Bart Bear's Blog

I am just back from an exciting fortnight traveling in Tasmania. Dad and I had never been to Tassie, so Mum organized our travels around Australia's island state. We drove over 2,500 kilometers and I have to say that some of the roads that Tasmania calls highways are not what the rest of the world would; frankly, some of them are really third-class roads. Anyhow, here I am in the first picture waiting for our aircraft to be readied for the flight from Melbourne across Bass Strait to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. We made Hobart our base for exploring, with a couple of nights in other places, but most days we came back to this view over the Hobart docks. There is always something happening in docklands and I spent hours at the window watching boats of all sizes from cruise ships to fishing boats. The bottom images show me helping with navigating the car on one of our longer drives, and relaxing on a cruise in a World Heritage area. Dad has the photos all downloaded, so over the next few weeks I will show you some of the best parts of Tassie (that Aussie-speak for Tasmania).

Labels: aircraft, Tasmania, trips

On our weekend trips we often meet interesting traffic. It is harvest time at present and here are two of the wide vehicles that we met last weekend. The wheat fields around Parkes in central New South Wales are being harvested and there are lots of these machines on the roads. You can see that both of them have their off-side wheels off the edge of the road. Even so, the red one took up all of its side of the road and a bit of ours as well. We had to drive on the very edge of our side of the road as it went past. We saw some harvesters at work in the fields, but too far away to get pictures.

Labels: New South Wales, trips

Only two sleeps to go, then we are off overseas! I am going to places with names that sound like Singy Paw and Do Buy. I will be flying on the biggest airliner in the world, the Airbus A380. I am getting really excited. The only way I can sleep is to remember that the time until we go is measured in sleeps. The Oldies have their suitcases packed and we are busy getting the paperwork sorted and into our backpacks with the other things we need in the aircraft cabin. My backpack is a lot smaller than the Oldies'. That's because I use their iPods and Kindles and Mum's iPad so I don't have to carry any of that big stuff. The biggest problem I have is carrying my money. For ages now I have been collecting all the gold coins that the Oldies leave around the place and have been storing them in my Cash Cow. The pile is too big for my pack, so tomorrow we are going to the bank and getting the pile turned into notes. Why do I have such a hoard? It's to buy Mum pretty things in the Duty Free shops. Back with lots of pictures in a few weeks.

Labels: aircraft, Dubai, Singapore, trips

Our main reason for stopping in Port Macquarie was to visit the Koala Hospital. This is a very special place which helps sick and injured wild koalas recover and return to the forest. Port Macquarie has just the right sort of forest for koalas to live in, but it also has lots of cats, dogs and cars. The forest comes right into the town in places, so in some places people and koalas live in the same areas. Koalas are safe while they are up in the trees, but they have to come down to the ground occasionally to move to another tree. Each year hundreds of them are hurt by being banged into by cars or mauled by cats and dogs. This is when the volunteers at the Koala hospital come in. The hospital has a surgery, intensive care unit, 6 outdoor intensive care yards and 33 rehabilitation yards. Blu and I have definite koala ancestry, so we were very keen to visit the hospital The top photo shows us checking out one of the outdoor IC yards. There is a recovering koala in there; you can see him if you look hard. The bottom photos show me reading one of the signs that tell the story of the koala in the big rehabilitation yard, and the koala herself, snuggled down high up in the gum tree. As well as treating sick koalas, the hospital is part of a research team trying to find cures for koala diseases. Do visit the hospital if you are ever in Port Macquarie, and donate a bit to help keep them in operation. One of the fun ways you can help is to adopt a wild koala; we have adopted 6 so far. If you want to help, you can read about the koala hospital and the "Adopt a Wild Koala" program on the web at http://www.koalahospital.org.au

