Day 1 AL375 Trip

Alright friends and family. Here I am again. Most (hopefully all) of you have heard from me since the last time I blogged. I have been crazy busy with school and of course also with not school things as well like travelling and eating.  Right now I am on a plane to Melbourne for study week (November 3^rd). This blog is going to go all the way back in time to September 16^th. About 7 papers and 2 presentations ago….might be more, it’s totally possible I’ve repressed some of them because there have been so many.

For AL375, Australian History and Society, we took a field trip for a week up to Kalgoolrie (pretty sure that’s how you spell it, it’s hard to sound out because I have trouble saying it properly). The CSBSJU students went on a different trip than the students from Portland, and Notre Dame IN. They went to Broome. Getting to the point now:

16/9/2013

            Brooke and I set our alarms for 4:15am. We actually did get up then because we HAD to be outside the P&O at 5:10am to walk with Larry, Johanna, and Peta (works for UNDA and was sort of leading the trip) and the rest of the CSBSJU people. We took the transperth train to East Perth where we then went to the transwa station. When we got to the station I fell asleep in the chairs during our wait. I would half wake up every few minutes when it got quieter because I thought they had left without me. They never left without me. We got on the train (for 7 hours). I sat next to Peta on the way there and she had a lot of interesting facts to share. Well, after I had taken my nap anyway. These are some of the fun facts that I learned:

·      The Transwa (wa for Western Australia) runs along the highway that runs from Perth to Sydney! It isn’t much of a highway. It has one lane in either direction.

·      The water supply that made the gold rush possible also runs by the train tracks and is still one of the main ways that Perth gets water as well as the places between Perth and Sydney.

·      I learned why the land is white in many places. (I also later learned this in class.) The Europeans arrived and didn’t understand how the native plants worked and treated them the way they did in Europe (bad, bad idea). The roots of the trees go down really deep – 100m or about 300ft – because it is often dry in Australia and Australia goes through periods of drought and large amounts of rainfall. Well when the Europeans tore them up the water level began to rise and the salt followed (OSMOSIS). Now there are large natural salt deposits that make the land infertile and turn it white. White = not farmable.

The land out of the window looks kind of like a mix of Ohio and Africa. It looks kind of like Africa because many of the trees are related from when Australia was a part of Meganesia (I think that’s how it is spelled but spell check was no help). It looks like Ohio because we have the corn fields and part of what we passed were fields of crops.

The train was actually really comfy. There was probably 3x more leg room than the plane. There was a buffet, TVs, big windows with blinds, and bathrooms from the future! The doors opened when you pushed a button and they slid sideways. To lock/flush/turn on the water etc. you just pushed buttons! 

I tried to add pictures to this one and it isn't cooperating so I'm just going to go onto the next one and hopefully I'll be able to get pictures onto it!