The Daintree Rainforest

How about the size of this fern? We thought Cinnamon ferns in Appalachia were impressive!

Palm

Strangler fig doing its thing to another tree.

Like big ferns and palms? This is the place for you.

Looking up at the canopy

And this is what you see!

Leafy vine

Birding is really hard here, but bird diversity is supposed to be incredible.

I thought these palms were the coolest

Buttress roots were common.

Two world heritage sites (I believe there are only 34 in the entire world) sit nearly on top of each other in this little corner of Australia - the Great Barrier Reef (which, truth be told, goes way beyond this little corner of Australia!) and the Daintree rainforest. Why is the Daintree special? Two words: Relictual biodiversity. Huh? OK, most tropical rainforests are diverse, but this one has been around a LONG time, and thus contains relicts of evolution that other places on earth lack. One example, now quite well known, is Idiospermum australiense (idiot fruit!). This endemic tree has been around for 120 million years! That's a long time. The seedlings have 3 or 4 cotyledons (most plants have one or 2, an evolutionary path chosen long ago by most flowering plants). Crazy huh?

The Daintree looks like a scene from Jurassic Park - huge tree ferns, vines, etc. are everywhere. All of this is wonderfully described at the Daintree Discovery Centre, where you can walk right up in the canopy with an elevated walkway and a tower at the end. The audio guide and written guides are both excellent for introducing the animal and plant life unique to the area.

Great Barrier Reef - Return to Shore: The personal music video

OK, as many of you know, I have indulged in making music videos, mostly of skiing expeditions set to progressive rock, over the past several years. It's a blast to do this and to share the 'art form'.

But in the past year or 2, I've discovered...invented?...not yet perfected, but I'm getting there...a new very personal art form I'm calling the personal music video - a one time performance that nevertheless lingers in the mind way beyond the time it occurs. To be really effective, it has to be planned in advance, kind of like a more formal music video, except you are the only one that experiences it, AND, it is a live interactive performance. So, what do I mean?

Both examples I'll give emerged from my repeated listening to the latest Pendragon album - Pure. Last spring break, one of the songs "The Freak Show' struck a cord with me in two ways. First, I thought about how at times we all step back from our brains and think what a 'freak show' we have going on in there, and how we really don't want people to know about it. That song captures this sentiment perfectly. Second, the rhythm of it struck me as perfect for huge swooping high speed GS turns. Where could I listen to that song and ski a really long, fast set of arcing curves? No better place than Elk Park Ridge at Big Sky Montana. Now, for the personal music video: Cue up the song at the top of the slope, press play, and take off! What happens next depends on how well you've chosen your music and your activity...in this case the conditions of the slope (perfect), the weather (bluebird day), and the state of your mind (freaky). By the middle of the song I had this ear-to-ear grin that I could not wipe off when I reached the bottom! There may have been tears of joy too, I don't recall. And I was skiing by myself. Now, every time I hear that song, my mind veers back to that experience.

So why am I harping on personal music videos? Well, living here in 'almost heaven' I've been thinking about the heaven on earth concept, and realized that perhaps these personal music videos are capturing a piece of that. I'm also mentioning it here because I had planned in my mind a personal music video moment for the boat trip return from the reef! Thus I pulled out my personal assistant (read iphone) and my noise cancelling headphones, sat on the front deck of the boat, and turned up 'Indigo', the first song on Pure, to relatively high volume. Now the first half of the song is about a rather sad boy growing up in a decrepit town where misfortune and misfitting were the main themes...but in the middle of this song it transitions into soaring major chords with visions of the boy escaping his prison and diving into a deep blue lagoon...to swim away from here...it becomes a song of liberation. And I thought the moment of returning from diving in the deep blue lagoon would be a perfect time to play this song due to the vision it conjured. Now of course it would have been better to play it underwater, but I haven't purchased the underwater ipod case yet, so this may have been second best. At any rate, once again, I probably looked like a freak as I swayed to the music, watched the ocean spray up from the bow, and contemplated the numerous dives into the deep blue sea we had just experienced. Personal music videos are very personal. I was curious whether it was transferable, so I plopped the earphones on Sara's head, but I don't think it had the same effect. She didn't know the song, why it was being played, hadn't anticipated the experience as I had. Ah well. That's why your perfect personal music video will be personal

Great Barrier Reef - Going Under

Some of the corals really glowed; most were not so colorful as this, though they came in fantastic shapes and sizes.

