun game of count the kangaroos: "Oh, there's a kangaroo over there.
Oh, there's another one.  Wait -- there's another.  Okay, one more ..."

January 4, 2015