A Few Days in Paradise

Well... Eden anyway.

Quite an interesting town and area was the centre of the east coast whaling industry until the 1930s. The Killer Whale Museum well worth a visit. You can see some photos of my visit by clicking on the link below.


http://www.bcl.id.au/

See Old Tom the killer whale that herded whales into Twofold Bay for the whalers in return for food.



You can also read how I came across this 2 metre goanna on my travels.

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

Lovely photos Bruce .. enjoyed looking at them, and on your blog. Nice way to spend sipping my cuppa ( I especially liked the tower).

Old Tom the killer whale was a bit of a sod wasn't he? I'm surprised baleen whales haven't campaigned to have his skeleton ground up into fish blood and bone meal fertiliser.

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

Old Tom looked huge whale! I had a look at your pics of the Whale Museum, it looks very interesting...

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

Lovely photos. It looks a very interesting place. The Goanna looks like a smaller version of a Monitor lizard. I like lizards but always kept my distance from the Monitors, they tend to be a bit vicious.

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

A goanna is a type of monitor lizard - that was just a relatively small one. I was told there are some 30 species of goanna but I have never verified that

When I first came to Australia in the 60s I was hitch hiking in Queensland when I was dropped off by a grazier in the middle of nowhere. While I was waiting for a car to come along I noticed a tail hanging over a log by the road.

Being a young and stupid pommie I thought it was a snake so I poked it with a long stick - about 8ft away from the tail a ruddy great head popped up - I took off in one direction the goanna in another; clumsy, funny looking thing (but fast) when on the run.

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

I haven't seen the Australian version of Monitor lizards, but I've seen African ones many times and I've seen similar ones in Sri Lanka. The African ones are huge, very much a tourist attraction, the hotels often have "feeding stations" to encourage them. Living in close proximity to hotels we would also get them in our garden. We always knew when they were around, the constant frog orchestra would go very suddenly silent.

Many of the local people would tell tourists they were crocodiles, and quite honestly many of them really thought they were.

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

Ended up in Canberra not exactly paradise but as cities go not a bad place to be:

http://www.bcl.id.au/

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

Canberra looks nice, but two days maximum in any city is enough for me, apart from Singapore, which I love. It isn't really a city though is it?

Re: A Few Days in Paradise

When I first went to Canberra in the 60s it was a real dump; just an overgrown country town with no entertainment, attractions or indeed anything to recommend it. Over the years since then it has grown into a very well designed city of just under 400,000 people (twice the population of Tasmania's capital city). With lots of open space and many, many attractions centred around Lake Burley Griffin.

It offers a lot for visitors, for example the Australian War Memorial is a must see place being not just a memorial but a wonderful museum as well, not to mention the National Library, Questacon, CSIRO, National Sound and TV Archives, Tidbinbilla Deep Space Centre, Mt Stromlo Observatory, the Mint, Australian National Museum, Old Parliament House, New Parliament House, The Parliamentary Triangle and much more.

My only objection to Canberra is the climate - bloody cold in winter and hot in summer, though I still toy with the idea of buying a flat there.