Big schools of these guys; species?

Butteflyfish pair

These are beginning divers hanging onto a line while they get used to breathing naturally underwater I guess.

Lots of small fishes on the reef.

The giant clams were truly phenomenal, and they had glowing green fluorescent dots on their lips!

A wrasse of some kind?

Like birds, many of these reef fish pair up; they really seem to have personalities too.

This is a small parrotfish

These small blue fish were everywhere in darting schools. I saw one get eaten by a very fast triggerfish.

Here I am exploring the reef.

These small stripy fish were everywhere too (Sergeant majors?)

Here's a large fish I saw frequently...

The first site we stopped at had a swift current going by the reef, so there would have been problems with beginning divers (or so we were told) so we moved to a calmer spot on Opal Reef one of the thousands of reeflets that are part of the GBR preserve. I was eager to plunge in but we had to wait for the divers to get their acts together - for those reading this, you may want to consider a snorkel only boat if you want a little more time in the water. We had originally signed up for one, called Wavelength, but they had to re-fit their propeller so we moved to this outfit, which sounded good on the web (and by and large, they were).

Anyway, plunging underwater, we were not disappointed by the wonderful displays of coral and fish. Now, when you've snorkeled before in places like Hawaii, Egypt, the Caribbean, etc. I think you get distorted memories over time...at least I think I do. I remember a place we call 'the aquarium' in Maui is just off the charts spectabulous in every way. But truth be told, I suspect the fish diversity was higher here on the GBR and the corals were most certainly more spectacular. But even after snorkeling here on the GBR, I have a tremendous fondness for the aquarium on Maui and would go back there in an instant.

So technology is amazing isn't it? Here are pictures taken with an $87, 8 Megapixel waterproof camera (Vivitar 8400). I'll let you be the judge about how they came out. I took about 150 pictures in the course of 2 snorkeling bouts, and these are definitely a culling from that, but some of them I hope give you the flavor of the day. Suffice it to say, I was wishing for more days on the reef...enough time to start learning the new fish, etc. So I felt like I just got a taste.

Aug. 22 - Great Barrier Reef; journey to the reef

Again, there are places in the world that kind of speak for themselves, or pictures speak more clearly than words. Perhaps the Great Barrier Reef is one of those. We met the bus for Haba (our snorkel tour company) in front of By the Sea apartments (more about them later) and were whisked across town (we could have walked) to the wharf where Haba's boat was docked. The boat was not the prettiest in the snorkeling/dive fleet, but it certainly beat QuickSilver for looks, whose boats looked like giant steel grey greyhound buses on the water. Our boat was modest in size with a simple foredeck, a main cabin area with seating for about 70 or 80, then an upper rear deck with seating for perhaps 30. Our group was supposed to only have about 60 people (as opposed to ca. 300 for Quicksilver). It was still a bit crowded on the boat, so we moved to the foredeck where we could watch where we were going and get a little freedom to move. It was nice up there, and here are a couple of shots I took so you get a flavor.

Aug. 21 - To Port Douglas via Cairns

Today began the vacation...er...um...I mean research on the northeast Queensland World Heritage Ecosystems known as The Great Barrier Reef and Daintree rainforest. Flight from Brisbane to Cairns was ca. 2 hrs. I rented a car from Alamo (read Europacar). Now, I had specifically requested an automatic since I didn't need the extra hassle of shifting left-handed while trying to remember how to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road all the time. But I shouldn't have been surprised when I got the vehicle for a lower price that it was in fact a manual shift Hyundai Getz (a very small econobox). I swallowed deep and took off into Cairns traffic, heading north toward Port Douglas along the coast. First impression - OK driving on the left is not all that bad - you just have to keep reminding yourself. Second - whoa, this coast is beautiful! Reminds me of Hawaii. Not quite as wild and woolly as the drive to Hana on Maui, but really very nice. Third, the coastal tropical scrub forest was burning in a number of places, sometimes right up to the road. Wow. Here are a couple of pics for ya.