Labels: animals, New South Wales, north coast, trips

Well, we are back in Canberra after a fortnight on the road. We drove over 2,500 kilometres - up to the Gold Coast in Queensland and back. Along the way we stopped at a few nice places for 2 or 3 days. The first stop was at Port Macquarie on the New South Wales north coast. Port Macquarie was founded in1821 as a convict settlement and its early history was very brutal. Today it is a top holiday spot and a place lots of people retire to. We stayed in a park cabin right next to the Hastings river. I love cabins like this because you can always see something interesting happening. During the day there are boats and joggers and at sunset you can see keen fishermen trying to catch the fish that come in to feed as it gets dark. The fisherman who used the breakwall in front of our cabin says that dusk is the best time to catch fish and he caught lots of them so he must be either right or very lucky. Scruffy, Milkshake, Blu and I spent lots of time sitting on the veranda rail watching the passing traffic. The only problem for us small critters were the Kookaburras that thought we might be edible, so we weren't allowed to sit on the rail without an Oldie in attendance. When the Oldies went out for dinner and left us in the cabin, they left the curtains open so that we could watch from the safety of inside the cabin. Besides being a pretty place for people, Port Macquarie also has a large population of wild koalas living there, more about them in the next post.

Labels: boats, Gold Coast, New South Wales, north coast, Queensland, trips

Just a quick note to let you know that we are off on the road again. The car is packed. Scruffy, Blu and Milkshake are ready to climb into their special seats in the back (the littlies ride in the cup holders) and the Oldies and I have the maps all sorted. See you all again in a couple of weeks.

Labels: New South Wales, Queensland, trips

This might look like a run-down old bush cabin, but in fact it is one of the nicest cafes that we have found on our travels around the Canberra area. It is at Bowning, a little village north of Canberra. It is also the place where I met the horses you can see three posts down; they were waiting hopefully by the back fence. The cafe has been built to look just like the old slab huts that the pioneers built. Dad says that his grandparents lived in a house just like this 60 years ago at Southgate in northern New South Wales. The walls are big slabs of timber and the gaps between the slabs are filled by plaster and small gravel. The inside walls are lined with ancient newspapers and most customers spend their time reading the walls while waiting for their order to come. If you are passing through Bowning, or near it on the Hume highway, roll on in for a snack. Actually, that's the name of the cafe, the "Rollonin".

Labels: Canberra, trips

There will be no posts for a week now, because tomorrow morning we catch a plane to Norfolk Island. Scruffy, Milkshake and I are all scrubbed up and packed and ready to go. Norfolk is a spectacularly pretty island, so expect lots of pretty pictures when I get back.

Labels: Norfolk Island, trips

This is not a real hill. It is one made up from all of the bits of rock and dirt that have been dug out of some big mines in Broken Hill, over by the New South Wales and South Australian border. We stopped for a while at Broken Hill early on day 2 of our trip across Australia while our Indian-Pacific train was being refuelled. A bus took us around the historic mining town and even up to the top of this pile. There are two buildings up there. The bigger one is the Mining Museum and the smaller one is the Miners' Memorial. The Museum was not open so early in the day (Dad liked that because the gift shop was shut as well). The Memorial has a viewing deck where you can see out over Broken Hill and see some of the "mines that made Australia". I liked the views and all the old mining machinery on display, but felt sad when I looked at the list of all the miners who have died there and some of the horrible accidents they died in. There is absolutely no way that this small bear is going to be taken down a mine, no matter how interesting Dad says it is.

Labels: New South Wales, train, trips

Here I am, way down at the end of the very long platform 1 at Sydney Central Station. It is the first day of our trans-Australia trip and the locomotive is busy getting carriages hooked up for the trip. This is the big loco that hauled us across the continent. It is about to hook onto a special carriage that carries cars, two decks of them. It will then haul the carriage onto the same track as the passenger carrriages are on and couple it onto them to make the complete train. I love watching shunting operations like this and Dad is usually OK about taking me to the far ends of platforms and holding me up so I can see over the barriers.The Indian-Pacific usually has a couple of car carriages. People can drive their car on in Sydney, Adelaide or Perth and not have to do the thousands of kilometers of driving. I think that is a great idea and it saves a lot of petrol and tired drivers. Maybe next time we will take our car with us.

Labels: New South Wales, Sydney, train, trips

This is the way I like to travel in trains when I am going over track I have been on before. The scenery outside is not new, so apart from the occasional glance to see if there is anything interesting like cows or kangaroos I can just relax and let the miles go by. The best way to do this is to get a comfortable seat and get the iPod back from Mum (she has this strange idea that it's hers). This is me on the way to Sydney at the start of our trans-Australia trip. I have been over this bit of track lots of times. So, fold out the tray table, just the right height for a small bear to see out of the window and with a good little leg hole for comfort and balance. Get my iPod back, select boppy music and chill out. The only interruption is when the Oldies think it's feeding time, but I usually convince them that they can share Dad's table for that.

Labels: train, trips

Here's some pictures of our locomotive (that's an Oldies' word for train engine). Our engine was the biggest one I have ever climbed on. It is an NR class diesel-electric, one of 120 built in Australia in the late 1990s. This is some tough loco. It weighs 132 tonnes and is powerful enough to haul just on 1,000 tonnes. Our train wasn't that heavy. We had 16 passenger carriages and two car-carrier carriages and these weighed just over 700 tonnes. At times the engine could haul us at 100 km/hr, especially on the long straight stretch across the Nullarbor. The pictures were taken at a place called Cook, which is in South Australia, just about half-way across Australia. Cook used to be a busy town back in the days of steam engines, but now only a few people live there to refuel and water the trains. We had a stop there while our train was serviced. Scruff and I made friends with the drivers and we spent some time in the drivers cabin learning how to drive the train. It is a lot simpler than the steam engines I had a go at on other trips. See the bears in the window? Unka Mark, eat your heart out.

Labels: South Australia, train, trips

Well, we are back from our trans-Australia trip from Sydney to Perf. Scruffy and I had a ball. We travelled in trains, planes, boats, buses, taxis and trams. The oldies suffered a bit from the heat because it was over 40 degrees some days, but us small bears had no problems. Dad says that is because we are stuffed anyway; I don't understand him sometimes. Anyhow, here I am on the platform at Sydney Central, sitting on Mum's cabin luggage, waiting for the carriage doors to open. Our cabin was just across the carriage from the window I am near. And what a cabin it was. Bigger than the other cabins, because the Oldies splurged a bit. It even had a table at the right place for Scruff and I to sit with a window each and watch the country whizz by. There was even a welcoming bottle of wine and two glasses there. I figured that two glasses and two bears were obviously meant to go together but the Oldies figured differently and took our wine away before we got stuck into it. We spent a lot of time on this table during our 3 day journey and over the next few months you will see lots of photos taken out of these windows.

Labels: Perth, Sydney, train, trips, Western Australia

I will be away from the computer for two weeks, so no postings for a while. The reason is great. We are off tomorrow on one of the world's classic train trips. We leave Canberra really early, about the time the Sun rises, and take the train to Sydney. In Sydney we get on a train called the Indian-Pacific which will take us right across the continent to Perf (Dad notes: of course Bart means Perth but his pronunciation is a bit off sometimes). The train is called the Indian-Pacific because it travells from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean (or the other way around the way we are doing it). It will take us four days and three nights to get to Perf and along the way we will do some side trips to see big mines in Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie. The longest straight stretch of railway track in the world, 478 kilometers, is on this trip. The whole trip is 4352 kilometers long. Yes, Scruffy is going with us even though he has been getting a bit snooty since he watched Star Wars and is convinced he has Wookie ancestors. The train will be nothing like the one in the little photo, I just put that in because I like trains that make lots of smoke. See you later, with lots of new photos.

Labels: train, trips

This is the perfect place for me to travel while the Oldies haul me around. They think it is the case for their new camera, but I know better. It is just the right size for me sit comfortably and securely, and it even has a flap that acts as a windscreen. Whoever designed this "camera case" obviously had small bears in mind. After all, the camera has a neck strap so the bag is not all that necessary, is it?

Labels: family, New South Wales, Newcastle, trips

One of the places that we stop at sometimes when we are heading down to the coast is the cheese factory at Bega. You can go on a tour of this factory and see just how milk from Mum's favourite animals is turned into all sorts of cheeses. I learned three things about cheese making. Almost everything is done at the Bega factory by robots. You can end up with all sorts of different cheese depending on how you mix it and what extras you put into it. And no matter what you put into it or how you mix it, it smells. Some cheeses even smell after they are made. The factory has a shop and cafe attached. Inside the cafe is a pair of plastic cows, like the ones that I found at the Gold Coast. Just as well that they were too big to fit into our car or Mum would have taken them home. Of course you have to have a milkshake if you are at a factory like this. They even do special ones for small bears.