Aug. 20: Brisbane Botanical Garden

I didn't feel like I was really in Australia until I skipped out on the meeting one afternoon and ventured out to the Brisbane Botanical Garden at Mt. Coot-tha, a few km outside of the city center. The garden was divided into different Australian habitats and showcased the tremendous diversity of plants comprising the flora there. There were also plants from around the world. We liked the 'natural' Australian dry tropical forest (where we saw a monitor lizard climb a tall tree, probably looking for bird eggs to munch (see pic). There were also many beautiful birds scattered about, including a mysterious large white loud bird that we later identified as a cockatoo. In this case, pictures really are worth a thousand words apiece, so to give you a flavor of this place, i've included several shots here.

Aug. 17 - 20: INTECOL, Brisbane

Now the real excuse for going to Australia was INTECOL, the International Congress of Ecology that meets only once every several years. When I found out it was in Brisbane and the theme was global change and sustainability, I thought 'Ahah!' (this was last fall before any wedding plans had been made!) and committed then and there to going to present our recent research on climatic warming and its effects on ginseng. This is the theme of one of my PhD students, Sara Souther. So, she and I had been planning to present here for the last 10 months or so. I had never been to an INTECOL meeting, but I heard good things.

Now for the ulterior motive; I have been to 6 continents in my various professorial and private leisure traveling: Europe (several times), Asia (now twice), South America (twice), Africa (twice), North America (of course), and Antarctica (once). The only continent I had never visited was Australia! So there you have it. A life goal within reach. So it really was with great conflict in my mind that I chose to stick with the Australia meeting when my family was traveling in China after the reception. I would obviously have loved to be with them. But I didn't want to let go of this life goal, and I had made a commitment, so here I was.

Now the conference was what I would characterize as 'pretty good'. Some good plenary talks, and a smattering of very interesting talks in between. One picture shows Sara next to our poster talking with Johan Ehrlen, a well-known plant population biologist. Another shows a very bizarre poster and you can look at it more closely if you dare by clicking on the image. And Brisbane is a neat city. Sculptures lying around (see pic). If you look closely at the city pic, you'll see that there were Prius taxis - now there's a progressive city! We stayed in the Hotel George Williams, a rather spartan hotel but in the center of the city within walking distance of most things. My room was modern, but had a real minimalist air about it that I actually liked - who needs all that luxury if you're just sleeping in a place. Anyway, Sara and I had a nice 4 days in Brisbane. Here are a couple of pics from the meeting and from walking around town. I'll describe the trip to the botanical garden on Thursday in more detail in the next post.

Aug. 16 - Off to Australia

Yes, folks. I was nuts. Flying all the way to Beijing to spend one full day there, and flying out to a conference in Brisbane the next day. Well, at least I got to be there for the reception and I'm sure glad I did it. But do you know how far it is to Australia from China? Pretty far. I left for the airport around 9ish Beijing time and didn't arrive in Brisbane until 7 the next morning. Sure, there was a layover in the nice airport in Seoul, Korea (pic above), but most of the time was in the air. Phew! My back was going to pay for all this air travel over such a short time.

Aug. 15 - Great Wall & Wedding Reception

Well, the trip to the Great Wall was an adventure, but we were overly-ambitious. Despite Ian warning the taxi driver that he had to have us back by 11:30, the traffic gods had their own plans as construction on the main route on the way to the Great Wall prompted the driver to try a back road on the way back, where we ran into stopped traffic due to, most likely an accident (we never found out). He eventually turned around, and re-joined the originally slow construction-clogged route back to the hotel, but we arrived an hour and a half late. This was all very bad since I was supposed to raise one of the early toasts to the honored couple. But here are a couple of the views we got to see as a result of the over-long excursion.

The reception was great. Exceptional food on a huge rotating platter on each of many tables in the room. Much boisterous toasting was performed followed by ritual downing of rice wine or beer or whatever concoction happened to be in your glass. Must have been a dozen special dishes on the table and all of it was great. I wish I had a picture of the layout but I was so flummoxed by being late I don't think I ever captured one.

Ann performed a toast on my behalf and by all accounts, particularly given the attention she was getting from the men in the audience later, she must have done a fine job. I had men toasting me for marrying Ann! Hilarious...I mean, I was happy to raise a glass to that!

Thank goodness there were no pictures of me singing Elton John's 'Your Song' during the nonstop karaoke session later that afternoon! Everyone was out on the dance floor. I have to say, kind of a trip to have people dancing to your singing! There was some applause afterwards, but thank goodness everyone had had a few drinks by that point. The audience was not highly critical...

August 15 - Great Wall and Wedding Reception

Only a few minutes of battery left so this will be quick.

Saturday, Ann had a hair appointment (3rd of the short wedding season!) so this was Kate and Trevor's chance to see the Great Wall at Simitai, which is normally not too far from the wedding town of Miyun. Today, it turned out to be pretty far, especially on the way back but on the way out too. On the way out the problem was road construction. On the way back the problem was unknown, but probably a traffic accident on an ill-advised attempt to re-route around the construction. At any rate, we were late for the reception which was to begin at noon. Bad scene, as I was supposed to give a toast near the beginning! Argh.

Anyway, we had to hurry once at Simitai, so we took the cable care up (see photo) and then almost ran up the steps to the wall itself. We only 20 minutes or so to enjoy the immense man-made world wonder. But it is spectacular and the mountainous terrain is quite scenic. I was pleased to be able to beat the kids to the top of the considerable number of steep steps to the top. The ol' man's still got it! Actually trevor was right on my heels. Kate was only a couple minutes behind.

I'm posting 2 pics from this trip if I can beat the battery dying. More on the reception tomorrow!

Marathon Trip to China-Australia begins - Aug 13-14

I'm running out of laptop battery in the Seoul, Korea airport, so this will be a quick couple of entries. Also, I realized that I somehow left my camera-computer connector cord in Morgantown, so I will only be uploading iphone images in the near-term, for this trip. But now that I know that I can take pics accordingly.

So, I left Pittsburgh at 6ish AM for Wash. DC, which necessitated beginning this trip at 3 AM from my house. 23 hours later I arrived in Beijing with the usual sleep deprivation and jet lag issues. But generally the drive-flight-flight went very well with very few issues. Bags arrived. I arrived. Took a nap when I arrived and had dinner without the need to be alert for interactions with newfound relatives (Ming's family) during dinner, and all went well on the first day. In fact, after dinner, we called on Ming's father's parents and there were several uncles and aunts and cousins in the place too. We are hoping we didn't embarrass Ming or Ian, or Min or Drew (MIng's parents) too much. We presented the grandparents with four bottles of fish oil (don't ask why? it is custom), and they gave us 2 boxes of tea.

The photo above was an image taken from the plane window showing the arctic ice sheet breaking up near northwest Greenland. I don't know that this level of breakup is unusual, but reports over the past several years are that the ice sheet has been melting significantly more than in previous decades, suggestive of a dramatic global warming effect, which could accelerate through feedback by changing the albedo of the earth (water absorbs more heat than ice). Anyway, we flew over the north pole again, though the pilot didn't point it out this time, like he did last time. Even though it was a longish 14 hour flight, you do realize you're flying halfway around the world (12 time zones!), so the world does seem small when this change happens so fast. The feeling of small worldness is accented by the joining together of two families from opposite sides of the globe. Ming's family seem like really nice people, though the language divide makes it hard to get to know them very fast.