Labels: New South Wales, south coast, trips

While we were at Eden last weekend we visited a place called Boydtown, on the same bay as Eden but about a half-hour drive away. Eden and Boydtown are on a big double bay called Twofold Bay. Sometimes the sea gets very rough on the Eden side, but it is usually calm near Boydtown which is why there was a town here in the mid-1800s. The town was built by a London stockbroker called William Boyd. He dabbled in just about everything in the Australian colony. He had a bank, a shipping line, a whaling station, and big million-acre farms. He went bankrupt in 1849 and headed off to the California gold rush. There is not much left of the old town now, just a building called the Seahorse Inn which was Boyd's headquarters. It has been renovated recently and we had lunch there and found this cute little tower near the front entrance. Just the right size for a small bear to climb on, although there was a worrying mark like a bullet hole near one of the windows. It turns out that this tower is a small copy of a much bigger tower way out in the scrub near the entrance to the bay, so on to part 2 of this posting.....

Labels: climbing, New South Wales, south coast, trips

When we go travelling one of the things we have to be careful about is to keep special things like passports, tickets and spare money from getting lost or stolen. The best way of doing this is to put them into a thing called a safe. Most places have one of these in the room or cabin. This one was in one of the places we stayed in on our last Fiji trip, but you find them everywhere. Scruffy and I are always being told to play safe, so here was a chance to really do just that. It was fairly easy to climb up to the safe and it was just the right size for a small bear cave. There was plenty of room for us, even after Dad had put the special things into it and closed the thick door. I bet that any safe-cracker would have died of fright if they had opened the safe to be confronted by two small bears full of teeth and claws diving for their throat.

Labels: climbing, Fiji, trips

This is one of the prettiest fish that I have ever seen, also one of the most dangerous. Fortunately, this one is behind glass at Canberra Aquarium. It is a Butterfly Cod, also known as Lionfish, Fire Cod and Zebra Fish. They live in shallow, warm water, usually hiding in crevices in the rocks and corals. Their coloured stripes camouflage them very well, so they just lurk in wait for smaller fish to come close. Then they quickly spread out their long fins to surround the poor little fish and suck it into their mouth. It all happens very fast. The spines in the fins are very dangerous. They are really sharp and venomous, so if you are stung by them you will be in agony for hours. The Oldies see lots of these guys when they snorkel on the Reef, Lord Howe and Fiji. The first time Dad saw one he was pulling himself down to see under a ledge and his hands went either side of a butterfly cod. Both Dad and the fish got a big fright. Actually Dad in his snorkelling gear is a sight to scare anything, sort of a cross between an elephant seal and Batman.

Labels: Canberra, fish, trips

Disaster has struck! I can't go with the oldies on their big trip to the other side of the world! We did some checking and found that stuffed toys are high on the list of suspect ways to smuggle drugs into the European Union. There are horrific pictures on the web of bins full of ripped toys at Heathrow airport. After a long and emotional discussion with the oldies it has been decided that my young hide is too precious to be degutted just because the beans I am stuffed with might be something prohibited. So I have to stay behind! Now this might have been totally tragic if it wasn't for my uncles, Patrick and Grant. They have asked if I can stay with them during the time that my oldies are away. I like that idea, and we dropped me off there just a few hours ago. Unka Paddy had a whole lot of American animals there to welcome me, and I felt at home straight away. It will be fun teaching these guys to be Aussies. I think the chipmunk and squirrels will be handy partners-in-mischief. Particularly as Patrick and Grant are away for the weekend and we have the place to ourselves for the next day. I think it will be fun here until the oldies return. When they get back I will be a "Virtual Traveller" and tell you all about the places they have been. It is a bit sad that I won't be with them, but as my readers know I am all in favour of border security so am not too angry with the overseas customs and immigration people. Dad has promised to bring me back a camel.

Goodbye for now. I will be back online in early November with lots of pictures of the oldies in Singapore, Dubai, Britain, France and Egypt, and mischief and mayhem at Unka Paddy's place.

Labels: trips, trouble